Yesterday’s layoffs at Bethesda Games Studios were not a cut of “14 layers of management”. We lost dozens of programmers, artists, designers and testers. Many of whom worked at BGS for decades.
If Bethesda fans are worried this will harm the quality of our future games, like TES VI, let Microsoft know! One way you can do it is here through the XBOX Player Voice feedback platform: https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/69b8ec0b-7479-f111-9b47-6045bdbd0989
The Elder Scrolls VI has the same issue GTA VI has, getting over the hype. GTA VI likely will. I doubt The Elder Scrolls VI will. I mean, sure, it’ll sell, but will it be good? The last good Fallout game was New Vegas, and Todd Howard had nothing to do with it. They bought the IP, made one good one, licensed it out to Obsidian, then half-arsed the next one and still haven’t fixed game-breaking bugs that make the game impossible to complete (at least on Xbox).
They say Fallout 5 and The Elder Scrolls VI are coming, but with the way Fallout 76 and The Elder Scrolls Online are printing money, I have little hope for their single-player adventures. Then there’s Skyrim. They ported it to ARM64 for Switch, which is the platform all the phones use. But instead of putting Skyrim on iOS and Android (pro tip: if your phone is made after 2018, it’s most likely more powerful than a Switch; if it’s an iPhone and it came out in 2016 or later, it absolutely is), they made this free-to-play trash riddled with microtransactions. They still haven’t put Skyrim on iOS, Android, or macOS, despite having already ported it to the ARM64 platform they all use. Oh, and when they did put Skyrim on Switch, they didn’t include any of the bug fixes found and published by the community years earlier. They’re porting Fallout 4 to ARM64 for the Switch 2, so yes, your phone can probably run that, too. But they’re not going to do it (or macOS) because it wouldn’t make them enough money. This is Bethesda now. They aren’t focused on experiences, they’re focused on monetisation and microtransactions. And they’ve been this way for 10-15 years, before the Xbox acquisition. Bethesda is trash now, and has been for a long time.
Starfield was kind of their chance to prove that they still had it. The game shipped without a map function and a lot of things were broken. They patched exploits that made the purely single-player game easier, but steadfastly refused to fix bugs, despite running an official Discord community and soliciting bug reports from the community. They then made a ship-building contest with real-world prizes, but they patched out a glitch people were using to make ships look a little cooler, but they let the people they’d already pre-selected to win use those very same glitches. Like the guy in Fallout: New Vegas told you in the beginning, the game was rigged from the start. There were quests most people couldn’t complete and they just didn’t care. They added land vehicles to the game, but they were buggy. People didn’t get out of your way, and if you hit anybody, the whole settlement turned against you. Fair, I suppose, but the NPCs not reacting to the vehicle isn’t. Fine if you deploy on a planet without people, but it was given to you on that main planet where your team is located. And speaking of your team, they would all turn against you if you took out certain enemies. We (the testing community) were able to narrow down the problem, and they still didn’t fix it. That said, despite the game being a rubbish fire, I still beat it 10 times to maximise all the powers, and I enjoyed the hell out of the Vanguard and pirate quest lines (the latter of which gives you the best gun in the game). Some parts of it were really fun. But like anything else Bethesda made, breadth of an ocean, depth of a puddle of lukewarm piss out behind the pub, left by someone who cared more about Starfield than Todd Howard’s team did. (And yet, I still wanna replay a few of those quests.)