It takes some giant balls to say "lets see if you can do better" When your company has relied on people doing better than you in the modding community, since the release of oblivion.
@@biosupdate7449 Don't get hyped for big mods, most of the time they never happen and the few that have come out have been pretty mediocre, only ones that have been good are the tamriel rebuilt mods for morrowind.
@@biosupdate7449 At least you're willing to listen and don't call me a hater like a lot of bethesda cult members. Its not like I take joy in this, I'm just a former fan of their games.
The fact that Emil just switched the roles of son looking for father in Fallout 3 to father looking for son in Fallout 4 speaks volumes of Emils creativity.
Don’t forget the members of the Dark Brotherhood in both Oblivion and Skyrim, there’s the brute who doesn’t care for stealth, the Argonian shadow scale, the poison Master, the wizard, the fanatic who we’re led to believe is the traitor, and the high ranking member who’s the real traitor. They both even have a vampire who’s exactly 300 years old, except in Skyrim he made the vampire a little girl which... yeah I’m not touching that with a 20ft pole.
I think the reason Starfield especially is standing out to people as being this grey pile of boredom is that it didn’t get to feed off of a pre established world. The Elder Scrolls and Fallout were lovingly crafted by competent writers. All Bethesda had to do was put strings on the corpses and make them dance. This time they actually had to make their own world and look how that turned out.
I think they had writers who cared in Morrowind and Oblivion, and sometimes even in Skyrim, but you're right that Fallout was mostly meh, and their new original world was a blob of nothing. Writing aside, something that really kills Starfield is that there are far better space games, like No Man's Sky, or the less accessible Elite: Dangerous, which barely lean on story at all like Starfield pretends to
@@robjsmiles Oh yeah I guess my comment could be seen that way since it was so negative. I believe there were and maybe even still are people that care, but they’re not in charge and if that doesn’t change well…the video explained that thought quite thoroughly already.
@@robjsmiles I know it has gotten miles better since launch but it's kinda sad that NMS is held up as a better game. I remember the mess it was at launch.
Tim Cain, the director of the first fallout game, has stated he regrets adding a small side quest in fallout 2 that introduced ghosts into the setting. In contrast, Emil stated in his writing speech he would have put the entire magic system from skyrim into the fallout setting (with his justification being the cultural association of salem with witches) if not for the fact that the programmers had already removed the magic system from their reused code and it would be too much work to copypaste it back in. There is no example that better drives home how little Emil cares, as long as he can use a hackneyed cliche he saw in a movie once. I can only conclude that he knows how to imitate things that work in other pieces of writing. But he doesn't understand why they work, or how to weave together elements into a cohesive story.
I'd like to think the programmers removed the magic functions AFTER finding out Emil wanted to turn Fallout 4 into Skyrim with guns. Maybe they realized how stupid it would make them all look, scrapped the functions, then told Emil it can't be done.
I can just imagine the poor programmer, having to bullshit his way out of going along with Emil's whim, just so he can retain whatever little sanity this game still had.
When I saw the Salem Museum I thought there was going to be a quest about finding a synth(instead of a witch) but no, fight a deathclaw by circling around a pillar til it dies
My head-canon is that Emil serves as the Writing Dept proxy for Todd, blindly repeating, "It just works". He also seems oblivious to the fact that his job also entails serving as a "whipping boy" for the Golden Boy of Bethesda.
The “Keep it Simple Stupid” motto was created by Kelly Johnson while working at Lockheed. When Johnson would explain what he meant by Keep it Simple Stupid, he used the example that repairs on the products his teams created should be possible with minimal equipment and experience. Otherwise, the products would be useless and a liability since they were being used in war zones. The way Emil applied it to his work as a writer is basically a way to justify the lack of depth in his stories. Because if it's a deliberate choice to write dumb stories no one would question your competence, right?
It wouldn't be the first time someone misapplied the idea of KISS to justify / "mask" their idiotic incompetence and laziness, and it won't be the last. It's really sad that people overlook the actual context for the reasoning of KISS and instead just mindlessly use it as a mantra.
KISS does still apply to writers. Do not overcomplicate your wording for no reason nor should you overconplicate motives. People are simple and have simple desires, the mechanisms of achieving desire are what makes a person complicated. A rich mans happiness is involved with gorging his ever expanding hunger for the lixurious while a peasant enjoys a family. Both achieve happiness but both have viscerally different mechanisms of achievement.
There is a difference between ""don't make it more complex than it needs to be" and "don't make it complex, period" that Emil does not seem to appreciate. Ultimately Kelly still made jets, not hot air balloons.
@@loserinasuit7880 Overcomplication is fine, it's how well you execute it and what's your target audience is. Was the rich man born greedy, did his previous life make him obsess with hoarding wealth, is it a survival mechanism, is it peer pressure, is it to compensate for something, is it because wealth is the measure of worth in his environment... all of them? And that's before we get into motive change over the course of the story or characters less conventional for their environment. Or if the creators want the audience to understand complex causes. If you look at the motive we have as human being, it seems like simple urges/pathos, but behind the scene, the causes are myriads and interconnected. There's also the other side of overcomplication. Deliberately release information scarcely, indirectly, unconventionally (sounds cues, structure, visual, pattern, meta...) and force the audience to piece it together. As always, how well an idea can be executed matter most.
In China stories have no substance, they are meaningless and childlike. There is a reason for this, and I suspect BGS's writing is safe, and boring for similar reasons.... It doesn't offend anyone or take any stance on anything.
There's a pattern for elder senior devs and artists that are pushed out the industry in some way or another: contractually obligated(enslaved) by NDA to stay silent or play along, blacklisted, demotivated to the point it ruins one's dream to make a sequel to his old IP, slander a reputation acquired earnestly, getting blacklisted just as or in consequence to a few of these example. Marty, Avelonne, American McGee, Mick Gordon, some old members of Troika and much more. Some of them even get slandered by a new generation of young Devs with a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome, because one of these Elders had standards and dared to tell them how to do their job correctly. It is sickening and something is afoot in the current ways this industry works.
@@camraid9 Have you ever read xianxia/wuxia? They are anything but "mild and safe". The "good guy" is like someone running an evil RPG playthrough most of the time.
@camraid9 if china werent involved, Emil would still be a shit writer. Actual children's story are safe as can be and tend to have better quality writing.
It amazes me seeing all the layoffs of actual quality employees that have happened in the gaming industry this year but a hack like Emil manages to stick around for decades while being crap at his job.
It's because Microsoft owns Bethesda now, and they're far too hands off, so incompetence is a guarantee at this point no matter how bad it effects things. Do you think Mojang would survive either under another company or independently when they couldn't even get a full Minecraft update out in 4 years, pandemic or not? Fuck no, they'd be gone. Think 343 would've been allowed to ruin what was Xbox's flagship franchise for over a decade to the point people only play it cause it's "free" on gamepass? No, they'd be fired. Microsoft, at this point, no matter what's happening internally at Bethesda, is the problem now.
It's not a conspiracy, it's the rule for the industry at large. Outside some studio like nintendo, game industry job is a revolving door so the employer can keep cost down (hire more junior staff, fire more experienced/expensive one) or senior leave by themselves to get a better position elsewhere. Emil climbed Bethesda quite early during the 2000s, Todd even earlier, they are in a positions that set for life.
@@Fuzzycatfur They did mention a couple years back they wanted to be more hands-on with the developers since the previous approach was failing, but no changes seem to have been made.
I've always thought that their games didn't have the best writing, but they did well enough to the point where the player could want to speculate on the story details, and I love the speculation videos I love the theories and investigations, so the writing may not be that great when it comes to the narrative in the actual game, but going off of other stories and other books and secrets within the game it always added up to a very well crafted story that's going on and then has been going on for thousands of years in the established lore of the series. Now I haven't played starfield, so I have no idea what that even looks like except for from other people's playthroughs and their experiences of the dialogue, now it's true that I know that Bethesda have kind of downgraded some of their choices, and those aspects I don't necessarily like, because they go after the narrative more than they go after choices for the game play aspects, so in that sense I would agree that's where some bad habits come into play in their games. I think one thing to take into consideration is the fact that this is a video game, it's not meant to be a movie, it's not meant to be a TV show, it's meant to be a role-playing video game, where we have silly choices and silly game design, and people liked it in the past so the only difference is people not liking it now based off of other games as the result, and also getting rid of other mechanics of the game used to have that people loved, although I will say for Oblivion I didn't like to persuasion check it was absurd to use that system, and yet some older Gamers really loved that mechanic, for me that mechanic was paying NPC some money in order to get in their good graces and compliment them, and it made no sense at all during the dialogue of whatever you were talking about in order to change their point of view of you, I thought it was kind of silly but it is a video game video games have funky mechanics every once in awhile.
Agreed, that whole "making games is hard, you guys" excuse they use all the time is peak comedy, in no other section of society would such a pathetic excuse work outside of gaming making. "I am sorry that the shopping mall collapsed on itself but making buildings is hard, you guys. Why did we use cheap material as foundation? You are just a hater".
In a decent world, you can't just be so two faced to say "Look at our ultra detailed, lore rich setting" and "Who gives a shit about details, it's got wrinkly radioactive people" in two consecutive breaths.
@vietimports I dunno, the overwhelming consensus I hear is "Starfield is a great game" Admittedly, the correlation between those who think that and also think Skyrim is an excellent rpg is very, very high.
@@bchin4005 i mean, starfield has a 66% rating on steam, was nominated for 1 award at the game awards and didnt win it, and its player count has dropped to 10k on steam. for reference baldurs gate 3 still hits 200k. i think the 'overwhelming consensus' is that it is an aggressively average game with outdated game design, evidenced by the myriad of youtube videos roasting the game for months
@@vietimportsit's nice to see how the talk around their games has shifted. I'm hoping it pushes them to actually try with ES6 but I'm not expecting it. I'm glad Baldurs Gate 3 happened this year, really shows how good an RPG can be.
Emil is the textbook definition of the "Peter Principle" - The idea that employees are essentially promoted based on previous success until they reach a level they are not competent at. People don't remember the DB questline for Emil's writing, they remember it for the game design. I've played Oblivion for 100s of hours and I can't even remember who the traitor is off the top of my head. I cannot think of a single writer in video games with a more infamous reputation than Emil. The player is never going to care about the larger story because Emil doesn't care about it. The best parts of Fallout 4, Skyrim, and Starfield, were all things that he had no part in. Nick Valentine & Far Harbor were both written and designed by William Shen, a far more talented individual. Someone posted on Reddit nearly 10 years ago, that as long as Emil is in charge at Bethesda, do not expect the quality of writing to improve. Well, here we are headed into ES6 and people are more nervous than ever regarding the quality of the writing.
I gave up after FO4. That game is already a dumpster fire but barely salvageable with hundreds of mods. Anything after that, I didn't even bother touching
I just read a comment what say both in Oblivion and Skyrim the traitor was the leader, all member was the same in both games and they even have a 300 years old vampire member in both games.
It was such a shame to hear Will Shen left Bethesda after Starfield. He was the one hope I had for their future (especially if he were to replace Emil). Now it all just feels like such a waste.
@@Zodroo_Tint I’m like 90% sure that might’ve been my comment you saw. The traitor in Oblivion’s Brotherhood isn’t *the* de-facto leader of the Brotherhood like Astrid is in Skyrim, but they are a member of the black hand who are the highest ranked members aside from the listener.
My most annoying contradiction in FO3 is that you are forced to flee the vault because the overseer has had Jonas killed and you're next. But through the rest of the game you are asked why you left the safety of the vault and running for your life is never an option.
It's not really a contradiction. The characters in the game assume that the vault is an underground paradise because all they know of the vaults are the propaganda leaflets left over in the ruins, and the accounts of the control vaults that actually opened up again after the war. As three dog keeps saying on the radio, no-one knows what happened down there for James and then for your character to leave. They just assume you left by choice because it didn't even occur to them that the inside of the vault could be just as dangerous as the outside.
@@duskmare0000 he's speaking of how you can't tell your dad about why you really left the vault, not telling your lifestory to some random hobos in the wasteland
Emil makes the dumbest points in his tweets. Yeah I don’t know how to make a Twinkie, but I still know when a Twinkie tastes like shit, and me not understanding the process of Twinkie-making doesn’t mean I’m obligated to eat shit.
AS IF he *never* got called a Ni*ger or F**got in a CoD lobby. WE ALL COLLECTIVELY SAW PEOPLE GET BEHEADED IN EXECUTION VIDEOS. We got Broad-spectrum censorship and absolute "political correctness" stamping out creativity and NOW its a wild west? 🤣
@@komikop literally. If there was *ANY* time period of the Internet that was a "wild west", it will have been that decade-and-a-bit from the very late 90's to around 2012
I haven't learned or tried to fly a plane. But if the plane is falling straight towards the ground, and the pilot is wide awake in the cockpit, smiling and saying we'll be at our destination soon, I'm going to fucking complain.
I dunno, I feel like I could use a pat on the back when I drop a huge deuce lol Seriously though, like you said, hard work doesn't equal good work. I'm tired of people saying "I/they worked really hard on that!" So? I could work really hard building a car, doesn't mean people would/should trust that it's any good.
"My bum has been a bum for a long time, but that doesn't mean I have to listen to anything it says." All the deflection of criticism oozing from him is sickening. I'm not a helicopter pilot, but if I see one in a tree...
@@OuroborosChoked Only said by scammers who try to delude you from thinking about the point of LTV: getting rid of overvalue of parasitic classes (bankers, rentiers and politicians) and undervalue of critical jobs (farmers, production and maintenance workers).
Oh god. The "this setting has fantastical things in it, so I will disregard all logic and common sense" argument makes my blood boil. You can immediately tell that whoever says a variation of "lmao this has magic, nothing has to make sense" doesn't understand a single thing about worldbuilding, verisimilitude, etc.
There are two types of writers - the one who makes an intricate magic system full of rules/cause and effect, akin to real life physics, and the ones who use magic as an excuse to handwave plotholes and stuff they can't be bothered to explain
@@adelram9299 I read the first one as a teen and was utterly bored by it, but granted I was a bit past the target audience age. Maybe I should give it a new chance?
Thank you! I'm in a publishing company's discord, Nat 1 Publishing, and the founder has an original setting he made called Faewalk. Well, one of the other guys in this discord will fight tooth and fucking nail to keep interesting explanations from happening. "It faewalk, it's kooky crazy, a wizard did it." I seriously disliked the setting until bossman (the name I gave the founder) explained that serious stories do happen. I read some of the stories that take place, and all I can think is that I am home in Skyrim/Cyrodiil once more and we call it Faewalk. Do not ignore consistency. Consistency rewards diligent audiences. Diligent audiences are life support for any work.
I guess Emil is not allowed to send back food at a restaurant if they serve him raw chicken, because he's "disconnected" from the realities of food preparation.
@@froggystyle9068There's an old adage from some creatives - audiences are GREAT and identifying exactly what they don't like, but pretty bad at proposing good alternatives. I dunno, the shitty amateurs might not be making much better stuff, but they're not asking me to pay $70 for their work either
@@froggystyle9068 I mean, I'd think it's more fitting that they're trash writers, too. There's the old saying, "it takes one to know one," so not surprising that they couldn't write themselves out of a pre-solved word puzzle, and detecting that quality in one of their own.
Dude had a group of people that hated him, now because he decided to sling shit at the customers there is an army of people who want him gone. Smooth moves Emil.
I really don't get what he got out of his little rant...is his ego so massive he couldn't help but stroke it ? Because now he puts a huge bullseye on his back by putting himself in public. I always called out Emil as the main reason why Bethesda is incompetent but now even casual players are starting to know Emil's failures.
@@KikyouNeko assuming Emil is legitimately the real problem. I pray he gets removed before TES 6 gets too far ahead 😭 I practically have an associates degree in elder scrolls lore and I couldn’t stand to see it massacred
@@woodlefoof2 My good dude, their last lorehead expert, Kurt Kuhlmann has left Bethesda right at the day of Starfield release, he was "let go", basically fired... Now Emil has full reigns over TES lore to himself, Todd is too busy playing CEO so Emil is basically the game director now.
"Not be Beholden to something somebody wrote 20 years ago" I have never heard anything more disrespectful than this. Getting butthurt they don't have a fraction of the talent as the Morrowwind Writers.
same thing happened with the halo and witcher tv shows lol, these writers think they can do better than the source material their show was greenlit off of
I’ve cared more about continuity when writing some silly story using someone else’s world in some silly corner of the internet, than this guy does writing for a beloved world from a meaningful work of fiction.
The only thing I disagreed with was his take on the DB questline; the entire questline is intentionally geared towards making you feel like an evil villain, and honestly it was a lot of fun. The dinner party quest is probably my favorite in the entire game. The instance of the Kahjit acting friendly all of a sudden was NOT implemented to make you "feel bad," it was classic dark humor to make the player go "it's a bit late for that buddy." Imagine playing through the DB oblivion questline as a moralist lol. Oblivion itself is filled with moments like this that fans love. I feel like he intentionally misrepresented the obvious tone just because he didn't like the writer. This does not however invalidate his other points.
@@JoeKing69 I agree that, to me at least, the first half of the dark brotherhood quests were actually decently written. However, that was also creetosis' point. The "dinner party" was also part of that first half, so your point there is moot. These were "decent" because they weren't really doing any heavy lifting in terms of overall plot or story, as these were all quests disconnected from one another aside from making progress within the DB hierarchy. Here, it really is just the quest design team that was doing all the work. It's when the questline tries to push forward an actual narrative that things quickly fall apart. COULD there be an instance where the cheydinhall DB has to be purged and you get the ugly task to do it? Sure. Would that make the player feel bad and have them question things? Sure. But it's not the premise that is the problem, it's the execution. The writing takes a dive into bullshit plottwists and plot contrivances after the dead drops start to change. The fact the player can't really interract with anybody about the obviously changed letters is annoying. The fact the characters within this questline do horribly ridiculous and unprofessional things despite the critical position they are in, is silly. The fact that the player is always JUST too late to influence the outcome of everything is contrived. The fact Lucien Lachance never noticed treachery is amateurish at best. The fact the other brotherhood hand members IMMEDIATELY killed an otherwise trustworthy and loyal subject, without questioning him and without investigating it themselves, is blatantly absurd. (To add to this: the manner in which you get recruited by lachance is also patronizing and silly. Not to mention the fact you can't report the brotherhood in any way to the authorities is stupid. Your point about playing as a moralist only serves to highlight this issue. It is blatantly impossible to play the dark brotherhood questline and pretend you're doing anything morally upright, unless you PRETEND that you are infiltrating the organization to bring about it's downfall. But PRETENDING and ROLEPLAYING are two very different things. The game fails at the last part if it's the player that has to pretend things are happening in their head.) And lastly, the fact that the night mother claims, at the end of all things, that everything was planned, it was all destiny, and anyway she knew about the traitor all along, TRUST ME BRO is the dumbest and most unneccesary shit ever. It doesn't add anything of substance to the plot, it just adds plotholes and another patronizing message of "you don't have any control, player." THIS is the issue. If your writing ONLY serves as a means to an eventual end, you might get away with people not noticing just how badly written the middle part is. And it absolutely is. This is why people have ignored the DB questline's shittier aspects, because the first half is decent and the shocking nature of plottwists and apparant tragedy is distracting enough in the second half that people simply didn't notice. And then there's the people that just attempt to rationalize and justify the bad writing afterwards. If bad writing is not adressed properly by the fanbase, how can we expect things to improve?
@@RedFloyd469 Lucien never noticing until it was too late is definitely a legitimate criticism but does kind of make sense as he wasn't expecting such a high ranking devotee of Sithis to be a traitor. People become so comfortable in their positions and "default to truth" when suspecting someone, especially someone they know, of treachery leading to chronic denial until it's too late. This is a prominent feature of abvse cases and there's a book called "Talking to Strangers" that goes more in depth into this topic. The part with the Kahjit was still never meant to "guilt trip" you, and even if you were playing as a moralist this guy is as evil as they come anyway so the criticism still doesn't hold as you'd be doing the world a favor. Infiltrating the brotherhood in order to bring about it's downfall feels kind of silly if you're actively taking contracts on what are quite possibly completely innocent people. The option to report them instead as you've suggested is far better. I don't think that it's a flaw in and of itself that you can't play through the questline as a double agent, it's more that the game doesn't give you an option between join them or don't. This is relatively acceptable however though because in order to discover them you need to commit a certain crime, which isn't something a moralist character would do to begin with. It's perfectly fine to address bad writing, and as I've previously stated I agree with his other points, but I find that when someone doesn't like somebody else they tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater and miss what's right in front of them. It's important to criticize someone when need be, while also remaining judicious in their appraisal. Otherwise they just come off as a hater and risk polarizing those on the fence in the interest of preaching to the choir, even if most of their points are solid. I think it's quite clear that he was not interested in changing anyone's mind with this video, rather he merely wanted to reinforce what most people already thought, people love having their suspicions confirmed. If he had published this video a few years ago I think we all know that the outcome would have been much different, it's just socially acceptable to condemn anything and everything related to this person now. He still would have been right on most points, but would have also been motivated to think through each of his points more. I should have been more clear that I did not mean the entire questline, only several points that he mentioned. I clearly wrote "DB questline" when I should have clarified specific parts rather than the whole. I agree with you on everything else, though.
I was getting sick of the memeing on Bethesda's buggy releases as well, it's not supposed to be funny. Todd Howard jokingly saying "yeah our games got some bugs" during the FO76 conference was embarrassing as hell, got really tired of the "hahah that's our Bethesda!" attitude from fans. It's about time people are finally gettting fed up with it.
@@AuXiiLia nobody is getting tired of bethesda games being buggy. You’re wrong for thinking they are. Bethesda games being buggy is completely and utterly okay with everyone. Skyrim was an early 2010s game that you could play on the 360 or ps3. That is insane, it was the best of the whole genre for a long time and frankly this wasn’t even the first time bethesda had made games that can be described that way. Morrowind, to this days does a lot of things that aren’t rivaled even today. Daggerfall even has levels of freedom in creating a character that you wont find anywhere except pen and paper rpgs and even THEN SOME. Bethesda games being buggy is absolutely fine because they’re supposed to make games that people still like in 10 years because even in 10 years games just struggle to match some of the aspects they got so right. They are ambitious in a way that is unique. Its okay for the games to be buggy. The reason people are mad is because the games Bethesda are making now feel like slop and for some reason the unambitious slop STILL has the same amount of bugs
@@AuXiiLia The games, especially 76, had far worse problems than bugs. If anything, the bug thing is often a distraction and misdirection. "it's a bethesda game" excuse was often used for basic features being terrible or badly done, as well.
@tillburr6799 This argument doesn't work when bugs are being ported over from past games. People are definitely sick of the rampant bugs that would be found in an hour of playtesting.
Emil doesn’t like internal documentation because it makes him have to consider the work of others far more creative than him. He doesn’t want to change his ideas because he needs to believe his ideas are too good to be changed or formed to the designs of more skilled writers. Emil used to have to be cooperative but then he got lead and wants everyone to do it his way and it turns out he was trash all along and just got credit for other people’s work because he had to take criticism.
I couldn't agree more with this sentiment. This also shows in his distaste of players not playing his questline and doing something else, or worse, not doing them exactly how he wrote them to work.
Also, making sure that the design document is up to date would be his work as a lead. So this walking fraud managed to justify skipping on his job, not sure how the hell he is still not fired.
An exhaustive document like this for F3 or F4 (including of course all major points from F1, F2) would be in itself an indictment and it would supply proof of his faults. Without a document, or with a vague one, as long as Todd is happy its all fine, its all just "creative decisions".
@@OnlyDeathIsEternal instead of actually doing the writing lead's job, he instead took it to mean he can now write whatever he wants, and no one can gainsay him
I honestly can't believe that a company as big as Bethesda is making such a rookie mistake as forgoing documentation. If anyone should know better, it's a company like them
Reminds me of drama class in jr highschool. I was lazy and thought "I won't write anything down. I'll just wing it on stage". Yeah, I'm terrible at improvising lol but I still did it whenever I could because Im lazy and didn't really care.
@@flowerthencrranger3854 It's called Critical Theory and it's a religion that hates White Straight Men and anything they may have produced. Replace with particular lever of grievance most likely to effectively attack Straight White Men.
@@rclaws3230What do you even mean by Bethesda being activists? And what does that have to do with providing internal documentation for game production back in 2006?
You don’t have to be a musician to inherently feel and understand a song, you don’t have to be a chef to know that being served skirt steak is not the same as filet mignon, and you certainly don’t need to be a dev to know if a game is un-fun and unfinished
As a dev, if one who's stricken by my ADHD and toddler-level object permanency and has the 50GB of WIPs to prove it: He sucks at the story and he's the fecker who put zombies in so much of Oblivion's dungeons, those are both absolute sins. My friend who's never played a TES game in their life wrote better story quests than him just from reading the in game books and the Morrowind dialogue on the UESP and we've fixed Skyrim by violently ramming all the stuff Kirkbride and Wormgod dropped all over the old Bethesda forums pre-Oblivion into it like we were making a kooshball of Weird.
My favorite response to "let's see YOU do better!" snark is "You don't need to be a seasoned helicopter pilot with 10 years of experience, to be able to see a helicopter in a tree and rightfully say 'Dude f*cked up!'"
This is something we all know, yet shit "artists" pretend isn't true so they can circlejerk each other's garbage. "How can you call art 'bad' if it's subjective?" Very easily, actually.
It's genuinely baffling hearing Emil make these excuses about "hard work" and "not fully achieving ambitions", when Fallout: New Vegas had a fraction of the development time and budget, and it's still one of the best written games in the series. You can't replace passion and skill with manpower.
Yet Obsidian still got screwed out of their bonus by 1 point, tells you all you need to know about Bethesda's arrogance when the reason the score was low was probably because they were forced to use the craptastic engine and were given so little time to make the game in the first place thus leading to bugs. When a bethesda game has bugs it's "quirky" and just a given mods will fix it yet the same leeway is not given to any other dev in the industry.
@@pinnacleevolution1634 Fun fact: they were not given documentation for the CK. They had to learn FROM DISSECTING FANS' MODS FOR FALLOUT 3 how to do half the magic they did (there's even still traces of some modder's annotated code buried inside comments).
@@neoqwertylmao I wander aware of that that is actually absurd. It feels like Bethesda were just paying them to push something new out because 3 was popular and Skyrim was being made, almost like they didn't care whether it was successful or not and just a money grab
"You can't replace passion and skill with manpower." Wait, what? Passion and skill is a part of manpower. Not speaking up for Emil at all as he's not a good writer.
@@pinnacleevolution1634yeah Todd and Bethesda by extension are some despicably nasty people. It was worse than the 1 point, it was less than half a point the score was 84.5. Bethesda even went out of their way to make it harder for them to reach that deadline by refusing to let anyone who knew the creation kid work with Obsidian.
Wasn't this the same guy that basically said, "Gamers won't read so there's no point in putting in effort in writing a story anyways" when talking about Fallout 4 and players "building bases" more than engaging with the...story? You know? Like how FALLOUT fans appreciated FALLOUT's story, lore, and worldbuilding from the first two games that made the IP iconic?
Bethesda Dumbed it down to the extreme in 4 anyway. Building a base is the only worthwhile thing to do in that game. Emil isn't wrong, but it's a state that they themselves made. I say this as someone who hate the base building in that game
gamers were basically FORCED to participate in fallout 4s base building, by having the game constantly harass us and destroying our settlements while we werent around and able to babysit them 24/7. Many fans argue that to enjoy the game you literally have to ignore the settlement system. And many mods exist to shut off the fucking radiant quest systems involving them.
Emil seems to be confusing "Players don't want to read the stories in games" with the more factual "Players don't want to read _my_ stories in games" - one of these statements has more truth than the other, and perhaps he should examine why that is. Then again, he's making bag while being openly incompetent at his job. Bethesda aren't giving him an incentive to get better or making him leave, so it's not like he's going to do either.
What's even worse is that in Fallout 4, Shaun wants you, the Player, to meet him at the end of the day, but at the same time, intentionally let you out of Vault 111 into the harsh wasteland as a fucking experiment, seeing how you, the Player, would manage or if you'd just die the second an enemy pops up (if you even make it out of the Vault). So in other words, he wants you to find him, but at the same time, is intrigued to see how you manage in the overworld, so if you die, what's the point? Does he just shrug it off and move onto the next thing?
Didn't Shaun also set up the fight with the guy who kidnapped him as a baby? The experienced cyborg merc with over a century of survival experience(and a squad of synths) vs Shaun's recently defrosted parent that has no idea what's going on yet, and was just wandering around.
@@stepmi yeah he basically sent Kellogg to go meet you and take it from there because he wanted the parent to get a little more closure and revenge. Basically Fallout 4 is literally just a social experiment but at the same time, instead of just bringing the player to the Institute, Shaun is like "oh I hope my parent finds me! They're so close! Oh shit a deathclaw! Oh no, oh no. Oh. Oh my God. Oh well." Which for clarification, the birds are synths too, they're like the bird camera robots from the Incredibles
To be fair, the vault as a concept was built on this premise that safety is the key to community and identity. A lot of Fo4 makes sense if you ignore the plot or story. Or logic. And replace it with something better. The story is kind of smashed together from stories that were half finished or pieces of better stories edited by other people. You can tell that happens frequently. One of the major reasons why, is that the core characters don’t have a timeline or a series of links to their own history. When fans made the wiki pages for characters, there’s often a large number of overlap and missing pieces, travel time is inconsistent. Et al. Nothing grows or changes within the vault itself, because it is a contrived process to begin with. The immortal people, who have lived 60+ years without aging… Is only reasonable if you ignore the problems of immortal people in the story. Ie main characters surviving events that should be traumatic. Father … wants the player to change his mind and break free from the system as a way to gain power and independence. This process is not that organic in the Fallout universe because independence is exceptionally difficult. You need to trade. Travel is ridiculously hard, etc. It is possible that the player is also immortal… or was genetically engineered to be different. That he’s probably one of the hundreds of children / clones. Think about how difficult it would be to build a city sized vault without the help of thousands of people over decades. Now build hundreds of these. You need a crazy amount of resources. It’s the size of a cruise ship, or multiple cruise ships under the ground. It’s hard to know that the vault’s exist to change the world… without assuming a larger purpose in spending trillions of dollars to build hundreds of underground infrastructures that don’t connect or trade. They have to understand that it’s a very backwards concept to start over and restart a culture, from nothing. The idea works if you have the ability to start over, but … They were tinkering with the mechanics of creating and modifying the social environment, using a series of scientific methods rather than assuming the end result.
@@ratatosk02 yeah, but no bird even tried to help the player character if its life was in danger. So, Shaun was ok with his parent dying. Also, why didn't Shaun at least programmed synths to not be hostile if he wanted to meet that much?
@@stepmi they could have actually done something _interesting_ with the story if it turned out you had some guardian angel synths looking out for you, who show up when you're in real danger (Mysterious Stranger style). Imagine noticing this and following the threads and discovering the links back to the Institute that way, instead of just following a dog with a magical nose along a pre-determined trail of undisturbed clues just lying around waiting for you to come along.
What really gets me about the whole "gamers don't know what they're talking about when they criticize my game since they don't make games" is that, by that same logic, we shouldn't be able to tell when a game is good, either. But you'll never see him say the same thing when games he worked on receive praise. He doesn't go out of his way to tell people who enjoy Starfield that they're wrong for doing so because they still aren't developers. And in the end, it really begs the question: if gamers can't give out negative feedback for a game because they don't know anything, and game developers can't give it either because then they'd be seen as rude, then who can? Who's allowed to criticize anything in this utopia Emil envisions? My bet is on the answer being "no one".
It comes off especially douchey when you, as someone criticizing his writing, are yourself *actually making a game* (hi im doing that (mainly as a personal project at the moment))
My favorite was in Oblivion, after you finish the mages guild and proceed to thieves guild, at one point you're tasked with stealing a staff from yourself to convince yourself to move your battle mages out from waterfront because without them protecting you you're not safe from yourself.
@@alshabib5849 Yeah, I could see how the guilds existed in the void, their questlines completely apart from each other, main or sidequests. This was literally the only point where one guild questline touched another, and they still botched it.
@@sharpfang In Morrowind one of the Fighters Guild leaders sends you out to eliminate a Thieves Guild leader. This actually breaks the Thieves Guild storyline making you unable to progress in the Guild. There are many other such interactions in Morrowind, thus providing replayability. In Oblivion/Skyrim all playthroughs are the same. You do the quests almost the same way.
@@whitegoose2017"Almost" is an understatement. What really is there in terms of decisions? Stormcloaks or imperial, dark brotherhood member or getting rid of them (and i don't remember if destroying the dark brotherhood has more than 1 quest even) and sparing or killing parthanux.. Is there actually more? If so it not memorable in the least. To this day i don't understand how people have like 500hours in this game, you do and see the same stuff over and over again
That statment has so little value, it's almsot similar to saying "I drank water today."... Of course nobody sets out to make a bad game duh but setting out to make a great game and delivering that will make your words more valuable unlike this hack Emil. I swear Bethesda is still living off Skyrim glory to this very day, they think they're untouchable.
@@KikyouNeko technically it's actually worse than that... Asset flippers continue to make money by... setting out to make the cheapest, most no effort, derivative, misleading, bad games they can get away with... There are indeed, people who set out to make bad games...
@@Dreadought I agree with that but usually good or bad games will always advertise themselves, indie titles are filled with lazy asset flips like you mentioned but they'll get exposed pretty quick and end up not worth it so it's a rare occurence when that actually happens.
"You don't have high standards for something you hate. I have high standards because I love video games so much and I want them to live up to the image I have for them inside my own head. " -Yahtzee
The thing I hated the most about Starfields story line was the fact that everything pointed to unity being a bad choice. You find letters left beind by some pilgrim guy who pretty much says it was a mistake to jump into unity because he gave up the ones he loved. The hunter is a crazy lunatic because each new universe takes him further and further from everything he cares about. Even your companions are really unsure if going into unity is the right choice. The whole time I was thinking "I'm gonna destroy Unity and put an end to this power-hungry forever war". Apparently choosing to be the good guy is the wrong choice. Power is the only choice. Even your unsure companions throw away all of their worriers and pressure you to do it and if you refuse unity, the stupid game says "Don't worry, we'll be waiting here when you're ready." So stupid.
Also Emil's insipid reduction to bad guy/good guy everything is extremely uncompelling. New Vegas was superb because, no matter who you agreed or disagreed with, you could see the solid reasoning behind the NCR, the Legion, and House. Even when Caesar is crucifying and enslaving people, your first conversation with him reveals "huh, he makes some good points, and I can see why he could gather a following." Even when Ulysses or Elijah try to kill you I find it impossible to truly hate them because they're so fleshed out and you can sympathize with their motivations. Meanwhile, Fallout 3 and 4 reduce the BoS and Enclave to lawful good and chaotic evil and are completely tainted going forward... one of Emil's worst crimes.
@@TaRAAASHBAGS Even one of your possible companions like Rose say how safe legion territory is for trading caravans and she's a trader by profession. She also has a lot of negative things to say about the legion too. It is not so black and white. There is an entire questline dedicated towards fixing N.C.R. corruption regarding the trading caravans. You can't compare Bethesda's storytelling to New Vegas.
@@whitegoose2017 I was just a preteen when I played Fallout 3 so I wasn't too conscious of what a good story/writing was. When I played NV a few years later I was woken up to how shit the previous title's narrative was. New Vegas's writing and worldbuilding are superb.
Hunter's diaries are actually pretty interesting 4th wall breaking because they tell the player what is the point of playing the game, because the player will be repeating the hunt for the artifacts over and over again till he/she is so bored he will do something else with their lives.... Sometimes with the followers, sometimes all alone... finding out there is no point to do it over and over again...
@@MirecU Maybe if he had any concept of game design beyond shit radiant fetch quests he'd understand why it's not pointless to a lot of people. Always good to be an "artist" with contempt for your audience.
That wouldn't have worked. Enclave is a huge stickler about "the purity of man" and as such, having a ghoul as one of their visible heads would go against that. Now, what would work is if he had been augmented with enclave tech to replace his irradiated parts. Sort of a Frank Horrigan deal but done for preservation's sake, rather than to make a secret service super soldier.
@@lillasagna5487 Mate I'm not talking about Cree, don't project instead do a little digging and find out before you make yourself the butt of a joke or are mocked for it.
"Think of all the people who put in years of hard work" - the guy who did the bare minimum, and a shoddy job at that. *He* is the one invalidating all of their work. And he probably knows that.
People: Emil, your writing sucks you incompetent hack! Emil: Hey now! That is a bit unfair, don't you think? This was a team effort. I'd almost be pissed if I was part of that team, with him deflecting his failures onto the whole group. Kind of the opposite of what a good leader would do.
I think part of why Bethesda wont let obsidian get another crack at the fallout franchise is because of Emil. Him and Todd are friends and Todd knows that the writers at obsidian would make bethesda look stupid, make Emil look stupid, but most of all make Todd look stupid for being so beholden to friendship instead of what would have ben better for the company and the fans of his games.
It's a real shame Bethesda only made that "mistake" once, giving us New Vegas. Obsidian even offered to make an Elder Scrolls games to fill the wait gap, but they never got a response
Thing about that is the leads at Obsidian that made New Vegas as good as it was are no longer at the company and their last game was fairly mediocre and forgettable
@@lamlelamatsiliza8550They sold the game as being "from the people that made Fallout" when the vast majority of those people weren't working there. Deceptive marketing at its best.
@@BullFrogFace right. some of my favorite games of all time, kotor 2 and fo:nv were made by obsidian. those guys who made those games possible aren't there anymore. the old heads that made gaming great have long since left.
16:50 Personally the most strange thing about this interaction I find is that you can ask Fawkes to go through the highly irradiated "core" of Vault 87 and retrieve the G.E.C.K with no problems. But now with an even more important task he just... doesn't feel like it?
@@TheBreakingBenny Which is even weirder because Ron Perlman still says you died. Somehow Bethesda couldn't get him to rerecord the ending saying you lived.
@@MrGhosta5 I would not be surprised if Emil Pagliarulo believed so firmly in his nonsense plot and story that he failed to think even further. Knowing him, though, he believes himself and Bethesda to be infallible
He's the reason the writing is stunted and unsatisfactory, and Todd's the reason more and more gameplay systems keep getting stripped out and oversimplified to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. They're the perfect team!
@@creamerthug7028 The bankers that control the reserve systems in every country and effectively all world governments have been using people like that as a cudgel among other things to systematically destroy our nation states so they can consolidate power in the form of a world government?
@@creamerthug7028Well you see, 'LGBT = bad' is a very popular stance nowadays. Does it have any basis or substance? No, but it's cool to be contrarian
Haven't finished yet, but what makes the Sanctuary purge even more insulting is that none of the brotherhood members react to each others deaths. This is ming-bogglingly incompetent, especially after the Whodunit? quest.
As somebody studying screenwriting in college, it amazes me that Pagliarulo refuses to take criticism. Most of my screenwriting classes consist of coming in with our work and having our fellow peers and professors criticize it. Not only does it help us learn from our mistakes but it teaches us how to take criticism and use it effectively. Something tells me that if Pagliarulo Ever went to a writer's workshop he would get really dismissive and not listen to anyone when they try to tell him that his writing has obvious flaws and should be looked at once again. What I've learned from college is that most of the writing is rewriting that's the hard part it's easy to put whatever on a piece of paper or on a Google doc. But actually sitting down and rewriting your work is what's hard, and something tells me that Pagliarulo Doesn't like to rewrite his work because he thinks it’s inherently perfect. You should never have this mindset of your writer or if you are in any artistic field.
that's not really the same as having it peer critiqued.... you're just going over your writing without external criticism (which imo it needs)@@Creetosis
I get the impression that Emil does exactly two passes when he writes. He does a first draft, and then he goes back over to spackle some glib efforts to chide anyone who points out the obvious solution to his setup.
Two things: Emil smears around all the criticism onto the team and then inserts himself into the positive like far harbor. I can tell from this set of messages he is a horrible boss. Imagine working for someone like that. Also, roofers work hard. Imagine if they put on a leaky roof and said "It's fine! We worked hard on it so don't worry about all that water dripping in ruining your house."
@@neoqwerty I had never heard of him so I had to look that up. There is a Tony from way back but I think you mean Tommy? I can see how it's similar. Both seem very ego driven.
One of my favrotie "There isn't a design document" moments in Skyrim is one of the wizards in the Mage's College stating that Necromancy is perfectly legal, but every other instance of Necromancy in the games narrative is clearly illegal and all necromancers are hostile.
Random necromancers are just perverts, so it's ok. Vunfert the unliver probably has not been in the College in a long time and their policies might have changed. The fact that you can't pressure him about it is a sign that it is not the case and you are actually right. I hate it.
@@karpai5427 That's right! Wuunferth says explicitly that Necromancy is illegal, and his "rumors of Necromancy" are just a red herring for the murder mystery quest.
I love how beautifully this contasts with how they handled the same matter in Morrowind. Different factions all have really distinct takes on the subject. It's illegal, but handled more as a taboo by the Mages Guild. The average Dunmer dislikes it, but for interesting reasons (they worship their ancestors and take strong offense to their remains being misused). It's all very consistent, and only inconsistent when it's meant to be.
I suspect this was a remnant of someone with D&D ideas buried in the back of their head. In D&D, healing magic is part of the school of necromancy, having to do with the revivification of dead flesh. In ES, of course, there is a separate school for healing, but I get the feeling the "necromancy isn't always bad even though necroMANCERS are" is an unconscious leftover of the D&D mode of thought.
@@Saibellus Or, now get this; Bethesda is bad at writing nuanced and well-thought out, thought-provoking moral dillemas, and just uses "necromancers bad" because that's the usual fantasy trope. You don't need D&D related conspiracy theories when the simple answer is that bethesda's writers think of morality as something black and white, and believe the fanbase are 5 year old children anyway.
"It's hard work to make a video game!" Is an excuse that works when you are a solo-dev working on your own time and resources... Not when you have held a high position in a triple A company for the last two decades.
And even if true, that doesn't excuse anything, that is just a statement without any real meaning to the conversation. "Building is hard" Isn't a good excuse when a bridge collapses.
When you read that series of tweets by this Emil guy, it becomes abundantly clear where the 'Bethesda customer support team' gets the nerve to respond to reviews on steam by talking down and demeaning people giving them legitimate criticism. Out of touch is putting it lightly.
Emil is the type of person that makes me hate developers. "Oh, it's HARD so you can't criticize us because it's so HARD to make games." I'm a paramedic. My job is difficult. But if I majorly fuck up, I will be criticized. Claiming that my job is hard so I can't be subjected to criticism isn't an excuse. Bethesda is officially on my shit list, and I will never pay for a single thing from them again until something changes.
Which is complete bullshit since he probably has the easiest job there based on wtf he pulled off. It took playtesting to figure out an idea was complete crap. Thousands of man hours probably used to get to that point when he could have just thought about it for a few seconds to realize how shit his idea was.
I don't think your issue is with "developers" the underpaid people working 80h a week at 70% of industry pay to make something. It's the leadership, emil was leadership at Bethesda.
@@kingmanichim, Neil Druckmann, that guy from Devil May Cry emo reboot, they all have something in common: they think they're rockstars and God's gift to games industry, but they're just a bunch of arrogant pricks.
It's a stupid excuse because he chose to work in the medium of games, and my suspicion is that Emil has never actually practiced the craft outside of that medium. If I write a shitty short story, and the editor tells me as much, I can't then turn around and go "well brah you just don't get how hard this is. It's hard work so like I dunno accept it if its bad" No. I have to take the criticism to heart and do better, because I will never sell another piece of writing if I concoct bullshit excuses for myself. He also has a lot of lazy, amateurish habits -- all the handwavy contrived nonsense and failed Rule of Cool bullshit -- that should have been pounded out of him by editors before his work ever saw the light of day.
You forgot something about Emil's 15/15 comment: He absolutely cannot make that statement because he's in an extremely privileged position where the game he's making *will* get made. Bethesda and MS won't cancel a Bethesda project. His job is cushy AF (given he's still in that position despite all the issues). So him saying "we should be lucky we have anything" is beyond ridiculous, coming from him specifically. No respect for developers who are actually in a financially precarious position. If he really wants to talk like that, someone should give him an ultimatum or a quality standard to aim for, if he doesn't meet them he should be fired. Without that motivation he won't do shit.
This has been my beef with his ridiculous Xcrement; he whines that the job is hard. STFU Emil, right now someone is digging a ditch in 20 degree weather. That job is hard. Sitting at a desk programming a freaking video game, while not an easy task, is in no way as strenuous as actual physical labor. You have a cushy, plush job that even gets you some nerd street cred. STFU.
@@kotzpenner Like Microsoft has a great track record of fixing failing franchises. If I were a head at Microsoft I'd force some kind of change in the writing team. They own Obsidian as well. I would want some of the Obsidian team leading the writing on ES6 and doing quality control. That would probably be Microsofts best bet at ensuring this gets fixed.
He uses his team as a shield, implying that they would be out of a job if fans criticized too hard. But he is the lead writer, he should take responsibility for it. All the times he points towards his subordinates he acts as if they were his colleagues, when he is the one in charge and with all the safety nets instead of them. He wants them to share the burden of criticism, when only he gets the perks of being in charge and when things go right.
Dude straight up wrote that it would take divine intervention for reality to line up with his vision. You'd think with 21+ years in the industry, he'd have a better grasp of exactly what he and his team can realistically do and come up with a more reasonable vision. Pushing yourself to do more is good, up to a point, but starfield was just setting themselves up for failure and then shrugging off any criticism because they tried their best. Shooting for the stars is a nice goal, but if you know you don't have the fuel to get anywhere close, then you're just an idiot.
It should be 24 years in the industry since he was hired for Thief 2. A human being could be born, grow up and finish a master's degree in the amount of time he's taken to figure out how to use 2-3 level editors (poorly).
Emil has ruined every Bethesda game he touched. Still tries to say he didn't... but it's not really his fault, it is Todd's fault for ever letting this guy ever work on writing ANYTHING important. Maybe is just Bethesda games are not important to Todd, he only wanted to say "look where I reached" to the bullies that messed with him when he was in the chess club
Regarding the Dark Brotherhood main questline in Oblivion, I wanted to add a minor point. I played Daggerfall, the second Elder Scrolls game in the series. In that game, the method for joining the Dark Brotherhood is the same as it is in Oblivion. You kill a civilian, and that triggers the Dark Brotherhood to contact you. The writers of Oblivion clearly recalled this mechanic as they replicated it directly for Oblivion's Dark Brotherhood, but they did not actually review the recruitment quest itself, particularly the dialog. In Daggerfall, after you complete your mission and join the Dark Brotherhood, it is noted to be a tradition that your first sanctioned kill is to be paid a single gold coin. When I joined the Dark Brotherhood in Oblivion and did not get the single gold coin as payment for my first sanctioned kill, I came to the conclusion that I was not actually recruited into the Dark Brotherhood, but that this cult of psychopaths was just pretending to be the guild of professional assassins I had known in Daggerfall. Thus, the entire time I was playing through, I was expecting a moment when the real Dark Brotherhood decided to get involved to deal with these pretenders. I noticed the difference in the notes at the deaddrops. I noticed the Dark Brotherhood armor in the targets' homes. My assumption was that the real Dark Brotherhood was eliminating the competition, and eventually, the reveal would come. After Lucien showed up and had his freak out, I was sure this was the moment we'd get the reveal, since the deaddrop method would no longer work, and I'd be approached by my contact to finish the job. Maybe get some sort of choice to side with Lucien or the real Dark Brotherhood's representative. Decide for myself whether I'd prefer to be a professional assassin or a member of a murder cult. I'd already decided I would finish off Lucien and get paid that single coin I'd been waiting for since the questline started. Needless to say, I was very disappointed with the reveal.
Holy cow, this is so much better. Like a bunch of organised thugs think they can clean up by pretending to be the brotherhood and then they start getting picked off and you have to uncover the truth and then decide where your loyalties lie. That's so much better.
I mean, he did say that he didn't know the lore, and even if he did, someone at the studio said that they don't have to abide by literally everything. They can or they don't. For those who don't they can do whatever they want. Emil maybe did that because he doesn't know it and just went with his experiences as a Catholic boy. Too bad he couldn't do the game version of Spotlight because you know....
@@damienrichards9743 i think hiring a guy who doesn't know the lore or care about it to expand on the lore and having him write the storylines for every quest is a super good idea
@@silvervampireteeth Tell that to either Rolston or Gooddall (I think that's how you spell his last name. PatricianTV said something about one of them saying they can either diverge from the lore or not have to do anything with it and do something new entirely. That and someone wrote a book named Coda where you can essentially choose which story and mods to be your preferred 'canon' so Emil took that literally and here we are....) Or any of the more experienced writers/designers before they left the studio for other endeavors. Just another excuse to justify "hey i can do whatever i want and there's literally nothing you can do about it". Much love and respect.
Emil is the perfect example of being promoted past one's capabilities Though, to be fair, I suspect having him mop floors would be past his capabilities
Emil in that timeline be like "Floor being a mess? Trashes everywhere? Funny how disconnected some of the employees are from the realities of floor mopping, and yet they speak with complete authority. I mean, I can guess what it takes to make a video game but I don't work on game development, so what the hell do I really know? Not a lot."
The internet has made you unnecessarily cruel for no reason. Is he a bad writer? Yeah sure, pretty solidly poor. But this seems like you’re saying the whole “probably couldn’t even mop right” bit for some personal satisfaction. You’re behaving like a scumbag, even if you’re in the right.
@@pterodummy Nah, I wouldn't trust Emil to mop my floors because I care about my floors. He'd fuck up my floors with his shit mopping then go on a schizophrenic essay about how I don't understand the intricacies of floor mopping. Emil can genuinely eat broken glass, if he didn't want to be ripped on by Internet people then he should stop shitting into a fucking fountain pen for a living. Unbearable hack.
Fixing Kellogg not aging seems so easy just make him a synth, an old kind like nick valentine. Then you can explain not aging, have interesting dialogue with nick upon rescuing him confusing him for Kellogg, give the player a reason to look into the institute and disliking them. You can even still keep the whole memory den thing by saying he was an early attempt to transfer people's memories to synths
A few ways to just fix the aging could be making him a synth like you said. Or he was the only successful one who survived the experiment. Sure it could be a copout excuse but if they just add enough evidence( such as when exploring the institute you come across a scientist who is injecting something into a test subject, they then explode or their head flys off or what ever). Furthermore he could be treated like the winter solder, they freeze him, and thaw him as needed. Another excuse could be he is a clone, where the reason for the brain impants is so each clone is up to date on what Kellogg knows, and when the active clone dies or suffers life threatening injuries, a new one wakes up.
Also, fixing Kid in a Fridge is super easy. You find the fridge outside of Quincy. Just make it so that the kid hid in the fridge during the siege of Quincy and got stuck there.
With Kellogg, Emil's story is so bad that I could write a better one using the basic framework of F4. And I'll prove it right now. My version deviates when you reach the door to the vault. You see a pip-boy on the door control console with a drawing showing you to put it on your wrist. You put it on and you see "BOOTING" and then "AUTOPLAY". You hear a voice, "Greetings. If you are listening to this, then the revival process was successful. With the old automated systems inoperative, I had to manually setup the sequences, a long and tedious process. I would have preferred to greet you in person, but my absence would have been noticed. There are many things you need to learn about this new world you've been dropped into. Too many to tell you in this message. Probably the most important thing for you right now is where's your son and who killed your husband/wife. I can give you some help with those. The man's name is Kellogg. Where he is now, I do not know. You can start your search for him in a place called Diamond City. I've entered the location into this pip-boy. Search out a detective named Nick Valentine. With luck he can help you. I will be in touch later." You see "MESSAGE ENDS." You then leave the vault. You head to Diamond City and go through the quest to free Nick. Nick's never heard of Kellogg, but agrees to help you look around. Rummaging around the bowels of the stadium, you find a room that looks like no one's been there for years and recover a holotape. It's Kellogg's voice and he's angry that the Institute has severed all contact with him after all the jobs he's done for them. He also fills in some details of his life and how he got involved with The Institute. He says that he's leaving DC to look for work with the Gunner mercenaries who are now a playable faction. You head down to Gunner HQ and sign up to work for them. A number of Gunner quests follow, some morally questionable, while you work your way up to build trust in that faction. You finally pop the question to the Gunner leader about Kellogg. He tells you he doesn't know him, but vaguely heard the name before. You rummage around Gunner HQ and find another holotape. Kellogg talks about how the Gunners are kicking him out because he has too much "baggage" and that he's going freelance. He fills out some more details of his life and talks about his wife and son/daughter were murdered by a rival gang back in the NCR. You follow the breadcrumbs through various NPC's, each time finding a holotape, each one where he sounds more bitter and depressed, leading to the next location. Your last location, you find a holotape. Kellogg's last job went tits-up. He complains he's slowing down and that he got shot up. He's heading off for a place he can get treatment and rest up. You head to that location. You walk in and ask the man at the desk if Kellogg is there. The man says "Are you here to kill him?" You have a number of answers. The man says, "A man with Kellogg's past, it's no surprise that someone would show up one day." and "Look, you can do whatever you want. I won't stop you. But just talk to him first." and tells you where Kellogg's room is. You walk into the room and there's an old man in a wheelchair. He's obviously senile. He thinks you're his son/daughter finally coming to visit him. He's happy and crying, saying how well you've grown up and how sorry he couldn't be there for you. He lamenting that he can't remember the things he's done but knows they were bad, that he did it all for the family, and makes you promise not to follow his path. It could be done to make him so pathetic that you actually feel some sympathy for him. You then have the choice to kill him, play along with his delusions, or just leave. Whatever you do, you leave the building and look up to see the Prydwen arrive in Commonwealth. End of Act I. The voice on the holotape is, of course, Sean who you will finally meet at the start of Act II. Hopefully you can piece together at this point that it's your son who's now an old man. I haven't worked out the entire path for Act II, but then again, I haven't devoted much time or thought to it. Anyway, let me know what you think.
Tbh they should have had him be a freshly made synth. If I remember correctly they were monitoring the vault for when you leave, so it wouldn't be hard for them to deploy Kelogg 2.0 as bait to bring you in. But nope, instead they wrote themselves into a hole.
@@AbelMusa the synths, railroad and institute are referenced in one quest in fallout 3, so I say the incompetent who wrote fo4 looked at that and then proceeded to royally screw the pooch and screw up the aesthetics they were clearly implied to have
If Larian had done the "Emmissary is your dead companion" thing, they'd have made an entirely separate version of the Emmissary for each character, then triggered the appropriate one in response to your choices. Emil's tweets defending himself sound like every other narccistic and incompetent douchebag who can't comprehend that they aren't infallible and everything is everyone else's fault.
You touch on _the most_ infuriating aspect of Emil's writing: the casually adding world-breaking plot contrivances and then utterly disregarding them immediately afterward and never acknowledging them again, which he does over and over and over again in the Fallout games in particular. It's as if any character Emil writes has a random chance of having a personal, one-use, pocket miracle they can whip out at any time to do one specific impossible thing... and he ~somehow~ doesn't see any issue with that kind of writing. It's such a weird combination of traits that it feels like some kind of mental disorder... like a problem with his brain structure that makes him incapable of understanding the relationship between causes, effects, and the even further downstream effects that ripple outward... and he still chose to become a writer despite this handicap.
"We invented teleportation, cold-fusion energy, mass-produced synthetic humanoids capable of independent, witty, and creative thoughts, brought the gorilla back from extinction, and we still haven't taken over the world yet. What's up with thaaaaat?" ~ Your son
Dumb people can't write smart things. He, and many other writers, see something that's cool, and want to write about it. Sadly, they're literally too stupid to understand it, so they resort to bullshit.
@@MK_ULTRA420 I'm more offended they somehow built cutting-edge future tech that exceeds anything that existed in Pre-War civilization with a box of scraps. That's not even a post-apocalypse story anymore.
It's insane to me that people praise Skyrim for having so much "player choice", and yet in the Thieves Guild quest line, you can't alert the Jarl to Maven's connections to the guild. The Jarl hates the guild. Mjoll hates them too. You can easily find hard evidence that Maven is in cahoots with them and the brotherhood. But can you do anything with it? Can you rescue Riften from the scourge of crime and prevent Maven from ruling the town either from the shadows or outright? No, you either have to become the head of the guild or do nothing. Where's the choice there?
Who the hell praises Skyrim for player choice? Its one of the most rail roaded "RPGs" ever. 99% of the time your only choice is either do the quest or don't.
@@GeraltofRivia22You'd be surprised how many mouthbreathers praise Skyrim for its seemingly huge amount of player choice and freedom when in reality it has none.
I'm pretty sure most people's idea of "player choice" is when the player gets a choice. In that regard, Skyrim is a masterpiece. All those dialogue options, different skill trees and paths, weapons, spells, shouts, so much player choice! I'm convinced this is the case, I refuse to accept that so many people are just hallucinating choices where there aren't any for the sake of an empty compliment for their favorite brain-turn-off games.
Skyrim is a crappy game. Go ahead, play it unmodded, even better, play the FIRST release of it unmodded. There is no reason for it to be praised even when it was first released, far better games were around. The only reason Skyrim gets praised is because it is a great skeleton for mods to create a decent enough game. Without mods? It is a skeleton without any meat on the bones. To make the game be passable for what a triple A title should be expected to be, you need to install so many mods that you double the disc space it uses.
Something lead quest guy Will Shen said in an interview after leaving BGS really struck a chord with me when it comes to how disjointed Bethesdas games have gotten so I'll just drop the quote. "I think one of the things that makes triple-A role-playing games really come together is when it feels like the game has some kind of a singular direction." The interview from the website gamedeveloper, and he says some other things in the interview that gives me the impression that leadership in general at BGS is a mess. Lack of a singular vision was an issue with the writing for FO4, but it's become an issue with the general design of Starfield all over the game. He says some other stuff like how leadership needs to be proactive. He didn't specifically call out BGS in the interview of course, but he's been at Bethesda since his career began so it isn't hard to read between the lines on which experiences he's drawing from.
@@vickkyytoria Funny thing is all of that could be avoided if he stfu and stayed silent. Really he's jealous he didn't write the script for Fallout TV show.
I never liked the guy sometimes I wondered "hey maybe he's got good ideas here and there but hodd toward just don't use them" -- but it's been too long.. that theory isn't plausible
@@villings The problem is emil has good concepts but he doesn't know how to use them beyond the concept phase. Starfield's actual premise of meta-narrative multiverse mirroring is absolutely genius but emil executed it in the worst way possible. They seriously need to get a few more writers that work alongside emil so that he's not doing everything on his own and failing at executions where they matter.
I have hated him since fallout 4 and now that i played oblivion and fsllout 3 i hate him even more. Starfield just verified bethsada hasnt made a good game since morrowind
The problem is that Emil is a lazy writer who routinely excuses himself by citing writing principles and practices that only work for short-story fanfic writers.@@piccoloatburgerking
He's had this job for this long and he still hasn't improved and yet people who are probably better writers have been laid off while he sits there making horrible quests kind of makes you think don't it.
One of the most perplexing things about the lore of Skyrim is the fact that the Dragonborn's actual importance is never meaningfully acknowledged. As Dragonborn, you're the only legitimate claimant to the Ruby Throne. If it still existed, you could wear the Amulet of Kings. You're capable of becoming Emperor/Empress. Ulfric Stormcloak almost certainly would support a Dragonborn in their claim, being that he already intends to march south on the Thalmor anyway. His main grievance with the Empire is that it's not the same Empire he fought for, that the current Emperor is just a quisling warlord, and he has nothing to say when a Dragonborn walks through his front door? This fact is not addressed, it's not even hinted at. A Dragonborn in TES is more than just a guy who can yell really loud and fling ragdolls across Whiterun. They're paradigm-altering superheroes who change the shape of Tamriel, sometimes literally. Other issues with the way the Dragonborn is portrayed can be chalked down to engine limitations; I'm not too torn up about not being able to literally Shout city walls to pieces, the same way I'm not too upset that the Thalmor aren't portrayed the way Kirkbride & Kuhlmann originally wanted to. The treatment of the protagonist in Skyrim, though, is just silly and disappointing.
@@notthefbi7015 The Thalmor want the civil war to prolong, not end conclusively one way or another. Better it ends with an actual human being running Skyrim imo. Either way, even the Thalmor barely acknowledge the fact that you're a Dragonborn, which is about as weird as Ulfric hardly mentioning it. Dragonborn's probably the one thing that can conclusively ruin their day and they treat you like some random schmuck, it's the worst
@@Eastcyning they do mention dragonborn stuff in the civil war though, i think both sides will throw an offhand comment to have the dragonborn deal the finishing blow on the imperials/stormcloaks, but that's it.
@@comentator93 From his account on Imperial Library: "I talked with Kurt about a whole mental anguish thing that happened to the world of TES after Talos was shot out of heaven by the Thalmor. Short version: any attempt to draw the old red diamond would invariably end up failing. Ex: A painter would paint it. The paint would set. The paint would crack and move. The final painting would be a 2D explosion. More Talos despair would set in. Ex: Blacksmiths would forge the symbol. The metal would cool, be applied to an Imperial helmet. A brave legate would wear it. The diamond stayed on long enough to meet with a Dominion ambassador. Imperials would be all "See? Our faith in Talos is--" Legate's helmet would crack from the symbol, legate's head crushes in. More Talos despair. Dominion ambassador would smile and accept the surrender of whole legions. Ex: A bard, knowing the "cracking diamond effect", attempts to describe the symbol in verse, to avoid the physical danger. He performs the verse to a crowd of secret Talos worshipers. They begin to see the diamond in their minds and are overjoyed. Then the screaming starts. Two hours later, a throng of headless corpses are found, strewn diamond-pattern in a courtyard. Other worshipers arrive to look on them, seeing a sign of their god in the bodies of his martyrs. Crowds gather at this holy site. Dominion lets the hope set in, declares small doubt in the finality of Talos' erasure. People go "whoa" and flock to the site. Thalmor button is pressed. The new settlement blows up as anything around the diamond shape regards it in a chain-reaction explosion of viscera, language, spellfire. Half a province surrenders to the Thalmor. Parts of Game: Skyrim would show all of this in mechanical terms. The LDB would have to learn how to successfully craft the diamond shape without danger. They would have to avoid certain "latent diamond traps", etc. Was awesome idea. Was also... technically difficult. Was also radical. Is saved for a future game or DLC."
What I hate is the contrived defense people come up with for bad writing: "If [XYZ convoluted/utterly illogical thing] didn't happen, then the rest of the story couldn't have happened!" (See: forcing a vampire-hunter to return Serana, an ANCIENT VAMPIRE WITH AN ELDER SCROLL, to her father in order to set the events of Dawnguard into motion) Like, shouldn't it be obvious that if the very impetus for your plot is a blatant stumbling-block for people with common sense, then you should probably _write a better plot?_
@@KopperNeoman but alas the dawnguard quest would be over/impossible in 3 seconds.no serana means soul Carin mostly closed off. so no Valernia so Harkon can't do his prophecy.
To be fair I think the way the Dawnguard quest starts off is the biggest problem. The questline relies on Serana trusting the player to help her but you have to meet her as a vampire hunter. Why couldn't the quest just starts with random NPCs from the Dawnguard hiring you as extra muscle who then die in the dungeon leaving you to meet Serana alone? That way you would start the questline with no affiliation and being a Vampire wouldn't be as unimmersive as going out of your way to join and help the vampire hunters either. I guess they wanted you to see the Dawnguard castle so badly they threw away a sensible setup just for that. In that case you could still go to the Dawnguard as a quest step to collect some payment or whatever even as a Vampire (risk your head for a chance of good money) so IDK just bad writing ig.
Yeah, came to a similar conclusion a while back, though it was more about mangling preexisting characters to suit the plot. Point still stands: if your super cool plot relies on either idiotic move to work, it’s not cool, it’s stupid, and needs to be scrapped entirely. This is even worse if you actually do get something good out of the plot, as its horrible impetus will taint that…but we don’t have to worry about that from Emil, because he’s too crap to make anything good period.
Exactly, the response they were looking for was “I played a game called Fallout where I launched a nuke AND I CLAPPED!” And that’s exactly what Bethesda got.
It works because the geeky stuff has become cool and popular on some level. This happened with bands all the time back in the day. They got big and the music changed for the worse to appeal to a broader pallet. I have a buddy who got into games about 5 years ago (we're 41). His opinion on gaming gives almost no priority to anything we care about. Lore, immersion, cohesive in-world details/physics. So many people prioritize tech specs and graphics. His major issue with Starfield when it came out was around the DLSS or whatever other feature was missing. Lol. I'm like "bro, this game looks so bad, what are you even liking about it?"
The whole "it's written on the internet so it must be true" cope seems like a phrase that gets passed around at Bethesda a lot. I remember Todd saying it when writing off past criticisms of their games having bugs during one of fallout 76's showcases.
Emil being passive aggressive and petty? >looks at the Broken Steel endings where you do the sensible thing instead of sacrificing yourself for no good reason, where Rob calls whoever went into the control room a "true hero" and not you ...nah, couldn't be. He's totally not the type.
@@EggEnjoyer No, Todd made Oblivion. He was project lead for Redguard and Morrowind, but the actual creative legwork for Morrowind mostly rests on Ken Rolston and Michael Kirkbride, while Mark Nelson, Douglas Goodall, and Gary Noonan contributed the graphical and writing elements. Todd did some Imperial quests, and was the main manager, but that just consists of telling people what to focus on and not literally how to do their jobs.
@@SecuR0M Right. But surely he has some talent if he was project lead for those 3 games. They’re all acclaimed. But then again maybe not if starfield was his dream game and he let it turn out like this. Maybe dude is checked out idk
@@EggEnjoyerTalent without effort is useless. Also, it could very well be that Todd is old hat, and is unable to create games at the baseline standard of current day.
I will say the Salem thing for fallout 4 isn't that weird, of "magic powers". But specifically because it already existed in the original fallout game and subsequent ones. Psychics and Psykers. They have special powers. The Master is known to have psychic powers, there is even a perk you can take at level 15 that specifically blocks psychic attacks from him. That he developed these powers from exposure to FEV. There is also literally the kid from New Vegas, The Forecaster who demonstrates psychic powers and wheres a psychic nullifier helmet. Which that helmet does come up in the original fallout game where you can meet psykers. That according to the fallout bible, have different powers. Such as telekinesis, pyrokinesis, and elctrokinesis. There is also literally Hakunin from fallout 2 who communicates to the player directly when you choose to sleep, in your dreams. I am just giving you a few examples, but there is plenty more of these. If anything, not including the "witches" in fallout 4 because to the developers it seems "out of place", actually shows how out of touch they are with their own series. Them saying they "don't want to beholden to writing from someone 20 years ago" and them not wanting to keep a design bible, is precisely how we get to the point where Fallout 76, yes that train wreck, is actually more in line with the original point of psychic powers from the original Fallout game.
I was thinking the same thing; it's been a while since I played FO1 and 2, but I was sure there were psychers there, and I definitely remembered the kid from New Vegas. Now, I love Fallout, and think Fallout 2 is one of the best games ever made. But they're not very serious games with very serious lore or stories, even before Bethesda shat on it.
Yes psykers are an established part of Fallout lore but in defence of New Vegas nothing the forcaster says or does requires supernatural aid. He himself admits he gets called out by wastelanders who claim his power can be possessed by anyone who listens more than they talk. The Forecaster has no proven power and admits as much himself. Whether you believe he does or not is up to you.
@@UnsoberIdiot just because they had unrealistic or even outlandish elements doesn’t mean they weren’t still internally consistent or capable of taking themselves seriously. Even Fallout 2 which is the wackiest out of the Black Isles/Obsidian Games, had its share of dark moments, usually involving the enclave or Frank Horrigan specifically.
What pissed me off the most about the Fawkes' inane pontifications but at the end of 3 is how RIDICULOUSLY EASY you could've had it make sense by changing one tiny-ass detail: Have Fawkes and the Lone Wanderer get separated during the storming of Project Purity sequence. It's so easy to do, just have an explosion go off and a wall, separating the two. You could even set up a more exciting ending situation by having Fawkes and the Lone Wanderer discuss their plans ahead of the final mission. For example, they go there together and then Fawkes will do the radiation bit, just like he did back in Vault 87. So, when the two are separated at Project Purity, Fawkes might tell the Lone Wanderer to go on ahead and secure the antichamber and he'll find an alternate route and they'll meet up there. Then the Lone Wanderer will arrive at the antichamber, wait around for Fawkes to show up until he can wait no longer, then choosing to self-sacrifice. There! I fixed it!
Emil and Todd glare at you in long, uncomfortable silence, turn to each other, scowl, then look back at you: "You're fired,' Todd says. 'So anyway', Emil says, turn to Todd, 'I'll just have Fawkes say something about it being the player's destiny or something' Todd stands up and claps his hands: 'Brilliant', he says, pointing at Emil, 'that's why I love you man, you think of this shit. Alright lunchtime guys I'm thinking Mexican'
I just watched the video. They could have easily explained why you couldn't use same drug as Autumn did by just having it break in the siege / fight with you or him just consuming it beforehand to account for possibility that he would have no time to find magic drug in his jacket and inject it if he would need to get into Project Purity so that you either find him with a broken or empty syringe. Like, it is completely believable that either would happen and easy to implement without changing much of dialogue or inventory for that to be in game. 0 fucks being given on culmination of your story is truly a peak of writing.
As a writer, listening to Pagliarulo talk about our field is physically painful because it's clear he doesn't understand or respect it. Writing is both an art and a craft. Yes it needs creativity and freedom, but it also requires practice and study. Writing rules and story structure NEED to be studied and followed. Story structure doesn't limit you or make your story predictable, it's like a recipe. If you're trying to make a cake there are literally millions of combinations with flavors, textures, design, etc that make each one unique but they all have basic ingredients like flour, sugar, eggs, etc and necessary actions like mixing and baking. Likewise, stories have basic things they NEED in order to be good like the Opening Image where you introduce your character and world, Pinch Points where your characters face adversity, a Midpoint Twist that either your character, your reader, or both didn't expect to contrast the Finale and raise the stakes so your story doesn't drag halfway through, etc. But it doesn't seem like Pagliarulo has EVER studied writing craft. He constantly breaks the rules for foreshadowing, lore consistency, and logical progression. He can't even resist breaking his OWN rules he created for the world/characters. 🤦♀
@@Whodjathink Right? Or at least Save The Cat! Or hell, just send him a link to Brandon Sanderson's writing classes he posts on UA-cam. Any of those would make SUCH a difference.
Pagliarulo is a propagandist, not a writer. All these AAA writers have been installed, not hired. So they don't respect writing because they see it as an advertising tool, not an artform. The 343 lead writer was exposed just some months ago. This has happened since domestic propaganda was legalized veeeeery quietly about 8 years back. That is why all media tanked and started pushing similar messaging.
I think one of the most critical writing follies in bethesda writing is sometimes they say "Hang on, if the player tried to do this, that would completely change the story" and then don't either 1: change the story slightly so you couldn't actually do that (make the entrance into the chamber real small so fawkes couldn't possibly enter) 2: reward the player by letting them use that superior option (let fawkes input the code, saving everyone without any sacrifice) but instead 3: have characters act utterly stupidly to railroad the player into the choice (fawkes says some bullshit about destiny, forcing you to pick from two terrible options)
actually that idea 1 is jokes and would have worked, imagine if you had to climb through a tiny vent with all your armor off the fit, thus you couldnt be wearing a radiation suit or powerarmor suit which would also mean no "wait but my rad resist is so high that doesnt matter?"
I'm not sure I've ever really seen this addressed, but the whole Fawkes thing is even more stupid when you consider that can still ask Sarah Lyons to do it for you and avoid death. If you can avoid it anyway, what was the fucking point of this stupid inconsistency? So you could feel bad about someone dying? So fucking cringe. In reality, Fawkes should've been allowed to do it so that fortuitous players who kept him as a companion all this time are rewarded with an alternative option that not every player might encounter. But God forbid a Bugthesda game has anything that you actually might miss on a first playthrough. There's also that one character you can have as a slave named Clover or something who doesn't refuse anything you do except for this. Again, would've been a perfect opportunity for evil karma characters to have a boom to avoid losing their life in the end. Imagine it might be a reason to actually have companions aside from being damage sponges.
Fawkes was my main companion in my first playthrough of 3, because I liked being a glass cannon and it was important to have a tanky buddy who drew aggro. This contrivance was so confusing and upsetting that I lost sleep over it. Not only does it make no sense, but self-sacrifice is Fawkes' whole motif! His gameplay is all about becoming strong and hardened to protect his friends, literally taking bullets for the Lone Wanderer, but suddenly, an action that would cost him nothing to do, and everything to abstain from, is simply too far.
@29:30 - It is amazing to watch Emil admit that by not bothering to think things through, he blew resources on IMPLEMENTING a "Replace Maxson by Whacking Maxson" plot. They didn't catch how bad of an idea it was ("it felt wrong") until they were playtesting it!
"Oh, I guess Klingon promotion is wrong here." Man, they must be dumb as fuck for not understanding that the BOS _isn't_ a barbarian faction unlike the raiders
“Oh yeah, you kill the leader and become the leader!” How the fuck did they come to that conclusion? How was the thing that bothered them was “Oh, they still don’t like Danse,” and not “You killed our fucking leader, prepare to die????”
@@Stryfe52 I wouldn't be surprised if Emil Pagliarulo is speaking for the team, effectively boiling down the talks they had behind-the-scenes (which may be a given because God forbid they use design documents, right Emil?!), and they were too depressed to maybe express why it's nonsensical with their hearts.
@@TheBreakingBennyI truly want to believe it's mostly the leads making these horrible games over at Bethesda. I can't comprehend an entire dev team being that stupid
i resent the title "Emil Pagliarulo is an Incompetent Writer" because it implies that this man has somehow earned the honor of being considered a writer
@@Slender_Man_186 They're even worse than that, They want you to buy the same product multiple times, on multiple platforms. Not to mention microtransactions are a thing because of them.
I don't know if this is brought up in the video yet, but Emil seems like the type of guy who doesn't really care about intricasies of his stories. And the thing is, if you're a writer or at least a good one, you really must be at least a little bit nerdy about the stories you're creating. That's where brilliant storytelling is told, when you set your world's rules, stick to them, and immerse yourself in it as much as you would want a player/reader/viewer to immerse themselves in it. If you don't care about the story you're telling, chances are you'll produce a mediocre story not many people will care about. Fallout 4 is liked for its gameplay and companions, but rarely do I ever hear people compliment its main plot. Which really cannot be said for, as an example, New Vegas. With New Vegas people still get really geeky when discussing the political picture of the Mojave and which faction is the right choice, myself included. That's how you know you've written a compelling story, when fans of it still talk about it a decade later. Emil really struggles with this concept, or seems generally disinterested in it at the very least
Yes, I got that impression of Emil as well. I write casually, and by no means will I say I’m good at it, but I do care and geek out about my characters and world. Morrowind’s lore had me geeked out for a long time, delving into all the books, myths, various accounts of Red Mountain, etc… can’t say the rest of Bethesda’s games kept me that entertained lore wise.
As soon as a writer expresses that they simply _don't care_ about ANY aspect of the story they're writing, that writer is a hack and, if they're part of a project, should be replaced. Thinking certain details aren't important enough to obsess over is one thing, but if you just shrug and say "it doesn't matter because nobody will care" you shouldn't be writing anything more complicated than a shopping list- and even then you'd probably leave off the deodorant because "eh, nobody cares what you smell like anyway".
Its brought up on one of ItsAGundam video from a couple of years ago, it even had a clip of Emil telling how he writes his stories which is Stupid, simple and easy.
Emil is literally quoted as saying that 'if you write something compelling the player is just going to turn it into paper airplanes anyway," so y'know.
Whenever someone says something along the lines of "it's fictional, it's not supposed to be realistic", know that they have absolutely zero understanding of writing and worldbuilding. I know that was Pete Hines and not Emil (although we'll see, I'm only at 27:08), but still remember this. Every story and fictional world needs to establish its rules and stick to them to retain suspense of disbelief. Break suspense of disbelief, and your audience audience instantly cares less about what's going on. Rules create stakes. In our world, we know falling hundreds of metres leads to instant death, so contemplating a dangerous climb across a chasm with a drop that big is instantly scary. But imagine if gravity in our world was highly inconsistent, and 40% of the time you just floated in a random direction? All of a sudden that climb can be ruined randomly by the climber just flying off the side. It goes from scary but tangible to annoying and random. This logic flows for real world physics and for fictional elements like magic or advanced technology. Without consistency, it's annoying, and the plot just becomes subjected to the whims of the writer, rather than seeming like the way the story is actually supposed to play out. That is suspense of disbelief being broken. When you can feel that, you can't get invested in characters or the world as much, because at any moment the writer will just pull out the rug and make you feel like an idiot BECAUSE you paid attention, therefore you are discouraged from paying attention. And when a writer doesn't understand these concepts, they will repeat this mistake dozens or even hundreds of times, eventually reaching the point where you simply cannot care about anything going on. A good example is in CW's the Flash, where a villain just throws a smoke bomb or runs around the corner and suddenly the Flash can no longer find them. This is done countless times, not because the specific villain has a power that allows them to do this, but just... because. Sorry, but that's the Flash. When you've literally shown him thoroughly search like 5 blocks to find a bomb in a few seconds, NO ONE without superspeed or teleportation powers can ever escape from him. But they do. All the time. Additionally, enemies without superspeed consistently challenge the Flash because he always lets them talk and attack first, even when he often already knows that yes, this person is a dangerous criminal with every intention of being hostile. No sane person with superspeed would allow this. The Flash can have them in a cell that disables their powers in under a second. These two issues combined mean literally every single fight in the entire series has no weight whatsoever. You simply cannot care, because Barry just won't use his superspeed.
Idiots like Emil confuse "believable" with "realistic". It helps when writers set a lore and the reality of that universe and NOT contradict it. Not realistic that every car crash you have in GTA doesn't kill the character, but it's believable that a legendary criminal has the skill to avoid deadly crashed It is both unrealistic AND unbelievable that a ghoul child got trapped in a fridge for 200 years fifteen steps from his parents and only got out when the character interacted with the fridge. Being consistent with the lore is believable, not realistic.
This “rules” thing on the internet is an approximate to something much more fundamental to modern writing; setup and payoff. If a thing set up does not have a payoff, it can and should be cut in modern writing philosophy. If a thing has a payoff but not a setup, plant one and any reminders in editing. If there is a gun on the table it must do something before the end of the story. Otherwise you don’t put a gun on the table and waste the reader’s time and energy on it. It’s a structure stolen from 19th century police procedurals which the reader was expected to be able to solve with the list of clues provided at the beginning. The writing of Bethesda games this last decade has been consistently struggling with this concept.
“Let’s see if you can do better” is the most classic dumbguy response of all time. If I do a shitty translation, I did a poor job, and you don’t need to know Japanese or be able to do better to see it.
It's a narcissistic response. I've had relatives that I hated because they'd say that, instead of accepting that they'd done something wrong. "I'd like to see you do better" is best answered with "It's not my job to do your work for you". If I was as bad as my job as Emil is at his, then I'd be referring to my current employment in the past tense.
How dare these dirty customers have standards for a product they spent money on. 😒 I’d heard so many times from moronic corporate shills that people don’t know what they want, but these corporations do. That clearly isn’t working out, to no sensible persons surprise.
Ok, having too much time while listening to these vids. I bet no one would read it but I wrote it, so have spiel. Most people don't know what they want. Why do you think many of these same corporations are making billions for decades? Clearly it has been "working out" amazingly for them, for a long time. Most people are easily manipulated. These corporations keep using highly scummy anti-consumer practices, pushing it more and more(for a very long time, it's not just recently and people haven't caught on yet or something), because they are making money, from people giving it to them. These tactics and psychological manipulations work. Bethesda, blizzard - countless others, have been producing mediocre to bad products for years, decades. Were still beloved for most of that time. And still are doing great despite countless beyond garbage displays and unethical practices. Even people who criticize, most of them still give them their money. Having relatively small portion of people being critical, doesn't stop the much larger demographic throw money at them. So many games now in top spots of highest revenue, have very negative review scores, but they are still raking it in. Games that re-release every year or every other year, being the same or worse, selling like hot cakes. Skins for 30$+, turning games into not being games anymore but virtual store fronts. Game after game of utter dogshit, most people still praise it. Still are hyped for the next game. Many of them even well regarded and liked, even beloved in some cases. A great game can be hated, a really bad game can be beloved. Been happening forever. Starfield case is more of a lucky one where the popular narrative (eventually) aligned with the truth. In the end, it's all about marketing and branding, and the narrative that wins out. Then it rolls like an avalanche from there with YT-bers making videos and people eating it up, whether it's true or not. (in the case of starfield, it deserves its criticism and more) After what bethesda did before starfield(it was bad, it was a lot), everyone was still hyped like crazy for starfield, delusional. Now I already see the cope and hype for TES 6. In even worse cases, it's the same. A studio can release the worst game ever, bomb a small country - people will still find a way to be hyped for their next #product. Forget about the other stuff in a month. As long as the brand is strong/big enough. That's what most people are, branded. Mindlessly consume #product. It's simply the realty of things, at large. Games aren't even about having fun anymore. Many people don't have actual fun playing(starfield is a decent example, with the "it gets fun after 100-200 hrs just keep playing", this is also ironically opposite of the truth, but anyway). It's about design formulas to keep people hooked. Preying on psychological tendencies of humans. (there is detailed documentation on this, for gaming, and its proven to work over and over) There is criticism and intelligence, but that's more the niche side of things. Been around game dev(and other creative work) for a long time to know that most people, indeed, do not know what they want(it's also just logical most people won't understand why they like a story, for example, not nearly as deep as a good writer who wrote it. Same way as most non-car mechanics won't understand how a car works anywhere close to a professional car mechanic who is competent). In most cases, people want what they are conditioned to want. You make something different, innovative and great? Many will cry that it's different than 99% of other games and demand it is made to be a copy/paste of other games(then maybe go complain somewhere else about all games being the same and no innovation). God forbid it's a game that demands some actual thought(this is a larger problem than gaming here, would take forever to get into it, of course i'm generalizing somewhat as i'm talking about what makes the most money by far and is the vast bulk of the industry). Or perhaps in some cases they are just more vocal about it. If devs listened to people, in many cases, the amazing game they made/are making, would be utterly ruined. Went on a bit of a "rant" because that phrase "people don’t know what they want" doesn't really follow logically there. Corps can be bad and make crappy products at the same time as people "don't know what they want". Both can be true at the same time, and someone acknowledging a fact, isn't necessarily a "corporate shill". The gaming industry has exploded and become another huge industry, consequently following into the steps of other industries of this scope. It went from innovative, passion driven industry, to soulless corporate product pushing, based around marketing and manipulation for the sake of making as much money as possible. It's how it goes. Of course there are still passionate developers attempting innovation and doing interesting things. Few and far between compared to the juggernaut the mainstream gaming industry has become though. Sadly it's the fate of any industry that becomes so large, in current way of society. It needs to become that, in order to become so large.
So many corporations nowadays have switched from "Is our product good enough to buy?" To "Are you good enough to buy our product?" The results have been nothing short of catastrophic.
There was a Chris Avellone interview years ago where he confirms Bethesda not keeping track of their own lore. "Bethesda mentioned… I shouldn't say this, but they said 'we don't track everything anymore, we just go to the wiki and figure out what the crossed lines are for everything, that's basically our game design document now.'”
@@contramachina354 Then microsoft should fire everyone that works for bethesda and just license out the fallout and elder scrolls ip to a few dozen different studios and we might get 1-2 decent games over the next 10 years.
Remember how the ending of Fallout 3 required you to flip a switch inside a room filled with lethal radiation? Even though you had a minimum of 3 companions that were flat-out immune to radiation, telling them to go inside and flip the switch at no danger to themselves will have them go "This is something you gotta do yourself" for absolutely no logical reason. Even in the revised ending, where you CAN tell them to flip the switch, the ending narration will outright call you a coward for refusing to die a completely pointless death. Emil basically called the player a coward for seeing through the glacier-sized holes in his writing. Brilliant.
There were two things I really hated about writing in Skyrim: First, there's no way to force the blades to keep working with you and keep parthurnax alive even though you're the Dragonborn and the blades would be gone without you... And the part of the Thieves guild where Karliah shoots you with an arrow to paralyze you. That one pisses me off actually... Because I can turn Ethereal before I walk in there, and it still hits me. Taking away player agency is super annoying
Skyrim's writing was very hamfisted and contrived. Taking away player agency, because "lazy" or not even bothering to mask the player not really having any real agency with good immersive dialogues is always shitty in an open sandbox "rpg". I don't think I have every played a game that made me feel like such a glorified super dumb mail courier, who does everything they are being told to because they only have two braincells, yet gets everything thrown at them, because player being the messiah or something. On top of all that the writers have the gal to reprimand the player via dialogue coming from their characters they have written about things we HAD to do because we want to finish that questline to get stuff like the archmage robe. They even railroaded how your character is supposed to behave and feel via how NPCs talk to you. Eugh....
I would argue that the Fallout franchise always had a silly side. However it's not a 50% serious, 50% silly ratio. I was more a 90% serious and 10% the rest. Obsidian really understood that in New Vegas, as the silliest ideas are locked behind the Wild Wastelander perk, an option that you have to consciously decide to toggle.
I can't help but think about Over the Edge from the New Batman Adventures cartoon. The episode involved Batgirl falling to her death, landing with a thud on Jim Gordon's car. Batgirl, for the three people who aren't familiar with the Batman mythos is Gordon's daughter. According to the writers of the episode, the censors weren't happy with the original take - so they forced a change. The scene had to be drawn from within the car, so that the moment of impact wasn't as directly shown. A decision which the writers credit with making the scene all that much more horrifying. When Emil talks about concessions having to be made to make a game happen, and how it is never going to be the perfect game in his head, that's what goes through mine. He views compromises as introducing flaws to his grand vision. But good writers take those compromises and find ways to make them standout moments. Make them into something better than their original vision. Emil cuts, where good writers prune.
Here’s another one: Spider-Man 3. CGI technology was barely capable of handling what they wanted to do with Sandman’s… everything. So what’d they do? Instead of showing him ripping open an armored car, they show the driver seeing his shadow. Instead of him directly attacking the occupants, they flooded the set piece with real sand. When they wanted Spider-Man to punch a hole in him? They brought in a one armed boxer. Besides making things actually possible to render, it treats him less like a character and more like a force of nature. One that our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is about to try fighting.
"Nobody sets out to make a bad game." That statment has so little value, it's almsot similar to saying "I drank water today."... Of course nobody sets out to make a bad game duh but setting out to make a great game and delivering just that will make your words a lot more valuable unlike this hack Emil. I swear Bethesda is still living off Skyrim glory to this very day, they think they're untouchable.
Even Skyrim barely achieved more than current day Starfield. I remember being out of content in less than 30 hours. Mods brought Skyrim out of the negative limelight before long-term reviews could ruin it. Mods CONTINUE to make Skyrim relevant. That being said, Skyrim was 5 pounds of crap in a 5 pound bag... Starfield is 20 pounds of crap in the same size bag as Skyrim - very messy.
@@jong2359 To Bethesda all the modding done to Skyrim should belong to their credit. They think they deserve all the praise for Skyrim still being relevant and that we owe them a great debt because mods kept it alive.
In Emil's defence, he is a talented writer. The problem is that he's writing something he shouldn't *be* writing. Emil's talent is in quest design. He can write a good quest, but the story behind it must be left to someone that isn't him. Best example is in his pre-Bethesda work - Life of the Party, arguably one of the best missions in Thief 2, was done by Emil. Bethesda's mistake, or rather Todd's mistake, is promoting him to a position he should've never been placed in. He should've stayed a quest designer, but they decided to make all the quest designers into writers (Todd has confirmed this), so now he's also writing the story, when he writes worse stories than teenage fanfiction. It's like getting someone like HP Lovecraft or Stephen King to write a Harry Potter knock-off. Sure, they could do it, but they're talent is writing horror, not children's fantasy. Also, just going to add something for your Dark Brotherhood criticisms. He ignored the existing lore for the Dark Brotherhood (both the Daggerfall "militant order of the Church of Arkay" and the Morrowind "renegade Morag Tong") for his own take, which was quite literally evil Catholicism. So when he says "people accuse me of ignoring Fallout lore," he's not wrong. He's just using a partial truth to make it look like a lie. He just doesn't care about lore in general, regardless of if it's Fallout, TES or as of recently, Starfield. Lore gets in the way of his story, which just makes his story even worse than it already is.
His quest design has also sucked ass since Oblivion too, though. So are you sure he just didn't accidentally do a good job a few times when he was young?
Wow, is he anti-christian or just anti-catholic? Because in Skyrim there was a heavy satanist symbolism. For militant atheists: I'm not religious but satanist symbolism is satanist symbolism even if you don't believe in satan.
31:20 would've actually made more sense if he just said "They're a bunch of Pyskers who secluded themselves believing their mutations are actually magical abilities." That way, instead of adding a magic system. It's a bunch of people with mutations and deformities with weird powers. But they're just stuck IN this one area. Kinda like an asylum for these people. Boom, fixed the idea, made it slightly workable and it'll be a neat spot.
"You kill the head of the organisation, and then you become the head of the organisation.. sounds great on paper, right?" No wtf this sounds dumb as hell.
the original fallouts had, not exactly magic, but psykers. People who had a rare mutation that allowed them strange powers of the mind. - Fallout 1 had a little side-project of the Masters experimenting in this line of human evolution, which I think could also be used against him, Because Blackrock/Obsidian did love their multiple choice solutions to a problem, like they were some kind of studio that made RPGs or something. - Fallout 2 continued in this vein, but the number of people who could be called gifted in this sense could be counted on one hand. It made sense in that the games were always about the horrific FALLOUT of the nuclear war. Bethesda and by extension Emil consistently misunderstands or simply ignores this and just focuses on all of the things affecting the world being PRE-WAR in origin. Because hurrp-de-durr, Enclave was a pre-war thing, ain't fallout unless all humanitys ills is the past haunting us. Gotta obsess with the past! To the point people are wearing 200 year old clothes which, by all rights, should been shreds in a bin by now and eating pre-war foods like the stuff is never going to run out. - Oh this guy's blood makes you physically immortal and he can blow people up with his mind? Oh he just found a weird artifact somewhere. It's lovecraft, not a result of radiation! La-de-durr-de-doo. Oh spooky visions in a stone quarry? They were digging up more lovecraft nonsense, nothing relating to radiation or mutations here! Durp-durr. - It's telling that Far Harbor wasn't worked on by Emil because far harbor IS ACTUALLY GOOD. Mostly. Fuck Bethesda. Fuck Emil, and Fuck Todd for enabling him.
He seemed like the type of writer that gone "This thing that happen in story that one time (like character survived getting shot point-blank) that mean I can write it in multiple time as much as I want" He doesn't realize that those things suppose to be rare exception and not the rule or the values of story will dwindle.
@@utes5532because obsidian at the time was made up of former devs from black isle studios which created the originals, never should have been stolen from them in the first place, only people that actually respect it
@@piegineer9130you ain't wrong. How many times has the Brotherhood of Steel and Supermutants shown up for no good reason in places where they don't belong once Bethesda got their hands on the Fallout IP?
@@DJWeapon8 well they always use FEV as a rason like for bethedsa every City testet in FEV and all gona wrong and Super Mutants turn out. Fallout 4 and F76 and also future i guess all blaming in FEV. And even if you ignore supermutants the fations in F4 also bad example are minute man you General after 2 times talking with some guy you dont know but if you say i float with the boat you have no power as a General. I dont understand whats the point being a leader when you can not do somethink. So manny holes that can not be fixed. Also freedom is cut down to a 20% you need kill kellogg why becosue you need to but if i dont want to then well you never end the game but ending is also 2 ways. Problem is Fallout 4 has sold more and also better Metracritiz then the best Series ever got like example Fallout New Vegas(or for me is one of the best and a proper rpg) so they dont need changing becouse it sold well poeple like it only die lore fands dont but nobody needs lore fans.
Morrowind was my first bethesda game and I enjoyed it. But everything they've released after just keeps getting more and more dumbed down. On a brighter side, Bethesda introduced me to Fallout. I enjoyed 1, 2 and NV a lot.
There are games I've played which are based on Fallout. ATOM RPG and ATOM RPG Trudograd for instance. They are set after the Nukes from the Cold War ... the story is from the PoV of the Soviet survivors (so mid to late 1990's).
Another thing to add with the colonel autumn situation: Why the hell didn't they try and make more of those "immune to all radiation" things? Sounds incredibly OP in a world full of radiation. If they were able to make one, why not make more?
Wow that would make for an amazing quest. I always loved that event that happens in Diamond City with the brothers so a quest dedicated to that fear and hysteria would be fantastic.
It takes some giant balls to say "lets see if you can do better"
When your company has relied on people doing better than you in the modding community, since the release of oblivion.
Fallout London hype🗣️
@@biosupdate7449 Don't get hyped for big mods, most of the time they never happen and the few that have come out have been pretty mediocre, only ones that have been good are the tamriel rebuilt mods for morrowind.
@@honeybadger6275 in my heart I know you’re right but the truth hurts man😭🤣
@@biosupdate7449 At least you're willing to listen and don't call me a hater like a lot of bethesda cult members. Its not like I take joy in this, I'm just a former fan of their games.
I love how even that statement feels 20 years too late 😂 Like where have you been? That challenge was completed at least a decade ago
The fact that Emil just switched the roles of son looking for father in Fallout 3 to father looking for son in Fallout 4 speaks volumes of Emils creativity.
Well...
Find my dad
Find my son
Find my thing
Dont get me started on "starborn"
Someone called this out on the OG starfield teaser years ago
Don’t forget the members of the Dark Brotherhood in both Oblivion and Skyrim, there’s the brute who doesn’t care for stealth, the Argonian shadow scale, the poison Master, the wizard, the fanatic who we’re led to believe is the traitor, and the high ranking member who’s the real traitor. They both even have a vampire who’s exactly 300 years old, except in Skyrim he made the vampire a little girl which... yeah I’m not touching that with a 20ft pole.
It's like poetry, it rhymes.
Not only that but they made the son an old man and called him "father". Imaginatively unimaginative
I think the reason Starfield especially is standing out to people as being this grey pile of boredom is that it didn’t get to feed off of a pre established world. The Elder Scrolls and Fallout were lovingly crafted by competent writers. All Bethesda had to do was put strings on the corpses and make them dance. This time they actually had to make their own world and look how that turned out.
I think they had writers who cared in Morrowind and Oblivion, and sometimes even in Skyrim, but you're right that Fallout was mostly meh, and their new original world was a blob of nothing. Writing aside, something that really kills Starfield is that there are far better space games, like No Man's Sky, or the less accessible Elite: Dangerous, which barely lean on story at all like Starfield pretends to
@@robjsmiles Oh yeah I guess my comment could be seen that way since it was so negative. I believe there were and maybe even still are people that care, but they’re not in charge and if that doesn’t change well…the video explained that thought quite thoroughly already.
@@robjsmiles I know it has gotten miles better since launch but it's kinda sad that NMS is held up as a better game. I remember the mess it was at launch.
Exactly.
@@oz_jones It still is a mid game at best. I remember I bought it after it was "fixed", for like 6$ and its a shalllow nothing.
Tim Cain, the director of the first fallout game, has stated he regrets adding a small side quest in fallout 2 that introduced ghosts into the setting.
In contrast, Emil stated in his writing speech he would have put the entire magic system from skyrim into the fallout setting (with his justification being the cultural association of salem with witches) if not for the fact that the programmers had already removed the magic system from their reused code and it would be too much work to copypaste it back in.
There is no example that better drives home how little Emil cares, as long as he can use a hackneyed cliche he saw in a movie once. I can only conclude that he knows how to imitate things that work in other pieces of writing. But he doesn't understand why they work, or how to weave together elements into a cohesive story.
I'd like to think the programmers removed the magic functions AFTER finding out Emil wanted to turn Fallout 4 into Skyrim with guns. Maybe they realized how stupid it would make them all look, scrapped the functions, then told Emil it can't be done.
I can just imagine the poor programmer, having to bullshit his way out of going along with Emil's whim, just so he can retain whatever little sanity this game still had.
Perfectly put, well written :D I didn't know about this, and it's hilarious :D
When I saw the Salem Museum I thought there was going to be a quest about finding a synth(instead of a witch) but no, fight a deathclaw by circling around a pillar til it dies
My head-canon is that Emil serves as the Writing Dept proxy for Todd, blindly repeating, "It just works".
He also seems oblivious to the fact that his job also entails serving as a "whipping boy" for the Golden Boy of Bethesda.
The “Keep it Simple Stupid” motto was created by Kelly Johnson while working at Lockheed. When Johnson would explain what he meant by Keep it Simple Stupid, he used the example that repairs on the products his teams created should be possible with minimal equipment and experience. Otherwise, the products would be useless and a liability since they were being used in war zones. The way Emil applied it to his work as a writer is basically a way to justify the lack of depth in his stories. Because if it's a deliberate choice to write dumb stories no one would question your competence, right?
It wouldn't be the first time someone misapplied the idea of KISS to justify / "mask" their idiotic incompetence and laziness, and it won't be the last.
It's really sad that people overlook the actual context for the reasoning of KISS and instead just mindlessly use it as a mantra.
KISS does still apply to writers. Do not overcomplicate your wording for no reason nor should you overconplicate motives. People are simple and have simple desires, the mechanisms of achieving desire are what makes a person complicated. A rich mans happiness is involved with gorging his ever expanding hunger for the lixurious while a peasant enjoys a family. Both achieve happiness but both have viscerally different mechanisms of achievement.
There is a difference between ""don't make it more complex than it needs to be" and "don't make it complex, period" that Emil does not seem to appreciate. Ultimately Kelly still made jets, not hot air balloons.
@@loserinasuit7880 Overcomplication is fine, it's how well you execute it and what's your target audience is. Was the rich man born greedy, did his previous life make him obsess with hoarding wealth, is it a survival mechanism, is it peer pressure, is it to compensate for something, is it because wealth is the measure of worth in his environment... all of them? And that's before we get into motive change over the course of the story or characters less conventional for their environment. Or if the creators want the audience to understand complex causes. If you look at the motive we have as human being, it seems like simple urges/pathos, but behind the scene, the causes are myriads and interconnected.
There's also the other side of overcomplication. Deliberately release information scarcely, indirectly, unconventionally (sounds cues, structure, visual, pattern, meta...) and force the audience to piece it together. As always, how well an idea can be executed matter most.
@mdd4296 Overcomplication is not fine. Complex and complication are not the same words.
its insane how talented people like michael salvatori get laid off and emil continues to ruin bethesda. this industry makes no sense
In China stories have no substance, they are meaningless and childlike. There is a reason for this, and I suspect BGS's writing is safe, and boring for similar reasons.... It doesn't offend anyone or take any stance on anything.
There's a pattern for elder senior devs and artists that are pushed out the industry in some way or another: contractually obligated(enslaved) by NDA to stay silent or play along, blacklisted, demotivated to the point it ruins one's dream to make a sequel to his old IP, slander a reputation acquired earnestly, getting blacklisted just as or in consequence to a few of these example.
Marty, Avelonne, American McGee, Mick Gordon, some old members of Troika and much more. Some of them even get slandered by a new generation of young Devs with a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome, because one of these Elders had standards and dared to tell them how to do their job correctly.
It is sickening and something is afoot in the current ways this industry works.
@@camraid9 Have you ever read xianxia/wuxia? They are anything but "mild and safe". The "good guy" is like someone running an evil RPG playthrough most of the time.
@camraid9 if china werent involved, Emil would still be a shit writer. Actual children's story are safe as can be and tend to have better quality writing.
We all know why: Emil is much cheaper.
It amazes me seeing all the layoffs of actual quality employees that have happened in the gaming industry this year but a hack like Emil manages to stick around for decades while being crap at his job.
There must be a conspiracy about higher ups all banding together and firing off talented staff to "keep the status quo" of stale garbage.
It's because Microsoft owns Bethesda now, and they're far too hands off, so incompetence is a guarantee at this point no matter how bad it effects things.
Do you think Mojang would survive either under another company or independently when they couldn't even get a full Minecraft update out in 4 years, pandemic or not? Fuck no, they'd be gone.
Think 343 would've been allowed to ruin what was Xbox's flagship franchise for over a decade to the point people only play it cause it's "free" on gamepass? No, they'd be fired.
Microsoft, at this point, no matter what's happening internally at Bethesda, is the problem now.
It's not a conspiracy, it's the rule for the industry at large. Outside some studio like nintendo, game industry job is a revolving door so the employer can keep cost down (hire more junior staff, fire more experienced/expensive one) or senior leave by themselves to get a better position elsewhere.
Emil climbed Bethesda quite early during the 2000s, Todd even earlier, they are in a positions that set for life.
@@Fuzzycatfur They did mention a couple years back they wanted to be more hands-on with the developers since the previous approach was failing, but no changes seem to have been made.
I've always thought that their games didn't have the best writing, but they did well enough to the point where the player could want to speculate on the story details, and I love the speculation videos I love the theories and investigations, so the writing may not be that great when it comes to the narrative in the actual game, but going off of other stories and other books and secrets within the game it always added up to a very well crafted story that's going on and then has been going on for thousands of years in the established lore of the series.
Now I haven't played starfield, so I have no idea what that even looks like except for from other people's playthroughs and their experiences of the dialogue, now it's true that I know that Bethesda have kind of downgraded some of their choices, and those aspects I don't necessarily like, because they go after the narrative more than they go after choices for the game play aspects, so in that sense I would agree that's where some bad habits come into play in their games.
I think one thing to take into consideration is the fact that this is a video game, it's not meant to be a movie, it's not meant to be a TV show, it's meant to be a role-playing video game, where we have silly choices and silly game design, and people liked it in the past so the only difference is people not liking it now based off of other games as the result, and also getting rid of other mechanics of the game used to have that people loved, although I will say for Oblivion I didn't like to persuasion check it was absurd to use that system, and yet some older Gamers really loved that mechanic, for me that mechanic was paying NPC some money in order to get in their good graces and compliment them, and it made no sense at all during the dialogue of whatever you were talking about in order to change their point of view of you, I thought it was kind of silly but it is a video game video games have funky mechanics every once in awhile.
>buy a car for $$$
>car doesn't turn on
>"making cars is hard, give me a break!"
Maybe you would know if you were a car manufacturer but you aren’t, so shut up.
@@bupbuppington4501 You don't need to be an engineer to know the Pinto was a poorly designed automobile.
Elon Musk lmao
Tesla moment
Agreed, that whole "making games is hard, you guys" excuse they use all the time is peak comedy, in no other section of society would such a pathetic excuse work outside of gaming making.
"I am sorry that the shopping mall collapsed on itself but making buildings is hard, you guys. Why did we use cheap material as foundation? You are just a hater".
In a decent world, you can't just be so two faced to say "Look at our ultra detailed, lore rich setting" and "Who gives a shit about details, it's got wrinkly radioactive people" in two consecutive breaths.
a decent man wouldn't say it just works either
Glad Pete is gone
@@AnarchicArachnid gone?
@@ncrranger2281obliterated
@@ncrranger2281 Retired in October.
thank you, I'm tired of Bethesda's incompetence being so obvious and yet being defended
Because people believe it can't be done better
there arent that many defenders when you look at how the hype cycle for starfield played out
@vietimports I dunno, the overwhelming consensus I hear is "Starfield is a great game"
Admittedly, the correlation between those who think that and also think Skyrim is an excellent rpg is very, very high.
@@bchin4005 i mean, starfield has a 66% rating on steam, was nominated for 1 award at the game awards and didnt win it, and its player count has dropped to 10k on steam. for reference baldurs gate 3 still hits 200k. i think the 'overwhelming consensus' is that it is an aggressively average game with outdated game design, evidenced by the myriad of youtube videos roasting the game for months
@@vietimportsit's nice to see how the talk around their games has shifted. I'm hoping it pushes them to actually try with ES6 but I'm not expecting it. I'm glad Baldurs Gate 3 happened this year, really shows how good an RPG can be.
Emil is the textbook definition of the "Peter Principle" - The idea that employees are essentially promoted based on previous success until they reach a level they are not competent at.
People don't remember the DB questline for Emil's writing, they remember it for the game design. I've played Oblivion for 100s of hours and I can't even remember who the traitor is off the top of my head.
I cannot think of a single writer in video games with a more infamous reputation than Emil. The player is never going to care about the larger story because Emil doesn't care about it. The best parts of Fallout 4, Skyrim, and Starfield, were all things that he had no part in. Nick Valentine & Far Harbor were both written and designed by William Shen, a far more talented individual.
Someone posted on Reddit nearly 10 years ago, that as long as Emil is in charge at Bethesda, do not expect the quality of writing to improve. Well, here we are headed into ES6 and people are more nervous than ever regarding the quality of the writing.
I gave up after FO4. That game is already a dumpster fire but barely salvageable with hundreds of mods. Anything after that, I didn't even bother touching
Something something the cream rises until it spoils.
I just read a comment what say both in Oblivion and Skyrim the traitor was the leader, all member was the same in both games and they even have a 300 years old vampire member in both games.
It was such a shame to hear Will Shen left Bethesda after Starfield. He was the one hope I had for their future (especially if he were to replace Emil). Now it all just feels like such a waste.
@@Zodroo_Tint I’m like 90% sure that might’ve been my comment you saw. The traitor in Oblivion’s Brotherhood isn’t *the* de-facto leader of the Brotherhood like Astrid is in Skyrim, but they are a member of the black hand who are the highest ranked members aside from the listener.
My most annoying contradiction in FO3 is that you are forced to flee the vault because the overseer has had Jonas killed and you're next. But through the rest of the game you are asked why you left the safety of the vault and running for your life is never an option.
It's not really a contradiction. The characters in the game assume that the vault is an underground paradise because all they know of the vaults are the propaganda leaflets left over in the ruins, and the accounts of the control vaults that actually opened up again after the war. As three dog keeps saying on the radio, no-one knows what happened down there for James and then for your character to leave. They just assume you left by choice because it didn't even occur to them that the inside of the vault could be just as dangerous as the outside.
@@duskmare0000 he's speaking of how you can't tell your dad about why you really left the vault, not telling your lifestory to some random hobos in the wasteland
@@duskmare0000it’s not that the characters don’t understand, it’s that you can’t explain to them that you were running for your life.
I wouldn't be super surprised if the entirety of the vault escape was added after those dialogues, and nobody bothered to go back and patch things up.
@@duskmare0000 dude literally writting the game for bethesda, what a proud shill
“Incompetent writer blames fans” seems pretty on brand for Emil.
Todd: "Emil, the game's got a 29% post-launch approval rate."
Emil: "And I guess that just isn't good enough for some assholes!!!"
Haha that’s like straight from the channel Terrible Writing Advice. Always blame the reader because you, the author, can’t be wrong.
@@kotzpenner It really is. I'm pretty sure he says something very close to that during his how to respond to criticism video.
Emil makes the dumbest points in his tweets. Yeah I don’t know how to make a Twinkie, but I still know when a Twinkie tastes like shit, and me not understanding the process of Twinkie-making doesn’t mean I’m obligated to eat shit.
Spoiler alert: All twinkies taste like shit.
not sure what you are talking about. i have never eaten a twinky and i am pretty sure it tastes like shit, so...
@@udozocklein6023 I love seeing schizophrenic non-sequitur replies like this
isn't it a sweet? like, full of sugar? clearly tastes like shit - no need to try. doesn't make me crazy or schizo^^@@macalvand
@@udozocklein6023 this follow up reply has proven @macalvand's judgement of your mental state, though I'm sure (to some extent) it was a joke
I don't know why, but Emil calling the 2023 internet a "wild wild west" when he's old enough to remember what it was like 20+ years ago is hilarious.
AS IF he *never* got called a Ni*ger or F**got in a CoD lobby. WE ALL COLLECTIVELY SAW PEOPLE GET BEHEADED IN EXECUTION VIDEOS. We got Broad-spectrum censorship and absolute "political correctness" stamping out creativity and NOW its a wild west?
🤣
Hes just a sensitive lil guy who can't take any sort of criticism
he just spits bullshit internet is way too safe these days
@@komikop literally. If there was *ANY* time period of the Internet that was a "wild west", it will have been that decade-and-a-bit from the very late 90's to around 2012
An afternoon in gamefaqs was like ww1 for him I bet.
I haven't learned or tried to fly a plane.
But if the plane is falling straight towards the ground, and the pilot is wide awake in the cockpit, smiling and saying we'll be at our destination soon, I'm going to fucking complain.
You know, I once heard an amazing phrase: "It takes a lot of effort, to shit out a mean turd. Doesn't mean that effort should be rewarded"
I dunno, I feel like I could use a pat on the back when I drop a huge deuce lol
Seriously though, like you said, hard work doesn't equal good work. I'm tired of people saying "I/they worked really hard on that!" So? I could work really hard building a car, doesn't mean people would/should trust that it's any good.
Emil Pagliarulo: the living, breathing proof that the labor theory of value is absurd nonsense.
@@OuroborosChokedWell he would be told to fuck off to mop floors even under perfect commmunism, beeing good for absolutely nothing else
"My bum has been a bum for a long time, but that doesn't mean I have to listen to anything it says."
All the deflection of criticism oozing from him is sickening.
I'm not a helicopter pilot, but if I see one in a tree...
@@OuroborosChoked Only said by scammers who try to delude you from thinking about the point of LTV: getting rid of overvalue of parasitic classes (bankers, rentiers and politicians) and undervalue of critical jobs (farmers, production and maintenance workers).
Oh god. The "this setting has fantastical things in it, so I will disregard all logic and common sense" argument makes my blood boil. You can immediately tell that whoever says a variation of "lmao this has magic, nothing has to make sense" doesn't understand a single thing about worldbuilding, verisimilitude, etc.
There are two types of writers - the one who makes an intricate magic system full of rules/cause and effect, akin to real life physics, and the ones who use magic as an excuse to handwave plotholes and stuff they can't be bothered to explain
Harry Potter probably is the second of those two. After reading five of the books, I couldn't be bothered to continue.@@Homiloko2
@@adelram9299 I read the first one as a teen and was utterly bored by it, but granted I was a bit past the target audience age. Maybe I should give it a new chance?
@@oz_jones you're better off watching the films first. The first 2 are abit childish but it's far less daunting than a book.
Thank you! I'm in a publishing company's discord, Nat 1 Publishing, and the founder has an original setting he made called Faewalk. Well, one of the other guys in this discord will fight tooth and fucking nail to keep interesting explanations from happening. "It faewalk, it's kooky crazy, a wizard did it."
I seriously disliked the setting until bossman (the name I gave the founder) explained that serious stories do happen. I read some of the stories that take place, and all I can think is that I am home in Skyrim/Cyrodiil once more and we call it Faewalk. Do not ignore consistency. Consistency rewards diligent audiences. Diligent audiences are life support for any work.
I guess Emil is not allowed to send back food at a restaurant if they serve him raw chicken, because he's "disconnected" from the realities of food preparation.
I don't need a Ph.D. in Meteorology to know when it's raining.
kinda feel like Emil is disconnected from the realities of playing video games, tbh
@@froggystyle9068you don’t think my idea of having a vault full of twitch streamers has any potential😭
@@froggystyle9068There's an old adage from some creatives - audiences are GREAT and identifying exactly what they don't like, but pretty bad at proposing good alternatives.
I dunno, the shitty amateurs might not be making much better stuff, but they're not asking me to pay $70 for their work either
@@froggystyle9068 I mean, I'd think it's more fitting that they're trash writers, too. There's the old saying, "it takes one to know one," so not surprising that they couldn't write themselves out of a pre-solved word puzzle, and detecting that quality in one of their own.
Dude had a group of people that hated him, now because he decided to sling shit at the customers there is an army of people who want him gone. Smooth moves Emil.
I really don't get what he got out of his little rant...is his ego so massive he couldn't help but stroke it ? Because now he puts a huge bullseye on his back by putting himself in public. I always called out Emil as the main reason why Bethesda is incompetent but now even casual players are starting to know Emil's failures.
Like smooth little babies.
@@KikyouNeko assuming Emil is legitimately the real problem.
I pray he gets removed before TES 6 gets too far ahead 😭 I practically have an associates degree in elder scrolls lore and I couldn’t stand to see it massacred
@@woodlefoof2 My good dude, their last lorehead expert, Kurt Kuhlmann has left Bethesda right at the day of Starfield release, he was "let go", basically fired... Now Emil has full reigns over TES lore to himself, Todd is too busy playing CEO so Emil is basically the game director now.
@@KikyouNeko 😭 it’s joever
"Not be Beholden to something somebody wrote 20 years ago"
I have never heard anything more disrespectful than this. Getting butthurt they don't have a fraction of the talent as the Morrowwind Writers.
"Shakespeare? Who's that guy?"
Emil is the kind of person to say Homer was a hack because the Iliad being written in rhyme was a gimmick to overcompensate lmfao
same thing happened with the halo and witcher tv shows lol, these writers think they can do better than the source material their show was greenlit off of
Considering how bad Morrowind is, that says a lot.
I’ve cared more about continuity when writing some silly story using someone else’s world in some silly corner of the internet, than this guy does writing for a beloved world from a meaningful work of fiction.
You know a writer is really good when their response to criticism is "Actually the writing is good and people just like to whine"
Can't even write themselves out of being a bad writer lol
"Writing is hard and I'm also not criticizing others who have a hard job."
The only thing I disagreed with was his take on the DB questline; the entire questline is intentionally geared towards making you feel like an evil villain, and honestly it was a lot of fun. The dinner party quest is probably my favorite in the entire game.
The instance of the Kahjit acting friendly all of a sudden was NOT implemented to make you "feel bad," it was classic dark humor to make the player go "it's a bit late for that buddy."
Imagine playing through the DB oblivion questline as a moralist lol.
Oblivion itself is filled with moments like this that fans love.
I feel like he intentionally misrepresented the obvious tone just because he didn't like the writer.
This does not however invalidate his other points.
@@JoeKing69
I agree that, to me at least, the first half of the dark brotherhood quests were actually decently written. However, that was also creetosis' point. The "dinner party" was also part of that first half, so your point there is moot.
These were "decent" because they weren't really doing any heavy lifting in terms of overall plot or story, as these were all quests disconnected from one another aside from making progress within the DB hierarchy. Here, it really is just the quest design team that was doing all the work.
It's when the questline tries to push forward an actual narrative that things quickly fall apart.
COULD there be an instance where the cheydinhall DB has to be purged and you get the ugly task to do it? Sure. Would that make the player feel bad and have them question things? Sure. But it's not the premise that is the problem, it's the execution.
The writing takes a dive into bullshit plottwists and plot contrivances after the dead drops start to change. The fact the player can't really interract with anybody about the obviously changed letters is annoying. The fact the characters within this questline do horribly ridiculous and unprofessional things despite the critical position they are in, is silly. The fact that the player is always JUST too late to influence the outcome of everything is contrived. The fact Lucien Lachance never noticed treachery is amateurish at best. The fact the other brotherhood hand members IMMEDIATELY killed an otherwise trustworthy and loyal subject, without questioning him and without investigating it themselves, is blatantly absurd.
(To add to this: the manner in which you get recruited by lachance is also patronizing and silly. Not to mention the fact you can't report the brotherhood in any way to the authorities is stupid. Your point about playing as a moralist only serves to highlight this issue. It is blatantly impossible to play the dark brotherhood questline and pretend you're doing anything morally upright, unless you PRETEND that you are infiltrating the organization to bring about it's downfall. But PRETENDING and ROLEPLAYING are two very different things. The game fails at the last part if it's the player that has to pretend things are happening in their head.)
And lastly, the fact that the night mother claims, at the end of all things, that everything was planned, it was all destiny, and anyway she knew about the traitor all along, TRUST ME BRO is the dumbest and most unneccesary shit ever. It doesn't add anything of substance to the plot, it just adds plotholes and another patronizing message of "you don't have any control, player."
THIS is the issue. If your writing ONLY serves as a means to an eventual end, you might get away with people not noticing just how badly written the middle part is. And it absolutely is. This is why people have ignored the DB questline's shittier aspects, because the first half is decent and the shocking nature of plottwists and apparant tragedy is distracting enough in the second half that people simply didn't notice. And then there's the people that just attempt to rationalize and justify the bad writing afterwards.
If bad writing is not adressed properly by the fanbase, how can we expect things to improve?
@@RedFloyd469
Lucien never noticing until it was too late is definitely a legitimate criticism but does kind of make sense as he wasn't expecting such a high ranking devotee of Sithis to be a traitor. People become so comfortable in their positions and "default to truth" when suspecting someone, especially someone they know, of treachery leading to chronic denial until it's too late. This is a prominent feature of abvse cases and there's a book called "Talking to Strangers" that goes more in depth into this topic.
The part with the Kahjit was still never meant to "guilt trip" you, and even if you were playing as a moralist this guy is as evil as they come anyway so the criticism still doesn't hold as you'd be doing the world a favor.
Infiltrating the brotherhood in order to bring about it's downfall feels kind of silly if you're actively taking contracts on what are quite possibly completely innocent people. The option to report them instead as you've suggested is far better.
I don't think that it's a flaw in and of itself that you can't play through the questline as a double agent, it's more that the game doesn't give you an option between join them or don't. This is relatively acceptable however though because in order to discover them you need to commit a certain crime, which isn't something a moralist character would do to begin with.
It's perfectly fine to address bad writing, and as I've previously stated I agree with his other points, but I find that when someone doesn't like somebody else they tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater and miss what's right in front of them. It's important to criticize someone when need be, while also remaining judicious in their appraisal. Otherwise they just come off as a hater and risk polarizing those on the fence in the interest of preaching to the choir, even if most of their points are solid.
I think it's quite clear that he was not interested in changing anyone's mind with this video, rather he merely wanted to reinforce what most people already thought, people love having their suspicions confirmed.
If he had published this video a few years ago I think we all know that the outcome would have been much different, it's just socially acceptable to condemn anything and everything related to this person now. He still would have been right on most points, but would have also been motivated to think through each of his points more.
I should have been more clear that I did not mean the entire questline, only several points that he mentioned. I clearly wrote "DB questline" when I should have clarified specific parts rather than the whole.
I agree with you on everything else, though.
Glad to see the excuse of "it's a bethesda game" is coming to an end.
I was getting sick of the memeing on Bethesda's buggy releases as well, it's not supposed to be funny.
Todd Howard jokingly saying "yeah our games got some bugs" during the FO76 conference was embarrassing as hell, got really tired of the "hahah that's our Bethesda!" attitude from fans.
It's about time people are finally gettting fed up with it.
@@AuXiiLia nobody is getting tired of bethesda games being buggy. You’re wrong for thinking they are. Bethesda games being buggy is completely and utterly okay with everyone.
Skyrim was an early 2010s game that you could play on the 360 or ps3. That is insane, it was the best of the whole genre for a long time and frankly this wasn’t even the first time bethesda had made games that can be described that way. Morrowind, to this days does a lot of things that aren’t rivaled even today. Daggerfall even has levels of freedom in creating a character that you wont find anywhere except pen and paper rpgs and even THEN SOME.
Bethesda games being buggy is absolutely fine because they’re supposed to make games that people still like in 10 years because even in 10 years games just struggle to match some of the aspects they got so right. They are ambitious in a way that is unique. Its okay for the games to be buggy.
The reason people are mad is because the games Bethesda are making now feel like slop and for some reason the unambitious slop STILL has the same amount of bugs
@@AuXiiLia The games, especially 76, had far worse problems than bugs. If anything, the bug thing is often a distraction and misdirection.
"it's a bethesda game" excuse was often used for basic features being terrible or badly done, as well.
@tillburr6799 This argument doesn't work when bugs are being ported over from past games. People are definitely sick of the rampant bugs that would be found in an hour of playtesting.
@@franzosisch5965 nope. Argument still works.
"Real astronauts weren't bored on the moon."
Yeah well real astronauts actually had things to do on the moon, unlike in Starfield.
Real astronauts got to seamlessly fly to the moon, without 5 loading screens.
@@honeybadger6275 Well they did kinda sit through a 3 day long elevator loading screen to get there.
Not to mention the fear and constant mortal peril they were in heading to the moon in the technological equivalence of a wristwatch garbage can.
And were rewarded to do so.
They had a moon buggy to ride as well iirc
Emil doesn’t like internal documentation because it makes him have to consider the work of others far more creative than him.
He doesn’t want to change his ideas because he needs to believe his ideas are too good to be changed or formed to the designs of more skilled writers.
Emil used to have to be cooperative but then he got lead and wants everyone to do it his way and it turns out he was trash all along and just got credit for other people’s work because he had to take criticism.
I couldn't agree more with this sentiment. This also shows in his distaste of players not playing his questline and doing something else, or worse, not doing them exactly how he wrote them to work.
Also, making sure that the design document is up to date would be his work as a lead. So this walking fraud managed to justify skipping on his job, not sure how the hell he is still not fired.
This would also explain why there were so few writers compared to other studios.
An exhaustive document like this for F3 or F4 (including of course all major points from F1, F2) would be in itself an indictment and it would supply proof of his faults. Without a document, or with a vague one, as long as Todd is happy its all fine, its all just "creative decisions".
@@OnlyDeathIsEternal instead of actually doing the writing lead's job, he instead took it to mean he can now write whatever he wants, and no one can gainsay him
I honestly can't believe that a company as big as Bethesda is making such a rookie mistake as forgoing documentation. If anyone should know better, it's a company like them
These people. Do not. Care. They're activists here to break the toys you remember from childhood when you don't play with them how they want you to.
Reminds me of drama class in jr highschool. I was lazy and thought "I won't write anything down. I'll just wing it on stage". Yeah, I'm terrible at improvising lol but I still did it whenever I could because Im lazy and didn't really care.
@@rclaws3230
How are they activists?
@@flowerthencrranger3854 It's called Critical Theory and it's a religion that hates White Straight Men and anything they may have produced.
Replace with particular lever of grievance most likely to effectively attack Straight White Men.
@@rclaws3230What do you even mean by Bethesda being activists? And what does that have to do with providing internal documentation for game production back in 2006?
You don’t have to be a musician to inherently feel and understand a song, you don’t have to be a chef to know that being served skirt steak is not the same as filet mignon, and you certainly don’t need to be a dev to know if a game is un-fun and unfinished
As a dev, if one who's stricken by my ADHD and toddler-level object permanency and has the 50GB of WIPs to prove it:
He sucks at the story and he's the fecker who put zombies in so much of Oblivion's dungeons, those are both absolute sins. My friend who's never played a TES game in their life wrote better story quests than him just from reading the in game books and the Morrowind dialogue on the UESP and we've fixed Skyrim by violently ramming all the stuff Kirkbride and Wormgod dropped all over the old Bethesda forums pre-Oblivion into it like we were making a kooshball of Weird.
My favorite response to "let's see YOU do better!" snark is "You don't need to be a seasoned helicopter pilot with 10 years of experience, to be able to see a helicopter in a tree and rightfully say 'Dude f*cked up!'"
This is something we all know, yet shit "artists" pretend isn't true so they can circlejerk each other's garbage.
"How can you call art 'bad' if it's subjective?" Very easily, actually.
Calling him a writer is like trying to call a plate only full of ketchup a full dish.
Put it in a bowl and Emil would say it is soup.
@@asbergan No, he'd make an entire main storyline where factions argue if it's soup or not and if it deserves to be treated equally to other dishes
@@Adrian2140 Don’t forget the twist near the end, concluding that it is actually a beverage!
@@asbergan
"But I thought we're talking about soup."
"Eh, you wouldn't understand, shut up and build."
@@Adrian2140don't forget the critique to capitalism
It's genuinely baffling hearing Emil make these excuses about "hard work" and "not fully achieving ambitions", when Fallout: New Vegas had a fraction of the development time and budget, and it's still one of the best written games in the series. You can't replace passion and skill with manpower.
Yet Obsidian still got screwed out of their bonus by 1 point, tells you all you need to know about Bethesda's arrogance when the reason the score was low was probably because they were forced to use the craptastic engine and were given so little time to make the game in the first place thus leading to bugs. When a bethesda game has bugs it's "quirky" and just a given mods will fix it yet the same leeway is not given to any other dev in the industry.
@@pinnacleevolution1634 Fun fact: they were not given documentation for the CK. They had to learn FROM DISSECTING FANS' MODS FOR FALLOUT 3 how to do half the magic they did (there's even still traces of some modder's annotated code buried inside comments).
@@neoqwertylmao I wander aware of that that is actually absurd. It feels like Bethesda were just paying them to push something new out because 3 was popular and Skyrim was being made, almost like they didn't care whether it was successful or not and just a money grab
"You can't replace passion and skill with manpower."
Wait, what? Passion and skill is a part of manpower. Not speaking up for Emil at all as he's not a good writer.
@@pinnacleevolution1634yeah Todd and Bethesda by extension are some despicably nasty people. It was worse than the 1 point, it was less than half a point the score was 84.5. Bethesda even went out of their way to make it harder for them to reach that deadline by refusing to let anyone who knew the creation kid work with Obsidian.
Wasn't this the same guy that basically said, "Gamers won't read so there's no point in putting in effort in writing a story anyways" when talking about Fallout 4 and players "building bases" more than engaging with the...story? You know? Like how FALLOUT fans appreciated FALLOUT's story, lore, and worldbuilding from the first two games that made the IP iconic?
Bethesda Dumbed it down to the extreme in 4 anyway. Building a base is the only worthwhile thing to do in that game. Emil isn't wrong, but it's a state that they themselves made.
I say this as someone who hate the base building in that game
gamers were basically FORCED to participate in fallout 4s base building, by having the game constantly harass us and destroying our settlements while we werent around and able to babysit them 24/7.
Many fans argue that to enjoy the game you literally have to ignore the settlement system. And many mods exist to shut off the fucking radiant quest systems involving them.
also, we dont fucking read the main story of a game...
Emil seems to be confusing "Players don't want to read the stories in games" with the more factual "Players don't want to read _my_ stories in games" - one of these statements has more truth than the other, and perhaps he should examine why that is. Then again, he's making bag while being openly incompetent at his job. Bethesda aren't giving him an incentive to get better or making him leave, so it's not like he's going to do either.
Reading a story is tedious and boring.@@TheDelinear
What's even worse is that in Fallout 4, Shaun wants you, the Player, to meet him at the end of the day, but at the same time, intentionally let you out of Vault 111 into the harsh wasteland as a fucking experiment, seeing how you, the Player, would manage or if you'd just die the second an enemy pops up (if you even make it out of the Vault). So in other words, he wants you to find him, but at the same time, is intrigued to see how you manage in the overworld, so if you die, what's the point? Does he just shrug it off and move onto the next thing?
Didn't Shaun also set up the fight with the guy who kidnapped him as a baby? The experienced cyborg merc with over a century of survival experience(and a squad of synths) vs Shaun's recently defrosted parent that has no idea what's going on yet, and was just wandering around.
@@stepmi yeah he basically sent Kellogg to go meet you and take it from there because he wanted the parent to get a little more closure and revenge. Basically Fallout 4 is literally just a social experiment but at the same time, instead of just bringing the player to the Institute, Shaun is like "oh I hope my parent finds me! They're so close! Oh shit a deathclaw! Oh no, oh no. Oh. Oh my God. Oh well." Which for clarification, the birds are synths too, they're like the bird camera robots from the Incredibles
To be fair, the vault as a concept was built on this premise that safety is the key to community and identity.
A lot of Fo4 makes sense if you ignore the plot or story. Or logic. And replace it with something better. The story is kind of smashed together from stories that were half finished or pieces of better stories edited by other people. You can tell that happens frequently.
One of the major reasons why, is that the core characters don’t have a timeline or a series of links to their own history. When fans made the wiki pages for characters, there’s often a large number of overlap and missing pieces, travel time is inconsistent. Et al.
Nothing grows or changes within the vault itself, because it is a contrived process to begin with. The immortal people, who have lived 60+ years without aging…
Is only reasonable if you ignore the problems of immortal people in the story. Ie main characters surviving events that should be traumatic.
Father … wants the player to change his mind and break free from the system as a way to gain power and independence. This process is not that organic in the Fallout universe because independence is exceptionally difficult. You need to trade. Travel is ridiculously hard, etc.
It is possible that the player is also immortal… or was genetically engineered to be different. That he’s probably one of the hundreds of children / clones.
Think about how difficult it would be to build a city sized vault without the help of thousands of people over decades. Now build hundreds of these. You need a crazy amount of resources. It’s the size of a cruise ship, or multiple cruise ships under the ground.
It’s hard to know that the vault’s exist to change the world… without assuming a larger purpose in spending trillions of dollars to build hundreds of underground infrastructures that don’t connect or trade.
They have to understand that it’s a very backwards concept to start over and restart a culture, from nothing. The idea works if you have the ability to start over, but …
They were tinkering with the mechanics of creating and modifying the social environment, using a series of scientific methods rather than assuming the end result.
@@ratatosk02 yeah, but no bird even tried to help the player character if its life was in danger. So, Shaun was ok with his parent dying.
Also, why didn't Shaun at least programmed synths to not be hostile if he wanted to meet that much?
@@stepmi they could have actually done something _interesting_ with the story if it turned out you had some guardian angel synths looking out for you, who show up when you're in real danger (Mysterious Stranger style). Imagine noticing this and following the threads and discovering the links back to the Institute that way, instead of just following a dog with a magical nose along a pre-determined trail of undisturbed clues just lying around waiting for you to come along.
What really gets me about the whole "gamers don't know what they're talking about when they criticize my game since they don't make games" is that, by that same logic, we shouldn't be able to tell when a game is good, either. But you'll never see him say the same thing when games he worked on receive praise. He doesn't go out of his way to tell people who enjoy Starfield that they're wrong for doing so because they still aren't developers.
And in the end, it really begs the question: if gamers can't give out negative feedback for a game because they don't know anything, and game developers can't give it either because then they'd be seen as rude, then who can? Who's allowed to criticize anything in this utopia Emil envisions? My bet is on the answer being "no one".
It comes off especially douchey when you, as someone criticizing his writing, are yourself *actually making a game* (hi im doing that (mainly as a personal project at the moment))
My favorite was in Oblivion, after you finish the mages guild and proceed to thieves guild, at one point you're tasked with stealing a staff from yourself to convince yourself to move your battle mages out from waterfront because without them protecting you you're not safe from yourself.
i think this can be attributed to separate people doing the guild quests, Emil, if i remember only did the Dark Brotherhood in Oblivion
@@alshabib5849 Yeah, I could see how the guilds existed in the void, their questlines completely apart from each other, main or sidequests. This was literally the only point where one guild questline touched another, and they still botched it.
@@sharpfang In Morrowind one of the Fighters Guild leaders sends you out to eliminate a Thieves Guild leader. This actually breaks the Thieves Guild storyline making you unable to progress in the Guild. There are many other such interactions in Morrowind, thus providing replayability. In Oblivion/Skyrim all playthroughs are the same. You do the quests almost the same way.
@@alshabib5849this is why internal documentation is important
@@whitegoose2017"Almost" is an understatement. What really is there in terms of decisions? Stormcloaks or imperial, dark brotherhood member or getting rid of them (and i don't remember if destroying the dark brotherhood has more than 1 quest even) and sparing or killing parthanux.. Is there actually more? If so it not memorable in the least. To this day i don't understand how people have like 500hours in this game, you do and see the same stuff over and over again
"Nobody starts out trying to make a bad game". Prove it Emil! Oh, that's right, you can't. You don't have a design doc.
That statment has so little value, it's almsot similar to saying "I drank water today."... Of course nobody sets out to make a bad game duh but setting out to make a great game and delivering that will make your words more valuable unlike this hack Emil. I swear Bethesda is still living off Skyrim glory to this very day, they think they're untouchable.
@@KikyouNeko technically it's actually worse than that... Asset flippers continue to make money by... setting out to make the cheapest, most no effort, derivative, misleading, bad games they can get away with...
There are indeed, people who set out to make bad games...
@@Dreadought I agree with that but usually good or bad games will always advertise themselves, indie titles are filled with lazy asset flips like you mentioned but they'll get exposed pretty quick and end up not worth it so it's a rare occurence when that actually happens.
"You don't have high standards for something you hate. I have high standards because I love video games so much and I want them to live up to the image I have for them inside my own head. "
-Yahtzee
The thing I hated the most about Starfields story line was the fact that everything pointed to unity being a bad choice. You find letters left beind by some pilgrim guy who pretty much says it was a mistake to jump into unity because he gave up the ones he loved. The hunter is a crazy lunatic because each new universe takes him further and further from everything he cares about. Even your companions are really unsure if going into unity is the right choice. The whole time I was thinking "I'm gonna destroy Unity and put an end to this power-hungry forever war". Apparently choosing to be the good guy is the wrong choice. Power is the only choice. Even your unsure companions throw away all of their worriers and pressure you to do it and if you refuse unity, the stupid game says "Don't worry, we'll be waiting here when you're ready." So stupid.
Also Emil's insipid reduction to bad guy/good guy everything is extremely uncompelling. New Vegas was superb because, no matter who you agreed or disagreed with, you could see the solid reasoning behind the NCR, the Legion, and House. Even when Caesar is crucifying and enslaving people, your first conversation with him reveals "huh, he makes some good points, and I can see why he could gather a following." Even when Ulysses or Elijah try to kill you I find it impossible to truly hate them because they're so fleshed out and you can sympathize with their motivations.
Meanwhile, Fallout 3 and 4 reduce the BoS and Enclave to lawful good and chaotic evil and are completely tainted going forward... one of Emil's worst crimes.
@@TaRAAASHBAGS Even one of your possible companions like Rose say how safe legion territory is for trading caravans and she's a trader by profession. She also has a lot of negative things to say about the legion too. It is not so black and white. There is an entire questline dedicated towards fixing N.C.R. corruption regarding the trading caravans. You can't compare Bethesda's storytelling to New Vegas.
@@whitegoose2017 I was just a preteen when I played Fallout 3 so I wasn't too conscious of what a good story/writing was.
When I played NV a few years later I was woken up to how shit the previous title's narrative was. New Vegas's writing and worldbuilding are superb.
Hunter's diaries are actually pretty interesting 4th wall breaking because they tell the player what is the point of playing the game, because the player will be repeating the hunt for the artifacts over and over again till he/she is so bored he will do something else with their lives.... Sometimes with the followers, sometimes all alone... finding out there is no point to do it over and over again...
@@MirecU Maybe if he had any concept of game design beyond shit radiant fetch quests he'd understand why it's not pointless to a lot of people.
Always good to be an "artist" with contempt for your audience.
The twist of Colonel Autumn surviving could have been made to work if he had come back as a ghoul. It seems so obvious.
Wait a minute, yeah! That's even established that earlier with Moira, why didn't they do that?
@@tentacledood5784Bethesda: Errrrrr…. Too much work and it’ll make us actually write something half decent.
That wouldn't have worked. Enclave is a huge stickler about "the purity of man" and as such, having a ghoul as one of their visible heads would go against that. Now, what would work is if he had been augmented with enclave tech to replace his irradiated parts. Sort of a Frank Horrigan deal but done for preservation's sake, rather than to make a secret service super soldier.
@@TheAdmantArchvileCrap, good point.
@@TheAdmantArchvile Offshoot of Enclave, the Exclave. Like the Outcasts in F3.
It makes me happy to see people roasting him in the comments. Apparently he blocked a number of them because he can't handle critics
Brother, you didn't even finish the video. Why should anyone take your criticism seriously?
@@lillasagna5487He didn’t have to finish the video to leave the comment that he left
Imagine your whole lifes work falling appart, brutal lmao
@@lillasagna5487 Mate I'm not talking about Cree, don't project instead do a little digging and find out before you make yourself the butt of a joke or are mocked for it.
@@lillasagna5487 How embarrassing for you
"Think of all the people who put in years of hard work" - the guy who did the bare minimum, and a shoddy job at that.
*He* is the one invalidating all of their work. And he probably knows that.
People: Emil, your writing sucks you incompetent hack!
Emil: Hey now! That is a bit unfair, don't you think? This was a team effort.
I'd almost be pissed if I was part of that team, with him deflecting his failures onto the whole group. Kind of the opposite of what a good leader would do.
I think part of why Bethesda wont let obsidian get another crack at the fallout franchise is because of Emil. Him and Todd are friends and Todd knows that the writers at obsidian would make bethesda look stupid, make Emil look stupid, but most of all make Todd look stupid for being so beholden to friendship instead of what would have ben better for the company and the fans of his games.
It's a real shame Bethesda only made that "mistake" once, giving us New Vegas. Obsidian even offered to make an Elder Scrolls games to fill the wait gap, but they never got a response
Thing about that is the leads at Obsidian that made New Vegas as good as it was are no longer at the company and their last game was fairly mediocre and forgettable
@@BullFrogFacethat's a shame, honestly the only reason I was hyped for outer worlds to begin with was with their previous work.
@@lamlelamatsiliza8550They sold the game as being "from the people that made Fallout" when the vast majority of those people weren't working there. Deceptive marketing at its best.
@@BullFrogFace right. some of my favorite games of all time, kotor 2 and fo:nv were made by obsidian. those guys who made those games possible aren't there anymore. the old heads that made gaming great have long since left.
16:50 Personally the most strange thing about this interaction I find is that you can ask Fawkes to go through the highly irradiated "core" of Vault 87 and retrieve the G.E.C.K with no problems. But now with an even more important task he just... doesn't feel like it?
"No, your dad James killed himself and you should glorify suicide too."
“You have to do it because it’s a part of the story, I’m an npc. That’d be too easy.”
@@gimpscam9976 And then they released Broken Steel later... Welp, so much for that "moral story"
@@TheBreakingBenny Which is even weirder because Ron Perlman still says you died. Somehow Bethesda couldn't get him to rerecord the ending saying you lived.
@@MrGhosta5 I would not be surprised if Emil Pagliarulo believed so firmly in his nonsense plot and story that he failed to think even further. Knowing him, though, he believes himself and Bethesda to be infallible
This man is responsible for the non-existent roleplaying and lack of choices in Bethesda games since Oblivion.
He's the reason the writing is stunted and unsatisfactory, and Todd's the reason more and more gameplay systems keep getting stripped out and oversimplified to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. They're the perfect team!
he is also nonbinary and gay
@crookedgamer7183 What does that have to do with anything
@@creamerthug7028 The bankers that control the reserve systems in every country and effectively all world governments have been using people like that as a cudgel among other things to systematically destroy our nation states so they can consolidate power in the form of a world government?
@@creamerthug7028Well you see, 'LGBT = bad' is a very popular stance nowadays. Does it have any basis or substance? No, but it's cool to be contrarian
Haven't finished yet, but what makes the Sanctuary purge even more insulting is that none of the brotherhood members react to each others deaths. This is ming-bogglingly incompetent, especially after the Whodunit? quest.
As somebody studying screenwriting in college, it amazes me that Pagliarulo refuses to take criticism. Most of my screenwriting classes consist of coming in with our work and having our fellow peers and professors criticize it. Not only does it help us learn from our mistakes but it teaches us how to take criticism and use it effectively. Something tells me that if Pagliarulo Ever went to a writer's workshop he would get really dismissive and not listen to anyone when they try to tell him that his writing has obvious flaws and should be looked at once again. What I've learned from college is that most of the writing is rewriting that's the hard part it's easy to put whatever on a piece of paper or on a Google doc. But actually sitting down and rewriting your work is what's hard, and something tells me that Pagliarulo Doesn't like to rewrite his work because he thinks it’s inherently perfect. You should never have this mindset of your writer or if you are in any artistic field.
I go through my scripts for youtube videos repeatedly and sometimes have to rewrite or even outright cut big segments.
that's not really the same as having it peer critiqued.... you're just going over your writing without external criticism (which imo it needs)@@Creetosis
I get the impression that Emil does exactly two passes when he writes. He does a first draft, and then he goes back over to spackle some glib efforts to chide anyone who points out the obvious solution to his setup.
Two things:
Emil smears around all the criticism onto the team and then inserts himself into the positive like far harbor. I can tell from this set of messages he is a horrible boss. Imagine working for someone like that.
Also, roofers work hard. Imagine if they put on a leaky roof and said "It's fine! We worked hard on it so don't worry about all that water dripping in ruining your house."
Roofing is absolutely awful and I commend the men that do it. I never could.
He reminds me of Tony Tollerico, except instead of music it's writing and Emil shits some out instead of just pretending like Tollerococo.
I can work hard making a meal but at the end of the day if its nasty its my own hands that made it.
Most people work hard to earn their income. Income they don't want to spend on rubbish.
@@neoqwerty I had never heard of him so I had to look that up. There is a Tony from way back but I think you mean Tommy? I can see how it's similar. Both seem very ego driven.
One of my favrotie "There isn't a design document" moments in Skyrim is one of the wizards in the Mage's College stating that Necromancy is perfectly legal, but every other instance of Necromancy in the games narrative is clearly illegal and all necromancers are hostile.
Random necromancers are just perverts, so it's ok.
Vunfert the unliver probably has not been in the College in a long time and their policies might have changed.
The fact that you can't pressure him about it is a sign that it is not the case and you are actually right.
I hate it.
@@karpai5427 That's right! Wuunferth says explicitly that Necromancy is illegal, and his "rumors of Necromancy" are just a red herring for the murder mystery quest.
I love how beautifully this contasts with how they handled the same matter in Morrowind. Different factions all have really distinct takes on the subject. It's illegal, but handled more as a taboo by the Mages Guild. The average Dunmer dislikes it, but for interesting reasons (they worship their ancestors and take strong offense to their remains being misused). It's all very consistent, and only inconsistent when it's meant to be.
I suspect this was a remnant of someone with D&D ideas buried in the back of their head. In D&D, healing magic is part of the school of necromancy, having to do with the revivification of dead flesh. In ES, of course, there is a separate school for healing, but I get the feeling the "necromancy isn't always bad even though necroMANCERS are" is an unconscious leftover of the D&D mode of thought.
@@Saibellus
Or, now get this;
Bethesda is bad at writing nuanced and well-thought out, thought-provoking moral dillemas, and just uses "necromancers bad" because that's the usual fantasy trope.
You don't need D&D related conspiracy theories when the simple answer is that bethesda's writers think of morality as something black and white, and believe the fanbase are 5 year old children anyway.
"It's hard work to make a video game!" Yeah, well maybe having design docs would make it easier.
everything is hard when you are incompetent
"It's hard work to make a video game!" Is an excuse that works when you are a solo-dev working on your own time and resources... Not when you have held a high position in a triple A company for the last two decades.
Laughed out loud
Nice
And even if true, that doesn't excuse anything, that is just a statement without any real meaning to the conversation.
"Building is hard" Isn't a good excuse when a bridge collapses.
What's a design doc, genuine question
When you read that series of tweets by this Emil guy, it becomes abundantly clear where the 'Bethesda customer support team' gets the nerve to respond to reviews on steam by talking down and demeaning people giving them legitimate criticism. Out of touch is putting it lightly.
Emil is the type of person that makes me hate developers. "Oh, it's HARD so you can't criticize us because it's so HARD to make games." I'm a paramedic. My job is difficult. But if I majorly fuck up, I will be criticized. Claiming that my job is hard so I can't be subjected to criticism isn't an excuse. Bethesda is officially on my shit list, and I will never pay for a single thing from them again until something changes.
Which is complete bullshit since he probably has the easiest job there based on wtf he pulled off. It took playtesting to figure out an idea was complete crap. Thousands of man hours probably used to get to that point when he could have just thought about it for a few seconds to realize how shit his idea was.
I don't think your issue is with "developers" the underpaid people working 80h a week at 70% of industry pay to make something. It's the leadership, emil was leadership at Bethesda.
@@kingmanichim, Neil Druckmann, that guy from Devil May Cry emo reboot, they all have something in common: they think they're rockstars and God's gift to games industry, but they're just a bunch of arrogant pricks.
Exactly. Everyone works hard, Emil. The rest of us actually have to be competent too
It's a stupid excuse because he chose to work in the medium of games, and my suspicion is that Emil has never actually practiced the craft outside of that medium. If I write a shitty short story, and the editor tells me as much, I can't then turn around and go "well brah you just don't get how hard this is. It's hard work so like I dunno accept it if its bad" No. I have to take the criticism to heart and do better, because I will never sell another piece of writing if I concoct bullshit excuses for myself. He also has a lot of lazy, amateurish habits -- all the handwavy contrived nonsense and failed Rule of Cool bullshit -- that should have been pounded out of him by editors before his work ever saw the light of day.
You forgot something about Emil's 15/15 comment: He absolutely cannot make that statement because he's in an extremely privileged position where the game he's making *will* get made. Bethesda and MS won't cancel a Bethesda project. His job is cushy AF (given he's still in that position despite all the issues). So him saying "we should be lucky we have anything" is beyond ridiculous, coming from him specifically. No respect for developers who are actually in a financially precarious position.
If he really wants to talk like that, someone should give him an ultimatum or a quality standard to aim for, if he doesn't meet them he should be fired. Without that motivation he won't do shit.
This has been my beef with his ridiculous Xcrement; he whines that the job is hard. STFU Emil, right now someone is digging a ditch in 20 degree weather. That job is hard. Sitting at a desk programming a freaking video game, while not an easy task, is in no way as strenuous as actual physical labor. You have a cushy, plush job that even gets you some nerd street cred. STFU.
Hopefully Microsoft will get tighter control running after Starfield
I think it's sad his whole 15-tweet post was based on a logical fallacy. He really is a dummy.
@@kotzpenner Like Microsoft has a great track record of fixing failing franchises. If I were a head at Microsoft I'd force some kind of change in the writing team. They own Obsidian as well. I would want some of the Obsidian team leading the writing on ES6 and doing quality control. That would probably be Microsofts best bet at ensuring this gets fixed.
He uses his team as a shield, implying that they would be out of a job if fans criticized too hard. But he is the lead writer, he should take responsibility for it. All the times he points towards his subordinates he acts as if they were his colleagues, when he is the one in charge and with all the safety nets instead of them. He wants them to share the burden of criticism, when only he gets the perks of being in charge and when things go right.
Dude straight up wrote that it would take divine intervention for reality to line up with his vision. You'd think with 21+ years in the industry, he'd have a better grasp of exactly what he and his team can realistically do and come up with a more reasonable vision. Pushing yourself to do more is good, up to a point, but starfield was just setting themselves up for failure and then shrugging off any criticism because they tried their best. Shooting for the stars is a nice goal, but if you know you don't have the fuel to get anywhere close, then you're just an idiot.
It should be 24 years in the industry since he was hired for Thief 2. A human being could be born, grow up and finish a master's degree in the amount of time he's taken to figure out how to use 2-3 level editors (poorly).
Emil has ruined every Bethesda game he touched. Still tries to say he didn't... but it's not really his fault, it is Todd's fault for ever letting this guy ever work on writing ANYTHING important. Maybe is just Bethesda games are not important to Todd, he only wanted to say "look where I reached" to the bullies that messed with him when he was in the chess club
Todd is like those big mouth midgets from high school spent entire junior high got stuffed in locker room
Regarding the Dark Brotherhood main questline in Oblivion, I wanted to add a minor point.
I played Daggerfall, the second Elder Scrolls game in the series. In that game, the method for joining the Dark Brotherhood is the same as it is in Oblivion. You kill a civilian, and that triggers the Dark Brotherhood to contact you. The writers of Oblivion clearly recalled this mechanic as they replicated it directly for Oblivion's Dark Brotherhood, but they did not actually review the recruitment quest itself, particularly the dialog. In Daggerfall, after you complete your mission and join the Dark Brotherhood, it is noted to be a tradition that your first sanctioned kill is to be paid a single gold coin.
When I joined the Dark Brotherhood in Oblivion and did not get the single gold coin as payment for my first sanctioned kill, I came to the conclusion that I was not actually recruited into the Dark Brotherhood, but that this cult of psychopaths was just pretending to be the guild of professional assassins I had known in Daggerfall. Thus, the entire time I was playing through, I was expecting a moment when the real Dark Brotherhood decided to get involved to deal with these pretenders.
I noticed the difference in the notes at the deaddrops. I noticed the Dark Brotherhood armor in the targets' homes. My assumption was that the real Dark Brotherhood was eliminating the competition, and eventually, the reveal would come. After Lucien showed up and had his freak out, I was sure this was the moment we'd get the reveal, since the deaddrop method would no longer work, and I'd be approached by my contact to finish the job.
Maybe get some sort of choice to side with Lucien or the real Dark Brotherhood's representative. Decide for myself whether I'd prefer to be a professional assassin or a member of a murder cult. I'd already decided I would finish off Lucien and get paid that single coin I'd been waiting for since the questline started.
Needless to say, I was very disappointed with the reveal.
Holy cow, this is so much better. Like a bunch of organised thugs think they can clean up by pretending to be the brotherhood and then they start getting picked off and you have to uncover the truth and then decide where your loyalties lie. That's so much better.
I mean, he did say that he didn't know the lore, and even if he did, someone at the studio said that they don't have to abide by literally everything. They can or they don't. For those who don't they can do whatever they want. Emil maybe did that because he doesn't know it and just went with his experiences as a Catholic boy. Too bad he couldn't do the game version of Spotlight because you know....
Man, that would have been an incredible, stupendous twist for teenage me playing Oblivion
@@damienrichards9743 i think hiring a guy who doesn't know the lore or care about it to expand on the lore and having him write the storylines for every quest is a super good idea
@@silvervampireteeth Tell that to either Rolston or Gooddall (I think that's how you spell his last name. PatricianTV said something about one of them saying they can either diverge from the lore or not have to do anything with it and do something new entirely. That and someone wrote a book named Coda where you can essentially choose which story and mods to be your preferred 'canon' so Emil took that literally and here we are....) Or any of the more experienced writers/designers before they left the studio for other endeavors. Just another excuse to justify "hey i can do whatever i want and there's literally nothing you can do about it". Much love and respect.
Emil is the perfect example of being promoted past one's capabilities
Though, to be fair, I suspect having him mop floors would be past his capabilities
Emil in that timeline be like "Floor being a mess? Trashes everywhere? Funny how disconnected some of the employees are from the realities of floor mopping, and yet they speak with complete authority. I mean, I can guess what it takes to make a video game but I don't work on game development, so what the hell do I really know? Not a lot."
@@missilecarrierI love you
The internet has made you unnecessarily cruel for no reason.
Is he a bad writer? Yeah sure, pretty solidly poor. But this seems like you’re saying the whole “probably couldn’t even mop right” bit for some personal satisfaction. You’re behaving like a scumbag, even if you’re in the right.
@@missilecarrier Perfection.
@@pterodummy Nah, I wouldn't trust Emil to mop my floors because I care about my floors. He'd fuck up my floors with his shit mopping then go on a schizophrenic essay about how I don't understand the intricacies of floor mopping. Emil can genuinely eat broken glass, if he didn't want to be ripped on by Internet people then he should stop shitting into a fucking fountain pen for a living. Unbearable hack.
Fixing Kellogg not aging seems so easy just make him a synth, an old kind like nick valentine. Then you can explain not aging, have interesting dialogue with nick upon rescuing him confusing him for Kellogg, give the player a reason to look into the institute and disliking them. You can even still keep the whole memory den thing by saying he was an early attempt to transfer people's memories to synths
A few ways to just fix the aging could be making him a synth like you said. Or he was the only successful one who survived the experiment. Sure it could be a copout excuse but if they just add enough evidence( such as when exploring the institute you come across a scientist who is injecting something into a test subject, they then explode or their head flys off or what ever). Furthermore he could be treated like the winter solder, they freeze him, and thaw him as needed. Another excuse could be he is a clone, where the reason for the brain impants is so each clone is up to date on what Kellogg knows, and when the active clone dies or suffers life threatening injuries, a new one wakes up.
Also, fixing Kid in a Fridge is super easy. You find the fridge outside of Quincy. Just make it so that the kid hid in the fridge during the siege of Quincy and got stuck there.
With Kellogg, Emil's story is so bad that I could write a better one using the basic framework of F4. And I'll prove it right now. My version deviates when you reach the door to the vault. You see a pip-boy on the door control console with a drawing showing you to put it on your wrist. You put it on and you see "BOOTING" and then "AUTOPLAY". You hear a voice, "Greetings. If you are listening to this, then the revival process was successful. With the old automated systems inoperative, I had to manually setup the sequences, a long and tedious process. I would have preferred to greet you in person, but my absence would have been noticed. There are many things you need to learn about this new world you've been dropped into. Too many to tell you in this message. Probably the most important thing for you right now is where's your son and who killed your husband/wife. I can give you some help with those. The man's name is Kellogg. Where he is now, I do not know. You can start your search for him in a place called Diamond City. I've entered the location into this pip-boy. Search out a detective named Nick Valentine. With luck he can help you. I will be in touch later." You see "MESSAGE ENDS." You then leave the vault.
You head to Diamond City and go through the quest to free Nick. Nick's never heard of Kellogg, but agrees to help you look around. Rummaging around the bowels of the stadium, you find a room that looks like no one's been there for years and recover a holotape. It's Kellogg's voice and he's angry that the Institute has severed all contact with him after all the jobs he's done for them. He also fills in some details of his life and how he got involved with The Institute. He says that he's leaving DC to look for work with the Gunner mercenaries who are now a playable faction. You head down to Gunner HQ and sign up to work for them. A number of Gunner quests follow, some morally questionable, while you work your way up to build trust in that faction. You finally pop the question to the Gunner leader about Kellogg. He tells you he doesn't know him, but vaguely heard the name before. You rummage around Gunner HQ and find another holotape. Kellogg talks about how the Gunners are kicking him out because he has too much "baggage" and that he's going freelance. He fills out some more details of his life and talks about his wife and son/daughter were murdered by a rival gang back in the NCR. You follow the breadcrumbs through various NPC's, each time finding a holotape, each one where he sounds more bitter and depressed, leading to the next location.
Your last location, you find a holotape. Kellogg's last job went tits-up. He complains he's slowing down and that he got shot up. He's heading off for a place he can get treatment and rest up. You head to that location. You walk in and ask the man at the desk if Kellogg is there. The man says "Are you here to kill him?" You have a number of answers. The man says, "A man with Kellogg's past, it's no surprise that someone would show up one day." and "Look, you can do whatever you want. I won't stop you. But just talk to him first." and tells you where Kellogg's room is. You walk into the room and there's an old man in a wheelchair. He's obviously senile. He thinks you're his son/daughter finally coming to visit him. He's happy and crying, saying how well you've grown up and how sorry he couldn't be there for you. He lamenting that he can't remember the things he's done but knows they were bad, that he did it all for the family, and makes you promise not to follow his path. It could be done to make him so pathetic that you actually feel some sympathy for him. You then have the choice to kill him, play along with his delusions, or just leave. Whatever you do, you leave the building and look up to see the Prydwen arrive in Commonwealth. End of Act I.
The voice on the holotape is, of course, Sean who you will finally meet at the start of Act II. Hopefully you can piece together at this point that it's your son who's now an old man. I haven't worked out the entire path for Act II, but then again, I haven't devoted much time or thought to it. Anyway, let me know what you think.
Tbh they should have had him be a freshly made synth.
If I remember correctly they were monitoring the vault for when you leave, so it wouldn't be hard for them to deploy Kelogg 2.0 as bait to bring you in.
But nope, instead they wrote themselves into a hole.
@@AbelMusa the synths, railroad and institute are referenced in one quest in fallout 3, so I say the incompetent who wrote fo4 looked at that and then proceeded to royally screw the pooch and screw up the aesthetics they were clearly implied to have
If Larian had done the "Emmissary is your dead companion" thing, they'd have made an entirely separate version of the Emmissary for each character, then triggered the appropriate one in response to your choices.
Emil's tweets defending himself sound like every other narccistic and incompetent douchebag who can't comprehend that they aren't infallible and everything is everyone else's fault.
That a game design decision not a writing one
@@j0nnyism That's not true at all. They are interlaced. If they aren't you get Deus Ex Human Revolution.
@@j0nnyismif you're a writing lead on a project you ARE a game designer.
You touch on _the most_ infuriating aspect of Emil's writing: the casually adding world-breaking plot contrivances and then utterly disregarding them immediately afterward and never acknowledging them again, which he does over and over and over again in the Fallout games in particular. It's as if any character Emil writes has a random chance of having a personal, one-use, pocket miracle they can whip out at any time to do one specific impossible thing... and he ~somehow~ doesn't see any issue with that kind of writing.
It's such a weird combination of traits that it feels like some kind of mental disorder... like a problem with his brain structure that makes him incapable of understanding the relationship between causes, effects, and the even further downstream effects that ripple outward... and he still chose to become a writer despite this handicap.
"We invented teleportation, cold-fusion energy, mass-produced synthetic humanoids capable of independent, witty, and creative thoughts, brought the gorilla back from extinction, and we still haven't taken over the world yet. What's up with thaaaaat?" ~ Your son
Dumb people can't write smart things. He, and many other writers, see something that's cool, and want to write about it. Sadly, they're literally too stupid to understand it, so they resort to bullshit.
@@MK_ULTRA420Don't forget the hyper advanced Cybertics capable of making someone Biologically immortal and yet Father dies of cancer
What Pagliarulo did to Fallout is borderline criminal
@@MK_ULTRA420
I'm more offended they somehow built cutting-edge future tech that exceeds anything that existed in Pre-War civilization with a box of scraps. That's not even a post-apocalypse story anymore.
It's insane to me that people praise Skyrim for having so much "player choice", and yet in the Thieves Guild quest line, you can't alert the Jarl to Maven's connections to the guild. The Jarl hates the guild. Mjoll hates them too. You can easily find hard evidence that Maven is in cahoots with them and the brotherhood. But can you do anything with it? Can you rescue Riften from the scourge of crime and prevent Maven from ruling the town either from the shadows or outright? No, you either have to become the head of the guild or do nothing. Where's the choice there?
Who the hell praises Skyrim for player choice? Its one of the most rail roaded "RPGs" ever. 99% of the time your only choice is either do the quest or don't.
@@GeraltofRivia22You'd be surprised how many mouthbreathers praise Skyrim for its seemingly huge amount of player choice and freedom when in reality it has none.
I'm pretty sure most people's idea of "player choice" is when the player gets a choice. In that regard, Skyrim is a masterpiece. All those dialogue options, different skill trees and paths, weapons, spells, shouts, so much player choice! I'm convinced this is the case, I refuse to accept that so many people are just hallucinating choices where there aren't any for the sake of an empty compliment for their favorite brain-turn-off games.
Skyrim is a crappy game. Go ahead, play it unmodded, even better, play the FIRST release of it unmodded. There is no reason for it to be praised even when it was first released, far better games were around.
The only reason Skyrim gets praised is because it is a great skeleton for mods to create a decent enough game. Without mods? It is a skeleton without any meat on the bones. To make the game be passable for what a triple A title should be expected to be, you need to install so many mods that you double the disc space it uses.
@@Nempo13 The FIRST release had the majority of its sales on Xbox 360, which is unmoddable.
Something lead quest guy Will Shen said in an interview after leaving BGS really struck a chord with me when it comes to how disjointed Bethesdas games have gotten so I'll just drop the quote.
"I think one of the things that makes triple-A role-playing games really come together is when it feels like the game has some kind of a singular direction."
The interview from the website gamedeveloper, and he says some other things in the interview that gives me the impression that leadership in general at BGS is a mess. Lack of a singular vision was an issue with the writing for FO4, but it's become an issue with the general design of Starfield all over the game. He says some other stuff like how leadership needs to be proactive.
He didn't specifically call out BGS in the interview of course, but he's been at Bethesda since his career began so it isn't hard to read between the lines on which experiences he's drawing from.
"Nate was the guy laughing at the executed Canadian" Yeah, but why tho?
Why, Emil? Why did Nate have to have anything to do with the original Fallout?
His backtracking on it is so fucking funny too
@@CatManThree’oh nooo my character I wrote to be a morally good family loving war hero now looks like a war criminal’
@@vickkyytoria Funny thing is all of that could be avoided if he stfu and stayed silent. Really he's jealous he didn't write the script for Fallout TV show.
Todd and Emil want Fallout to have been their series that they created from the start, not just a series that they bought from a defunct studio.
@@eleven99 You mean demolish legacy that was before their time?
I'm glad more people are starting to criticize this hack writer
I never liked the guy
sometimes I wondered "hey maybe he's got good ideas here and there but hodd toward just don't use them" -- but it's been too long.. that theory isn't plausible
@@villings Pretty sure Todd is just a spokesman and hasn't actually been involved in the game development since Morrowind.
@@villings The problem is emil has good concepts but he doesn't know how to use them beyond the concept phase. Starfield's actual premise of meta-narrative multiverse mirroring is absolutely genius but emil executed it in the worst way possible. They seriously need to get a few more writers that work alongside emil so that he's not doing everything on his own and failing at executions where they matter.
I have hated him since fallout 4 and now that i played oblivion and fsllout 3 i hate him even more. Starfield just verified bethsada hasnt made a good game since morrowind
The problem is that Emil is a lazy writer who routinely excuses himself by citing writing principles and practices that only work for short-story fanfic writers.@@piccoloatburgerking
He's had this job for this long and he still hasn't improved and yet people who are probably better writers have been laid off while he sits there making horrible quests kind of makes you think don't it.
It’s not what you know but who. He’s buddy buddy with someone important, likely Todd, so he’ll remain
Not what you know but who you blow
Ah I didn't take into account he probably gives mean head.
@@johnjaeger2968Sometimes you gotta give head to get ahead.
@@garbearfar1394 Not just likely Todd, but rather it's literally Todd. Todd Howard's friendship with Emil is the reason he got the job to begin with.
One of the most perplexing things about the lore of Skyrim is the fact that the Dragonborn's actual importance is never meaningfully acknowledged.
As Dragonborn, you're the only legitimate claimant to the Ruby Throne. If it still existed, you could wear the Amulet of Kings. You're capable of becoming Emperor/Empress. Ulfric Stormcloak almost certainly would support a Dragonborn in their claim, being that he already intends to march south on the Thalmor anyway. His main grievance with the Empire is that it's not the same Empire he fought for, that the current Emperor is just a quisling warlord, and he has nothing to say when a Dragonborn walks through his front door? This fact is not addressed, it's not even hinted at.
A Dragonborn in TES is more than just a guy who can yell really loud and fling ragdolls across Whiterun. They're paradigm-altering superheroes who change the shape of Tamriel, sometimes literally. Other issues with the way the Dragonborn is portrayed can be chalked down to engine limitations; I'm not too torn up about not being able to literally Shout city walls to pieces, the same way I'm not too upset that the Thalmor aren't portrayed the way Kirkbride & Kuhlmann originally wanted to. The treatment of the protagonist in Skyrim, though, is just silly and disappointing.
Tbf Ulfric wasn't very smart because he started the civil war the Thalmor wanted to weaken the empire
@@notthefbi7015 The Thalmor want the civil war to prolong, not end conclusively one way or another. Better it ends with an actual human being running Skyrim imo. Either way, even the Thalmor barely acknowledge the fact that you're a Dragonborn, which is about as weird as Ulfric hardly mentioning it. Dragonborn's probably the one thing that can conclusively ruin their day and they treat you like some random schmuck, it's the worst
@@Eastcyning they do mention dragonborn stuff in the civil war though, i think both sides will throw an offhand comment to have the dragonborn deal the finishing blow on the imperials/stormcloaks, but that's it.
How did Kirkbride and Kuhlmann portrayed Thalmor btw?
@@comentator93 From his account on Imperial Library:
"I talked with Kurt about a whole mental anguish thing that happened to the world of TES after Talos was shot out of heaven by the Thalmor.
Short version: any attempt to draw the old red diamond would invariably end up failing.
Ex: A painter would paint it. The paint would set. The paint would crack and move. The final painting would be a 2D explosion. More Talos despair would set in.
Ex: Blacksmiths would forge the symbol. The metal would cool, be applied to an Imperial helmet. A brave legate would wear it. The diamond stayed on long enough to meet with a Dominion ambassador. Imperials would be all "See? Our faith in Talos is--" Legate's helmet would crack from the symbol, legate's head crushes in. More Talos despair. Dominion ambassador would smile and accept the surrender of whole legions.
Ex: A bard, knowing the "cracking diamond effect", attempts to describe the symbol in verse, to avoid the physical danger. He performs the verse to a crowd of secret Talos worshipers. They begin to see the diamond in their minds and are overjoyed. Then the screaming starts. Two hours later, a throng of headless corpses are found, strewn diamond-pattern in a courtyard. Other worshipers arrive to look on them, seeing a sign of their god in the bodies of his martyrs. Crowds gather at this holy site. Dominion lets the hope set in, declares small doubt in the finality of Talos' erasure. People go "whoa" and flock to the site. Thalmor button is pressed. The new settlement blows up as anything around the diamond shape regards it in a chain-reaction explosion of viscera, language, spellfire. Half a province surrenders to the Thalmor.
Parts of Game: Skyrim would show all of this in mechanical terms. The LDB would have to learn how to successfully craft the diamond shape without danger. They would have to avoid certain "latent diamond traps", etc.
Was awesome idea. Was also... technically difficult. Was also radical. Is saved for a future game or DLC."
I saw the title and auto liked the video!
Holy shit! Hey, Gundam!
omg daddy gundam hi
What I hate is the contrived defense people come up with for bad writing: "If [XYZ convoluted/utterly illogical thing] didn't happen, then the rest of the story couldn't have happened!" (See: forcing a vampire-hunter to return Serana, an ANCIENT VAMPIRE WITH AN ELDER SCROLL, to her father in order to set the events of Dawnguard into motion)
Like, shouldn't it be obvious that if the very impetus for your plot is a blatant stumbling-block for people with common sense, then you should probably _write a better plot?_
The most ridiculously easy fix for that is to allow the player to also get the starting quest from a representative of Castle Volkihar.
@@KopperNeoman but alas the dawnguard quest would be over/impossible in 3 seconds.no serana means soul Carin mostly closed off. so no Valernia so Harkon can't do his prophecy.
To be fair I think the way the Dawnguard quest starts off is the biggest problem. The questline relies on Serana trusting the player to help her but you have to meet her as a vampire hunter. Why couldn't the quest just starts with random NPCs from the Dawnguard hiring you as extra muscle who then die in the dungeon leaving you to meet Serana alone? That way you would start the questline with no affiliation and being a Vampire wouldn't be as unimmersive as going out of your way to join and help the vampire hunters either. I guess they wanted you to see the Dawnguard castle so badly they threw away a sensible setup just for that.
In that case you could still go to the Dawnguard as a quest step to collect some payment or whatever even as a Vampire (risk your head for a chance of good money) so IDK just bad writing ig.
Yeah, came to a similar conclusion a while back, though it was more about mangling preexisting characters to suit the plot. Point still stands: if your super cool plot relies on either idiotic move to work, it’s not cool, it’s stupid, and needs to be scrapped entirely.
This is even worse if you actually do get something good out of the plot, as its horrible impetus will taint that…but we don’t have to worry about that from Emil, because he’s too crap to make anything good period.
Imagine buying a dense and deep IP with tons of potential then just being like "I don't care about the lore, I just wanted to use the name"
Exactly, the response they were looking for was “I played a game called Fallout where I launched a nuke AND I CLAPPED!” And that’s exactly what Bethesda got.
It's a popular strategy these days, just look at what happened to Star Wars.
It works because the geeky stuff has become cool and popular on some level. This happened with bands all the time back in the day. They got big and the music changed for the worse to appeal to a broader pallet.
I have a buddy who got into games about 5 years ago (we're 41). His opinion on gaming gives almost no priority to anything we care about. Lore, immersion, cohesive in-world details/physics. So many people prioritize tech specs and graphics. His major issue with Starfield when it came out was around the DLSS or whatever other feature was missing. Lol. I'm like "bro, this game looks so bad, what are you even liking about it?"
“Ignore reviews” something you never hear when the reviews are positive
If the reviews are bad/low: "Ignore them"
If the reviews are good/high:
"Please give ME a bonus for it"
The whole "it's written on the internet so it must be true" cope seems like a phrase that gets passed around at Bethesda a lot. I remember Todd saying it when writing off past criticisms of their games having bugs during one of fallout 76's showcases.
Emil being passive aggressive and petty?
>looks at the Broken Steel endings where you do the sensible thing instead of sacrificing yourself for no good reason, where Rob calls whoever went into the control room a "true hero" and not you
...nah, couldn't be. He's totally not the type.
We can write off TES 6 as long as this muppet and Todd remains there.
As long as Todd and Emil are development leads at Bethesda we can not expect any innovation or evolution.
But Todd made the OG games?
@@EggEnjoyer No, Todd made Oblivion. He was project lead for Redguard and Morrowind, but the actual creative legwork for Morrowind mostly rests on Ken Rolston and Michael Kirkbride, while Mark Nelson, Douglas Goodall, and Gary Noonan contributed the graphical and writing elements.
Todd did some Imperial quests, and was the main manager, but that just consists of telling people what to focus on and not literally how to do their jobs.
@@SecuR0M Right. But surely he has some talent if he was project lead for those 3 games. They’re all acclaimed.
But then again maybe not if starfield was his dream game and he let it turn out like this.
Maybe dude is checked out idk
@@EggEnjoyerTalent without effort is useless. Also, it could very well be that Todd is old hat, and is unable to create games at the baseline standard of current day.
I will say the Salem thing for fallout 4 isn't that weird, of "magic powers". But specifically because it already existed in the original fallout game and subsequent ones. Psychics and Psykers. They have special powers. The Master is known to have psychic powers, there is even a perk you can take at level 15 that specifically blocks psychic attacks from him. That he developed these powers from exposure to FEV.
There is also literally the kid from New Vegas, The Forecaster who demonstrates psychic powers and wheres a psychic nullifier helmet.
Which that helmet does come up in the original fallout game where you can meet psykers. That according to the fallout bible, have different powers. Such as telekinesis, pyrokinesis, and elctrokinesis.
There is also literally Hakunin from fallout 2 who communicates to the player directly when you choose to sleep, in your dreams. I am just giving you a few examples, but there is plenty more of these.
If anything, not including the "witches" in fallout 4 because to the developers it seems "out of place", actually shows how out of touch they are with their own series. Them saying they "don't want to beholden to writing from someone 20 years ago" and them not wanting to keep a design bible, is precisely how we get to the point where Fallout 76, yes that train wreck, is actually more in line with the original point of psychic powers from the original Fallout game.
I was thinking the same thing; it's been a while since I played FO1 and 2, but I was sure there were psychers there, and I definitely remembered the kid from New Vegas.
Now, I love Fallout, and think Fallout 2 is one of the best games ever made. But they're not very serious games with very serious lore or stories, even before Bethesda shat on it.
Yes psykers are an established part of Fallout lore but in defence of New Vegas nothing the forcaster says or does requires supernatural aid. He himself admits he gets called out by wastelanders who claim his power can be possessed by anyone who listens more than they talk.
The Forecaster has no proven power and admits as much himself. Whether you believe he does or not is up to you.
@@UnsoberIdiot just because they had unrealistic or even outlandish elements doesn’t mean they weren’t still internally consistent or capable of taking themselves seriously. Even Fallout 2 which is the wackiest out of the Black Isles/Obsidian Games, had its share of dark moments, usually involving the enclave or Frank Horrigan specifically.
What pissed me off the most about the Fawkes' inane pontifications but at the end of 3 is how RIDICULOUSLY EASY you could've had it make sense by changing one tiny-ass detail:
Have Fawkes and the Lone Wanderer get separated during the storming of Project Purity sequence. It's so easy to do, just have an explosion go off and a wall, separating the two.
You could even set up a more exciting ending situation by having Fawkes and the Lone Wanderer discuss their plans ahead of the final mission. For example, they go there together and then Fawkes will do the radiation bit, just like he did back in Vault 87.
So, when the two are separated at Project Purity, Fawkes might tell the Lone Wanderer to go on ahead and secure the antichamber and he'll find an alternate route and they'll meet up there.
Then the Lone Wanderer will arrive at the antichamber, wait around for Fawkes to show up until he can wait no longer, then choosing to self-sacrifice.
There! I fixed it!
Emil and Todd glare at you in long, uncomfortable silence, turn to each other, scowl, then look back at you: "You're fired,' Todd says. 'So anyway', Emil says, turn to Todd, 'I'll
just have Fawkes say something about it being the player's destiny or something'
Todd stands up and claps his hands: 'Brilliant', he says, pointing at Emil, 'that's why I love you man, you think of this shit. Alright lunchtime guys I'm thinking Mexican'
@@DougWIngate Yeah... It just works, doesn't it?
Still need to change stuff for Charon and RL-3 then because it's stupid for them too.
I just watched the video. They could have easily explained why you couldn't use same drug as Autumn did by just having it break in the siege / fight with you or him just consuming it beforehand to account for possibility that he would have no time to find magic drug in his jacket and inject it if he would need to get into Project Purity so that you either find him with a broken or empty syringe. Like, it is completely believable that either would happen and easy to implement without changing much of dialogue or inventory for that to be in game. 0 fucks being given on culmination of your story is truly a peak of writing.
As a writer, listening to Pagliarulo talk about our field is physically painful because it's clear he doesn't understand or respect it. Writing is both an art and a craft. Yes it needs creativity and freedom, but it also requires practice and study. Writing rules and story structure NEED to be studied and followed. Story structure doesn't limit you or make your story predictable, it's like a recipe. If you're trying to make a cake there are literally millions of combinations with flavors, textures, design, etc that make each one unique but they all have basic ingredients like flour, sugar, eggs, etc and necessary actions like mixing and baking. Likewise, stories have basic things they NEED in order to be good like the Opening Image where you introduce your character and world, Pinch Points where your characters face adversity, a Midpoint Twist that either your character, your reader, or both didn't expect to contrast the Finale and raise the stakes so your story doesn't drag halfway through, etc. But it doesn't seem like Pagliarulo has EVER studied writing craft. He constantly breaks the rules for foreshadowing, lore consistency, and logical progression. He can't even resist breaking his OWN rules he created for the world/characters. 🤦♀
I hope someone will mail him Story by Robert Mckee so Emil can understand why people dislike him and his hot takes so much
@@Whodjathink Right? Or at least Save The Cat! Or hell, just send him a link to Brandon Sanderson's writing classes he posts on UA-cam. Any of those would make SUCH a difference.
Pagliarulo is a propagandist, not a writer. All these AAA writers have been installed, not hired. So they don't respect writing because they see it as an advertising tool, not an artform. The 343 lead writer was exposed just some months ago.
This has happened since domestic propaganda was legalized veeeeery quietly about 8 years back. That is why all media tanked and started pushing similar messaging.
yikes, the conspiracionist appeared
@@Momo_MinomoOh man, I'd pay to see a reaction video of that...
Actually, scratch that, Bethesda might actually do it just for the spare changr
I think one of the most critical writing follies in bethesda writing is sometimes they say "Hang on, if the player tried to do this, that would completely change the story" and then don't either
1: change the story slightly so you couldn't actually do that (make the entrance into the chamber real small so fawkes couldn't possibly enter)
2: reward the player by letting them use that superior option (let fawkes input the code, saving everyone without any sacrifice)
but instead
3: have characters act utterly stupidly to railroad the player into the choice (fawkes says some bullshit about destiny, forcing you to pick from two terrible options)
actually that idea 1 is jokes and would have worked, imagine if you had to climb through a tiny vent with all your armor off the fit, thus you couldnt be wearing a radiation suit or powerarmor suit which would also mean no "wait but my rad resist is so high that doesnt matter?"
essential npcs go brrr
I'm not sure I've ever really seen this addressed, but the whole Fawkes thing is even more stupid when you consider that can still ask Sarah Lyons to do it for you and avoid death. If you can avoid it anyway, what was the fucking point of this stupid inconsistency? So you could feel bad about someone dying? So fucking cringe. In reality, Fawkes should've been allowed to do it so that fortuitous players who kept him as a companion all this time are rewarded with an alternative option that not every player might encounter. But God forbid a Bugthesda game has anything that you actually might miss on a first playthrough.
There's also that one character you can have as a slave named Clover or something who doesn't refuse anything you do except for this. Again, would've been a perfect opportunity for evil karma characters to have a boom to avoid losing their life in the end. Imagine it might be a reason to actually have companions aside from being damage sponges.
Fawkes was my main companion in my first playthrough of 3, because I liked being a glass cannon and it was important to have a tanky buddy who drew aggro. This contrivance was so confusing and upsetting that I lost sleep over it. Not only does it make no sense, but self-sacrifice is Fawkes' whole motif! His gameplay is all about becoming strong and hardened to protect his friends, literally taking bullets for the Lone Wanderer, but suddenly, an action that would cost him nothing to do, and everything to abstain from, is simply too far.
@29:30 - It is amazing to watch Emil admit that by not bothering to think things through, he blew resources on IMPLEMENTING a "Replace Maxson by Whacking Maxson" plot. They didn't catch how bad of an idea it was ("it felt wrong") until they were playtesting it!
"Oh, I guess Klingon promotion is wrong here."
Man, they must be dumb as fuck for not understanding that the BOS _isn't_ a barbarian faction unlike the raiders
“Oh yeah, you kill the leader and become the leader!”
How the fuck did they come to that conclusion? How was the thing that bothered them was “Oh, they still don’t like Danse,” and not “You killed our fucking leader, prepare to die????”
@@Stryfe52 I wouldn't be surprised if Emil Pagliarulo is speaking for the team, effectively boiling down the talks they had behind-the-scenes (which may be a given because God forbid they use design documents, right Emil?!), and they were too depressed to maybe express why it's nonsensical with their hearts.
@@TheBreakingBennyI truly want to believe it's mostly the leads making these horrible games over at Bethesda. I can't comprehend an entire dev team being that stupid
Your profile picture gives off Bjorn from Peggle vibes.
i resent the title "Emil Pagliarulo is an Incompetent Writer" because it implies that this man has somehow earned the honor of being considered a writer
It's a bad sign when the only defense Bethesda fanboys have is "STOP NOTICING THINGS"
“Don’t ask questions, just consoom product and get excited for next product.”
@@Slender_Man_186 They're even worse than that, They want you to buy the same product multiple times, on multiple platforms. Not to mention microtransactions are a thing because of them.
@@Slender_Man_186 f76 fans be like:
Yeah, noticing things is what led to world war 2.
@@Zeropointillnot really because of them but you aren't entirely wrong
I don't know if this is brought up in the video yet, but Emil seems like the type of guy who doesn't really care about intricasies of his stories. And the thing is, if you're a writer or at least a good one, you really must be at least a little bit nerdy about the stories you're creating. That's where brilliant storytelling is told, when you set your world's rules, stick to them, and immerse yourself in it as much as you would want a player/reader/viewer to immerse themselves in it. If you don't care about the story you're telling, chances are you'll produce a mediocre story not many people will care about. Fallout 4 is liked for its gameplay and companions, but rarely do I ever hear people compliment its main plot. Which really cannot be said for, as an example, New Vegas. With New Vegas people still get really geeky when discussing the political picture of the Mojave and which faction is the right choice, myself included. That's how you know you've written a compelling story, when fans of it still talk about it a decade later. Emil really struggles with this concept, or seems generally disinterested in it at the very least
Yes, I got that impression of Emil as well. I write casually, and by no means will I say I’m good at it, but I do care and geek out about my characters and world. Morrowind’s lore had me geeked out for a long time, delving into all the books, myths, various accounts of Red Mountain, etc… can’t say the rest of Bethesda’s games kept me that entertained lore wise.
As soon as a writer expresses that they simply _don't care_ about ANY aspect of the story they're writing, that writer is a hack and, if they're part of a project, should be replaced. Thinking certain details aren't important enough to obsess over is one thing, but if you just shrug and say "it doesn't matter because nobody will care" you shouldn't be writing anything more complicated than a shopping list- and even then you'd probably leave off the deodorant because "eh, nobody cares what you smell like anyway".
Its brought up on one of ItsAGundam video from a couple of years ago, it even had a clip of Emil telling how he writes his stories which is Stupid, simple and easy.
@@Spacefrisian ItsAGundam is a hack, though. He'd defend Emil if Emil went on twitter and said 'TRUMP IS GOD'.
Emil is literally quoted as saying that 'if you write something compelling the player is just going to turn it into paper airplanes anyway," so y'know.
Whenever someone says something along the lines of "it's fictional, it's not supposed to be realistic", know that they have absolutely zero understanding of writing and worldbuilding. I know that was Pete Hines and not Emil (although we'll see, I'm only at 27:08), but still remember this.
Every story and fictional world needs to establish its rules and stick to them to retain suspense of disbelief. Break suspense of disbelief, and your audience audience instantly cares less about what's going on. Rules create stakes. In our world, we know falling hundreds of metres leads to instant death, so contemplating a dangerous climb across a chasm with a drop that big is instantly scary. But imagine if gravity in our world was highly inconsistent, and 40% of the time you just floated in a random direction? All of a sudden that climb can be ruined randomly by the climber just flying off the side. It goes from scary but tangible to annoying and random.
This logic flows for real world physics and for fictional elements like magic or advanced technology. Without consistency, it's annoying, and the plot just becomes subjected to the whims of the writer, rather than seeming like the way the story is actually supposed to play out. That is suspense of disbelief being broken. When you can feel that, you can't get invested in characters or the world as much, because at any moment the writer will just pull out the rug and make you feel like an idiot BECAUSE you paid attention, therefore you are discouraged from paying attention. And when a writer doesn't understand these concepts, they will repeat this mistake dozens or even hundreds of times, eventually reaching the point where you simply cannot care about anything going on.
A good example is in CW's the Flash, where a villain just throws a smoke bomb or runs around the corner and suddenly the Flash can no longer find them. This is done countless times, not because the specific villain has a power that allows them to do this, but just... because. Sorry, but that's the Flash. When you've literally shown him thoroughly search like 5 blocks to find a bomb in a few seconds, NO ONE without superspeed or teleportation powers can ever escape from him. But they do. All the time. Additionally, enemies without superspeed consistently challenge the Flash because he always lets them talk and attack first, even when he often already knows that yes, this person is a dangerous criminal with every intention of being hostile. No sane person with superspeed would allow this. The Flash can have them in a cell that disables their powers in under a second. These two issues combined mean literally every single fight in the entire series has no weight whatsoever. You simply cannot care, because Barry just won't use his superspeed.
Rise of Trashwalker is another case where suspension of disbelief is constantly broken, and arguably that can be said of The Last Jedi too.
Idiots like Emil confuse "believable" with "realistic". It helps when writers set a lore and the reality of that universe and NOT contradict it.
Not realistic that every car crash you have in GTA doesn't kill the character, but it's believable that a legendary criminal has the skill to avoid deadly crashed
It is both unrealistic AND unbelievable that a ghoul child got trapped in a fridge for 200 years fifteen steps from his parents and only got out when the character interacted with the fridge.
Being consistent with the lore is believable, not realistic.
This “rules” thing on the internet is an approximate to something much more fundamental to modern writing; setup and payoff. If a thing set up does not have a payoff, it can and should be cut in modern writing philosophy. If a thing has a payoff but not a setup, plant one and any reminders in editing. If there is a gun on the table it must do something before the end of the story. Otherwise you don’t put a gun on the table and waste the reader’s time and energy on it. It’s a structure stolen from 19th century police procedurals which the reader was expected to be able to solve with the list of clues provided at the beginning. The writing of Bethesda games this last decade has been consistently struggling with this concept.
“Let’s see if you can do better” is the most classic dumbguy response of all time. If I do a shitty translation, I did a poor job, and you don’t need to know Japanese or be able to do better to see it.
It's a narcissistic response. I've had relatives that I hated because they'd say that, instead of accepting that they'd done something wrong. "I'd like to see you do better" is best answered with "It's not my job to do your work for you". If I was as bad as my job as Emil is at his, then I'd be referring to my current employment in the past tense.
How dare these dirty customers have standards for a product they spent money on. 😒
I’d heard so many times from moronic corporate shills that people don’t know what they want, but these corporations do. That clearly isn’t working out, to no sensible persons surprise.
Who spent money on Starfield? You get it for free on gamepass, dummy.
Ok, having too much time while listening to these vids. I bet no one would read it but I wrote it, so have spiel.
Most people don't know what they want. Why do you think many of these same corporations are making billions for decades? Clearly it has been "working out" amazingly for them, for a long time.
Most people are easily manipulated. These corporations keep using highly scummy anti-consumer practices, pushing it more and more(for a very long time, it's not just recently and people haven't caught on yet or something), because they are making money, from people giving it to them. These tactics and psychological manipulations work. Bethesda, blizzard - countless others, have been producing mediocre to bad products for years, decades. Were still beloved for most of that time. And still are doing great despite countless beyond garbage displays and unethical practices. Even people who criticize, most of them still give them their money.
Having relatively small portion of people being critical, doesn't stop the much larger demographic throw money at them. So many games now in top spots of highest revenue, have very negative review scores, but they are still raking it in. Games that re-release every year or every other year, being the same or worse, selling like hot cakes. Skins for 30$+, turning games into not being games anymore but virtual store fronts.
Game after game of utter dogshit, most people still praise it. Still are hyped for the next game. Many of them even well regarded and liked, even beloved in some cases. A great game can be hated, a really bad game can be beloved. Been happening forever. Starfield case is more of a lucky one where the popular narrative (eventually) aligned with the truth.
In the end, it's all about marketing and branding, and the narrative that wins out. Then it rolls like an avalanche from there with YT-bers making videos and people eating it up, whether it's true or not. (in the case of starfield, it deserves its criticism and more)
After what bethesda did before starfield(it was bad, it was a lot), everyone was still hyped like crazy for starfield, delusional. Now I already see the cope and hype for TES 6. In even worse cases, it's the same. A studio can release the worst game ever, bomb a small country - people will still find a way to be hyped for their next #product. Forget about the other stuff in a month. As long as the brand is strong/big enough. That's what most people are, branded.
Mindlessly consume #product. It's simply the realty of things, at large. Games aren't even about having fun anymore. Many people don't have actual fun playing(starfield is a decent example, with the "it gets fun after 100-200 hrs just keep playing", this is also ironically opposite of the truth, but anyway). It's about design formulas to keep people hooked. Preying on psychological tendencies of humans.
(there is detailed documentation on this, for gaming, and its proven to work over and over)
There is criticism and intelligence, but that's more the niche side of things.
Been around game dev(and other creative work) for a long time to know that most people, indeed, do not know what they want(it's also just logical most people won't understand why they like a story, for example, not nearly as deep as a good writer who wrote it. Same way as most non-car mechanics won't understand how a car works anywhere close to a professional car mechanic who is competent).
In most cases, people want what they are conditioned to want. You make something different, innovative and great? Many will cry that it's different than 99% of other games and demand it is made to be a copy/paste of other games(then maybe go complain somewhere else about all games being the same and no innovation). God forbid it's a game that demands some actual thought(this is a larger problem than gaming here, would take forever to get into it, of course i'm generalizing somewhat as i'm talking about what makes the most money by far and is the vast bulk of the industry). Or perhaps in some cases they are just more vocal about it.
If devs listened to people, in many cases, the amazing game they made/are making, would be utterly ruined.
Went on a bit of a "rant" because that phrase "people don’t know what they want" doesn't really follow logically there. Corps can be bad and make crappy products at the same time as people "don't know what they want". Both can be true at the same time, and someone acknowledging a fact, isn't necessarily a "corporate shill".
The gaming industry has exploded and become another huge industry, consequently following into the steps of other industries of this scope. It went from innovative, passion driven industry, to soulless corporate product pushing, based around marketing and manipulation for the sake of making as much money as possible. It's how it goes. Of course there are still passionate developers attempting innovation and doing interesting things. Few and far between compared to the juggernaut the mainstream gaming industry has become though.
Sadly it's the fate of any industry that becomes so large, in current way of society. It needs to become that, in order to become so large.
So many corporations nowadays have switched from "Is our product good enough to buy?" To "Are you good enough to buy our product?" The results have been nothing short of catastrophic.
@@APsychicMonkey No they haven't lmao
@@hihihi1q23 Never been told by the maker of a thing that you're neither wanted or needed? "Don't play our game", "don't watch our movie" etc.?
There was a Chris Avellone interview years ago where he confirms Bethesda not keeping track of their own lore.
"Bethesda mentioned… I shouldn't say this, but they said 'we don't track everything anymore, we just go to the wiki and figure out what the crossed lines are for everything, that's basically our game design document now.'”
lol the unoffical elder scrolls pages should change their name to the official elder scrolls pages
@@honeybadger6275 straight up.
@@contramachina354 Then microsoft should fire everyone that works for bethesda and just license out the fallout and elder scrolls ip to a few dozen different studios and we might get 1-2 decent games over the next 10 years.
@@honeybadger6275Fallout by Larian Studios... Can you imagine? 🤤
@@NostraDavid2 You'd probably be able to have sex with deathclaws or something messed up like that knowing those pervs.
What i noticed about his writing is that he allways introduces the main villan in the last hour or two of the game so hes under developed.
never consciously noticed that but omg yeah he does
Remember how the ending of Fallout 3 required you to flip a switch inside a room filled with lethal radiation? Even though you had a minimum of 3 companions that were flat-out immune to radiation, telling them to go inside and flip the switch at no danger to themselves will have them go "This is something you gotta do yourself" for absolutely no logical reason. Even in the revised ending, where you CAN tell them to flip the switch, the ending narration will outright call you a coward for refusing to die a completely pointless death.
Emil basically called the player a coward for seeing through the glacier-sized holes in his writing. Brilliant.
Emil puts more work into the absolute nonsense excuses he has than he puts in writing
There were two things I really hated about writing in Skyrim: First, there's no way to force the blades to keep working with you and keep parthurnax alive even though you're the Dragonborn and the blades would be gone without you... And the part of the Thieves guild where Karliah shoots you with an arrow to paralyze you. That one pisses me off actually... Because I can turn Ethereal before I walk in there, and it still hits me. Taking away player agency is super annoying
"Taking away player agency without a good explanation is annoying"*
FTFY
Skyrim's writing was very hamfisted and contrived. Taking away player agency, because "lazy" or not even bothering to mask the player not really having any real agency with good immersive dialogues is always shitty in an open sandbox "rpg". I don't think I have every played a game that made me feel like such a glorified super dumb mail courier, who does everything they are being told to because they only have two braincells, yet gets everything thrown at them, because player being the messiah or something. On top of all that the writers have the gal to reprimand the player via dialogue coming from their characters they have written about things we HAD to do because we want to finish that questline to get stuff like the archmage robe. They even railroaded how your character is supposed to behave and feel via how NPCs talk to you. Eugh....
@@amberbaum4079 ...oh my god they were trying to replicate Obsidian's Courier in Skyrim. That explains it! XD
@@KainYusanagi
Without understanding what made the courier a compelling playable character, or why their story is interesting.
@@RedFloyd469 Of course not. Emil is a hack writer.
I would argue that the Fallout franchise always had a silly side. However it's not a 50% serious, 50% silly ratio. I was more a 90% serious and 10% the rest. Obsidian really understood that in New Vegas, as the silliest ideas are locked behind the Wild Wastelander perk, an option that you have to consciously decide to toggle.
The Flanderization of Fallout?
Most of the silly stuff in the early fallout games is limited to random encounters.
fallout 2 had much more than that like magic the gathering being a popular game in the wastes or tom cruise and the scientologists
I can't help but think about Over the Edge from the New Batman Adventures cartoon.
The episode involved Batgirl falling to her death, landing with a thud on Jim Gordon's car. Batgirl, for the three people who aren't familiar with the Batman mythos is Gordon's daughter.
According to the writers of the episode, the censors weren't happy with the original take - so they forced a change. The scene had to be drawn from within the car, so that the moment of impact wasn't as directly shown.
A decision which the writers credit with making the scene all that much more horrifying.
When Emil talks about concessions having to be made to make a game happen, and how it is never going to be the perfect game in his head, that's what goes through mine. He views compromises as introducing flaws to his grand vision.
But good writers take those compromises and find ways to make them standout moments. Make them into something better than their original vision. Emil cuts, where good writers prune.
Here’s another one: Spider-Man 3. CGI technology was barely capable of handling what they wanted to do with Sandman’s… everything.
So what’d they do? Instead of showing him ripping open an armored car, they show the driver seeing his shadow. Instead of him directly attacking the occupants, they flooded the set piece with real sand. When they wanted Spider-Man to punch a hole in him? They brought in a one armed boxer.
Besides making things actually possible to render, it treats him less like a character and more like a force of nature. One that our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is about to try fighting.
"Nobody sets out to make a bad game." That statment has so little value, it's almsot similar to saying "I drank water today."... Of course nobody sets out to make a bad game duh but setting out to make a great game and delivering just that will make your words a lot more valuable unlike this hack Emil. I swear Bethesda is still living off Skyrim glory to this very day, they think they're untouchable.
Even Skyrim barely achieved more than current day Starfield. I remember being out of content in less than 30 hours. Mods brought Skyrim out of the negative limelight before long-term reviews could ruin it. Mods CONTINUE to make Skyrim relevant. That being said, Skyrim was 5 pounds of crap in a 5 pound bag... Starfield is 20 pounds of crap in the same size bag as Skyrim - very messy.
@@jong2359 To Bethesda all the modding done to Skyrim should belong to their credit. They think they deserve all the praise for Skyrim still being relevant and that we owe them a great debt because mods kept it alive.
i always set out to make bad games.
@@manboy4720 I've played intentionally bad games, they always end up funny
Yeah...sometimes people do set out to make a bad game cuz uhhhh...idk maybe its fnuy
In Emil's defence, he is a talented writer. The problem is that he's writing something he shouldn't *be* writing. Emil's talent is in quest design. He can write a good quest, but the story behind it must be left to someone that isn't him. Best example is in his pre-Bethesda work - Life of the Party, arguably one of the best missions in Thief 2, was done by Emil. Bethesda's mistake, or rather Todd's mistake, is promoting him to a position he should've never been placed in. He should've stayed a quest designer, but they decided to make all the quest designers into writers (Todd has confirmed this), so now he's also writing the story, when he writes worse stories than teenage fanfiction. It's like getting someone like HP Lovecraft or Stephen King to write a Harry Potter knock-off. Sure, they could do it, but they're talent is writing horror, not children's fantasy.
Also, just going to add something for your Dark Brotherhood criticisms. He ignored the existing lore for the Dark Brotherhood (both the Daggerfall "militant order of the Church of Arkay" and the Morrowind "renegade Morag Tong") for his own take, which was quite literally evil Catholicism. So when he says "people accuse me of ignoring Fallout lore," he's not wrong. He's just using a partial truth to make it look like a lie. He just doesn't care about lore in general, regardless of if it's Fallout, TES or as of recently, Starfield. Lore gets in the way of his story, which just makes his story even worse than it already is.
His quest design has also sucked ass since Oblivion too, though. So are you sure he just didn't accidentally do a good job a few times when he was young?
@@billjacobs521So basically he lost his touch.
Wow, is he anti-christian or just anti-catholic? Because in Skyrim there was a heavy satanist symbolism.
For militant atheists: I'm not religious but satanist symbolism is satanist symbolism even if you don't believe in satan.
@@Zodroo_Tint What are you referring to?
Satanism is just secular humanism meant to piss off christians.
31:20 would've actually made more sense if he just said "They're a bunch of Pyskers who secluded themselves believing their mutations are actually magical abilities." That way, instead of adding a magic system. It's a bunch of people with mutations and deformities with weird powers. But they're just stuck IN this one area. Kinda like an asylum for these people.
Boom, fixed the idea, made it slightly workable and it'll be a neat spot.
Guarantee Emil doesn't even know what a Psyker is
@@contramachina354Emil doesn't even know what radiation is, what makes you think he could grasp that concept at all?
"You kill the head of the organisation, and then you become the head of the organisation.. sounds great on paper, right?"
No wtf this sounds dumb as hell.
the original fallouts had, not exactly magic, but psykers. People who had a rare mutation that allowed them strange powers of the mind. - Fallout 1 had a little side-project of the Masters experimenting in this line of human evolution, which I think could also be used against him, Because Blackrock/Obsidian did love their multiple choice solutions to a problem, like they were some kind of studio that made RPGs or something. - Fallout 2 continued in this vein, but the number of people who could be called gifted in this sense could be counted on one hand. It made sense in that the games were always about the horrific FALLOUT of the nuclear war.
Bethesda and by extension Emil consistently misunderstands or simply ignores this and just focuses on all of the things affecting the world being PRE-WAR in origin. Because hurrp-de-durr, Enclave was a pre-war thing, ain't fallout unless all humanitys ills is the past haunting us. Gotta obsess with the past! To the point people are wearing 200 year old clothes which, by all rights, should been shreds in a bin by now and eating pre-war foods like the stuff is never going to run out. - Oh this guy's blood makes you physically immortal and he can blow people up with his mind? Oh he just found a weird artifact somewhere. It's lovecraft, not a result of radiation! La-de-durr-de-doo. Oh spooky visions in a stone quarry? They were digging up more lovecraft nonsense, nothing relating to radiation or mutations here! Durp-durr. - It's telling that Far Harbor wasn't worked on by Emil because far harbor IS ACTUALLY GOOD. Mostly.
Fuck Bethesda. Fuck Emil, and Fuck Todd for enabling him.
There's also a psyker in New Vegas - Forecaster
He seemed like the type of writer that gone "This thing that happen in story that one time (like character survived getting shot point-blank) that mean I can write it in multiple time as much as I want" He doesn't realize that those things suppose to be rare exception and not the rule or the values of story will dwindle.
@@utes5532because obsidian at the time was made up of former devs from black isle studios which created the originals, never should have been stolen from them in the first place, only people that actually respect it
@@piegineer9130you ain't wrong.
How many times has the Brotherhood of Steel and Supermutants shown up for no good reason in places where they don't belong once Bethesda got their hands on the Fallout IP?
@@DJWeapon8 well they always use FEV as a rason like for bethedsa every City testet in FEV and all gona wrong and Super Mutants turn out. Fallout 4 and F76 and also future i guess all blaming in FEV. And even if you ignore supermutants the fations in F4 also bad example are minute man you General after 2 times talking with some guy you dont know but if you say i float with the boat you have no power as a General. I dont understand whats the point being a leader when you can not do somethink. So manny holes that can not be fixed. Also freedom is cut down to a 20% you need kill kellogg why becosue you need to but if i dont want to then well you never end the game but ending is also 2 ways. Problem is Fallout 4 has sold more and also better Metracritiz then the best Series ever got like example Fallout New Vegas(or for me is one of the best and a proper rpg) so they dont need changing becouse it sold well poeple like it only die lore fands dont but nobody needs lore fans.
Morrowind was my first bethesda game and I enjoyed it. But everything they've released after just keeps getting more and more dumbed down.
On a brighter side, Bethesda introduced me to Fallout. I enjoyed 1, 2 and NV a lot.
There are games I've played which are based on Fallout. ATOM RPG and ATOM RPG Trudograd for instance. They are set after the Nukes from the Cold War ... the story is from the PoV of the Soviet survivors (so mid to late 1990's).
and none of them are made by bethesda
Metro 2033 feels a lot more fallouty than 3 does. Which is kinda sad.
Play Wasteland 2
Pretty much, yeah.
Another thing to add with the colonel autumn situation: Why the hell didn't they try and make more of those "immune to all radiation" things? Sounds incredibly OP in a world full of radiation. If they were able to make one, why not make more?
Or from a Doylist perspective,why not show why they couldn't make more.
"Fallout show and no mention of the NCR"
Man, you WISH they left the NCR outta that show.
They missed an easy one with Salem. Have a whole town with factions and recreate the Witch Trials as the Synth Trials.
Wow that would make for an amazing quest. I always loved that event that happens in Diamond City with the brothers so a quest dedicated to that fear and hysteria would be fantastic.
So easy but too hard for Emil apparently. Just left Salem with only a rooftop NPC shooting mutated crabs.
imagine not using a design document then wondering why things get lost....
Too much effort to keep a public Notepad document on the company server for notes.
If emil is the same guy who i think he is, he gets majorly pissed off when people bring up jets lore retcon in FO4
8 years ago I read a thread on Reddit that says Emil the reason FO4's writing was bad. Amazing how well it aged.
There is also a 7 year old UA-cam video about this, if I remember correctly. 😂
@@ChrisH43 It's a Gundam lol