"It's not everyone's cup of tea." Bruh, you didn't even serve tea. You served 15 year old coffee. And got pissy when we asked for some extra sugar to put in it.
Yup, Bethesda and/or Todd Howard have been desperately trying to ignore that doing the same thing over and over again will see you getting diminishing returns. Fallout 4, Fallout 76 and now Starfield, there just isn't that much progress and a lot of it is laziness and the refusal to accept that the Creation Engine just doesn't cut it anymore. Sure, it can still render beautiful worlds and scenery, but the fishbowl concept that the Creation Engine still uses simply doesn't scale up and where Bethesda could get away with that in Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, it becomes painfully obvious in Starfield. Seamless transitions are simply impossible, because the engine can't handle them.
It's not even tea, it's a glass of cheap lukewarm beer that was diluted with piss before getting served. Piss 16 times the amount of beer, to be precise.
There are some ex-employee interviews where they say Todd would always go for the safest most boring monster designs in response to which the employee would make more crazier designs than the last so Todd would settle for the previous one lol. He would also cut a ton of features and only focus on the basics which frustrated some old employees, Skyrim had a TON of cut content, civil war for example felt very unfinished.
I think we should stop spreading misinformation about Todd's contribution to this industry: Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim weren't successful because of Todd, but in spite of Todd. Many talented creators worked on these games, but they were slowly replaced by hacks who are boring enough to be on Todd's alley. I think the way we've seen people like Rolston and Kirkbride be replaced by freaking Emil Paglurio is the same way many lesser known, but equally impactful team members ended up being replaced by Todd's lobotomites. That's what Starfield is: pure and unadulterated Todd, without all the impurities of creativity and innovation.
Todd's contribution was Terminator: Future Shock, it is why Todd got and kept his job and why he continued to upgrade his spot to where it is now despite the games being mostly hollow. He did things in xnGine that other much much larger dev studios with much larger budgets and much more advanced engines failed to do as good, he's been riding high off those huge acheivements.
Its kind of similar to George Lucas, imo. The first three Starwars films were so great because Lucas still had people around him to say "No, thats dumb." After their massive success, the prequels came out a lot worse because those people didn't exist anymore, or if they did, they weren't going to question their golden goose. Since Todd was head of Bethesda for Morrowind, which saved the company from bankruptcy, I feel like that same sort of scenario just played out again - no one would dare question his decision making considering the company wouldn't exist without his role during that.
The biggest red flag for me with Bethesda is they just seem like they've lost interest in player feedback since Skyrim was released. They ignored the bugs in Skyrim and instead released multiple versions that all had similar bugs in. They ignored feedback regarding the awful dialogue choices in Fallout 4. They ignored and even made jokes about the myriad off issues that plagued Fallout 76 for months after its launch. They ignored the various complains made about Starfield's base game. They've now also ignored valid criticism about Shattered Space.
There is also a reason all those games were considered shit in some way or another. Skyrim showed while insanely successful, it was also the most hollow of all the TES games. It kept getting more and more dumbed down and let's be honest with ourselves. Skyrim without mods plays the CRAPPIEST compared to Oblivion or Morrowind and it shows. Fallout 4 even to this day is considered a joke compared to New Vegas which had a less than 2 year time period to make. 4 had great gunplay, but its hardly considered a FO game to most. 76 was just a joke, I won't even get into it. It took them what? 3 years to have crap in the game that shoulda been in day 1? Enough said. Starfield for being such a vaunted idea, is literally a crappier Skyrim, which already isn't a great game without mods, and made it even crappier. Case in point, barely anyone makes mods for Starfield showing how much a joke it is. Shattered Space shows how much of a fuckup Bethesda is, since this was a joke of a dlc, and also never shoulda been a dlc to begin with.
Because they realized the money making process of mods. All they needed to do was release a mundane rpg, and let the modders make it profitable for years. Look how long Skyrim has gone for…Now imagine if Skyrim was unmoddable, people would easily forget about it.
@@theanimer1 The problem with the "fallout 4 is crap compared with New Vegas" is that ALL the Fallouts are crap compared with New Vegas. New Vegas was an outlier for Fallout. 1 & 2 were completely different games that should be compared with stuff like Underrail. 3 and 4 were basically shooters with some talking and a lot of exploration with interesting stories scattered around the map. if you are saying "its bad compared with New Vegas..." EVERYTHING is bad compared with New Vegas. In short, New Vegas is NOT the Standard. Its Mount Everest which nothing before equaled and which nothing is getting up to now. The big problem with 76 was not the game, its that Todd Howard insisted ther there should be not Human NPCs. The actual shooting mechanics were fine, it was just boring. The fact that the game is now populated far more than starfield shows that the core was ok. Plus a decent community can carry a bad game. But Bethsedas' big problem is that rivals are running rings around them, and have for the last 10 years. And Todd cannot see that.
Knew Todd was cooked when he gave that interview prior to 76 about how Skyrim and Fallout 4 were still incredibly popular BUT Bethesda was disappointed that they couldn’t monetize those players. Once I heard that I knew they’d never make another quality game, because “engagement” and “monetization” were more important than fun and quality.
Can't just give ol' Todd all the credit. We can't ignore how much Emil Pagliarulo brutalized the IP's with his pretentious "storytelling" and "writing"
Yes, but only reason Emil is allowed to be so dogshit, is Todd is friends with him and allows it. So the root problem is Todd being biased and not doing his damn job. Todd is too much a coward and Emil can't lead, so they both need to drop down a peg and have someone above both.
Todd wishes he had a fraction of Christopher Nolan's talent, and Emil deludes himself regarding his 'storytelling and writing'. I wonder whether either of them have ever actually investigated current gaming to see how far it's evolved beyond them.
The issue is, Todd is the boss. If anyone at Bethesda fucks up, it's Todd's fault. In the same vein, if the FBI screw up, you blame either the head or the president, because they're the ones in charge and ultimately, it's their job to ensure these fuck ups don't happen. So every time Todd tries to shift the blame to the Austin team or talk about bugs, press him on that. "Why did you, the boss, FAIL to make sure that the other team was making this correctly?" "Why did you, the boss, FAIL to ensure there were no bugs?" Don't give him an inch, he's a rich prick, he doesn't need you to defend him. Maybe if he spent less time shopping for leather jackets and more time working, the finished product wouldn't be hated so much.
Their role playing elements only ever afford the illusion of choice and they never dared to give the players any freedom. It always feels like the plot is playing us rather than the other way around
Emil Pagliarulo is Todd's closest confidant and biggest yes man in Bethesda. Him around resulted in a lot of talented devs pressure to leave, like Jeff Gardiner, Bruce Nesmith, Will Shen and most importantly, Bethesda last TES lorehead Kurt Kuhlmann.
Funny thing about Emil, he's a pretty good if not REALLY good level designer but ever since they moved him into his current position... Yeaaaaaah, he should have stayed as a level designer
My prediction for ES6 is no levels, no perks, no weapon variations, no spell variations, and just three buttons: Melee, Bow, Magic. His obsessive streamlining makes it seem like he’s trying to turn Elder Scrolls into Gauntlet, so I imagine the trend to oversimplify everything will continue unabated.
I gave up on BGS when Todd said he was ok with having fans wait 16+ years between titles instead of letting another studio make a spin off of one of their IPs
They don't want to be shown up. Everytime someone gets their hands on their IPs they show them up. Look at New Vegas and Fallout London. Fallout London is so popular FOLON formaly became a studio.
Imagine not one but TWO grand theft autos and a red dead being released BETWEEN your elder scrolls games, and their more fleshed out as well, and better voice acted, and better game mechanics and combat mechanics. I used to be a Bethesda fan boy. I've since realized my mistakes. Rockstar was 2nd place, now they take the pedestal.
Todd Howard went on an interview before for Starfield stating they never tried something like Jet Packs before. As if they didn't exist in Fallout 4 or 76. I'll never forget that, it was so insultingly bold faced that it's hard to forgive.
LMAO didn't even know he said that. Sounds like a pathological liar and I've been baffled from the beginning as to why people like Bethesda so much. I never liked Bathesda from the start. Skyrim is severely overrated, Fallout 3 sucks and everything they did after that sucks even harder. Best thing they did was New Vegas and that was Obsidian...
@@HoboHunterRik Morrowind had some of the most interesting mechanics such as several fast travel options that were integrated into the world as well as a spell crafting system. With the mark and recall spell, you can mark an area inside a shop, wait outside for the owner to go to sleep, and pop in past the locked door. You could also remove curses on OP items such as the boots of blinding speed and basically become the flash. Then they nerfed the lot for Oblivion because they couldn't make a contained experience with a high level of player freedom. Their games started to force players into play styles and plot decisions. You had to be a champion of the people, regardless of whether you were a murdering thief/vampire.
Bethesda has a Bethesda problem. Unfinished, buggy messes that they expect the community to fix for free. Hopefully gamers will move on from this pitiful dev
The crap coding and lack of polish isnt even the worst thing about them, they completely lack talent and ambition, they limit themselves to recreate the Fallout 4 formula, a 10 year old game that isnt even good and make it even more bland and boring
Make a game like Skyrim, Fallout 3/4, that strategy is fine. Slop out fallout 76 or Starfield and the fans won't fix it for you (pretty sure it wasn't even possible for 76).
During an interview with Polygon for Fallout 4, Todd Howard was hyping up Fallout 4 to the interviewer. Boasting how they don't take outside influences when they make their games. How they don't do research and work from a purely creative perspective or some such PR nonsense. With excitement he revealed the big plot hook: What if robots were just like humans. Polite, yet clearly not impressed the interviewer went to move on. Todd wanted to know why the interviewer wasn't impressed and learned it has been done to death. The look on his face was priceless. The look of "we just messed up." I used to defend Todd Howard. Not blindly. More maybe with supervision he could produce some great work. He just needed someone to veto his stupid ideas and make him put his nose to the grindstone. Then he made the Fallout TV show canon. Destroying the canon of New Vegas, all over his pettiness. The moron straight up forgot the NCR had more than one city. He quickly shifted the blame for destroying the NCR capital to the showrunners when he previously was taking credit for everything. After that, I look forward to his "retirement" alongside Emil. When you look at it, Todd Howard has only produced inferior renditions of more talented people's work and got credit for the work of more talented people who have left the studio. They fired the writer of Elder Scrolls, he didn't create the Fallout universe and continues to screw up its continuity. Everything that people love from Bethesda was originally created by people no longer working at Bethesda. Now they're making Wyrdsong and The Wayward Realms (Daggerfall 2).
I find it funny that "Player freedom" to Todd means "Restrict everything to only a single way of play" Actual Player Freedom would mean you Can fail and you Can lock yourself out of certain content because thats how Actual Freedom works. People able to join every faction and appease everyone is not freedom. that's a fixed route because you cannot make anyone angry, which means you can only play 1 type of character.
A meaningless choice between unlikeable and badly written factions. People still talk about factions in NV. There is no discussion in Skyrim or Fallout 4 because there is no depth.
Todd is that guy on the team who overpromise, keep juging everyone work, suckup to the teacher and claim it was all him at the end, despite having done very little.
Bethesda became Ubisoft, compliant thinking that if they just reused the Farcry 3 (Skyrim) open world formula from 10+ years ago people will just buy it and will never grow tired of it.
Skyrim formula is still a game winning formula if only they just refine it like fromsoft did bethesda will still be a beloved developer right now.but instead they ruined the formula with whatever FO76 and Starfield is.
I would have gladly bought new TES games like Skyrim every 3-5 yrs, problem being Bethesda not releasing any TES games since 2011. (or since 2014 if you really want to count ESO).
Is becoming… ubisoft is by far worst company in the video game industry. Just changing maps and call it new game to literally stealing games you owned just because you didn't play it in the while
Creation Engine absolutely needs to be overhauled though. That thing is old enough to legally drink in the US. Get an entire new and powerful engine and new team heads.
@@ichigokage bring back old writters and devs. The man working on Daggerfall wants to return and use AI to virutally exponentially increase world role play enrichment and NPC functionality.
Glad you like Lorerim's second iteration! The dev took quite the gauntlet to get up and running over the years! I'm happy they reached the finish line and people like you get to enjoy it. Hope you also take the chance add your own take and content to the modlist, that is what makes playing Skyrim soo fun! Just make sure to backup your install though in case of a steam update haha. I agree that currently BGS is executing things in a manner that is not we had hope for unfortunately. It was imo either way too "safe" or lacking the novelty that we have experienced in the past. I'd like for them to push further and something new with what they had. They should've also reached out to the community as well for talent! We have so many great modder with great skills and vision that could spice the up the soup at BGS. Regardless of trouble and disagreement I'm happy for the content creators we have for modding BGS games. The FO London and their ability to create a fullblown indie title, Skyrim's animation modders creating content from so many places although most are Souls-Like stuff lol, LoTD and their collectors content mod, the outfit modders!, and all of Script Extender Modders with their talent to add more function and contents to each respective base games! Still crazy to think there's functional vehicles modded into FNV! The GOATED OpenMW team as well, they really took the gauntlet to modernize and smoothen the GameBryo engine to a different state and level! I always hear people saying that BGS should just switch to more mainstream engine with "actual" working pipelines but they don't understand that this engine as arcane as it can be, is what gives us modders and players the ability take our own spin at it. The content, creation, and story for us to play in our own little world. BGS has a long road ahead but as long they are willing to work on their shortcomings and not stray away from the light that makes their games as endearing as they are, then things will get better. We need a games that provide intrigue and fascination into another world, not something that necessarily parallel or alludes to ours. I like skyrim for being able to quest for relics and just fight bandits and monsters, not to worry about society and situations that may be around me in reality. I don't know what the future may hold for BGS, but it's better if they just focus on giving it their all to make a decent game with a canvas that is that ready to make it ours. Whatever happens in life is life, but in a game especially like Bethesda it should be a breath of air we should be able to take away from it.
When the data is more complete, you'll realize that bethesda does not have a todd howard problem-- todd howard has a nepotism problem. This is not todd howard's design philosophy, this is *Emil Pagliarulo's* design problem. Howard's problem is that Emil is his friend, and refused to replace him with someone who has a healthy, viable vision for 2025.
Well, emil doesn't try to control every aspect of the games as hard as Todd, I bet. Both are deserving of the blame, emil for the writing aspect and todd for the mechanical side, micromanaging stuff and "keeping the games stupidly simple" on many parts (where he thinks some design aspects are just "so cool" when they won't work and feel like that for others than that get excited when seeing a video game first time).
It's still a Todd problem because he's the boss. He ultimately can choose to fix all of this but doesn't. Thus, he's the villain here. If you replace him with someone who actually gives a fuck, then Emil is homeless in 48 hours, as well as any other lingering cancers.
I think it's more so Skyrim was good for its time. The formula it used has inspired a lot that we've seen from this industry, it pushed a lot of devs to do better BUT Starfield doesnt attempt to evolve that formula much and just does an imitation of it with less complex RPG mechanics & sure more competent combat/gameplay systems (that still feel lacking compared to what competitors are nowadays producing). That's the point I was hitting on. Todd & his team are out of touch and still living off of the Skyrim success, using that structure to guide Starfield's design which 13 years later feels extremely dated & tiring.
Skyrim and starfield use the same formula skyrim is just better in terms of quest and lore designs, and the open world aspect is also superior but its the same formula that is outdated and that is morrowind formula bethesda didnt change their formula since morrowind and while it was fine for a while its not anymore since their competition is ways ahead now.
@@LegacyKillaHD Todd thinks the same formula will work with every game. He's not a visionary; he's a tunnel-vision developer. Todd gave us all microtransactions with the Oblivion Horse Armor, thinking it was "innovative," and I will never forgive him for that.
@@1vaultdweller Maybe Vanilla Skyrim, but with the mods, it's still an incredible experience. Compared to a lot of games out there, you get your money's worth with Skyrim.
Yeah, NO!! They fuck skyrim up more and more. The new 'survival' shit is trash and poorly implemented vs other survival stuff like frost fall and ineeds mods. You can see how uncreative the main people at Bethesda are vs everywhere else. Fallout new vegas (obsidian) had a great survival mode while fallout 4(bethesda) had a shit one. And when my steam account auto updated to anniversary addition i basically stopped playing the one game i loved the most. They fucked up my game by just not letting well enough alone.
They are still leaving horrific bugs in all their games and if you complain to them and open a ticket they demand screenshots and proof and after jumping through their flaming rings of annoyance they then say we will pass it along to the devs who already know about it and have chosen to do nothing about it and never will because they clearly cannot be bothered to do their jobs and change a little bit of code as that would be actual work and customer service which they don't care for and never will.
Part of the problem is the same issue Microsoft has with windows. The engine is so old, and they went without a dedicated team of engineers to maintain and upgrade it, combined with the loss of almost the entire dev team responsible for ES3-5 and FO3, that no one knows how to fix anything. It also almost certainly one of the big reasons that Bethesda, even with it’s decently sized team (of new untested talent fresh from college and only trained on a few new engines) take so long to make games, DLCs, updates, and patches. The whole company has become a joke.
As long as Todd is at Bethesda, they're not getting another penny from me. Todd IS the problem. He's in charge of it all, right? Then who is responsible for all the problems? Even Bethesda's promotional videos show Todd talking and everyone else nodding their heads like robots. Todd is shallow, insecure, and pathetic.
Fallout 4 is the last game I’ve bought from Bethesda and will remain such until they get their shit together. Which is sadly unlikely. Todd can get away with lies that damned other companies. Emil can write insultingly boring things now. Their PR dude can say ‘stfu about X game’ when people ask for any details. They are content to sit on their laurels and damn near demand modders to do the job Betheada should be doing. And they will continue to get away with everything because too many in their community will slurp it all up.
Ex staff on F76 nicknamed him "The Seagull" cause Todd would just appear at random, shit on weeks worth of work, tell them to do it his way and then disappear.
All I really wanted was Skyrim in space. Multiple races to play as, different factions/guilds, maybe a handful of really fleshed out planets that actually have a feeling of a lived in experience.
@@Fred-rv2tuI realize I’m the millionth person to probably say this, but Bethesda didn’t make New Vegas, Obsidian did. That’s why underneath all the bugs (courtesy of Bethesda’s engine and giving Obsidian so little time to develop it) is an actual good game.
More embarrassing is that they copy and pasted FO4 so badly they even brought bugs that modders had long since fixed and couldn’t be bothered to try with FO76.
Starfield wasn’t too different. It was exactly what I thought it’d be. Too many doors when virtually all doors are loading screens. The space setting was a complete misstep for their game design.
I’d argue developers like CD Project Red & Fromsoft are all still chilling in their respective zones. But yes, a majority of companies have fallen off hard trying to chase money instead of just making fun & interesting games.
Starfield's problem wasn't that it was "irresponsibly large" it was the lack of content, out of the billions of planets there was only like 3 major cities and some very very small towns, starfield may have been technically bigger than skyrim but skyrim had more content
That was the thing about the other games. You could pick a direction and very quickly find something interesting to interact with. The big size of the Map was no virtue, it was the fact that it was filled with interesting content.
@@jjoshaugh Yeah the big size of the map isn't the problem, I mean everything interesting in starfield is pretty much in 3 or 4 places, it's the lack of overall content that is not procedural slop that makes it bad
One of the many reasons why Morrowind is still the most popular of the 3D Bethesda titles. Despite having the smallest worldspace unmodded, the world is so densely populated and full of life it feels larger. Meanwhile, Oblivion, Skyrim, FO3, 4 and 76 and especially Starfield have been getting progressively more empty. Part of me honestly expects TES6 to look like an amateur Skyrim modder trying their hand at a new world space and just leaving a flat plain with maybe a city or two in the distance.
They seem to be going down a path of just creating big maps just for the hell of it. It's not the size but it's how you use it. I'd rather have a Skyrim sized map filled with more content and less loading screens than a giant universe like starcraft with nothing in it
Well this was me. My mate builds gaming pc's so I showed him the requirements for the system to run this game at ultra and then add 50% extra performance. He did that and I paid up for the parts and a tip. Saw the early reviews for the game and didn't buy it. Didn't buy 76 either. Fallout 4 was my last buy from them.
If Todd having the final say in BGS is true, then the company is doomed to fail. I've worked under a boss like that. He wanted to micromanage everything. Trouble was, he was a genius salesman, but had very little knowledge about anything else. Despite that, he was stubborn as a mule in having the final say in HR, legal, IT, etc. The company didn't last long...
Sometimes a boss having the final say in everything is a good idea as long as he appoints good people under him and let's them work relatively freely. Micromanaging is never good, it's a sign you hired the wrong people or you as a person have problems.
Todd feels justified in his philosophy of dumbing down games and not learning from 20+ of experience. They had 15 years to see what works and what features people want via popular mods and Starfield didn't show any of that. That creative bankruptcy must be because of his chess upbringing, cold, logical, and safe, if all you do is try the most vanilla designs and are too afraid to foster creativity of your employees.
Its also why they all leave. The director isn't who makes the game. Its the designers and programmers that do. And if all the talented ones leave.....all you are left with is trash like Emil lol
Good point about the mods being a lens into what players would want. Bethesda makes buggy messes that are fixed by the community, turning good games into great games. Without mods Skyrim would have died years ago. And Bethesda learned next to nothing from this. Hell, Fallout 4 is more different from Skyrim, than Starfield is from Fallout 4. And even then Fallout 4 is too alike to Skyrim.
The funniest thing is, chess requires you to be unsafe. Sacrificing pieces to lure your opponent into a check is the name of the game. Cold and logical are also optional, sometimes a fiery, illogical move is what's needed to trick your foe. His chess upbringing shows that he's learned absolutely nothing about chess, and I seriously doubt he's actually played the game.
Todd Howard reminds me of that guy who makes headlines by spending a million dollars a day swapping out blood with his son so he doesn't age. One bad tan away from having a leather mask for a face
Todd Howard is a modern Peter Molyneux. He'll lie and deflect as much as it takes to sell his next game. You can see this from how much he trashes the previous game... after the sales have dried up.
@@WisteriaDrake "I'm trying to make the greatest role-playing game of all time... Again." I sort of miss Molyneux's crazy antics, Todd is rather tame with his sweet little lies.
Bro thank goodness someones talking about this, I used to think todd was the hope of the company. But now he's LITERALLY holding back the company from an actual good rpg!
@@Vert_GreenHeart Exactly man, just look back at the history of elder scrolls, morrowind was a super deep complex rpg then after oblivion and skyrim, it got more and more watered down with less and less complex rpg mechanics. Crazy stuff man
@@Gaming_Media00 you re not gonna like this but even morrowind was toned down asf compared to daggerfall they had an insane vision for that game and were only limited by the tech of the time
@@trevorpearlharbor5171 At least Uwe Boll himself is entertaining. Criticise his movies, he'll challenge you to a boxing match. Todd just sticks his fingers in his ear and goes "LALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU, BUY SKYRIM!"
as much as you thought you said something smart - it was dumb empty and spacious lmao - Giants are known to be stupid as much as talentless idiots who think wording things in a way that sounds like it should gives off the effect they think it would - when in reality sometimes it smarter to keep that mouth shut - stupid.
Honestly their style works fine if its made by genuinely passionate and creative developers (see: Enderal). The problem is their design is dull as dishwater designed by committee slop.
Their engine isn't the problem exactly. The problem is hardly anyone know how their engine works. It's like windows OS. It still has many problems that have existed for a long while but no one knows how the OS really works because all the OGs retired.
@@kay_keik7842 Gamebryo engine (what Creation Engine is based on) is older than 90% of the Fortnite playerbase. Its 27y old now and it still has the mouse polling rate bug in Bethesdas newer titles
@@cherryrook8684once again thats because no one in the team knows the engine lol just like windows still carries many issues between each iteration. Thats why you see all these companies moving to unreal engine 5. They think moving to unreal engine 5 will allow them to hire anyone since unreal engine 5 is used by a lot of people. But that doesn't mean they know exactly how to properly use it. The problem isn't the gamebryo engine, it's the people who don't know how to use it because the OGs are gone or got let go. See cdpr as an example. Everyone who knew how to use the engine left, so cdpr is using unreal engine 5 so they can hire any schmup.
I like FO4... but it was an ass Fallout game, and yes, there was definitely writing on the wall. And despite enjoying it, I've never beaten it. I get about 20-30 hours into a play through, modded and all that jazz... and it just gets me in the mood for Skyrim, which I think is still far superior. Hell, modded Skyrim is better than any other Bethesda game that came after it. Starfield does the same thing. I'll play it and "enjoy" it for a bit... but it just gets me in the mood for Skyrim, because at the end of the day both of those games are just inferior versions of Skyrim.
@@nicholasrova3698I like FO4 in the same way I like Cookie Clicker - it’s mindless slop for me to resort to when I need to massage and numb my brain for a few hours. It’s Tik-Tok of video games.
@@nicholasrova3698 fallout 4 was so underwhelming for me, I prefer 3 and new Vegas and even 76. Fallout 4 is straight up bad. From the art direction to the writing, to the gameplay. The shooting was better sure, but every other aspect was significantly worse.
@@efancording6363 Skyrim has been vapid and mediocre since it was created, it's what someone thinks a good RPG is when they have quite literally never played a good RPG before. The only reason people even play it anymore is because of how many amazing mods have been made by the community over the years.
@@efancording6363 oblivion was _alright,_ it was decently ambitious but it failed miserably at what they actually wanted to achieve and was riddled with near game ruining issues besides. skyrim was slop at the best of times, with a tiny scale, poor storytelling, and mediocre gameplay.
@Cynsham got to disagree. Every game developer that made RPGs wanted to replicate what Skyrim did but couldn't do it. It's loved by audiences and critics. Is it perfect? No. Does it have flaws? Absolutely.
@@efancording6363 Speaking as someone who doesn't care for the Witcher, both the novels and the games, the Witcher 3 was Skyrim but better, and was released around the same time. Dragon's Dogma was Skyrim but better and with *real* magic, and again was released around the same time. There absolutely were devs who did Skyrim but better. Skyrim was a mediocre at best open world that was beloved by people who never even picked up Oblivion, let alone the great TES titles.
Morrowind was a miracle. It feels hard to believe he was project leader on that when you look at so many other things he was responsible. Sure, he wasn't alone for morrowind, LeFay and Peterson were there still and I imagine he had fewer yes men, but there's so much contrast.
They havent even had a proper writing team since Morrowind or Oblivion. Todd said it himself at one of their tech conventions, I wish I remember the one. They have their level designers write stories and then they all get stitched together. Email just dashes out a quick high level plot. Thats it. Their actual story / lore / vision guys are long since gone. Skyrim might have been their peak but arrived at a good place mostly because of momentum.
Get rid of Emil and Todd, get rid of the rest of the lazy activist staff, get Chris Avalone in there, and sever the connection between Microsoft and Bethesda, which is also going to ruin them.
I always thought Todd wasn't the worst of the villains. He just became too corporate at one point. I remember him during Skyrim days, he was more of a vision-guy than a boring money-man he is now.
He was always like this, the tendency of dumbing down to the core basics is seen since morrowind onward. The problem was they disneyfied and mainstreamed themselves but never innovated and so starfield plays like a skyrim game with little to no improvements after 12 years.
@@Vert_GreenHeart Emil is...oh boy I don't think that guy should be anywhere near game design, storyboarding or scripting. He's a big part of why Starfield is not good, even by Bethesda standards.
I like games where you wander around and check every nook and cranny only to find interesting little things tucked away in there. That part of exploration is what I find fun. It would be nice if Bethesda would put Sven’s speech about making fun games on a loop at corporate.
13:30 real player freedom is the freedom to make mistakes and realize later you can't do something and now have a reason to either reload or, better yet, replay and make more mistakes, er I mean, decisions, more decisions...
The tech isnt the problem... It's the overall paint by the numbers design... It's the games story and stale engine...they need to throw it away and start from scratch.. it's not like they are broke...
I was surprised when I found out the level/world designers are the same people as the writers, they need to act like the big studio they are and hire a separate writer departement. Ideally, the team behind Morrowind.
Ken Rolston bounced after Todd's changes to Oblivion. That dude was a Bethesda OG, and even wrote modules for D&D 1st edition. I would have liked to have seen a TES where he stayed at the helm instead of getting sidelined after Morrowind.
The moment I realized Starfield was shit was the quest where you track a fugitive to a hospital and have to gain access to the intensive care wing. And you get in there and immediately start finding corpses and blood trails. Eventually you track down the fugitive and do what you do. But afterward, when you go back out into the main part of the hospital, everybody's acting like nothing happened. No alarms going off, no security guards rushing to intensive care, nobody panicking. Not even an option to tell anybody what happened. 😩
In classic Bethesda fashion, I reckon Nesmith doesn't know what "dozen" means. He just threw it in there, thinking it's synonymous with "a couple", as in four, at most.
This could be "developer speak" where a "project" isn't a game - but it's a questline project. There are multiple small teams working on individual quests in a game. These are projects requiring stories, assets, animations, etc.
Keep in mind that Bethesda is also a producer and Todd is involved in that part too. Bethesda was involved in the release of 9 games in 2023/2024 so definitely more than once a decade. They have 5 official projects in the works, and probably a lot more that aren't yet official. Seeing how long most of their projects are taking, and that they released 9 games in the last 2 years, i wouldn't be surprised if they currently have a dozen projects, but probably not 2.
Emil is totally worse And with the timeline of fo4-76-starfield, it is likely tes6 is shit too; at least very mediocre Fo5 wont matter unless there is a drastic change in bethesda All of us are too old to care that much for mediocre fallout slop; and normies will temporarily gobble that shit up
I feel like Todd has had an issue with space games ever since Outer Worlds blew Fallout's release out of the water, which is what caused his fixation on wanting to "one up" and make Starfield a "better" space game. Meantime he is so out of touch with what modern gamers want he REALLY needs to stop having input and just stick to doing the PR and being the frontman for interviews and stuff.
They have lost all ambition. I swear Skyrim is the worst thing to happen to Bethesda. They think they can just replicate the same game in different scenarios and we’ll be happy.
Hopefully they pull off another Morrowind, Morrowind was made when Bethesda was on the brink of shutting down forcing them to put they’re all into it. Don’t buy anything Bethesda until they provide a good game.
In my opinion Bethesda had three major problems Pete Hines, Todd Howard, and Emil Pagliarulo. Pete Hines retired. So you would think that would just leave two problems but no. They got a new boss, Phil Spencer. Who is pushing Identity Politics into all the Game Studios under him.
@@mastersmurfify But that shit is a cancer that has rotted everything it has ever been forced into. It's only a matter of time before it eats away enough substance to ruin a title, this has proven true all across this industry and others. If you don't nip it in the bud, it will ruin shit.
It not one or three problems, it’s however many new hires problem. See, Bethesda doesn’t HAVE a Todd problem it HAD a Todd problem. Then Todd hired people like him, and it’s now a much bigger problem. Most of the devs that made ES3-ES5 and FO3 are gone. They have retired or moved on. The devs at Bethesda are the ones that gave us Starfield with big old smiles on their faces, fully believing they had created the ultimate SciFi rpg space game and would sweep the game awards. They in turn are backed up by the devs that created the FO4 Next Gen update, that came late, fixed basically nothing, broke just about everything (both mod wise and game wise) and sit have yet to fix it. This is the Bethesda of this generation folks. It’s not going away, even if Todd retires or is replaced tomorrow. It will take years with a dedicated ceo and hiring team working together to fix the company. And with how Microsoft is, I don’t see that happening any time soon. And part of the problem is the same issue Microsoft has with windows. The engine is so old, and they went without a dedicated team of engineers to maintain and upgrade it, combined, again with the loss of almost the entire dev team responsible for ES3-5 and FO3, and now no one knows how to fix anything. It also almost certainly one of the big reasons that Bethesda, even with it’s decently sized team (of new untested talent fresh from college and only trained on a few new engines) take so long to make games, DLCs, updates, and patches. The whole company has become a joke.
@@mastersmurfify Its part of it, not because its bad to include it but its bad to force people to include it that arent passionate and willing to tell a good story with it especially with Emil as a writer which is talentless, also it impacts the hiring practices of company where people get hired based on their identity rather then passion and accomplishment.
Bethesda should simply hire every Skyrim modder. The game would release bug free and look much better, than it will without them. The only reason why they don't hire them is, because they're banking on the modders to do this stuff for free, after the release. Well... that worked out greatly for Starfield, where modders said "nah this is not worth it".
He won't do it because he knows the modders can create a better game than he can these days. Why do you think he sabotaged Fallout: London. Pride, ego, greed, power, and deep down knows he's not as creative as people think he is. He's the cheerleader for Bethesda. He's also the megalomaniac who just dictates his will to the rest of the peons. I'm done with Bethesda. When they sold out to Microsoft when they clearly didn't need to, they've gotten their last nickel out of me.
@@williamyoung9401 Well guess it's time to watch the HonestCon video for the 5th time, because it's the absolute best content that starfield ever created 🤣 search for this and you will 100% thank me ^^ -> Todd Howard Unveils The Truth About Starfield In An Honest Conference
Skyrim was miles wide and inches deep, it thrives only because it was so fresh that the community rushed to save it with mods. In 2025 Skyrim thrives only as a mod simulator with better original voice acting.
TES six will only survive if the modding community flocks to it, and with how much effort they put into Skyrim they probably won't. Skyblivion, and Beyond Skyrim are arguably more anticipated than the sixth game because the longer we wait the more we see Skyrims cracks in comparison to oblivion.
Climbing a procedurally generated mountain to find some procedurally generated loot in a copy-pasted location is not as fun as it was when everything was hand-made. So even though I could fly to that planet and climb that mountain I just won't. Because it's boring.
I've been saying this for the better half of a decade. Took people long enough to come to this realization, please force todd out of the picture into retirement the man has no good reason to be in games industry anymore, that said please whoever you replace him with let them not be a crazy leftist who just makes things worse. need actual good story telling not the incessant over recited rhetoric these idiots have been putting into games the last few years and reallllly doubling down this year with so many flops because of woke ideology shoved into games
@@ryszakowy it wasnt empty lmfao. u can tell this person hasnt played any skyrim. you can literally walk in any direction and find tons of things to do, spend hundreds of hours playing and never even touch the main quest. dont listen to this loser
What Michael Kirkbride did about showing an extra weird monster only for it to be rejected and then a weird but less weird monster, for it to be accepted, is common practice in all kinds of jobs where your boss is an idiot. If you want something to be approved, don't present that thing, present a superior version of it. Idiot bosses will never accept the first thing you show them because they think the first thing was the easiest thing, and therefore you didn't work enough, so you need to work harder (they think), and show a new thing. That second thing will be accepted as long as it's not better that the first.
Todd Howard is the guy who became famous in high school for coming up with a catchphrase and has done nothing more than repeat it ad nauseam and here he is 20 years later still saying it with an occasional different tone to try and make it sound interesting or cool again
Todd and Emil are perfect examples of the old adage that good employees will be promoted until they are no longer good employees. Todd is an exceptional coder. He's the man who got Morrowind to work on the Xbox original and Oblivion on the 360, both of which are considered technological marvels given the limitations of both consoles. He's also an incredibly hard worker and multi-talented in the design space. Whenever another team was overworked and doing crunch in Morrowind, he would pitch in, writing minor quests, doing sound design, etc Emil is an excellent game designer. More specifically, the "play area" of games, such as dungeons. He's responsible for many of the levels in Thief and the assassination quests in Oblivion. You know what these two people are doing today? Todd is now a VP and executive producer who does very little actual game design outside of broad ideas and yes/no'ing the developers. He got to this point because he, as a hard worker who was talented in multiple areas, was promoted to project lead. From project lead he became VP. Emil is the lead writer. He does little level design, and mostly does lore and quest writing. He got to this point because Bethesda, during the Morrowind years, was understaffed and teetering on bankruptcy, so quest/level designers also had to write the story that was to be associated with his work. So he went from level designer to quest designer to main quest writer to head writer. And that leaves us where we are today. Todd, who would working miracles coding the same is doing marketing and events, and Emil who should be making dungeons and great set pieces is writing shitty stories. It's just such a shame.
You see it with some of their combat & gameplay systems but its the problem of that leap is still dated compared to competitors on the market. And then yeah there's certain areas that just feel like they havent been touched in 20 years.
The fact is that you need crazy creatives like Kirkbride to make things interesting. And you need the company structure to allow for it so seep through. The studio isn't so small anymore that the 36 lessons of Vivek could be aired out over the lunch table. More likely the idea would have to be brought up in a production meeting with middle-management.. and nothing would come of it.
Skyrim was great, Skyrim was an 8/10. The problems all started to arise post-Skyrim: the Creation Club, the MMO-ification, stramlining even more and putting rubber bumpers on anything. Playing Skyrim, even thousands of hours in, still felt like an adventure. ESO, FO76, Starfield... They all felt like theme parks.
I think you miss understand why people didn't like Starfield. You seem to believe that people didn't like Starfield because it was too much like Skyrim. But truth is people would of loved the game if it was more Skyrim. It was the Exploration in Skyrim that people loved, the fact that you could pick a direction and run into really cool quests and content but you never got that feeling in Starfield. And while a new game engine would be nice, it's not the main issue with Starfield. Give me a RPG where it feels like my choices are dramatically effecting the story and the game world and I will be happy.
I hate this debate. Skyrim is ancient. Please give it to me again with other skins and stories, it doesn't have to be pretty, it can be the same nightmarish clusterfuck for my inventory. Just give me another Elderscrolls game already goddarnit!
Skyrim is not a good game for todays standard the competition of rpgs is just so much better games like bg3, witcher 3, cyberpunk etc are just superior in every way. The formula of morrowind is too dated for current gaming climat. Its the same case as in ubislop formula that is dated and they did worse job implementing it as well in newer games.
This is why I'm massively looking forward to two project. The first being "The Wayward Realms" by Once Lost Games. AKA the true Bethesda veterans who build Elder Scroll 1, 2, 3, and some of Oblivion. Who show to be working on mind breaking new systems. Along with that Skyblivion. I want to see that destroy Oblivion remaster
End of the day, Bethesda has become bloated organisationally. So meetings to schedule meetings to prepare for meetings is pilling up the time spent. To request actions outside your own particular team for you to continue to do your work may take weeks. Bottlenecks in production. Bethesda is just fat. This is where the head needs to reassess the organisation efficiently and start to swing the axe. More people doesn't mean more efficiency. Taking more than 15 years to make a game is a red flag.
And what of all the corporate monstrosities that bought out Bethesda before Microsoft? Todd was always on his knees servicing shareholders. I don't see much has changed since he's now owned by Microsoft other than he has to service more shareholders before he can actually do any work.
Unfortunately I'm not looking forward to ES6 any more 😢 I know it won't be what we thought/hoped it would be. I'm still hopeful but not excited atm🤷🏾♂️
Todd overpromoted people who had no right being in positions they were in. Emil, for example. Dude was an environment designer… but Todd promoted him cause he wanted to look after his friends. Bethesda have been fucked since Skyrim.
"It's not everyone's cup of tea."
Bruh, you didn't even serve tea.
You served 15 year old coffee. And got pissy when we asked for some extra sugar to put in it.
Waiter pees in my soup in the restaurant and says "well it ain't everyone's cup of tea I suppose" .
man that's a good coment
Yup, Bethesda and/or Todd Howard have been desperately trying to ignore that doing the same thing over and over again will see you getting diminishing returns. Fallout 4, Fallout 76 and now Starfield, there just isn't that much progress and a lot of it is laziness and the refusal to accept that the Creation Engine just doesn't cut it anymore. Sure, it can still render beautiful worlds and scenery, but the fishbowl concept that the Creation Engine still uses simply doesn't scale up and where Bethesda could get away with that in Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, it becomes painfully obvious in Starfield. Seamless transitions are simply impossible, because the engine can't handle them.
It’s pretty clear Todd Howard was focused on the Indiana Jones story more than Starfield itself
It's not even tea, it's a glass of cheap lukewarm beer that was diluted with piss before getting served. Piss 16 times the amount of beer, to be precise.
There are some ex-employee interviews where they say Todd would always go for the safest most boring monster designs in response to which the employee would make more crazier designs than the last so Todd would settle for the previous one lol. He would also cut a ton of features and only focus on the basics which frustrated some old employees, Skyrim had a TON of cut content, civil war for example felt very unfinished.
It was Michael Kirkb
ride.
When you realize "it just works" means "it ONLY works"
Yep. This was my biggest gripe going from Morrowind to Oblivion to Skyrim. Safe decisions that won't scare away casuals on console.
@@JohnPeacekeeper "It just about works."
Starfield seems to have launched unfinished in a lot of ways as well.
I think we should stop spreading misinformation about Todd's contribution to this industry: Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim weren't successful because of Todd, but in spite of Todd. Many talented creators worked on these games, but they were slowly replaced by hacks who are boring enough to be on Todd's alley. I think the way we've seen people like Rolston and Kirkbride be replaced by freaking Emil Paglurio is the same way many lesser known, but equally impactful team members ended up being replaced by Todd's lobotomites. That's what Starfield is: pure and unadulterated Todd, without all the impurities of creativity and innovation.
Todd's contribution was Terminator: Future Shock, it is why Todd got and kept his job and why he continued to upgrade his spot to where it is now despite the games being mostly hollow. He did things in xnGine that other much much larger dev studios with much larger budgets and much more advanced engines failed to do as good, he's been riding high off those huge acheivements.
Its kind of similar to George Lucas, imo. The first three Starwars films were so great because Lucas still had people around him to say "No, thats dumb." After their massive success, the prequels came out a lot worse because those people didn't exist anymore, or if they did, they weren't going to question their golden goose. Since Todd was head of Bethesda for Morrowind, which saved the company from bankruptcy, I feel like that same sort of scenario just played out again - no one would dare question his decision making considering the company wouldn't exist without his role during that.
Goat
@@Shmandalf Good point
i see the cattle is pulling out the "George Lucas didn't make SW" card. ah, the human condition. both predictable and unchangeable.
If starfield is Todd's Baby, it came out with fetal alcohol syndrome and an extra chromosome.
😂
Nah, not enough load screens.
A baby is a baby lol
Not only that but instead of breastmilk they feed it soymilk
Hello Games: (laughing in No Mans Sky)
The biggest red flag for me with Bethesda is they just seem like they've lost interest in player feedback since Skyrim was released.
They ignored the bugs in Skyrim and instead released multiple versions that all had similar bugs in.
They ignored feedback regarding the awful dialogue choices in Fallout 4.
They ignored and even made jokes about the myriad off issues that plagued Fallout 76 for months after its launch.
They ignored the various complains made about Starfield's base game.
They've now also ignored valid criticism about Shattered Space.
There is also a reason all those games were considered shit in some way or another.
Skyrim showed while insanely successful, it was also the most hollow of all the TES games. It kept getting more and more dumbed down and let's be honest with ourselves. Skyrim without mods plays the CRAPPIEST compared to Oblivion or Morrowind and it shows.
Fallout 4 even to this day is considered a joke compared to New Vegas which had a less than 2 year time period to make. 4 had great gunplay, but its hardly considered a FO game to most.
76 was just a joke, I won't even get into it. It took them what? 3 years to have crap in the game that shoulda been in day 1? Enough said.
Starfield for being such a vaunted idea, is literally a crappier Skyrim, which already isn't a great game without mods, and made it even crappier. Case in point, barely anyone makes mods for Starfield showing how much a joke it is.
Shattered Space shows how much of a fuckup Bethesda is, since this was a joke of a dlc, and also never shoulda been a dlc to begin with.
Because they realized the money making process of mods. All they needed to do was release a mundane rpg, and let the modders make it profitable for years. Look how long Skyrim has gone for…Now imagine if Skyrim was unmoddable, people would easily forget about it.
@@theanimer1it’s funny that many turn fallout 4 into a stalker game lol.
They now people will pay so why put effort in when we'll buy it any ways it's sad
@@theanimer1 The problem with the "fallout 4 is crap compared with New Vegas" is that ALL the Fallouts are crap compared with New Vegas. New Vegas was an outlier for Fallout. 1 & 2 were completely different games that should be compared with stuff like Underrail. 3 and 4 were basically shooters with some talking and a lot of exploration with interesting stories scattered around the map. if you are saying "its bad compared with New Vegas..." EVERYTHING is bad compared with New Vegas. In short, New Vegas is NOT the Standard. Its Mount Everest which nothing before equaled and which nothing is getting up to now.
The big problem with 76 was not the game, its that Todd Howard insisted ther there should be not Human NPCs. The actual shooting mechanics were fine, it was just boring. The fact that the game is now populated far more than starfield shows that the core was ok. Plus a decent community can carry a bad game.
But Bethsedas' big problem is that rivals are running rings around them, and have for the last 10 years. And Todd cannot see that.
Knew Todd was cooked when he gave that interview prior to 76 about how Skyrim and Fallout 4 were still incredibly popular BUT Bethesda was disappointed that they couldn’t monetize those players. Once I heard that I knew they’d never make another quality game, because “engagement” and “monetization” were more important than fun and quality.
Microsoft's acquisition of them made this fully realized.
Can't just give ol' Todd all the credit. We can't ignore how much Emil Pagliarulo brutalized the IP's with his pretentious "storytelling" and "writing"
Emil still draws a check on Todd's dime.
Yes, but only reason Emil is allowed to be so dogshit, is Todd is friends with him and allows it. So the root problem is Todd being biased and not doing his damn job.
Todd is too much a coward and Emil can't lead, so they both need to drop down a peg and have someone above both.
Todd wishes he had a fraction of Christopher Nolan's talent, and Emil deludes himself regarding his 'storytelling and writing'. I wonder whether either of them have ever actually investigated current gaming to see how far it's evolved beyond them.
The issue is, Todd is the boss. If anyone at Bethesda fucks up, it's Todd's fault. In the same vein, if the FBI screw up, you blame either the head or the president, because they're the ones in charge and ultimately, it's their job to ensure these fuck ups don't happen. So every time Todd tries to shift the blame to the Austin team or talk about bugs, press him on that. "Why did you, the boss, FAIL to make sure that the other team was making this correctly?" "Why did you, the boss, FAIL to ensure there were no bugs?" Don't give him an inch, he's a rich prick, he doesn't need you to defend him. Maybe if he spent less time shopping for leather jackets and more time working, the finished product wouldn't be hated so much.
Their role playing elements only ever afford the illusion of choice and they never dared to give the players any freedom. It always feels like the plot is playing us rather than the other way around
Emil Pagliarulo is Todd's closest confidant and biggest yes man in Bethesda. Him around resulted in a lot of talented devs pressure to leave, like Jeff Gardiner, Bruce Nesmith, Will Shen and most importantly, Bethesda last TES lorehead Kurt Kuhlmann.
He really ramped up after Pete left, and Emil's ego practically tripled as he started acting like Todd "Manylies".
He just can't take criticism and feedback.
Will Shen was the lead quest designer for Starfield though 😅
@@RiderZer0 He left literally the day of Starfield release, they all jumped ship...
Funny thing about Emil, he's a pretty good if not REALLY good level designer but ever since they moved him into his current position... Yeaaaaaah, he should have stayed as a level designer
Todd asking if they should have delayed the release of the car because it was such an "amazing" addition is really giving horse armor flashbacks.
by the way, you keep saying, "blunt of the blame," when you mean brunt.
Blunt....because he is HIGH
He has absolutely NO idea what he's doing 😂
That's so much COPIUM from his part that's crazy
I have absolutley no expectations for ES6. Im actually scared to see it come to life under bathesda....
He treated his "baby" this way. so like ES6 is DOOMED.
Personally i think skyrim should be the last one
I can aleeady see the thousands of loading screens...
It took so long the gaming industry and their audience has changed so much. No way they can live up to whatever people expect from them.
@PIXAUL94
The sad part is people don't have high expectations so like they really gonna disappoint people.
Bethesda: "We gave you a vehicle so you can see nothing faster" 5:57
I can spend 8 minutes traveling instead of 10 to scan those magic rocks
@@muzien87 because you are stupid
Until you reach the invisible wall.
meanwhile it’s borderline faster to travel on foot because of how often the buggy gets stuck on plants and rocks. the driving is horrendous
I am still suprised people have "expectations" for TES6 after everything that's happened in the last 20 years
Same also starfield came out exactly as i expected it to be just another same outdated formula game with no passion and being even mre watered down.
Skyrim fanboys are some of the most unreasonable consumers in the industry.
@@cellamuert they would literally buy dog turds if it was from a brand they recognize.
I have an expectation that it will be a buggy, overpriced, overhyped dissapointing mess of a bland and soulless insult to the TES francise and lore.
its just gonna be another reskinned skyrim. the way starfield was reskinned fallout 4
His vision for elder scrolls 6: minimal effort maximum profit
All armor should be horse armor. Got to think on that early pension 😉
My prediction for ES6 is no levels, no perks, no weapon variations, no spell variations, and just three buttons: Melee, Bow, Magic. His obsessive streamlining makes it seem like he’s trying to turn Elder Scrolls into Gauntlet, so I imagine the trend to oversimplify everything will continue unabated.
It just works!😂😂😂
they removed stats in skyrim, it really cant get much worse from there
Elder scrolls 6 will be skyrim with less depth
bro lived long enougth to become the villain...
haha right
People change once they taste success.
That isn't very long. He has always been a glory hog.
he's always been a villain, he even lied about being a nerdy loser in chess club.
He was a liar in the late 00s but he was a meme so it was ok back then
ES6 skill system:
You can choose to level up HP, Stamina or Magicka and one perk for Sneak, Magic or Melee
I gave up on BGS when Todd said he was ok with having fans wait 16+ years between titles instead of letting another studio make a spin off of one of their IPs
Their egos can't handle another New Vegas situation where a studio makes a RPG leagues above their own in a very minimal amount of time
They don't want to be shown up. Everytime someone gets their hands on their IPs they show them up. Look at New Vegas and Fallout London. Fallout London is so popular FOLON formaly became a studio.
Todd doesn't want to ruin people's standards by experiencing what a good modern Elder Scrolls or Fallout would be like.
Imagine not one but TWO grand theft autos and a red dead being released BETWEEN your elder scrolls games, and their more fleshed out as well, and better voice acted, and better game mechanics and combat mechanics. I used to be a Bethesda fan boy. I've since realized my mistakes. Rockstar was 2nd place, now they take the pedestal.
@@wrex2060 the other studio actually made an RPG.
The horse armor dlc was pretty much the 1st clue to exposing Todd Howard's real priorities.
wait, was that all his idea? I figured it was some other executive that put a price on that
Yeah, it was Todds idea for the $2.50 dlc@iwantcrawfish6110
@@iwantcrawfish6110 yes and he even said "people will buy anything" in a interview
After everything with Fallout 76, they rolled out a subscription service. To a game. A bad one. That told me everything.
Cashgrab 76 killed it for me. I will never buy another Bethesda game again.
Todd Howard is Ridley Scott of video games. All the superlatives about him are true, but they’re all in the past. It’s about time to pass the torch.
Don't insult Ridley Scott like that. Todd is much worse.
@@paulisfat8077They're on the exact same level
@@paulisfat8077Ridley ain’t that great anymore tbh. Last Duel was great tho, super overlooked
@@vingasoline5068 oh no, you misunderstand me; Ridley sucks. Todd is worse, by alot.
@@paulisfat8077Todd definitely didn't suck at one point though. Morrowind is GOATED
Todd Howard went on an interview before for Starfield stating they never tried something like Jet Packs before. As if they didn't exist in Fallout 4 or 76.
I'll never forget that, it was so insultingly bold faced that it's hard to forgive.
Not to mention levitation magic that serves the same purpose in Morrowind. Acting like a cut feature is something new
I just used a jet pack in 76 3 minutes ago. What a weird thing for him to say.
LMAO didn't even know he said that. Sounds like a pathological liar and I've been baffled from the beginning as to why people like Bethesda so much.
I never liked Bathesda from the start. Skyrim is severely overrated, Fallout 3 sucks and everything they did after that sucks even harder.
Best thing they did was New Vegas and that was Obsidian...
Quick note- the Jetpack System proves that the levitation spell could have stayed in the Elder Scrolls games
@@HoboHunterRik Morrowind had some of the most interesting mechanics such as several fast travel options that were integrated into the world as well as a spell crafting system. With the mark and recall spell, you can mark an area inside a shop, wait outside for the owner to go to sleep, and pop in past the locked door. You could also remove curses on OP items such as the boots of blinding speed and basically become the flash. Then they nerfed the lot for Oblivion because they couldn't make a contained experience with a high level of player freedom. Their games started to force players into play styles and plot decisions. You had to be a champion of the people, regardless of whether you were a murdering thief/vampire.
Bethesda has a Bethesda problem. Unfinished, buggy messes that they expect the community to fix for free. Hopefully gamers will move on from this pitiful dev
sunken cost fallacy got people clutching to them
The crap coding and lack of polish isnt even the worst thing about them, they completely lack talent and ambition, they limit themselves to recreate the Fallout 4 formula, a 10 year old game that isnt even good and make it even more bland and boring
Todd proved that with Indiana Jones. but this angry Fallout NV fans are dumb
@@kyero8724 Todd did not work on it
Make a game like Skyrim, Fallout 3/4, that strategy is fine.
Slop out fallout 76 or Starfield and the fans won't fix it for you (pretty sure it wasn't even possible for 76).
During an interview with Polygon for Fallout 4, Todd Howard was hyping up Fallout 4 to the interviewer. Boasting how they don't take outside influences when they make their games. How they don't do research and work from a purely creative perspective or some such PR nonsense. With excitement he revealed the big plot hook: What if robots were just like humans. Polite, yet clearly not impressed the interviewer went to move on. Todd wanted to know why the interviewer wasn't impressed and learned it has been done to death. The look on his face was priceless. The look of "we just messed up."
I used to defend Todd Howard. Not blindly. More maybe with supervision he could produce some great work. He just needed someone to veto his stupid ideas and make him put his nose to the grindstone. Then he made the Fallout TV show canon. Destroying the canon of New Vegas, all over his pettiness. The moron straight up forgot the NCR had more than one city. He quickly shifted the blame for destroying the NCR capital to the showrunners when he previously was taking credit for everything. After that, I look forward to his "retirement" alongside Emil.
When you look at it, Todd Howard has only produced inferior renditions of more talented people's work and got credit for the work of more talented people who have left the studio. They fired the writer of Elder Scrolls, he didn't create the Fallout universe and continues to screw up its continuity. Everything that people love from Bethesda was originally created by people no longer working at Bethesda. Now they're making Wyrdsong and The Wayward Realms (Daggerfall 2).
I find it funny that "Player freedom" to Todd means "Restrict everything to only a single way of play"
Actual Player Freedom would mean you Can fail and you Can lock yourself out of certain content because thats how Actual Freedom works.
People able to join every faction and appease everyone is not freedom. that's a fixed route because you cannot make anyone angry, which means you can only play 1 type of character.
Yeah he doesn't seem to get that freedom comes with choice and consequences. No consequences given, no choices, made no freedom granted.
so siding with the institute in fo4 or crimson fleet in sf does not have consequences? interesting point of view
A meaningless choice between unlikeable and badly written factions. People still talk about factions in NV. There is no discussion in Skyrim or Fallout 4 because there is no depth.
Todd is that guy on the team who overpromise, keep juging everyone work, suckup to the teacher and claim it was all him at the end, despite having done very little.
Bethesda became Ubisoft, compliant thinking that if they just reused the Farcry 3 (Skyrim) open world formula from 10+ years ago people will just buy it and will never grow tired of it.
Skyrim formula is still a game winning formula if only they just refine it like fromsoft did bethesda will still be a beloved developer right now.but instead they ruined the formula with whatever FO76 and Starfield is.
@@BLue3547-o7veven further, Sktrim's formula is just Oblivion's formula...
I would have gladly bought new TES games like Skyrim every 3-5 yrs, problem being Bethesda not releasing any TES games since 2011.
(or since 2014 if you really want to count ESO).
@@nathanlaleff4273 To me even Skyrim was just more boring version of Oblivion.
Is becoming… ubisoft is by far worst company in the video game industry. Just changing maps and call it new game to literally stealing games you owned just because you didn't play it in the while
They also have an Emil Pagliarulo problem who ostensiblty is their lead writer which is funny because Bethesda games have no writing to speak of.
Just replayed Skyrim with Lorerim 2.0. Absolutely mind-blowing. Creation engine is not the problem. Lack of vision and talent at Bethesda is.
Creation Engine absolutely needs to be overhauled though. That thing is old enough to legally drink in the US. Get an entire new and powerful engine and new team heads.
@@ichigokage bring back old writters and devs. The man working on Daggerfall wants to return and use AI to virutally exponentially increase world role play enrichment and NPC functionality.
Lorerim is incredible. It's insane that independent creators had to make Skyrim what it *should* have been with a little modernization.
Glad you like Lorerim's second iteration!
The dev took quite the gauntlet to get up and running over the years!
I'm happy they reached the finish line and people like you get to enjoy it. Hope you also take the chance add your own take and content to the modlist, that is what makes playing Skyrim soo fun! Just make sure to backup your install though in case of a steam update haha.
I agree that currently BGS is executing things in a manner that is not we had hope for unfortunately. It was imo either way too "safe" or lacking the novelty that we have experienced in the past. I'd like for them to push further and something new with what they had.
They should've also reached out to the community as well for talent!
We have so many great modder with great skills and vision that could spice the up the soup at BGS. Regardless of trouble and disagreement I'm happy for the content creators we have for modding BGS games. The FO London and their ability to create a fullblown indie title, Skyrim's animation modders creating content from so many places although most are Souls-Like stuff lol, LoTD and their collectors content mod, the outfit modders!, and all of Script Extender Modders with their talent to add more function and contents to each respective base games! Still crazy to think there's functional vehicles modded into FNV! The GOATED OpenMW team as well, they really took the gauntlet to modernize and smoothen the GameBryo engine to a different state and level!
I always hear people saying that BGS should just switch to more mainstream engine with "actual" working pipelines but they don't understand that this engine as arcane as it can be, is what gives us modders and players the ability take our own spin at it. The content, creation, and story for us to play in our own little world.
BGS has a long road ahead but as long they are willing to work on their shortcomings and not stray away from the light that makes their games as endearing as they are, then things will get better.
We need a games that provide intrigue and fascination into another world, not something that necessarily parallel or alludes to ours. I like skyrim for being able to quest for relics and just fight bandits and monsters, not to worry about society and situations that may be around me in reality.
I don't know what the future may hold for BGS, but it's better if they just focus on giving it their all to make a decent game with a canvas that is that ready to make it ours.
Whatever happens in life is life, but in a game especially like Bethesda it should be a breath of air we should be able to take away from it.
@@Scribe333Great, more AI slop
When the data is more complete, you'll realize that bethesda does not have a todd howard problem-- todd howard has a nepotism problem. This is not todd howard's design philosophy, this is *Emil Pagliarulo's* design problem. Howard's problem is that Emil is his friend, and refused to replace him with someone who has a healthy, viable vision for 2025.
Exactly. Emil Pagliarulo's the real wrecker and Todd enables him.
Well, emil doesn't try to control every aspect of the games as hard as Todd, I bet. Both are deserving of the blame, emil for the writing aspect and todd for the mechanical side, micromanaging stuff and "keeping the games stupidly simple" on many parts (where he thinks some design aspects are just "so cool" when they won't work and feel like that for others than that get excited when seeing a video game first time).
It's still a Todd problem because he's the boss. He ultimately can choose to fix all of this but doesn't. Thus, he's the villain here. If you replace him with someone who actually gives a fuck, then Emil is homeless in 48 hours, as well as any other lingering cancers.
@@WisteriaDrake Todd absolutely isn't the boss of Bethesda. Microsoft is. And they can kick him out literally any time they want.
I think getting your friends into positions of power is called cronyism. Nepotism is when you get into power by being related to someone in authority.
Calling starfeild another skyrim is an insult to skyrim. There is so much more wrong with starfeild than skyrim
I think it's more so Skyrim was good for its time. The formula it used has inspired a lot that we've seen from this industry, it pushed a lot of devs to do better BUT Starfield doesnt attempt to evolve that formula much and just does an imitation of it with less complex RPG mechanics & sure more competent combat/gameplay systems (that still feel lacking compared to what competitors are nowadays producing). That's the point I was hitting on. Todd & his team are out of touch and still living off of the Skyrim success, using that structure to guide Starfield's design which 13 years later feels extremely dated & tiring.
Skyrim is a meh game by todays standards
Skyrim and starfield use the same formula skyrim is just better in terms of quest and lore designs, and the open world aspect is also superior but its the same formula that is outdated and that is morrowind formula bethesda didnt change their formula since morrowind and while it was fine for a while its not anymore since their competition is ways ahead now.
@@LegacyKillaHD Todd thinks the same formula will work with every game. He's not a visionary; he's a tunnel-vision developer. Todd gave us all microtransactions with the Oblivion Horse Armor, thinking it was "innovative," and I will never forgive him for that.
@@1vaultdweller Maybe Vanilla Skyrim, but with the mods, it's still an incredible experience. Compared to a lot of games out there, you get your money's worth with Skyrim.
Starfield is not more skyrim. I'd love more skyrim, an updated skyrim with no loading screens, deeper consequences, better looking vanilla game.
And more than 3 voice actors
you want them to try and make me buy the game for a 5th time?
@@prydzen I only bought it three times and thought that should be enough already :D
Skyrim is a trash game. Too many bugs, completely empty RPG elements and characters, mixed with the laziest dungeons ever created.
Yeah, NO!! They fuck skyrim up more and more. The new 'survival' shit is trash and poorly implemented vs other survival stuff like frost fall and ineeds mods. You can see how uncreative the main people at Bethesda are vs everywhere else. Fallout new vegas (obsidian) had a great survival mode while fallout 4(bethesda) had a shit one. And when my steam account auto updated to anniversary addition i basically stopped playing the one game i loved the most. They fucked up my game by just not letting well enough alone.
Lets not forget they released the "next gen update" for fallout 4 broke the game and they never fixed it.
They are still leaving horrific bugs in all their games and if you complain to them and open a ticket they demand screenshots and proof and after jumping through their flaming rings of annoyance they then say we will pass it along to the devs who already know about it and have chosen to do nothing about it and never will because they clearly cannot be bothered to do their jobs and change a little bit of code as that would be actual work and customer service which they don't care for and never will.
i been screaming on boards thiers no nail gun ammo why is only one vender selling ammo
Part of the problem is the same issue Microsoft has with windows. The engine is so old, and they went without a dedicated team of engineers to maintain and upgrade it, combined with the loss of almost the entire dev team responsible for ES3-5 and FO3, that no one knows how to fix anything. It also almost certainly one of the big reasons that Bethesda, even with it’s decently sized team (of new untested talent fresh from college and only trained on a few new engines) take so long to make games, DLCs, updates, and patches. The whole company has become a joke.
This is why I got the GOG version, they left it on the last "best" patch that also works with Fallout London.
@mightylink65 I did exactly the same.
I stopped caring about Bethesda back when they released fallout 76. They have to entice me back and they don't seem to be trying that
As long as Todd is at Bethesda, they're not getting another penny from me. Todd IS the problem. He's in charge of it all, right? Then who is responsible for all the problems? Even Bethesda's promotional videos show Todd talking and everyone else nodding their heads like robots. Todd is shallow, insecure, and pathetic.
Fallout 4 is the last game I’ve bought from Bethesda and will remain such until they get their shit together. Which is sadly unlikely.
Todd can get away with lies that damned other companies. Emil can write insultingly boring things now. Their PR dude can say ‘stfu about X game’ when people ask for any details.
They are content to sit on their laurels and damn near demand modders to do the job Betheada should be doing. And they will continue to get away with everything because too many in their community will slurp it all up.
I stopped caring at Oblivion horse armor.
@@DyceFreak you weren't born back then blud
Ex staff on F76 nicknamed him "The Seagull" cause Todd would just appear at random, shit on weeks worth of work, tell them to do it his way and then disappear.
Howard is the Uwe Bolle of video gaming.
Not even Kojima claimed he was Chris Nolan of video games.
Not just a Todd problem, but an Emil aswel.
Emil is a part of the Todd problem though since they are friends and thus Todd will never fire Emil.
Todd allowed him and approves whatever buggy product they sell in the market.
So hes the real problem.
The issue with Todd Howard is that he is too safe and boring now.
Basically all AAA gaming companies.
The issue is that he's a straight up con artist scumbag. I don't know why people give this guy so much slack.
He was always like this, perks of being a chess club member.
Now? The last awesome game they made was Skyrim and Skyrim was already a dumb down RPG in caparison to Oblivion
He’s too safe in general, his job needs to be at risk or we’ll never get anywhere.
All I really wanted was Skyrim in space. Multiple races to play as, different factions/guilds, maybe a handful of really fleshed out planets that actually have a feeling of a lived in experience.
imagine giving Bethesda another chance after Fallout 76. Never forget the Duffle Kerfuffle
Embarrassingly I did. But I’m done with Bethesda now. Which is sad. I miss fallout 3 and new Vegas
@@Fred-rv2tuI realize I’m the millionth person to probably say this, but Bethesda didn’t make New Vegas, Obsidian did. That’s why underneath all the bugs (courtesy of Bethesda’s engine and giving Obsidian so little time to develop it) is an actual good game.
So true
More embarrassing is that they copy and pasted FO4 so badly they even brought bugs that modders had long since fixed and couldn’t be bothered to try with FO76.
PREACH, my thoughts exactly.
"Canvas bag", indeed!
Todd is the guy who saved the company 25 years ago, and now he’s the one sinking it.
Saved the company? Hope you're not pretending Morrowind was a success because of him.
@@monody Todd is famous for taking credit for things that he has no hand in doing.
I've never seen a franchise flanderized harder than Fallout.
Borderlands 😕
@@SerMichaeloftheMire Borderlands wasn't flanderized as it's always just been le quirky millennial writing game
Todd Howard: We will give players what they want.
Me: More loading screens?
Todd Howard: Exactly!
Todd & Emil are what’s wrong with Bethesda & BGS will continue to put out complete garbage as long as they are there.
So until they go the way of Ubisoft.
Starfield wasn’t too different. It was exactly what I thought it’d be. Too many doors when virtually all doors are loading screens. The space setting was a complete misstep for their game design.
I think the golden times of AAA is behind us. Those who were a part of it can only tell stories about it.
The future is in indies - AA.
I’d argue developers like CD Project Red & Fromsoft are all still chilling in their respective zones. But yes, a majority of companies have fallen off hard trying to chase money instead of just making fun & interesting games.
Yup
@@dawsong5208forgot about the shit show cyber punk was ?
@@vexx12343Thank you. CDPR effectively ended the golden age of gaming
@@dawsong5208CDPR is the same shit now.
Starfield's problem wasn't that it was "irresponsibly large" it was the lack of content, out of the billions of planets there was only like 3 major cities and some very very small towns, starfield may have been technically bigger than skyrim but skyrim had more content
That was the thing about the other games. You could pick a direction and very quickly find something interesting to interact with. The big size of the Map was no virtue, it was the fact that it was filled with interesting content.
@@jjoshaugh Yeah the big size of the map isn't the problem, I mean everything interesting in starfield is pretty much in 3 or 4 places, it's the lack of overall content that is not procedural slop that makes it bad
One of the many reasons why Morrowind is still the most popular of the 3D Bethesda titles. Despite having the smallest worldspace unmodded, the world is so densely populated and full of life it feels larger. Meanwhile, Oblivion, Skyrim, FO3, 4 and 76 and especially Starfield have been getting progressively more empty. Part of me honestly expects TES6 to look like an amateur Skyrim modder trying their hand at a new world space and just leaving a flat plain with maybe a city or two in the distance.
They seem to be going down a path of just creating big maps just for the hell of it.
It's not the size but it's how you use it. I'd rather have a Skyrim sized map filled with more content and less loading screens than a giant universe like starcraft with nothing in it
Starfield was the first game where I truly regretted buying at full price.
You honestly should have learned after Fallout 76 was a thing. All the warning signs were there dude. Better late then never though.
Well this was me. My mate builds gaming pc's so I showed him the requirements for the system to run this game at ultra and then add 50% extra performance. He did that and I paid up for the parts and a tip. Saw the early reviews for the game and didn't buy it. Didn't buy 76 either. Fallout 4 was my last buy from them.
@@MrSpartan993 I'd go further back, but sadly, Skyrim and FO4 were popular with the kind of people who unironically used to ask for a Skyrim 2.
If Todd having the final say in BGS is true, then the company is doomed to fail.
I've worked under a boss like that. He wanted to micromanage everything. Trouble was, he was a genius salesman, but had very little knowledge about anything else. Despite that, he was stubborn as a mule in having the final say in HR, legal, IT, etc.
The company didn't last long...
A good leader isn’t one who is overly active or knows everything but one who knows how to fill his weak areas with the proper people.
A good leader knows to delegate his weak fields, not one who tries to fill them himself.
Sometimes a boss having the final say in everything is a good idea as long as he appoints good people under him and let's them work relatively freely.
Micromanaging is never good, it's a sign you hired the wrong people or you as a person have problems.
Todd feels justified in his philosophy of dumbing down games and not learning from 20+ of experience. They had 15 years to see what works and what features people want via popular mods and Starfield didn't show any of that. That creative bankruptcy must be because of his chess upbringing, cold, logical, and safe, if all you do is try the most vanilla designs and are too afraid to foster creativity of your employees.
Its also why they all leave. The director isn't who makes the game. Its the designers and programmers that do. And if all the talented ones leave.....all you are left with is trash like Emil lol
Good point about the mods being a lens into what players would want. Bethesda makes buggy messes that are fixed by the community, turning good games into great games. Without mods Skyrim would have died years ago. And Bethesda learned next to nothing from this. Hell, Fallout 4 is more different from Skyrim, than Starfield is from Fallout 4. And even then Fallout 4 is too alike to Skyrim.
The funniest thing is, chess requires you to be unsafe. Sacrificing pieces to lure your opponent into a check is the name of the game. Cold and logical are also optional, sometimes a fiery, illogical move is what's needed to trick your foe. His chess upbringing shows that he's learned absolutely nothing about chess, and I seriously doubt he's actually played the game.
“Todd’s being spread too thin.” That’s one excuse for his height.
Todd Howard reminds me of that guy who makes headlines by spending a million dollars a day swapping out blood with his son so he doesn't age. One bad tan away from having a leather mask for a face
Bryan Johnson 😂😂
Todd Howard is a modern Peter Molyneux. He'll lie and deflect as much as it takes to sell his next game. You can see this from how much he trashes the previous game... after the sales have dried up.
@@WisteriaDrake "I'm trying to make the greatest role-playing game of all time... Again." I sort of miss Molyneux's crazy antics, Todd is rather tame with his sweet little lies.
He does what
Bro thank goodness someones talking about this, I used to think todd was the hope of the company. But now he's LITERALLY holding back the company from an actual good rpg!
Him and his buddy Emil. If they're gone maybe there would be hope again.
you should look under the hood of peoples words instead of taking them at face value 😂
You sure about that? You realize he was big part of Indaian Jones right
@@Vert_GreenHeart Exactly man, just look back at the history of elder scrolls, morrowind was a super deep complex rpg then after oblivion and skyrim, it got more and more watered down with less and less complex rpg mechanics. Crazy stuff man
@@Gaming_Media00 you re not gonna like this but even morrowind was toned down asf compared to daggerfall they had an insane vision for that game and were only limited by the tech of the time
The reality is that Bethesda was successful in spite of Todd Howard, not because of him. Every decision he's ever made has made Bethesda worse.
"Christopher Nolan of gaming", I want to vomit.
Sounds like mockery for Nolan😢
That’s like calling Corrine Busche from BioWare the King of RPGs or whatever they called that hack.
More like the 'Uwe Boll of gaming..."
@@trevorpearlharbor5171 At least Uwe Boll himself is entertaining. Criticise his movies, he'll challenge you to a boxing match. Todd just sticks his fingers in his ear and goes "LALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU, BUY SKYRIM!"
Todd is as talented as he is tall.
And I doubt that Emil is capable of mentally visualizing an apple.
Tall? He's 5,6
as much as you thought you said something smart - it was dumb empty and spacious lmao - Giants are known to be stupid as much as talentless idiots who think wording things in a way that sounds like it should gives off the effect they think it would - when in reality sometimes it smarter to keep that mouth shut - stupid.
@@pawhunter340 Thats the joke buddy. He called him talentless and short.
@@pawhunter340whooosh
@@pawhunter340 And he's not even 5'6ft. The guy is two heads shorter than anyone else even when wearing platform shoes.
Honestly their style works fine if its made by genuinely passionate and creative developers (see: Enderal). The problem is their design is dull as dishwater designed by committee slop.
Todd Howard: "We need new technology for this game" then proceeds to using the same outdated technology hold together with glue and duct tape...
Their engine isn't the problem exactly. The problem is hardly anyone know how their engine works. It's like windows OS. It still has many problems that have existed for a long while but no one knows how the OS really works because all the OGs retired.
@@kay_keik7842 Gamebryo engine (what Creation Engine is based on) is older than 90% of the Fortnite playerbase. Its 27y old now and it still has the mouse polling rate bug in Bethesdas newer titles
Nah. Modders fix it pretty well. Bethesda just doesnt care
@@cherryrook8684once again thats because no one in the team knows the engine lol just like windows still carries many issues between each iteration. Thats why you see all these companies moving to unreal engine 5. They think moving to unreal engine 5 will allow them to hire anyone since unreal engine 5 is used by a lot of people. But that doesn't mean they know exactly how to properly use it.
The problem isn't the gamebryo engine, it's the people who don't know how to use it because the OGs are gone or got let go. See cdpr as an example. Everyone who knew how to use the engine left, so cdpr is using unreal engine 5 so they can hire any schmup.
@@cherryrook8684 I'm old enough to remember its original name is NetImmerse....
Fallout 4 was when I opened my eyes, everyone loved it and I saw the writing on the wall
Agreed, that was the first game I bought of their's that I didn't finish.
I like FO4... but it was an ass Fallout game, and yes, there was definitely writing on the wall. And despite enjoying it, I've never beaten it. I get about 20-30 hours into a play through, modded and all that jazz... and it just gets me in the mood for Skyrim, which I think is still far superior. Hell, modded Skyrim is better than any other Bethesda game that came after it. Starfield does the same thing. I'll play it and "enjoy" it for a bit... but it just gets me in the mood for Skyrim, because at the end of the day both of those games are just inferior versions of Skyrim.
@@nicholasrova3698I like FO4 in the same way I like Cookie Clicker - it’s mindless slop for me to resort to when I need to massage and numb my brain for a few hours. It’s Tik-Tok of video games.
I started calling out the downward trends in fucking _Oblivion_ and everyone said I was being too pessimistic.
@@nicholasrova3698 fallout 4 was so underwhelming for me, I prefer 3 and new Vegas and even 76. Fallout 4 is straight up bad. From the art direction to the writing, to the gameplay. The shooting was better sure, but every other aspect was significantly worse.
Bethesda has been making ground beef slop for 20 years now but there was nobody making burgers for players to compare it to. Now there are several.
Don't rewrite history. Oblivion and Skyrim were great, especially for back then
@@efancording6363 Skyrim has been vapid and mediocre since it was created, it's what someone thinks a good RPG is when they have quite literally never played a good RPG before. The only reason people even play it anymore is because of how many amazing mods have been made by the community over the years.
@@efancording6363 oblivion was _alright,_ it was decently ambitious but it failed miserably at what they actually wanted to achieve and was riddled with near game ruining issues besides. skyrim was slop at the best of times, with a tiny scale, poor storytelling, and mediocre gameplay.
@Cynsham got to disagree. Every game developer that made RPGs wanted to replicate what Skyrim did but couldn't do it. It's loved by audiences and critics. Is it perfect? No. Does it have flaws? Absolutely.
@@efancording6363 Speaking as someone who doesn't care for the Witcher, both the novels and the games, the Witcher 3 was Skyrim but better, and was released around the same time. Dragon's Dogma was Skyrim but better and with *real* magic, and again was released around the same time. There absolutely were devs who did Skyrim but better. Skyrim was a mediocre at best open world that was beloved by people who never even picked up Oblivion, let alone the great TES titles.
When Todd Howard says "It just works" it means that it only works, and he doesn't intend on making it improve.
My 40-year old Ford 'just works', but I still feel like a twat driving it.
Means: Intentional game desing... a feature.
Saying Bethesda games work at all is debatable.
He only meets the Steam requirement for his games, the exe needs to run and that's all.
There is no passion or creative mindset that lead Bethesda since 10years, Fallout 4 and his DLC was a miracle.
Morrowind was a miracle. It feels hard to believe he was project leader on that when you look at so many other things he was responsible. Sure, he wasn't alone for morrowind, LeFay and Peterson were there still and I imagine he had fewer yes men, but there's so much contrast.
Todd absolutely has never "worked on 2 dozen products at once" they don't even have a dozen projects total in the past 20 years
Todd is the reason we know never to trust anything BGS say.
Bethesda needs a new writing team getting rid of tod will do nothing he's just the face
Exactly, Emil Pagliarulo needs to go and replaced by talented writers who actually knows what they're doing.
They need much more than just a new writing team XD!
Emil must go!
They havent even had a proper writing team since Morrowind or Oblivion. Todd said it himself at one of their tech conventions, I wish I remember the one. They have their level designers write stories and then they all get stitched together. Email just dashes out a quick high level plot. Thats it. Their actual story / lore / vision guys are long since gone. Skyrim might have been their peak but arrived at a good place mostly because of momentum.
Get rid of Emil and Todd, get rid of the rest of the lazy activist staff, get Chris Avalone in there, and sever the connection between Microsoft and Bethesda, which is also going to ruin them.
It's pretty ironic that Bethesda's first ever vehicle is a buggy
Wasnt the first vehicle a spaceship?
I always thought Todd wasn't the worst of the villains. He just became too corporate at one point. I remember him during Skyrim days, he was more of a vision-guy than a boring money-man he is now.
After Altman died he's basically his replacement and Emil Pagliarulo is Todd's replacement. Bad choices all over the place.
Todd howard was always like this. He was never a creator, he is a business man. He graduated as a business man and worked in marketing.
He was always like this, the tendency of dumbing down to the core basics is seen since morrowind onward. The problem was they disneyfied and mainstreamed themselves but never innovated and so starfield plays like a skyrim game with little to no improvements after 12 years.
@@Vert_GreenHeart Emil is...oh boy I don't think that guy should be anywhere near game design, storyboarding or scripting. He's a big part of why Starfield is not good, even by Bethesda standards.
@@danielsh8984 Except you're objectively wrong lol
I like games where you wander around and check every nook and cranny only to find interesting little things tucked away in there. That part of exploration is what I find fun.
It would be nice if Bethesda would put Sven’s speech about making fun games on a loop at corporate.
13:30 real player freedom is the freedom to make mistakes and realize later you can't do something and now have a reason to either reload or, better yet, replay and make more mistakes, er I mean, decisions, more decisions...
The Fallout series was never meant to be an online experience.
It was never meant to be a Bethesda experience...
The tech isnt the problem... It's the overall paint by the numbers design... It's the games story and stale engine...they need to throw it away and start from scratch.. it's not like they are broke...
Todd is always around to accept awards he had no part in earning
I was surprised when I found out the level/world designers are the same people as the writers, they need to act like the big studio they are and hire a separate writer departement.
Ideally, the team behind Morrowind.
Ken Rolston bounced after Todd's changes to Oblivion. That dude was a Bethesda OG, and even wrote modules for D&D 1st edition.
I would have liked to have seen a TES where he stayed at the helm instead of getting sidelined after Morrowind.
I do not want a fantasy world simulator. I want an action adventure open world RPG. You know, the entire point of Bethesda.
Fantasy world simulator and action adventure open world RPG aren't mutually exclusive.
If you played daggerfall you would disagree
The moment I realized Starfield was shit was the quest where you track a fugitive to a hospital and have to gain access to the intensive care wing. And you get in there and immediately start finding corpses and blood trails. Eventually you track down the fugitive and do what you do. But afterward, when you go back out into the main part of the hospital, everybody's acting like nothing happened. No alarms going off, no security guards rushing to intensive care, nobody panicking. Not even an option to tell anybody what happened. 😩
10:45 2 dozen projects is a lie. beth puts games out once a decade. there arent 2 dozen projects even at the studio
In classic Bethesda fashion, I reckon Nesmith doesn't know what "dozen" means. He just threw it in there, thinking it's synonymous with "a couple", as in four, at most.
They released quite a bit of mobile games so it still not as much but more then 1 game a decade.
Artwork team projects, design team projects, coding team projects, could easily be dozens if you itemize like that for any given title.
This could be "developer speak" where a "project" isn't a game - but it's a questline project. There are multiple small teams working on individual quests in a game. These are projects requiring stories, assets, animations, etc.
Keep in mind that Bethesda is also a producer and Todd is involved in that part too. Bethesda was involved in the release of 9 games in 2023/2024 so definitely more than once a decade. They have 5 official projects in the works, and probably a lot more that aren't yet official. Seeing how long most of their projects are taking, and that they released 9 games in the last 2 years, i wouldn't be surprised if they currently have a dozen projects, but probably not 2.
Emil is totally worse
And with the timeline of fo4-76-starfield, it is likely tes6 is shit too; at least very mediocre
Fo5 wont matter unless there is a drastic change in bethesda
All of us are too old to care that much for mediocre fallout slop; and normies will temporarily gobble that shit up
I feel like Todd has had an issue with space games ever since Outer Worlds blew Fallout's release out of the water, which is what caused his fixation on wanting to "one up" and make Starfield a "better" space game. Meantime he is so out of touch with what modern gamers want he REALLY needs to stop having input and just stick to doing the PR and being the frontman for interviews and stuff.
Even Obsidian are cooked tbh. If Todd isn't directing then it falls to Emil Pagliarulo and he is 10 times worse than Todd.
Todd may just be a figurehead, but he is a lying snake
Yeah, but at least he gave us microtransactions with the Oblivion Horse Armor. 🤑 He'll be remembered more for that than Skyrim.
They have lost all ambition. I swear Skyrim is the worst thing to happen to Bethesda. They think they can just replicate the same game in different scenarios and we’ll be happy.
It's a double edged sword
Hopefully they pull off another Morrowind, Morrowind was made when Bethesda was on the brink of shutting down forcing them to put they’re all into it. Don’t buy anything Bethesda until they provide a good game.
They went from a company focused on making great games to a company focused on making money.
honestly i would be happy? they didn't replicate skyrim at all unfortunately...
They've been trying to make Skyrim-game since Daggerfall. It's their magnum opus.
With both Kirkbride and Kuhlman gone from Bethesda and Emil in charge of writing, I have no faith in Elder Scrolls 6
Todd used to be an in-touch gaming guy like you, but then he took an arrow to the knee.
In my opinion Bethesda had three major problems Pete Hines, Todd Howard, and Emil Pagliarulo. Pete Hines retired. So you would think that would just leave two problems but no. They got a new boss, Phil Spencer. Who is pushing Identity Politics into all the Game Studios under him.
Identity Politics isn't the reason Starfield falls apart quickly
@@mastersmurfify But that shit is a cancer that has rotted everything it has ever been forced into. It's only a matter of time before it eats away enough substance to ruin a title, this has proven true all across this industry and others. If you don't nip it in the bud, it will ruin shit.
It not one or three problems, it’s however many new hires problem. See, Bethesda doesn’t HAVE a Todd problem it HAD a Todd problem. Then Todd hired people like him, and it’s now a much bigger problem. Most of the devs that made ES3-ES5 and FO3 are gone. They have retired or moved on. The devs at Bethesda are the ones that gave us Starfield with big old smiles on their faces, fully believing they had created the ultimate SciFi rpg space game and would sweep the game awards. They in turn are backed up by the devs that created the FO4 Next Gen update, that came late, fixed basically nothing, broke just about everything (both mod wise and game wise) and sit have yet to fix it.
This is the Bethesda of this generation folks. It’s not going away, even if Todd retires or is replaced tomorrow. It will take years with a dedicated ceo and hiring team working together to fix the company. And with how Microsoft is, I don’t see that happening any time soon.
And part of the problem is the same issue Microsoft has with windows. The engine is so old, and they went without a dedicated team of engineers to maintain and upgrade it, combined, again with the loss of almost the entire dev team responsible for ES3-5 and FO3, and now no one knows how to fix anything. It also almost certainly one of the big reasons that Bethesda, even with it’s decently sized team (of new untested talent fresh from college and only trained on a few new engines) take so long to make games, DLCs, updates, and patches. The whole company has become a joke.
@@mastersmurfify Its part of it, not because its bad to include it but its bad to force people to include it that arent passionate and willing to tell a good story with it especially with Emil as a writer which is talentless, also it impacts the hiring practices of company where people get hired based on their identity rather then passion and accomplishment.
Bethesda should simply hire every Skyrim modder. The game would release bug free and look much better, than it will without them. The only reason why they don't hire them is, because they're banking on the modders to do this stuff for free, after the release. Well... that worked out greatly for Starfield, where modders said "nah this is not worth it".
I’m pretty sure a lot of skyrim modders worked on starfield at bethesda
He won't do it because he knows the modders can create a better game than he can these days. Why do you think he sabotaged Fallout: London. Pride, ego, greed, power, and deep down knows he's not as creative as people think he is. He's the cheerleader for Bethesda. He's also the megalomaniac who just dictates his will to the rest of the peons. I'm done with Bethesda. When they sold out to Microsoft when they clearly didn't need to, they've gotten their last nickel out of me.
@@williamyoung9401 Well guess it's time to watch the HonestCon video for the 5th time, because it's the absolute best content that starfield ever created 🤣 search for this and you will 100% thank me ^^ -> Todd Howard Unveils The Truth About Starfield In An Honest Conference
and yet there are so many very good paid creations so that the modders get a reward for their efforts
Skyrim was miles wide and inches deep, it thrives only because it was so fresh that the community rushed to save it with mods. In 2025 Skyrim thrives only as a mod simulator with better original voice acting.
TES six will only survive if the modding community flocks to it, and with how much effort they put into Skyrim they probably won't. Skyblivion, and Beyond Skyrim are arguably more anticipated than the sixth game because the longer we wait the more we see Skyrims cracks in comparison to oblivion.
With every new game in Bethesda there is more 16 times the toxic positivity.
In some way Todd Howard is the personification of Bethesda
Smaller and less impressive than you remember?
Climbing a procedurally generated mountain to find some procedurally generated loot in a copy-pasted location is not as fun as it was when everything was hand-made. So even though I could fly to that planet and climb that mountain I just won't. Because it's boring.
I've been saying this for the better half of a decade. Took people long enough to come to this realization, please force todd out of the picture into retirement the man has no good reason to be in games industry anymore, that said please whoever you replace him with let them not be a crazy leftist who just makes things worse. need actual good story telling not the incessant over recited rhetoric these idiots have been putting into games the last few years and reallllly doubling down this year with so many flops because of woke ideology shoved into games
Forcing the creation and continuation of FO76 really made me hate his narrow vision
Skyrim had a massive living map with next to no loading screens outside of entering caves and towns.
Starfield did not copy this at all
massive EMPTY map with nothing worth time to do stuffed with boring and ultra repetitive dungeons that kill any potential joy from playing
"It's evolving, just backwards"
And New Vegas had 4 loading screens just to walk to the other end of the "strip" lol
@@ryszakowy it wasnt empty lmfao. u can tell this person hasnt played any skyrim. you can literally walk in any direction and find tons of things to do, spend hundreds of hours playing and never even touch the main quest. dont listen to this loser
@@ctg4818that was because of the damn engine they were forced to use. It was originally designed to be one space but the engine couldn't handle it.
What Michael Kirkbride did about showing an extra weird monster only for it to be rejected and then a weird but less weird monster, for it to be accepted, is common practice in all kinds of jobs where your boss is an idiot. If you want something to be approved, don't present that thing, present a superior version of it. Idiot bosses will never accept the first thing you show them because they think the first thing was the easiest thing, and therefore you didn't work enough, so you need to work harder (they think), and show a new thing. That second thing will be accepted as long as it's not better that the first.
Todd Howard is the guy who became famous in high school for coming up with a catchphrase and has done nothing more than repeat it ad nauseam and here he is 20 years later still saying it with an occasional different tone to try and make it sound interesting or cool again
1:10 I think the problem is that Todd is a bit short-sighted.
🤣🤣 OMG 😂😂
Just a bit?
Todd and Emil are perfect examples of the old adage that good employees will be promoted until they are no longer good employees.
Todd is an exceptional coder. He's the man who got Morrowind to work on the Xbox original and Oblivion on the 360, both of which are considered technological marvels given the limitations of both consoles. He's also an incredibly hard worker and multi-talented in the design space. Whenever another team was overworked and doing crunch in Morrowind, he would pitch in, writing minor quests, doing sound design, etc
Emil is an excellent game designer. More specifically, the "play area" of games, such as dungeons. He's responsible for many of the levels in Thief and the assassination quests in Oblivion.
You know what these two people are doing today? Todd is now a VP and executive producer who does very little actual game design outside of broad ideas and yes/no'ing the developers. He got to this point because he, as a hard worker who was talented in multiple areas, was promoted to project lead. From project lead he became VP. Emil is the lead writer. He does little level design, and mostly does lore and quest writing. He got to this point because Bethesda, during the Morrowind years, was understaffed and teetering on bankruptcy, so quest/level designers also had to write the story that was to be associated with his work. So he went from level designer to quest designer to main quest writer to head writer.
And that leaves us where we are today. Todd, who would working miracles coding the same is doing marketing and events, and Emil who should be making dungeons and great set pieces is writing shitty stories.
It's just such a shame.
Where is that technological leap? It feels like they're going backwards and devolving in real time.
You see it with some of their combat & gameplay systems but its the problem of that leap is still dated compared to competitors on the market. And then yeah there's certain areas that just feel like they havent been touched in 20 years.
The fact is that you need crazy creatives like Kirkbride to make things interesting. And you need the company structure to allow for it so seep through. The studio isn't so small anymore that the 36 lessons of Vivek could be aired out over the lunch table. More likely the idea would have to be brought up in a production meeting with middle-management.. and nothing would come of it.
Skyrim was great, Skyrim was an 8/10. The problems all started to arise post-Skyrim: the Creation Club, the MMO-ification, stramlining even more and putting rubber bumpers on anything. Playing Skyrim, even thousands of hours in, still felt like an adventure. ESO, FO76, Starfield... They all felt like theme parks.
I think you miss understand why people didn't like Starfield. You seem to believe that people didn't like Starfield because it was too much like Skyrim. But truth is people would of loved the game if it was more Skyrim. It was the Exploration in Skyrim that people loved, the fact that you could pick a direction and run into really cool quests and content but you never got that feeling in Starfield.
And while a new game engine would be nice, it's not the main issue with Starfield. Give me a RPG where it feels like my choices are dramatically effecting the story and the game world and I will be happy.
"Would of" really?
I hate this debate. Skyrim is ancient. Please give it to me again with other skins and stories, it doesn't have to be pretty, it can be the same nightmarish clusterfuck for my inventory. Just give me another Elderscrolls game already goddarnit!
Skyrim is not a good game for todays standard the competition of rpgs is just so much better games like bg3, witcher 3, cyberpunk etc are just superior in every way. The formula of morrowind is too dated for current gaming climat. Its the same case as in ubislop formula that is dated and they did worse job implementing it as well in newer games.
Never should of come here!
@@sgnox7781 Disagree completely Skyrim still holds up and fits between those other games you listed.
This is why I'm massively looking forward to two project. The first being "The Wayward Realms" by Once Lost Games. AKA the true Bethesda veterans who build Elder Scroll 1, 2, 3, and some of Oblivion. Who show to be working on mind breaking new systems. Along with that Skyblivion. I want to see that destroy Oblivion remaster
your a fool if you think they will let skyblivion live if they are doing an oblivion remaster
Agreed
End of the day, Bethesda has become bloated organisationally. So meetings to schedule meetings to prepare for meetings is pilling up the time spent. To request actions outside your own particular team for you to continue to do your work may take weeks. Bottlenecks in production. Bethesda is just fat. This is where the head needs to reassess the organisation efficiently and start to swing the axe. More people doesn't mean more efficiency. Taking more than 15 years to make a game is a red flag.
Todd sold out to Mircosoft and now he's planning his retirement.
Rich people like that can retire whenever.
And what of all the corporate monstrosities that bought out Bethesda before Microsoft? Todd was always on his knees servicing shareholders. I don't see much has changed since he's now owned by Microsoft other than he has to service more shareholders before he can actually do any work.
Why does someone with $150 million (the personal deal he made with Microsoft) need to plan anything?
@@williamyoung9401 Ego. Todd is going to have a horrible time watching every franchise he's worked on get critical acclaim when he's gone.
7:33 If I were Christopher Nolan I would sue for deformation
*defamation
@@JTSuter kinda funnier with the typo
@@bchin4005 yeah, in hindsight I agree
Unfortunately I'm not looking forward to ES6 any more 😢 I know it won't be what we thought/hoped it would be. I'm still hopeful but not excited atm🤷🏾♂️
Todd overpromoted people who had no right being in positions they were in. Emil, for example. Dude was an environment designer… but Todd promoted him cause he wanted to look after his friends. Bethesda have been fucked since Skyrim.