Firstly, I'll clarify that I have no interest in this, and I certainly never played Skyrim.
Having said that, I suspect Bethseda will learn lessons from Bioware's failure - surely they'd have been watching TOR like a hawk and would be drinking buckets of shadenfrude when it flopped. I actually think this will just be a run of the mill MMORPG, that it will make them a moderate but not massive profit, and it won't be any shitter than most of the mmorpgs out there:
- a mmorpg really isn't a big step from Beth's single player games. It's a much more natural step for them than it was for Bioware;
- they aren't talking about reinventing the genre. As much as I think their games are theme parks, they've demonstrated that they can sell them as open worlds. They don't try to write story-based games, just lots of idiot content. Moreover, in FO3 they were demonstrably better at writing random side-quests than they were at the main plot (e.g. the android quest on that ship town). A mmorpg environment where they're writing largely disconnected content in different zones with no expectation of a coherent main quest might actually suit them better than single player games.
- When Oblivion came out, I thought it was the worst game ever made. At that time I remember posting that Bethesda were essentially the worst thing ever to happen to gaming, and Bioware were mediocre but rarely awful. My opinion has largely been reversed since then. Bethesda continued to simplify the TES franchise with Skyrim from what I've heard, but my experience playing FO3 (again - I don't like the game, but I can give credit where it's due) is that for all their crappiness, I can't deny that Bethesda makes rpgs, and that they have a clear interest in making crpgs. Todd actually seems to be more 'out of his depth' than 'inherently retarded' - he very clearly wants to make modern-day Ultima 7 games, which is a laudable aim, but he's simply not talented enough to pull it off. His games play like a crappy fan-made attempt at a FP Ultima 7 (right down to the embarassing writing), but I can still respect his intent. Bioware, on the other hand, has left rpg-land a long time ago, and seems to make corridor shooters / b-grade action games interspersed by dating sims that read worse than Mills and Boon. I don't buy games from either studio any more, but these days I'd back Bethesda over Bioware easily. If nothing else, Bethesda makes the kind of gameplay and product that you expect in a mmorpg - they just do it badly. Bioware had the moronic aim of trying to sell half-baked single-player gameplay, mixed up with grinding, complete lack of open world and bad romances as a mmorpg - i.e. even if they were good at what they were doing, they simply don't make the right kind of games for a mmorpg environment anymore.
- Fanbase. Bioware has a core fanbase that actively alienates everyone else. Moreover, they even have a 'give me exactly what I want - even if it makes the game so hideous that nobody outside of BSN will play it - or I'm going to have a fucking tantrum' attitude. Bioware just can't win when making a game that opens up those players to the wider audience. It lost its rpg fans long ago, and now they're wedged between making dating sims that most gamers are put off by, or alienating their rabid waifu-obsessed core fans. Bethesda has its share of fanboys, but for the most part they simply don't stir the kind of passion one way or the other compared to Bioware - and for all their LARPING (which they'll happily do whether they're playing a mmorpg or notepad), they still expect a game with the kind of gameplay that is often put in mmorpgs.
- Bethesda doesn't seem to be betting the house on this mmorpg to the same extent as Bioware did with TOR. Bioware hitched their reputation to TOR in a way that's rare even in the gaming industry - it had such a long development time, with such a big budget and such lofty claims that they were always going to fall hard if it flopped. Bethesda seems to be treating their mmorpg no differently to any other product - the hype machine is surprisingly late actually, and they've been very coy with their promotion. I suspect that after TOR's debacle, they're going to be cautious about how much they promise, and leave themselves some leeway if the game fails/
However they have then rendered the entire game outside of the canon.
