The Greedy and Egotistical Decline of Bethesda Game Studios

I can't imagine any other job where you'd use the difficulty of the job as an excuse to the customer for why you failed at it. "My new roof leaks" "Yea , shit is hard. Have to use ladders and everything. See ya later"

I’m not a game developer, I’m also not a helicopter pilot but if I see a helicopter upside down in a tree I know somebody goofed

I think those astronauts that landed on the moon would soon be bored if they had to explore another 999 planets all the same as the barren moon.

I'd love to ask that Emil dude one question: "I don't work at the Twinkie factory. Am I allowed to eat a Twinkie and decide it doesn't taste good?" His analogy doesn't make a lick of sense, it's embarrassing.

The steam awards was a coup by 4chan to make fun of/bring light to certain games; Starfield being awarded was a slap in the face because it has zero innovation, boring story, and dull gameplay; steam reviews reflected this, adding salt in the wound. For labor of love, it was awarded to RDR2, which has been dropped support by rock star 2–3 years ago, making fun of them giving it love despite the community saying to f-ing fix the game and give it updates for the past 2-3 years. So overall, do not have loyalty to these brands, all have sold out for quick and easy cash.

Just to point out, Bethesda only published fallout new vegas, they didn't work on it. It had the series creator and multiple people from 1 and 2 on team with great writers. Thats why its so highly regarded. Dont give Bethesda credit for something they didn't do. Especially since new vegas is actually a very good game. Todd already tries hard enough to make people believe he was the creator of the fallout series when thats far from it.

Starfirld is litterally a test to see if they can use procedural generation to replace the entire studio when it comes to shitting out the new elder scrolls game.

What happened? After 20+ years working at Bethesda the senior management couldn't sell their stock and retire without taking a massive loss to the company. So when Microsoft came around looking for IPs, Bethesda sold Microsoft on their great engine and brand new IP. You see, if the senior staff in a company sell their stock, the company stock fails. But if the Bethesda stock is converted to Microsoft stock and the Bethesda executives become Microsoft employees, they can then retire after their contracts with no loss of income because Microsoft's stock won't care that a couple of acquired employees retire. So that is what Starfield is. A trinket of an idea that Bethesda sold Microsoft on, and the hurdle the Bethesda executives faced before they could leave. What we got was the "Minimal Contractual Obligation" Bethesda had to fill before the senior management could leave, and it shows. A hurried collection of cobbled ideas that resembled more of an asset turnover for how well they worked together, it fulfilled the legal definition of a 'game' and a week after it's release, probably once it cleared Legal, they cashed out & retired.

Bethesda is totally disconnected from the reality of gaming, and has no clue how hard it is to eat their products without puking or falling into a coma.

23:58 - As a writer & creator myself I am so disgusted by his "process" ... This speaks volumes, get these fake writers outta their offices.

The worst thing about Starfield is that I'm no longer excited for Elder Scrolls 6. In fact, I would rather prefer if Bethesda hired bunch of well-known and talented modders and let them do it for them. I have zero confidence that Bethesda can pull it off and make ES6 a great game, let alone a masterpiece like Skyrim was.

I think Bethesda has never truly recovered from the Fallout 3/New Vegas comparisons, which completely exposed their design philosophy and approach to game making. Those two games, despite being so similar, yet so different, really opened a lot of peoples' eyes to how Bethesda crafts their games. And they've had some stiffer competition in the open world RPG genre in the 2010's. People aren't content with Bethesdaslop: janky mechanics on an aging engine that is being stretched too thin to do things it was never designed for, boneheaded world building, strangely constricted quest design (ie. the quest First Contact, why can't you just kill the rich people?), too many essential marked NPC's because Todd Howard doesn't want you playing outside of his sandbox.

I can't wait to see how much of a "next generation RPG" Elder Scrolls 6 is going to be. We might even get a companion that has a personality that isn't "generic good guy who enjoys helping people". Or even be able play for ten minutes without having to see a loading screen. Oh, and you know what else would be cool? An inventory system that isn't terribly designed. Imagine that! Oh man I better update my PC so it'll be able to handle that masterpiece.

Starfield suffers from losing to No Man’s Sky on almost every metric

what’s really sad for me is that no other games scratch that role playing itch like the elder scrolls/fallout games do. knowing that i’ll probably never experience the same feeling i felt my first time playing those games

Boy do I disagree that starfield doesnt do anything "offensively wrong" I think its offensive to our intelligence to have the capitol city of a space faring humanity be smaller than my hometown, surrounded entirely by absolute desolate empty plains of nothingness. New Vegas city had more outer limit sprawl than this supposed metropolitan. I think its offensively wrong to have the constellation faction be as inept and impotent as explorers as they are, They poses a single ship, In a world where ships seem to be about as easily obtainable as cars in our modern day. I think its offensive that every single companion has the exact same boring morality, and by extension, mostly identical personality. People site the companions as being varied in personality, I must have missed an entire other half of the companion quests in this game, because I dont get that at all. Backstories and clothing dont make up someones personality differences. Its offensive that they made points of interest spread thousands of meters apart and give you no land vehicles to explore the surface in this space exploration game. Its offensively wrong that Bethesda has only regressed, never improved themselves in the past 20 years.

Here are some fun facts to keep in mind to not be exited about TES6 (some of these you've brought up and I'm very thankful for that) - As long as Emil is lead anything, we won't get proper RPG storylines, I don't even want him in Quest design, the Dark Brotherhood was pretty good but had some serious issues regarding you as player not being able to NOT do the obviously forged Deaddrop contracts and question wtf you're doing. Another railroad just like Emil loves doing. - Jeremy Soule won't be composing for TES6 unless some actual real miracle happens. -The guy responsible of the environmental storytelling (leveldesign) has left BGS, so I'm not even surprised when I hear about there only being 20 or so PoI's in SF. - Their main dev team aren't masters at papyrus and they can't handle this engine, its been visible since Oblivion, got exposed in Skyrim (the dragons operate on a system of animations, this is why dragonriding is an absolute joke of a mechanic), Fallout4 was stripped of not just RPG options but visual details (guns magically appear in your hands, armor is one large piece), and really got out of control with SF, I bet Starfield had more detail and mechanics but they all stripped those out because they couldn't make it work due their incompetency. Remember that modders have made a working buggy in the NewVegas version of the engine, and there was a dragon riding mod that gave people true control over the dragonflying for LE Skyrim. I'm glad this video wasn't 20 minutes bashing on the engine, like many fall into, because thats not the issue, the issue is the devs behind it just aren't good programmers. This is a terrible thing because now the only capable people in that office are the visual artists, and the engine can't even show their work properly.

In case anyone hasn't yet noticed this over the years, Bethesda Game Studio is the real world equivalent of Vault Tec in the Fallout games. The very same unscrupulous behavior.

"KISS" or also known as "I don't want to work too much, just make some cookie cutter bullshit and jam it into the story, our audience is ret -*- arded enough that they will just eat it, like they always have and always will"

The amazing thing about “Baldur’s Gate 3” is that it’s not even open world. But it FEELS open world, because of how layered and in depth the storytelling is. And “The Witcher 3” is open world, but the storytelling is so deep and layered, with so many twists and reveals with even the fetch quests.