'The players are never right', apparently...
The Elder Scrolls Online made it's latest proclamation during the Bethesda/Microsoft hybrid conference amalgamation, and I would be lying if I didn't say it was probably one of the least interesting sections of that presentations next to Forza, depending on what you like out of your game genres. The Elder Scrolls online is so much of a known quantity these days that it's hard to really get excited as an outsider for it's new year-long expedition into one of the various remaining nooks and crannies' still left over on the Tamriel map. That being said, the Zenimax team did reveal a new class coming to the roster, which is something that ESO doesn't do very often, so that alone is going to draw some curious eyes. But as for my eyes, even if I wanted to look back at the game I left behind, the end result would be me just shrugging my shoulders in frustration because increadibly, in the year of our lord 2023, Bethesda as a company have stubbornly refused to adopt any form of save migration.
Gaming is a rapidly evolving medium these days that regularly jumps from newer hardware to new platforms with the regularity of the tides rising, nothing is capable of staying static in the world of evolving technology. But our save data for all of these online games, where info is kept server-side, can often get themselves tied to the consoles we leave behind, preventing a problem with preservation and longevity; both key pillars of MMOs. Maybe a console gamer is now a PC gamer and the reverse. How do you bridge that gap without losing players due to the slow march of time and personal circumstantial evolution? Well, the greatest minds of our age already pow-wowed to fix this. The solution is save migration, a system which has lingered in the public consciousness since the time of Mass Effect. It isn't automatic, and hardly flawless, but for online games that encourage you to 'main' a small group of characters for years on end, you'd have thought that basic save migration features would be a necessity, wouldn't you?
But you'd be wrong, wouldn't you! Because Bethesda seem utterly allergic to the very idea of porting progress from one platform to another, in a manner that I can't help but find utterly archaic in our modern age of interconnectivity. Now days we are constantly bedecked in smart functionality devices from phones to watches to fridges and light sockets, all of which talk to each with a complex web of networks and systems designed to work as intuitively and 'invisibly' as possible. Why is it that the modern world is so keen on bringing the typically mundane and static together, whilst the games industry with it's heart forged in the fires of this technically progressive world, seems so bitterly adverse? At first I bought the excuse, that Sony's unwillingness to open up it's ecosystem spelled stunted evolution for us all; but as Sony has slowly begun to reverse it's enclosed ecosystem and yet the boundaries remained, sights have to be retrained at the individual companies themselves.
Bethesda, though typically a single player company, have themselves a couple of ongoing multiplayer titles based on their properties and neither of them are open to cross platform play or migration. Fallout 76 in particular shut down any momentum towards players having the ability to migrate platforms, even as the older generation of the game struggles to provide a decent play experience that the new gen of consoles can offer. Oh sure, you can jump from Xbox One to Series X just fine, because Bethesda have to do next to nothing to facilitate that, but Xbox to Steam? No way, buddy; that's alien tech! What astounds me so much about this is, just like with Elder Scrolls Online, Fallout 76 is a universally updated game! Each version of the game maintains itself to the same update standard more or less, so it's pretty much the same game regardless of platform. Why is migration still such a taboo, then?
For the Elder Scrolls Online this problems seem close to an actual sin of design. The game is supposed to be MMO, the very concept of migration should be in it's very blood! I know that part of the charm of The Elder Scrolls Online is the subtle removal of visible servers which allows anyone to play with anyone else, thus removing the concept of server hopping as it exists in more traditional MMOs, but honestly that kind of reinforces my point in a different way. Can they really market the global connectivity of the game, allowing people across the world to connect with one another to some limited degree and allow enemy factions to fight alongside one another; when they don't provide even the most basic account migration option from console to PC? I understand vice versa, but not even a one way conversion? That smells like hypocrisy to me!
Each time the patterns plays out in the exact same way. These studios remain utterly staunch in their stance against external player QOL procedures until such a situation where it becomes a necessity to their bottom line. If there was a new Xbox releasing with a distinctly incompatible server makeup to the Xbox of today, you can bet that Zenimax and Bethesda would scramble over on another to build some sort of bridging technology to ensure the generational jump would occur as seamlessly as possible. But today, in peace times, Bethesda are happy to laze about and grow fat laughing about the struggle thier fans have to go through if they want to migrate their progress and characters from one platform to another. Inexplicably giddy at how their years-long games need to be completely restarted if someone simply grabs themselves a change of hardware and doesn't want to fish out the Xbox just to play their favourite time waster game. It's maddening!
Bethesda are by no means alone in their rank laziness, a lot of prominent developers won't bother lift their hand unless it's already in the fire. But after seeing how easy it was for all those companies that found out Stadia was shutting down, during which they got together and built framework for a lot of save porting tech over the space of a couple of months, it becomes a really hard pill to swallow when contemporary studios declare it's too much work to figure out a clean save migration system to be used at players' leisure, not under the duress of an entire crumbling ecosystem. So instead of lauding the new Elder Scrolls update and brushing past the shortcomings, I'm dedicating this blog to my grumbling about inequities and unnecessary systemic omissions that bug me. Thank you so much, Bethesda, for not wanting my money bad enough to convince me not to buy your game on a new platform. I guess that is, unintentionally, somewhat conscientious of you.
No comments:
Post a Comment