Hear me out, Bethesda hasn’t made a really successful game since Skyrim. their new overlords are more than happy to shuffle them around, and who’s to say Todd Howard won’t retire after TES6 is launched?
I’m seeing a lot of parallels to Bioware, with game after game not doing as hot as the previous ones, and XBOX being very trigger happy with axing studios that aren’t pulling their weight, similar to EA.
It’s possible TES6, if it releases, will be the make it or break it of the company.
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No, I don’t. There’s far too much value in Elder Scrolls and Fallout. Fallout has a very successful Amazon show, and Wolfenstein has an upcoming Amazon show. Obsidian, with the reputation of being the development studio who makes a better Fallout, has now been bundled in with Bethesda to work on Fallout. If you ask me, I don’t think they’re anywhere near closing down, but they sure seem to be boxed up with a bow on it to be sold to Amazon.
Not yet.
Microsoft usually squeezes out a couple games in their studio purchases before dumping them. What we’ll probably see is them push for a fallout game being worked alongside TES6 to capitalize on the TV show’s success. Quality may suffer with that split attention from a studio used to doing one monolithic game at a time
Not unless they’re owned by Microslop
um Microsoft owns XBOX which owns Bethesda?
I probably should’ve marked that with /s
There’s probably a AAA crash coming. Bethesda probably gets shutdown then. What I don’t know is if that crash will happen before they release another game. I wouldn’t be surprised if MS leaves the gaming market entirely with the crash.
Bethesda does not belong to EA so it‘s not as likely. EA will likely go before Bethesda does.
Microsoft has an equally appalling graveyard of studios it bought up and did nothing with, in its history
Yeah but EA is toast. Like actually done. They did not survive Saudi deal and the debt they were loaded with. Every studio of theirs will be closed and all IPs sold shortly.
XBOX shuttered Arkane and other studios already. they’re in cost cutting mode.
That‘s completely different from seizing to exist, though. EA got murdered from the inside in the dirty Saudi deal. Microsoft is in a completely different position so comparing Bioware with Bethesda is nonsense.
No, Bioware was sold off by the founders to a private equity firm who eventually sold them off to EA, a company who even then was notorious for shutting game studios down arbitrarily. A sports game company that killed game companies for less, they were always an odd fit and the fact EA kept them for as long as they did was an anomaly.
Bethesda ownership wise and structurally speaking has remained the same from it’s peak till today. They have plenty of more flops to give and probably won’t care or learn from their mistakes like Bioware because of how unique Bioware’s situation was.
Microsoft is also pretty notorious for shutting down development studios they’ve bought up and let sit around without doing anything with them.
they are owned by XBOX tho, sure internally it’s the same but externally it needs to make them money, and even Arkane wasn’t safe from getting axed in spite of the good games.
imo, todd will get a chance, or two, if he’s lucky.
another skyrim-something-ai-edition from him and that’s a chance down the drain.
The old jank engine is honestly pretty good for atmospheric storytelling.
Sure, Cyberpunk is shiny and all, but there’s something about Bethesda.
Idk how to explain, corpses in Fallout never despawn. That item you hid in the bush? it’s still there 300h later. It has a certain persistence that isn’t that common.
It can also feel stale real quick though.
Especially when you get into janky bugs.
But all this needs an interesting premise, story and vision.I don’t have much hopes for whatever they release next.
Nor from any AAA.
Games is art and art is incompatible with the corpo mindset of most game companies these days.I’d rather play something that was made with passion than with greed.
I don’t disagree, I actually mod Skyrim in my free time, but that doesn’t make the games successful. Starfield basically flopped, and made many fans lose excitement for a new Bethesda game.
Idk how to explain, corpses in Fallout never despawn. That item you hid in the bush? it’s still there 300h later. It has a certain persistence that isn’t that common.
That’s not necessarily a good thing world building wise, I’d certainly expect bodies to eventually get eaten / buried / rot for example.
Agreed, but less so than corpses disappearing under eyes.
Like how RDR2 does it with animal carcasses.
it takes 30d in game for cells to reset fyi
This might be controversial but Todd has to go. His ego has gone to his head and progress has stifled under his tenure.
- Diablo
- Overwatch
- The Elder Scrolls
- Fallout
- Starfield
I think they are safe.
Diablo and Overwatch are Blizzard, not Bethesda.
Fallout 4 was okay, 76 was an abject disappointment that was somewhat clawed back into the light, for all 12 people who still play it.
Starfield was a disappointment full stop, which never recovered itself.
I don’t think Bethesda is in trouble, but it isn’t because of their game quality. It’s because they’re going to market ES6 with an amount of money comparable to the GDP of Germany, and the average person who played Skyrim will buy it, because everyone and their mother and their mother’s dog played Skyrim for some reason. They’ve re-released Skyrim 8 times and made money every time. It’s a household name.
Get rid of Todd Howard and we might have a chance of seeing them make a half decent game again, but it’s not going to be this one, because they have no need to make a half decent game when they can ride on their own coattails into the sunset. Every person who has ever held a controller has heard of Elder Scrolls now, half of them will buy the new one sight unseen, and Bethesda is banking on that heavily.
Get rid of Todd Howard and we might have a chance of seeing them make a half decent game again
I’m actually not so sure if Todd is the problem. I think it’s under Microsoft, that is the bad influence.
Todd moved into a leadership role around the time of the development of Oblivion and his fingerprints have been visible on it since then.
One thing that comes to mind specifically, and this isn’t game breaking, really, but I think it neatly illustrates the larger problem -
You ever notice coming from Morrowind to Oblivion that Oblivion has about a quarter or less of the actual story and dialogue that Morrowind had? This was, if I recall correctly (and I might not, it’s been a while) a Todd decision. This happened because voice acted dialogue was considered a hard requirement for Oblivion to have, except… they didn’t have enough space on the disk to actually hold all of these audio files and still have a decent amount of game. So a lot of the dialogue and nuance was cut completely, dumbing down the entire game by a significant degree. NPC’s now only have a half dozen lines or so apiece, with the exception of (some) main quest NPC’s, because of this design decision.
If you want to know more about this, I’ll recommend you this heckin’ chonker of a video from PatricianTV (it’s literally 12 hours long, that’s not a joke, be warned) which goes over the game itself in pretty obsessive detail but more importantly pulls back the curtain on a lot of the development cycle.
To be clear, I don’t think that Todd is the entirety of the problem at Bethesda. But I do get the impression that he’s a significant blocker to forward progress. He has to go first, before the rest of the studio can start to regroup and recover.
Same guy also has an 18 hour long Skyrim retrospective in the same style that goes into a lot of Todd’s further antics post-Oblivion.
Fuck, what I was thinking (the fuck is toward myself, not you, just clarification), kind of embarrassing. I just had the image in my head that Diablo and Overwatch was by Bethesda, which makes no sense, but I got confused. But my point stands anyway, as the other games are enough to secure Bethesda.
They banked really hard on Starfield being the game that’ll determine how things will go for them. Starfield ended up not being that good of a reception because it was simply overhyped. Now everyone’s expectations on TES VI and Fallout 5 are all but lukewarm because they’re expecting more of the same which is Bethesda’s model.
But really, Starfield was that game for Bethesda and it under-delivered.
simply overhyped.
Wasn’t it also just not very good? Plenty of games were overhyped or rushed then their rep picked up after people’s expectations leveled off, or the game was patched.
I barely ever hear about starfield, and when i do it’s only about why it’s not good.
Its good enough to spend time moaning about it not being great.
It has two or three issues, and the problem is theyre buried so deep in the design they compromise everything and are essentially unfixable.
The art, setting, bespoke quests are all great. Even the gunplay really, which is a shock but its honestly fun.
Ship building is possibly the best ship design system ever made. And its completely pointless, you will never see the inside of the ship as you teleport to PoIs and barely see the outside.
Inventory management is hell. Building your own mining base depends on very large inventory usage. And the reward is more materials for your inventory to do upgrades to weapons and armour you barely need.
The environmental damage system is incomprehensible so luckily it almost never matters. You take damage breathing in your sealed space suit?? Ridiculous.
The skill system does not feel good, all it can do is unlock stuff above that doesnt feel like it really matters, or gives more inventory management nonsense; or give incremental improvements to damage etc that do not feel good.
And the kicker, Skyrim draws you in by promising and delivering more and more new places to explore and once thats replaced with random pois the entire game collapses around it. When exploring feels pointless the entire game feels pointless.
I really liked Starfield and I played it for about 250 hours, multiple new game plus runs and all. It is not a bad game, I liked the characters and the story and especially the world with its near future NASA-punk setting. And yes, such a setting means that most of space is boring and that travel between planets (or even stars) in real time would take ages, very boring ages with nothing other then darkness around them. So the gravity jump mechanic and the focus on events around planets was only logical.
The big problem that Starfield had was that so many people had the idea or the fantasy that Starfield would be a game that it a) never was and that b) Bethesda never said that it would be.
I play, and I mod and create mods for, games with versions of the creation engine for over 20 years now, I began with Morrowind back then, and I have a very good idea and understanding of how the engine works and where its powers and limitations are, maybe that’s why the picture that I had from the game was very close to what the game delivered (loading screens and all) and why I was able to had (and still have) so much fun with the game. There was no huge hype cliff based on wishes and imagination that I could fall down from.
Starfield could’ve been amazing - just like how well Cyberpunk 2077 or No Man’s Sky turned out. But that would’ve required Bethesda committing to long term QoL updates, DLCs, etc., for little to no profit.
Exactly, if Bethesda had put half of the effort CD Project Red and Hello Games put into fixing their games, they could have polished Starfield into a great game. The potential is there, it has some interesting ideas, it just has some very rough edges.
The way they just abandoned it vs how CD Project Red keeps releasing “final final final” updates to Cyberpunk like they still have something prove shows the huge gap between both studios culture.
Not any time soon, simply because TES6 is too far along in development to pull the plug, costs have already been sunk. And it’s impossible to predict the future after TES6 because that entirely depends on how well the game does.
Its going to move numbers. Serious numbers. No matter how good or bad it is. Its right behind GTA and COD in terms of guaranteed success.
I already know my reaction when it comes out. Really happy we have new TES. Really enjoy making character. Get overwhelmed by overworld and scared off most of the experience. Be disappointed that it wasnt better. Play it on and off for a whole decade anyway. (This entire list remains true if its an ET-level turd or the unquestionable game of the century)
It’s possible TES6, if it releases, will be the make it or break it of the company.
Yes. The last good game they made was Fallout 4 and it’s 11 years old.
That’s the rose color of a decade creeping in in you. I like fallout 4 but, like skyrim before it, it’s a bad game in its franchise. Both of them dramatically oversimplified their RPG format to make room for graphical fidelity what wasn’t even particularly impressive compared to their contemporaries. Nobody is obsessed with New Vega for it’s cinematic FPS experience, they’re fans because they can immerse themselves in the rich narrative of Cheezboi McShwiftey, the jet addicted robosexual on his quest to bear-bull a hole through Ulysses before Fisto starts to wonder if he’s got competition.
11 years later and the first thing everyone does is tell Preston and Shaun to fuck off and let them enjoy their mod collection in peace. There’s not a fallout player in the world that wouldn’t immediately stuff baby shaun in a fat man pointed at Strong’s open mouth if it meant they’d get a wholly different game out of it.
that’s the thing, I tried to avoid using “good” and instead went for “successful”. Skyrim is a lesser game than its predecessors but it still made them a lot of money.
I wouldn’t say that Fallout 4 wasn’t a success, its first week sales outpaced Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Fallout New Vegas. It just has less of a cult following conpared to the previous Fallouts.
Still, it’s been 11 years…
The only games to come out since then are Fallout 76 and Starfield. Here’s hoping they learned from the blunders that accompanied each of those.
financially not a loss but how many years can a studio coast on that money and glory before someone asks them to do their job and make more money?
what blunder was starfield?
Hi todd
I pirated it and still felt like demanding a refund.
It goes out of its way to make itself not fun.
the writing was poor, and for a space sandbox it was really missing a lot of the space navigation and sandbox. they recently increased the number of POIs (points of interest) on maps, but I’m not sure that’s enough to salvage it.
I’d say the blunder was them really just staying the course. Starfield isn’t a bad game, it’s just not ground breaking (which is what everyone was expecting). I think the ship building was probably the most fun I had in a Bethesda title for a long time, but it wasn’t the focus of the game.
Your comment makes so much sense. I had a lot of fun with my playthrough and was wondering why it got so much hate. I also had zero expectations going in. So maybe the disappointment was a big part of the hate? It’s a fun game at least for a single playthrough. I haven’t done follow-up playthroughs though. And I agree that ship building was great, genuinely one of the best parts of a recent game to me.
Yeah, I thought that Starfield was fine as a game. There are some things I dislike about it, but that’s also true of all their past games too. I had plenty of good hours in it.
That being said, relative to its time, it wasn’t as impactful as the mainline Fallout games.
I sat down to try to figure out the people who were really upset about it, because it’s rare for my opinion to diverge that much from many people. There were a couple “groups”:
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Some people apparently expected it to be a space combat flight sim and were really disappointed in that. On one hand, I get how one could feel that way if one had that expectation. On the hand, I have a hard time figuring out how someone winds up with that expectation. I saw someone disparaging calling it “Skyrim in space”, which…was kind of what I was expecting, but clearly not what they did. I do think that there’s a market for space opera combat flight sims, as evidenced by the amount of money that people have thrown at Star Citizen.
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I found one comment on Reddit about someone on YouTube who had a really good hour-long review listing all of the problems. IIRC, “Synthetic Man” was the reviewer. I went and watched it. There were a couple of complaints. One was around the fact that he liked killing a lot of people in Fallout and was upset that Starfield had a lot more major plot people marked essential, to avoid breaking plotlines. Okay, I don’t personally go around killing a lot of major plot characters, but I guess if someone did, it could be frustrating, feel like you’re “on rails”. He felt that Fallout’s world was unique, had an unusual world, whereas Starfield was “generic sci-fi” a lot like the present day. Okay, I guess I could see that, though I have also seen a lot of people criticize the world-building in the later Fallout games as being just a nod to concepts introduced in the first two, that the real world-building happened there. But most of his complaints were kinda of the hard-right variety. Like, he was pissed that women were in authority positions (“of course the President is a woman”). He was angry that there were a lot of non-white people doing things lile running the military, and that there were so many of them. Now, okay, that was kinda distasteful to me, and I was thinking about commenting how you’d expect that in a society with more population movement and such, but it did sorta make me think more deeply about why people liked the Fallout series. Fallout—I believe that the name is something of a pun, refers not just to the radioacrive fallout, but to the social fallout, what a post-apocalyptic society would look like—is kinda a prepper fantasy. Like, society breaks down, and most people die, and the people who come out on top are those who are armed and have the will to change the world. I think that a lot of the appeal of prepping is maybe because it lets people fantasize about a world where there’s a social reset, and the things that make people important or influential in the current world go away and they’re a lot more prominent or relatively better off. And I think that maybe applies to a lot of different things. Marx called religion the “opium of the masses”—you can believe that things that you find unjust in the current world don’t matter. People die and there’s an afterlife and all the unrighteous are punished and the believers—you—are the ones on top. I think that a lot of the appeal of many things is enabling a fantasy like that. But, okay, to stay on track…from that perspective, Fallout was really appealing to some people because it created a fantasy world that they liked imagining themselves in. Starfield didn’t—it imagined a more-or-less progressive extension of our current world. One of the cardinal sins I think a media series can do is to try to change up its demographic. Liie, once you build a userbase, you want to make games that appeal to that userbase. It could be that the creators of the series had, perhaps unintentionally, built a world that had a lot of appeal to a demographic, and then unintentionally shifted it.
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Some people I saw didn’t like the procedurally-generated aspect of it. I think that the procedural aspect, which clearly soaked up a lot of resources, didn’t buy much gameplay. You had infinite planet surface, but no real reson to venture our over it. I think that for games to benefit from procedural generation, the way roguelikes and roguelites do, they really need to have the generated content change the way one plays. The only real “game” aspect to the terrain was finding an outpost location with multiple resources, which isn’t very interesting, or very rarely needing to traverse some more-difficult terrain. That is, the terrain was mostly just cosmetic. I think that what was needed was for the terrain to matter a lot more to gameplay. Maybe enemes act differently around it or utilize it or player abilities are tied to it so that it affects combat. Flip side is, though…while I don’t think that the terrain generation bought much, disn’t create much gameplay, I don’t see as how it hurt things much either. Not much reason to go on a trek through infinite terrain, but not as if you needed to, either.
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The main plot wasn’t great. Yeah, I do agree there. Bethesda had a history of dramatic openings, like Skyrim or Fallout 4. By comparison, Starfield had an underwhelming intro. The main questline was maybe one of the more-uninteresting questlines (though I remember people who didn’t like the main Fallout 4 questline too). I think that Bethesda heard that people liked exploring, by which they meant they liked walking around a handcrafted map full of handcrafted plot, and interpreted it as “I want exploration thematically”, which they didn’t. On the other hand, I don’t really think that the main questline was really the core appeal of Fallout or Elder Scrolls games either, so…shrugs.
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The star and field parts.
And the game parts
Good, sell the IP to Michael Kirkbride and let him cook.
Nah, do not sell it to him.
Give him full rights to adapt the story with full rights to any/all residual profits, and redirect his income to mandatory purchases of cocaine, mushrooms and booze so that when he writes the next games story it will light a fire in everyone’s minds brighter than anything that could possibly exist in our reality.
This dude seeks CHIM.
