I understand your reservation, as it's never been done before.
I'm talking about something on a new and higher level, progressing forward into the next generation of gaming. The last big thing in the gaming marketplace was online play. It has gotten stronger and stronger since the late 90s. The next big thing will be interactivity. From the peripherals we use to interface with media device, to the level of interaction found within software. Combine that with multiplayer gaming, while society rides the wave of globalized technology surge, and you're digging at a goldmine
Meanwhile. while you're exhibiting some bias towards a great concept, by still hanging onto something archaic. It has has been played out many times before, and is getting stale - just like the Gamebryo engine, and the classic 'bugs' syndrome of Bethesda products and the numerous other things that keep showing up in all their games, and yet the games are becoming copies of one another.
This idea of the lonesome cowboy playing his RPG's in the dark by himself, immersed in a 3d representation of a never ending D&D game, is old hat and becoming niche. It is you and your view that will soon find yourself in the minority.
The contradiction is in your belief that you can only have an adventure alone and subsequently the 'point' of TES/Fallout is therefore somehow only applicable to the individual, rather than the individuals.
What you should have said was, you like playing alone... end of sentence.
A whole media industry out there is riding a trend that's saying otherwise.
I see some critical errors in judgment here.
- You think that the market for gaming, and the 'gamer' is a single type of customer with a single set of needs and wishes
- You think that 'a whole media industry rides a trend' while this is only a part of it
- You think that new developments in terms of VR and interactivity will dominate the market for gaming
Literally all of the above is not a fact, it is your current assessment of the market as it stands today, heavily influenced by what the big companies are pushing right now. Allow me to place some big question marks there. 3D gaming/movies are a great example of this. 3D movies exist for over 10 years, and have just recently been 'relaunched' in theaters as the next best thing. Yet among those who visit movies, there are huge groups that cannot stand it. They will never visit a 3D movie, and may even avoid 3D-only releases altogether. I am one of these customers. That is why, for example, a big release like SPECTRE is also available in 2D. And this won't change, at least not in the foreseeable future.
Another example: curved HD screens. Even before they got released big groups of customers frowned upon this development. You see curved screens in homes, but the vast majority is still flat screen TV's. There is no tangible benefit to a curved screen. Remember when they came out how it was touted as 'the next best thing'? I also remember how Samsung manipulated sales numbers to make curved screens look better in terms of popularity.
Last but not least: VR technology. I will be the LAST gamer that will sit in his own house swinging arms around and putting a big heavy headset with lenses in front of my eyes. Fuck that, regardless of how awesome it could be, but that is not what gaming is for me. And just like me, there will be many others. VR is just a means to an end, a tool no different from any other set of peripherals like mouse and keyboard. It will be a presence on the market, but will never take it over entirely.
Online is exactly the same; I play both on- and offline and I have my specific games for that. There is no reason to think, at all, that immersive single player gaming will ever lose ground. It hasn't ever lost ground. We just play more games, of which a significant part is also online gaming. But the amount of gamers, and the time people spend on games, has also increased with it and Online is biggest growth market within gaming - which is completely logical as the vast majority of older games and playerbase comes from a single-player focused environment. The growth of online, means little for the decline of single player.
Now let's put these actual facts into context of the 'single player focused game experience' which Fallout and TES games have always been about. Is it a niche? Sure, but a pretty big one. Is it a product with its own USPs? Most definitely.
As long as a product has its USP's, it is generally a viable product. The only changes you will see is that perhaps, based on the playerbase, the budgets for such games will go down a bit to scale with lower projected sales numbers. But no company with even the slightest bit of brains will toss away a product that is unique in the market, even if the demand dwindles. That is why niches exist.
It makes zero sense from a business perspective to throw away USPs within the same IP. IF Bethesda introduces online, they will make it a spinoff. Case in point: TES:Online. And about that, if you look at the progress of that playerbase, it doesn't look well for online Elder Scrolls adventures. The most heard complaint was: 'it doesn't play like a TES game'. Note: I've been beta testing and playing TESO a *lot*. The general consensus is that it doesn't really work.
Elder Scrolls Online is actually the very best counter to your idea that TES will go online in the original series, the pilot project is failing miserably at everything that makes TES, a TES game. Promised features are postponed because they cause all sorts of issues within an online world, Justice system implementation is worthless, Stealth has no real value, release scheme has been pushed back several times and the game is F2P within a year of its release while the playerbase is dwindling.
