If they were worried about the expectations, they shouldn’t have taken 15 years to release the damn thing.
I can get wanting to not rush a project, and I know as a studio they don’t do multiple projects at the same time, but they’ve wedged themselves into a pickle.
Series that release at a relatively steady clip (not too often but frequently enough to stay in conversation) have the privilege of coasting on iterative design. You can try a few cool new things, see what works and what doesn’t, and then you can see how the tides shift for the next project.
When you take ages between games, the entire market shifts its tendencies to the point where you can no longer anticipate what people will be into and what they’ve already gotten over. That’s not to say that they need to make a radically different game, but you’re not going to win any points by just repeating styles that the audience has already moved away from.
Just as one example, Dark Souls 1 and Skyrim came out in the same year. Demon’s Souls aside, basically the entire Soulsborne genre developed and iterated within the time it’s taken Bethesda to get around to Elder Scrolls 6. And now that a game like Elden Ring has such a strong association to the modern state of open world fantasy RPGs, it’s hard to entirely ignore that when there will inevitably be a good deal of audience overlap.
If they were worried about the expectations, they shouldn’t have taken 15 years to release the damn thing.
I can get wanting to not rush a project, and I know as a studio they don’t do multiple projects at the same time, but they’ve wedged themselves into a pickle.
Series that release at a relatively steady clip (not too often but frequently enough to stay in conversation) have the privilege of coasting on iterative design. You can try a few cool new things, see what works and what doesn’t, and then you can see how the tides shift for the next project.
When you take ages between games, the entire market shifts its tendencies to the point where you can no longer anticipate what people will be into and what they’ve already gotten over. That’s not to say that they need to make a radically different game, but you’re not going to win any points by just repeating styles that the audience has already moved away from.
Just as one example, Dark Souls 1 and Skyrim came out in the same year. Demon’s Souls aside, basically the entire Soulsborne genre developed and iterated within the time it’s taken Bethesda to get around to Elder Scrolls 6. And now that a game like Elden Ring has such a strong association to the modern state of open world fantasy RPGs, it’s hard to entirely ignore that when there will inevitably be a good deal of audience overlap.