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.
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.
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.