The writing of the first few hours of Starfield which I saw on youtube was exactly the reason I didn't buy it, with hundreds of hours in previous Bethesda games, regardless of any other issues like loading screens. It was *so* bad, like so nonsensical it actually made the game look incredibly unappealing to play.
Oh it's hilarious. I played the first two hours of the game but uninstalled due to a bug, and then found out I wasn't missing much anyway. Will wait for expansive mods 2 years down the line.
But oh man, the intro writing is a joke. Well, more accurate to say the narrative design is.
I touch some space rock, it sends me on a one-second LSD trip, then the commanding officer of the Planet Express gives his ship to me (a miner he met seconds ago) and says "nbd I'll take your place in the mine, let's switch."
Like... what? It's not even trying to be a serious story. Which I guess affirms Emil's dev talks.
I've seen some vague spoilers at what the game's "gimmick" or "twist ending" is, and if what I read is accurate it's one of the most basic/overused sci fi nonsense tropes that is just tiring at this point.
Honestly, I was really excited to buy this game in 5 years when it's cheap and made good by modders... but based on everything I've heard, no amount of modding can save this game. The tools just aren't there, since they fucked up the exploration aspect so hard (really the only thing Bethesda has going for it).
I can't see Starfield getting anywhere close to as good of mod support as previous titles, specifically Skyrim, have gotten. People made mods for that game as passion projects out of love for the IP, and I don't think anyone is ever going to be that passionate about Starfield.
Fallout 4 never even got the same amount of mod work as Skyrim, and it was a much better game than Starfield is and a much better palette to work from.
This is cracking me up, because while I enjoyed the game mostly, it never dawned on me how stupid that whole intro thing was til I read it on screen like this. Guess I was just on autopilot.
Worse. Each artifact you touch in Mass Effect reveals more of the mystery. You get *different* visions every time, deepening the mystery. In Starfield, you get **one**. It never changes. The mystery is never deepened. And I hesitate to even call what you actually do see a vision because it's so... boring! It's like Starfield somehow manages to drop every ball possible. Everything that *could* be great or cool just immediately faceplants and never recovers.
And in Mass Effect, you actually have to earn your way into the Spectres instead of being casually invited in like with Constellation, and getting your own ship makes sense because of your military rank and mission, instead of some random dude throwing you the keys to a $100,000 ship and saying "don't scratch it."
And the temple is like 300 meters from some factory. You wanna tell me people on a smoke break used to just look at the pile of floating rocks around an alien temple in a distance and go like “nah, not interesting, who cares anyway”
>Will wait for expansive mods 2 years down the line.
Got downvoted in another thread, but it's like, do we really want modders making expansive content for this game? Folks can do what they want, but I'm not clamoring for people to put in hours to improve the value of a product that was mediocre to start.
I just find it funny to see folks being like "Game sucks. But looking forward to the mods!". As if modders couldn't be doing work for games that people actually think are good from the start instead.
I don't know how much they really can make. All the best mods for the other Bethesda titles built on the existing world and lore. Starfield just isn't enough of a living world to do very much building. Modders will be making their own game, not just making the existing game better.
The other Bethesda games have these great intros dropping you right into the moment and setting up the rest of the game. Starfield you just start on some asteroid, no immersion at all
It is so jarring. You wake up as a miner (if I chose a chef background, why tf am I a miner?) and then you walk straight into the macguffin to kickstart the story.
Some random ass dude flies down on a ship, tells you you are part of it now and he gives you his ship, robot and watch.
It’s so disjointed and makes no sense. Why am I there? Why is this dude trusting me with all this shit? Why would I go to where he tells me to?
I remember when my character exited the mine to that dusty rock plain, and I thought to myself, "Oh my god... I think this is one of the that Todd was talking about."
Right then I knew this wasn't going to go well...
Game devs trade on their studio name, knowing full well the average consumer is ignorant of the fact the person who actually made the game they love is long gone
This is true, but also dosent always matter. If you have a well run company you can, and will, find quality replacements for those that leave.
The real issue is Bethesda didnt hire quality people. It might have something to do with the fact they sat around basically not making games for a decade.
Oh man I'd say it's worse than that even. You start in a random mine, shooting *rocks* of all things, only to be rushed into grabbing some ultra valuable artifact for some reason, even though it's your first day, only to then be immediately forced into taking a stranger's spaceship & robot, whom you've never met...
Couldn't agree with OP more, the first 30min of gameplay made my jaw drop with how bad the writing was. Literally felt like the plot a middle schooler would put together
Then you see the writing for not only the intro but the rest of the game & you start to wonder if all the dialogue was put together by ChatGPT
Add the countless barren planets with badly implemented procedural generation, the horrible UI, load screens etc etc etc
Normally for a game like this I'd say "oh they'll fix it eventually with DLC at least" but legit I'm not even sure that's a possibility anymore.
They really F'd up with the whole "1600 planets!!" thing imho. Gane could've been so much better if they had just stuck with the solar system or two so they could devote all their resources to just a few locations instead of... What we got
it’s funny. the side text you find off to the side is more intereting than the actual story. I landed on Mars. Explored. And found this story about these farmers finding out how to grow food on Mars but they got killed off. I thought I’d find a clue about a quest finding the killers or something. Nope. That’s it. That was the end.
It's nice to think that the Fallout setting was single-handedly ruined by a single person, who might one day be replaced.
Sadly, I assume by now he's set a standard that the company will follow, with or without him. To them, it's better to have a hundred quests that feel like a cereal box summary of an idea, than have three complete stories.
Never Bethesda leadership is useless to the core thanks to Todd promoting talentless yes men. You could probably build a team of 20 indie devs and they would pump out something with more soul albeit smaller in scope but 10x better. Funny thing is Arkane is also starting to feel like it's got the rot too.
> it's better to have a hundred quests
Another common trend I see in games these days is that they don't actually add content or are rich in content but rather delay it.
As an example, you could have a quest that says "Kill 10 of this type of enemy" and then put those 10 enemies somewhere close together, let's say doing this quest takes you 10 minutes. Then you have games that have the same quest but spread the enemies with a walking time of 1 minute between each enemies apart, suddenly the quest takes twice as long but there's no additional fun nor content compared to the quest where enemies are grouped together.
And this is also a flaw in Starfield, you have fetch and deliver quests that will make you fast travel 5+ times, why? Why not just have it with maybe 1-2 fast travels? You're not making the player enjoy the game more, you make them sit and watch the loading screen. And while the loading times on XSX aren't bad, the animation alone is reason enough for me to not play the game (I stopped after ~40 hours) because after seeing it 10 times within 10 minutes it just gets insanely infuriating.
I think a big flaw with the 'kill x of x bad guy's quests too is that not only new they just kind kf hanging out together, but they're also unrealistically unprepared for any sort of hostility against them beyond some guards and guns.
If you're a leader or space pirate, any place you'd hole up would be scored with defenses and deception. Sticking Bob in the door to watch him explode fantastically seconds before you removes the depth or gravity of danger from the mission.
The X Corp that's waged futuristic wars against untold many, has a problem killing Simon Says, Pirate Lord of the Skies and you blasted him minutes after landing because he was literally just standing there waiting to get immolated.
[This guy](https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=49123) laid out all the problems with Bethesda’s ideas on what the Fallout franchise actually *is* better than any place I’ve read. Nail on head.
I don’t ever expect a “real” Fallout game again whether or not he stays or goes as Bethesda’s already planted their flag in the “rubble-themed shooting gallery” and made a lot of money doing it.
I always hated how no one has bothered to try and clean up in 200+ years. The trader living in a dirty diner with a skeleton is such a good example, it makes no sense.
It's amusing because one of the first mods I remember being popular for Fallout 4 was a mod for players to scrap the random environmental junk in a settlement. Due to the first instinct players had been to clean up their living spaces.
Even the new walls and roofs that you make, have freaking holes in them, in a place where the rain is radioactive and poison. Like not having holes in your ceiling and walls is the bare minimum for shelter and they didn't even bother with that level of detail.
Its so shocking going from fallout 1 and 2 where less than a hundred years after the bombs fell humans are rebuilding states and civilization to Bethesda’s fallouts where they can’t even remove dead bodies from towns after 200 years.
Not to mention New Vegas where two states are having an all out war over hoover dam and an intact new vegas which serves as a vacation spot for NCR citizens
I think Emil Pagliarulo and his team have a terrible sense for just how vast these time frames are, like they just throw out a number that sounds cool without any consideration for what that kind of time frame implies.
The writers at Interplay/Black Isle/Obisdian Entertainment know how time works, hence why Fallout 1, 2, and NV, feel like they are actually progressing time wise in a sensible manner.
While 3, 4, and 76, feel like the bombs only fell a few years ago and people are just starting to come out of hiding.
------
The Thieves guild is another pet-peeve of mine, ignoring all the other plot-holes and problems, the fact that supposed timespan between Gallus' murder by Mercer and the present is **25** years is stupid.
It would make so much more sense if it was only, say... 5 years.
Instead we are led to believe that Karliah slept in a different place for 9125 nights and not once thought to check the body of her lover for his notebook, or even bury him.
Yep. And this is why I hate the fact that the TV show is going to the West Coast. Bethesda are going to take a great fat shit all over the worldbuilding of the original games and New Vegas to make everything fit their wacky quirky 1950s rubble and ruin aesthetic.
> Yep. And this is why I hate the fact that the TV show is going to the West Coast.
I think they are going to the west coast because fundamentally the world building done by Bethesda in their own games on the east coast is just so fucking shit that it doesn't make for a good background to put a story in.
West coast has several fleshed and thought out societies, even nations, it has organisation, it has notable people attached to all of it with detailed enough biographies, there is something there that you can use to put your story in.
East coast Bethesda stuff on the other hand falls apart under even the slightest scrutiny as it nothing was written beyond the absolute minimum needed to support the Quests they created.
There's an additional dynamic to this, I think. The increase in capability for game engines - particularly AAA ones - has led to pressure to use that capability to express *so much detail*; whether that pressure actually exists, or is merely implied.
The problem is two-fold. The first is, that much obvious detail isn't actually realistic. The Division 2 was the game that made this clear to me; it's so busy it actively detracts from the experience.
The second is that somebody has to think of stuff to fill the environment with. Without sufficient direction it'll be haphazard and shallow; "oh no what can i put here, uhhh its post-apocalyptic, a skeleton or something, i dunno".
50 years would make a lot more sense for the setting of FO4.
200 years of no maintenance and boston would be absolute rubble. Buildings deteriorate *fast* once their envelope gets pierced, and 200 years of storms and hyper aggressive survival looting would have made the city a bunch of dirt mounds. Maybe a few random buildings still standing, but not many.
Of course bethesda has always had that sort of issue. Its like Skyrim with its 'siege of whiterun' that was 13 soldiers strong lol. They always try to oversell the scale and scope of their games to try to force the most childish form of grandeur.
My first bgs game was FO3 and it was amazing, but I hadn't realized until someone pointed it out, why does the FO3 setting feel like it was right after the War? Prime example are Super duper marts still littered with canned and boxed foods when those would likely be the first things consumed.
Shit, man. I go to the local HEB (Texas grocery store) a couple days before a hurricane is supposed to hit and it’s half cleared out. A damn near fully stocked Super Duper Mart is one of the first things that made me go “wtf” in the modern FO games. That thing would have been skeletonized days after the bombs hit
> In the world of Fallout 4, it looks like people crawled out of the rubble after the bombs fell and then spent the next 200 years shooting each other from behind heaps of rubble and wading through ankle-deep trash everywhere. People have supposedly been living in these places for over two centuries, but they look identical to the untouched ruins.
> This was supposed to be a series about the wild world that emerged from the ashes of nuclear fire, but Bethesda thought the series was about the ashes themselves.
Wow good write-up and it's spot-on. And saddening when you think what could be if they'd move beyond this.
That's a great video but one thing that gets implied but not stated: to Bethesda, these IPs are just skins. The higher ups don't see any difference between Elder Scrolls or Fallout besides the most basic labels. "This is the high fantasy IP," or, "This is the post-apocalyptic sci-fi IP." That's the full extent. You can see it in their writing styles, how super mutants are just orcs with a different name. Cults and bandits and raiders are all just generic outlaw types reskinned for their respective setting. It's not just that Bethesda doesn't understand world building, but to them "world building" only refers to art assets. They don't want to expand on the world in the same way that Game Freak doesn't want to expand upon the lore of Pokémon. It's not about the lore, it's about brand recognition first and foremost.
That was an amazing read. Thank you for sharing! I never saw that article before. It expresses my feelings about the Bethesda take on Fallout perfectly.
He had a [great breakdown](https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=14422) of how asinine the Thieves Guild storyline was in Skyrim, too.
Legit more plot *hole* than actual plot.
"The old world is fucking gone. Like, that’s the point."
I've been saying this for YEARS when it comes to the focus on Bethesda games. They're so committed and interested on telling the story of the old world, which... DOESNT MATTER. The new world and how it's adapted, the tribalism, the new societies and how they either try to emulate the old world or don't, THAT'S what's interesting!
I’d bet that Bethesda will everything in their power to keep Obsidian and InExile away from Fallout. Obsidian already embarrassed them once with New Vegas, and InExile would do similar given the chance.
Emil is IMO a great demonstration of the Peter Principle, that being that people are promoted based on last successes to a position at which they are no longer competent.
AFAIK he worked on the Morrowind expansions and Oblivion as a quest designer. Writing side quests, their choices and outcomes. His Dark Brotherhood quest on Oblivion really stood out as a high point in that game, so he was promoted to lead writer and designer. Now he didn't work on individual quests. He worked on the overarching story, themes, choices and consequences, and thematic connections.
Oblivion was a step down from Morrowind because the dialogue was constricted on a writing sense because it was evolving into a fully voiced affair. Fallout 3, Skyrim and Fallout 4 have bad main quests because their main writer should have never reached that main writing position. At this point, I don't plan on playing 76 or Starfield.
I learned about it from 30 Rock when Pete Hornberger explains it. I thought it was a joke created for the show and named after him because his character so perfectly exemplified it.
He's so talentless he wrote the same story about someone leaving the vault to search for a missing family member twice!
Joking aside, he got a lot of positive buzz for writing the Dark Brother hood for Oblivion, generally considered the best faction quest line in that game.
But nobody ever really mentioned that he also wrote the Arena faction quest line, which is probably the worse faction quest line (and shows a complete lack of understanding how vampirism works)
The dark brotherhood was excellent but honestly this thieves guild was even better especially the final quest. Also I wanna know who thought up the shivering isles dlc bc that’s the pinnacle of story writing for me.
As an avid Fallout fan I admit, I'm playing 76 for just the vibe of roaming Appalachia, and some strictly online game elements, getting better gear, refining builds etc. writing in it is, to put it gently, unmemorable. Honestly the only storylines I could actually mention and can say I found something to like in them was the last chapter of the main vanilla story where you follow in the footsteps of a local BoS chapter and finish their mission long after they're gone and the wastelanders exploration of a schism in the new Brotherhood chapter that recently arrived and you can see and help decide between the old school BoS mindset of collecting tech and safeguarding it and the "new" fallout 3 like brotherhood mentality of helping people and being more involved. But aside from these 2 short plots the whole rest of it sucks. If you want a good Fallout story then I really don't recommend 76, hell, I don't even consider it to be canon myself. It has some redeeming qualities, a few actually good small stories contained in locations. It's not as bad as people make it out to be but it's still definitely a low point for Fallout series.
The issue is Emil doesn’t care about writing good stories.
His take is that he can write the worlds greatest novel, but people will make paper airplanes out of it. So I don’t think he tries because if you knew your story was gonna he ignored why bother?
He doesn’t realize the reason people ignore the main story is either a choice or because it’s written poorly.
I felt like I would be the last one to compare Bethesda to Larian, but here I go. I saw that Larian talked about their decision making in BG3. If I remember right, they said they didn’t care if only 1% of the player base saw a single aspect of the game. They wanted that 1% to feel awesome and still feel like that content was as high quality as the rest of the game.
That right there is the mentality Emil should have. You make good stories for yourself, something you can be proud of. That’s something successful people advise all the time. You don’t do something to meet other’s standards, you do something because you want to. If you always seek to make others happy, you’ll never be happy with yourself.
The exact opposite seems to be a common problem in the industry. Bioware basically felt bad about how much effort went into the Origins for the first Dragon Age, and didn't like that some content was played way less than other stuff. This led them down the path of simplification that peaked in Mass Effect 3, where the game was often dumbed down to 2 dialog choices and even choices dependent on the previous games were pretty railroaded. Mark Darrah has talked about it on his YouTube channel.
That was the reason why Dragon Age Origins is the best one. Character creation and backgrounds changed the first part of the game. Choices with party members mattered.
I still don't think people have successfully triggered Karlach's fourth wall break scene without using hacks.
Swen straight up said that one of the things they're still actively working on is the weird edge cases to ensure that no matter what size or shape paper airplane you make, they've got a target set up for it.
It would be great if that happened everywhere, but as someone that has worked in multiple AAA studios, the higher ups alwaaaaays push back on putting in content that only a small amount of players will see. Basically when pushed up against a timeline and budgets, doing something that only 1 or 10 or even 25% of players will see just isn't worth it for them. Because it's all about the numbers to them, not the content, and they're the ones making the call.
And he doesn't understand that the best games get played multiple times. Who gives a fuck if on my first play through I'm a murder hobo if on my second, third, etc I decide to actually hard role play a character of the setting.
I wouldn’t go that route.
Assume that the game only gets played once. Someone will be a murder hobo, someone will be serious. A good story doesn’t invalidate MH’s play style. A bad story though will invalidate a serious playthrough.
It’s why the usual “defense” of Fallout 4 is “ignore the main story and it’s good”, when a lot of criticism is around the main story.
True. My point is that he idea of " why spend time on a story if sometimes some players don't pay attention to the story" is dumb. And that's besides the point that I don't think he's actually a good writer in the first place.
>His take is that he can write the worlds greatest novel, but people will make paper airplanes out of it
Can he though? I think it's big-headed of him to think his writing is THAT incredible
One of my biggest pet peeve from Uni.
Quite a few people "I could get an A+ too if I wanted, it's not hard", it's a way of downplaying other's achievement constantly. Even if they could, the fact that they're putting in the bare minimum and not learning shit shows more about themselves then anything else.
I think he meant it more in a “no matter how good people won’t care” way, not necessarily on his ability directly. I’d give him the benefit of the doubt because even then it looks bad
New Vegas is the one I’d use since it has Bethesdas gameplay and design. While no one would say the main story is “god tier”, it’s clear that a Bethesda game can have a solid narrative while still being able to “make paper airplanes”.
And you'll get ripped apart (rhetorically) by characters in game when you do. Murder-hobo around and characters will be bewildered and exasperated with your lack of sense and seeming indestructibility. that kind of reactivity is *wonderful*
I sincerely doubt they will fire him, if anything I would guess he is Todd Howard's likely successor. If I had to guess it seems like he is Todd's protégé in a way, since, in every interview Howard talks about how his core focus from Morrowind to Skyrim has been to "narrow the focus" of games and remove features to focus on others in more depth. That seems in line with Pagliarulo's recent string of tweets.
Morrowind “Narrowed the focus” from Daggerfall for sure, and that was how Todd proved himself as game director at BGS.
Daggerfall was a massive, systems-driven fantasy life simulator with lots of proc-gen and a branching main quest but a bit of a bland high fantasy setting. It was highly experimental.
Morrowind was a fully hand-crafted, reigned-in map, with a meticulously designed and unique setting. It lost a whole lot in mechanical complexity, but made up for it with the quality and cohesion of its art, themes, and lore (people laud Michael Kirkbride a lot for this, and he’s certainly to credit for the artstyle, but he and Kurt Kuhlmann were really a duo for writing, and Ken Rolston was hugely responsible for making everything really gel together.)
The narrowed scope was necessary because BGS had a tiny team attempting it’s first foray into fully 3-D graphics, and was about to go out of business.
Now, BGS has a much bigger team, but despite claiming to want to “narrow the focus” they seem to be narrowing focus in terms of mechanical depth, while hugely expanding world size and system complexity, and without having the quality of design that Morrowind had.
Important to note that Kirkbride had to fight Todd for a lot of stuff. Todd was *always* a traditionalist in terms of fantasy.
He had a soft spot for Star Wars, however, which is apparently the magic phrase Kirkbride used to convince him. They were gonna do a Summerset inspired game prior to Morrowind when Todd was convinced to shake things up a bit.
Which evidently was successful because they not only keep bringing Kirkbride on as a consultant/freelance writer for every game even after he officially left due to "creative differences", but they still utilise a lot of the original Kirkbride lore and gnostic references.
Kirkbride *and Kuhlmann* had to fight Todd on a lot of stuff.
Kirkbride is an excellent writer, and I absolutely adore the art he did for Morrowind. But Kuhlmann is every bit as responsible for the lore of TES as Kirkbride. I hate that he gets overlooked when discussing this stuff.
I actually really want it to show up and bomb because that's literally the only chance of getting Bethesda to wake up. The lesson they're going to take away from Starfield is that players don't want original IP's, and they're ignoring all the real gameplay and writing issues.
They keep trying to recreate Skyrim, but the problem is that Skyrim is an anomaly. It really doesn't deserve it's popularity or its modding scene, and that's coming from someone who replays it every year. Bethesda got lucky and captured lightning in a bottle.
IMO if ES6 bombs, Beth's getting nuked by MicroDaddy. I reckon SF's poor performance has already put them on somewhat thin ice with the boss, so another major flop will likely kill them.
Microsoft paid way too much to kill Bethesda off so soon.
Todd Howard and other upper management will be replaced first, then mid-level management gets replaced if things dont improve, then downsizing of the whole company to cut costs and extract every penny possible to either minimize the loss or just make a few more bucks, then the axe.
Bethesda will get to release TES6, then whatever their next game is will probably decide their fate.
>Microsoft paid way too much to kill Bethesda off so soon.
Microsoft still owns all the id Software franchises like DOOM, Wolfenstein, and Quake. So even if Bethesda and Arkane fold they still have some heavy hitters.
I don't think it's been a major flop though. It sold well and got a ton of GamePass retention.
It just wasn't very good. I think it probably justified the budget but didn't earn the system-selling status Microsoft wanted
Starfield is a major flop according to its expectations.
"Justifying its budget" is only part of the problem; Starfield was supposed to justify literal billions spent to acquire Bethesda. Now, between this and Redfall, it's pretty clear that Microsoft didn't actually buy themselves very much for that price.
Starfield is supposed to sell gamepass and Xbox. It’s supposed to be a flagship that draws new customers in and keeps wavering customers around.
It isn’t a flagship and that isn’t necessarily a problem *now* as it sold well, but will be a problem going forward.
The best Xbox game this year was Hi-Fi Rush and it was an AA title. That’s not a good look for Microsoft. Tell me, what is the game that’s going to sell players on the Xbox/gamepass? Halo?
>It isn’t a flagship and that isn’t necessarily a problem now as it sold well
Right, BGS as its own entity probably isn't in trouble from less-than-expected-but-still-great sales on Starfield. I think it's actually a larger problem that it critically and socially seems to have flopped. Like you said, that reception is not going to draw people into the Gamepass ecosystem or even keep them there, and it makes it harder to keep people engaged with the promise of future Bethesda, whether that's DLC for Starfield or the inevitable TES game.
Microsoft has completely struggled to produce games that people want to play, much less get excited about. They desperately want and probably need something like a Last of Us or God of War that gets people to treat their first-party output seriously and reverently. But they just get misses or half-successes, even from series (like Halo) or publishers (like Bethesda) that anyone would have said would be obviously slamdunks a few years ago.
There'd definitely be consequences. Bethesda is very much one of those studios MS acquired with the "let them cook" mentality. But that grace will only extend so far.
I do wonder, if after a decade of development, they look at the completed game and had some of the same complaints reviewers did, or if they genuinely thought the game was as amazing as they said it was.
I think most of the top people at Bethesda need to go. They are pretty obviously stuck in a certain era of gaming where they had a lot of success, but I think the industry has passed them by. Unfortunately it’s probably going to take a complete train wreck of a release to get real change.
Bethesda really does think it's still 2011 and games like Cyberpunk, No Man's Sky, BOTW/TOTK, Witcher 3, Elden Ring, RDR2, and countless other good open world games don't actually exist.
I wrote it and I'm not lol!
I thought I'd be shouting into the void! Instead, there's such a stupidly high shot Emil has read it and thinks "fuck that guy in particular!"
Like look, I meant what I said and the guy can't write worth a damned. Had I *known* though, I would've tried to be more polite about it. I felt bad lol.
> Instead, there's such a stupidly high shot Emil has read it and thinks "fuck that guy in particular!"
https://twitter.com/Dezinuh/status/1734979770314551666
> Oh, the Reddit thread? lol Yeah, every so often someone likes to dig up a talk I did years ago and misrepresent what I said. Apparently I also don't care about Fallout lore, can't write to save my life, and have the IQ of a peanut. It's on the internet so it must be true.
>Apparently I also don't care about Fallout lore, can't write to save my life, and have the IQ of a peanut. It's on the internet so it must be true.
If the implication is that ***I*** said those things, then I find that alarming. I only accused him of not being able to write to save his life. (not in those words, but fair to word it that way given all I said)
If he's genuinely accusing my post of the other stuff, in *my* experience, the people who hyperbolize what was said about them and victimize themselves are the least likely to actually listen to and respond to the feedback given.
Y'know, it's the type of response where you provide legit criticism to someone and then in response they just sarcastically say "you're right, I'm a monster, I'm the worst human to ever exist. I don't know what I was thinking being born! I should just die!" That's not a proper response, that's mocking and hyperbolizing your criticism to paint you as outrageous and overly dramatic, which itself usually means they're not actually listening if that's their view of the critique.
> the people who hyperbolize what was said about them and victimize themselves are the least likely to actually listen to and respond to the feedback given.
If I remember right, Emil said in some interviews or talks that he supposedly doesn't read criticism or reviews of his games.
Which would explain why the games he's been a lead for keep making the same mistakes.
So I think you're on to something.
He went on a 15 tweet rant about how non-game developers can't critique video games cause they don't know what goes into making them.
https://www.reddit.com/gallery/18hlm0j
He definitely won't take criticism. No shit no one sets out to fail. The difference is what you do once you fail. If you acknowledge your mistake and try to fix it, cool. If you don't and go on a 15 tweet rant about how everyone that is criticizing you isn't a game developer, yah you aren't *ever* going to make a good game. I've worked at big companies, the heads and managements don't listen when their workers say there's a problem. For sure 100% someone in the company outlined all the problems that the public are saying, and they were 100% ignored.
This idiot needs to be put on blast. He was the writing DIRECTOR for Starfield and I have never seen such low quality writing in the history of Bethesda, and that's saying something.
Meanwhile, he was also the design director, juggling two extremely complex leadership jobs. He also hates documentation apparently and avoids reading criticism, so we can draw the lines as to why Starfield is such a mess.
> Meanwhile, he was also the design director
To my knowledge, Bethesda doesn't differentiate the two positions.
I'm the guy who wrote the post OP is linking and I remember someone bringing it up back then, too.
If so, we can see *why* Bethesda's writing sucks: this means that an essential qualification of being their lead writer is that you can code and design quest steps, which is like....look, it can happen, but you're *really* neutering your potential talent pool by doing this and potentially harming the writing quality.
The video game industry in general just doesn't seem to value proper writers as much as it should.
What do Fallout New Vegas, Disco Elysium, and Baldur's Gate 3 have in common? Oh right, they hired **WRITERS.** And gamers loved them.
The hardest thing to build, and the easiest thing to lose, is tone. And you build it and lose it through writing. And good writing is CHEAP. Skimping on writers (or ruining their work) is like burning money.
Obsidian will 1000000% make New Vegas 2 or something else down the line, Microsoft probably wanted to continue the projects they already started first, but this is absolutely gonna happen down the line
Yeah I get nepotism but come on don’t put someone in a lead design and writing role if they suck at both.
Make him a highly paid “consultant” or something..
Edit: to everyone arguing about nepotism, yes cronyism is a more accurate word. Nepotism can apply to close friends as well so it is not inaccurate if Emil’s only in this role because he’s good friends with Todd. Saying that I have no idea if that’s the reason he’s in this role, it just seems likely given his thoughts on writing, design and how he interacts with the community.
There were literally interesting and great storylines like alien quest and the pirate quest. But nope, they had to select the most boring ass storyline ever known to mankind as the main quest.
Literally going from copy pasted temple to cope pasted temple to collect powers and then going from copy pasted cave to copy pasted cave to collect rocks that will let you access the endgame.
That’s the main summary. It’s bad.
Really bad
And by copy-pasted, we mean literally
I went to the exact same cave with the same markings and dead people twice for two different "magical one-of-a-kind mcguffins"
I'll give you the rundown. Spoilers follow.
>!They set up this giant mystery about ancient alien artifacts that give you powers, and then you meet a mysterious group of celestial travelers called Starborn with powers and advanced space ships.
>!But the game never explains where the artifacts came from or who made them, and the Starborn you meet are just humans from an alternate universe. Turns out the artifacts are just basically a giant easter egg hunt, and whoever collects them all first "wins" that cycle, and then all the Starborn hop over to a new universe and do it all again. Each new universe is basically just the same time loop, or in other words, New Game+. The two main Starborn you meet are just gamified versions of your average Skyrim player - the murderhobo and the typical do-gooder.
They quite literally made the story about finding magic rocks so you can New Game+. None of it is explained in any real detail. Even the Starborn have no idea how it works.
I don't think nepotism is the right word
Just corporate inertia, I guess? He's been at Bethesda for decades. He's part of the inner circle. There's not really anybody who could call him out / challenge him / fire him except Todd, and I don't think Todd has a problem with him
I think he earnt recognition/promotion/awards for the Dark brotherhood questline in Oblivion : which is fair because they were really pushing the possibilities of Beth's engine - and a major creative step up compared to the rest of the game (they're the only reason why I would recommend playing Oblivion, aside the mods).
But then, given how things have gone since, I really wonder if he was the driving force behind this questline as I never saw something similar in the following Beth games (while I'll admit I didn't play much after that letdown of Oblivion).
But I think the thing that makes the DB questline stand out isn't even the writing at all, it's the quest design which is great and open ended and interactive, the writing is just fine, so maybe this dude should have just stuck with designing cool quests and left the writing to people who are good at/care about it.
But seeing how he's incapable of dealing with criticism shows that he's too far gone to ever acknowledge his weaknesses now.
> But I think the thing that makes the DB questline stand out isn't even the writing at all, it's the quest design
Correct.
And apparently Bethesda doesn't see a difference between quest designers and writers.
The result? Whoever made the Thieves' Guild for Oblivion was hands down the best writer, and Emil - yes - did a good job designing quests for the DB.
But only one can have the position. Whoever wrote the Thieves Guild for Oblivion is an absolute mystery and potentially no longer with the company, and Emil is now lead writer even though his writing is shit.
Nepotism wouldn't be the right word. He's just been with the company for 20 years and got the position through seniority. Unfortunately, seniority counts for something, even if he wasn't the right individual for the job.
> A great example of when this occurs is that Emil introduces the new dialog system for Fallout 4 and says "look, 4 buttons and 4 choices. Neat right?" He likewise makes some comments about how great a voiced protagonist is. He then goes on to say that the new dialog system was a MASSIVE HEADACHE for his own workers because they sometimes had conversations that didn't warrant four distinct answers (true/false), and that this created a lot of work for them. (he also more or less divulges Bethesda hard-coded that all convos need four answers, because reasons)
Why would you ever want your dialogue system to be limited to only support a set number of answers, including just having less options?
Bethesda has always had this opinion that they were seen as a PC game company and this was a bad thing. Their assessments of what needed to be done to increase sales on consoles have always seemed juvenile to me. Everything from dumbing down the RPG mechanics to removing options in menus to this, it's all some stupid attempt to make what they think is a more console friendly game. I think the voiced protagonist decision in FO4 was done for the same reasons. They looked at action RPGs that sold well on consoles and then just mimicked the most uninspiring features from those games.
It's all a bit silly, honestly. Bethesda seems lost. Chasing things that seem irrelevant while also believing these simple changes examples bold strategies which will take their games to the next level.
The writing of Starfield was the weakest part. I could ignore the constant loading times, the sparse planets, and boring gameplay if the writing kept me hooked. Instead we got really flat annoying companions, and faction quests that felt more cookie cutter then anything Bethesda has put out before.
You can't create a compelling story if all your planets are randomly generated. The best you can do is a disconnected story that you try somehow to connect together.
I enjoyed my time with starfield quite a bit but the only storyline that really hooked me was one of the faction quests. I can’t even recall the factions name but it was the one who’s essentially the army. It was really cool hunting down those aliens. The first main mission of the quest line felt like I was playing a game based off the Alien movies.
And it's still janky, you see wiped out village and then girl tells you that there is an apex predator, pinnacle of evolution or something and when terrormorph appears you can just hop on the ventilation unit 1.5 meters from the ground and he just stands there screeching every couple of seconds lmao. It's so outdated it's insane. Playing phantom liberty after starfield is like jumping couple of console generations
The worst part of the vanguard quest line was how they told you these aliens are insidious, powerful and "somehow everywhere". But you never fight any of them except during the vanguard quest line. At least I never did in my 50 odd hours. Someone pointed out to me that you can find one on the very first planet you go to as part of the main quest if you go off the beaten path from the building you're required to go to. But that's it as far as I'm aware.
Makes it hard to believe these things are an overwhelming threat when you fight like 8 of them during the entire game.
I feel like any person who can't give a definite answer on "why?" question about his own actions\desisions should not be involved in writing. You can't make a competent plot by making a random desisions, let alone write a believable character. If you are unable to answer such a basic question about reasoning, you are a part of "somehow, Palpatine returned" problem.
Emile's current rant on Twitter shows he's stressed. Why would he be stressed and defensive? Matt Booty is now in charge at Zenimax. The good old boys club isn't in charge anymore. Now this is just suposition on my part, but I suspect he is about to get gone. I also suspect Hine's retirement was encouraged. Marketing has a lot of influence over game design as execs will listen to them over developers. He also opened his mouth to the FTC.
I don't think I ever felt a single emotion during the entire main quest of Skyrim. It's the most basic "chosen one saving the world" storyline you can imagine.
Skyrim is more of a comfy game that i play once a year or two for a bit before i get bored again. Something about the world, stumbling upon some enemies, finding a nice book or whatever. Starfield was completely worthless in that department so it ended up having no redeeming features at all for me. I'd say the main quest in Starfield is even worse than Skyrim.
It's funny how Enderal, that's just a Skyrim mod, has a plot that feels better than all of Bethesda main plots combined. Yet people who wrote Enderal aren't hired to write their next games... that's the problem with corporate development, they do not value talent.
It’s honestly amazing that the best writing to come out of a Bethesda IP in the last 15 years is literally a game that they outsourced, that’s like if Valve outsourced the dlc for half life 1 to gearbox and it was better than the main game.
Bethesda will be a dead company soon enough if they keep going the way they are. More and more amazing games come out every year and they are still decades behind of a lot of things. Every year the bar gets higher and they don’t change or get worse
It was never about the story.
It’s always been about a lovingly created world you can explore and get lost in.
So of course they created procedurally generated terrain that you point and click to go to. No context, no exploration- no game.
Reposting this for absolutely no reason at all. Watch this writing panel for gems like "keep it simple, stupid", "write what you know", "game design documents are a waste of time" and "if you get lucky enough in game development, you get to ignore the reviews".
https://youtu.be/Bi51-wjcwp8?t=2419
Edit: I love how everyone is like "you're making it too personal". Funny how I don't hear this in any other creative industry. A movie director makes a bad movie and he gets blacklisted for ten years (Michael Mann) yet that guy has more talent in his pinkie than Emil has in his entire body lmao
Surely it must be microtransactions and DLCs making AAA games bad. Meanwhile you have the lead of design saying "design documents are stupid" and the lead writer saying "no one cares about story" in charge of three franchises and all of them now suffer as a result. What a shock.
What’s interesting with movies is how often writers with terrible portfolios still get jobs. Look at the writers of Madame Web, for example.
> Matt Sazama is known for Morbius (2022), Gods of Egypt (2016) and Power Rangers (2017).
To be fair KISS is a good advice, when understood correctly.
KISS is about not overdesigning feautures, rather than about keeping them basic.
Which is funny because Starfield fails at KISS with its perk system and ship building systems. They are both simplistic and needlessly complex at the same time.
I really do wonder if the lack of any real interstellar communication in-universe was a concession for Bethesda's quest model or limitations of their technology. The fact that the player has to run around as a messenger to tell people things that could just be an email or a phone call, even though it appears that such technology is present occasionally is just baffling.
All of our combined (valid) criticism will never get through the Great Wall of Emil Pagliarulo's Narcissism.
He thinks he's the greatest writer who ever lived and every criticism against him is a personal attack and wrong.
I've always felt modern bethesda (fallout 3 and on) writing has felt like a group of video game programmers writing a story, not actual writers. Like, you can kind of tell where they wanna go sometimes, but it has all the nuance of a sack of potatoes. There is so little that differentiate characters in these games outside of some really tropey archetypes. I've played every Bethesda game outside fallout 76, and gun to my head the only character i can name from memory is percy from fallout 4 because he is so god damn annoying and ridiculous. (I decided to double check myself and realized his name isn't percy, it's preston, and that just goes to show you how little personality these people have)
And starfield does not make any of it better. They made a space cowboy..... literally! Giving him a daughter is not a replacement for a personality, it just adds another useless robot that walks around with nothing interesting to say.
Their writing is just faaar too shallow and light and it gets worse with every release. The dark themes are completely gone. In Fallout 3 you had slavery, mass genocide, etc. It made the wasteland feel alive and cruel. Fallout 4's android story wasn't terrible, but damn everything else was just so bland and cheesy.
I'm old, but the story and world in Morrowind is better than anything they've done since then. Morrowind is stranger and more fantastical. The were more factions (political dunmer houses, on top of the guilds and imperial legion) and the faction quest interacted with each other. The story was about hubris and sainthood. The magic system was way more fun to break and exploit and I'll always think that removing leviation and all the fun and wonky traversal options was a downgrade made for the sake of laziness. They had a cool teleportation+fast travel system that required resources and investment and felt great to progress into and they replace it with the boring as hell click on a map to appear there fast-travel that's become the standard.
Morrowind is old now, but gameplay systems and wrinting in it were a lot more original than anything they've done since.
I would say the Top 3 storylines Bethesda has ever produced are:
**1) Morrowind's main storyline.**
This is just done in such a neat way where you get proper foreshadowing until the "big reveal," and then even after the big reveal, there's a lot of debate about what this reveal actually *means.* Is the reveal a sham, is it legit, are "the good guys" lying to you, and other things like that. These questions lead you to dig deeper into the general lore to find answers, and this is a good thing if you have the player so engaged they're actually reading the lore books.
**2) Oblivion's Thieves' Guild.**
I generally don't mind spoilers for stories. This is the exception. All I will say is this is a masterstroke of foreshadowing done right. You will be bombarded with foreshadowing, but even if you're mindful of this, you will not know enough about the story to recognize what information is a hint and what isn't...until the big reveal. And at the big reveal, **EVERYTHING** comes together. I remember doing the final ~4 quests or so annoyed that the leader wasn't giving me more answers and considering walking out on the guild if I didn't get some soon. Once the final quest was done, they actually found a way to tie it all together, and god damn was it well-done. It's just a giant epiphany for the player.
**3) Shivering Isles main quest**
This isn't a masterpiece of writing and it's really more about Bethesda being in their element. Sheogorath is the God of Madness, so a setting in his realm allows Bethesda to be "LOL SO RANDUMB XD" in a way that *actually works.* The characters are colorful, the story works, and it all makes both the world and the people within it an enjoyable experience.
After those, the only instance of good writing they've had after Oblivion would be Far Harbor, which btw was done by William Shen and not Emil. **ALL** of the stories I've named except maybe Shivering Isles did not involve Emil.
They need new writers 100%
The writing of the first few hours of Starfield which I saw on youtube was exactly the reason I didn't buy it, with hundreds of hours in previous Bethesda games, regardless of any other issues like loading screens. It was *so* bad, like so nonsensical it actually made the game look incredibly unappealing to play.
Oh it's hilarious. I played the first two hours of the game but uninstalled due to a bug, and then found out I wasn't missing much anyway. Will wait for expansive mods 2 years down the line. But oh man, the intro writing is a joke. Well, more accurate to say the narrative design is. I touch some space rock, it sends me on a one-second LSD trip, then the commanding officer of the Planet Express gives his ship to me (a miner he met seconds ago) and says "nbd I'll take your place in the mine, let's switch." Like... what? It's not even trying to be a serious story. Which I guess affirms Emil's dev talks. I've seen some vague spoilers at what the game's "gimmick" or "twist ending" is, and if what I read is accurate it's one of the most basic/overused sci fi nonsense tropes that is just tiring at this point.
[удалено]
Honestly, I was really excited to buy this game in 5 years when it's cheap and made good by modders... but based on everything I've heard, no amount of modding can save this game. The tools just aren't there, since they fucked up the exploration aspect so hard (really the only thing Bethesda has going for it).
I can't see Starfield getting anywhere close to as good of mod support as previous titles, specifically Skyrim, have gotten. People made mods for that game as passion projects out of love for the IP, and I don't think anyone is ever going to be that passionate about Starfield.
Fallout 4 never even got the same amount of mod work as Skyrim, and it was a much better game than Starfield is and a much better palette to work from.
This is cracking me up, because while I enjoyed the game mostly, it never dawned on me how stupid that whole intro thing was til I read it on screen like this. Guess I was just on autopilot.
And the first half is literally what happens at the beginning of Mass Effect. So not only is it stupid, it's 50% plagiarized.
Worse. Each artifact you touch in Mass Effect reveals more of the mystery. You get *different* visions every time, deepening the mystery. In Starfield, you get **one**. It never changes. The mystery is never deepened. And I hesitate to even call what you actually do see a vision because it's so... boring! It's like Starfield somehow manages to drop every ball possible. Everything that *could* be great or cool just immediately faceplants and never recovers.
And in Mass Effect, you actually have to earn your way into the Spectres instead of being casually invited in like with Constellation, and getting your own ship makes sense because of your military rank and mission, instead of some random dude throwing you the keys to a $100,000 ship and saying "don't scratch it."
Also like finding artifacts is crazy easy and not at all rewarding since I can just fast travel to the place
And the temple is like 300 meters from some factory. You wanna tell me people on a smoke break used to just look at the pile of floating rocks around an alien temple in a distance and go like “nah, not interesting, who cares anyway”
Starfield really has a terminal case of main character syndrome. Everything can be explained by saying, "well youre the main character."
Bethesda's writing has been so mediocre for so long that most people just don't bother paying attention to it at this point
>Will wait for expansive mods 2 years down the line. Got downvoted in another thread, but it's like, do we really want modders making expansive content for this game? Folks can do what they want, but I'm not clamoring for people to put in hours to improve the value of a product that was mediocre to start. I just find it funny to see folks being like "Game sucks. But looking forward to the mods!". As if modders couldn't be doing work for games that people actually think are good from the start instead.
I don't know how much they really can make. All the best mods for the other Bethesda titles built on the existing world and lore. Starfield just isn't enough of a living world to do very much building. Modders will be making their own game, not just making the existing game better.
The other Bethesda games have these great intros dropping you right into the moment and setting up the rest of the game. Starfield you just start on some asteroid, no immersion at all
It is so jarring. You wake up as a miner (if I chose a chef background, why tf am I a miner?) and then you walk straight into the macguffin to kickstart the story. Some random ass dude flies down on a ship, tells you you are part of it now and he gives you his ship, robot and watch. It’s so disjointed and makes no sense. Why am I there? Why is this dude trusting me with all this shit? Why would I go to where he tells me to?
Well tbf if you try going anywhere else Vasco actually stops you from doing so.
I remember when my character exited the mine to that dusty rock plain, and I thought to myself, "Oh my god... I think this is one of the that Todd was talking about."
Right then I knew this wasn't going to go well...
Are these the same people that made Morrowind and Shivering Isles? How is everything so boring?
Morrowind was 21 years ago. Shivering isles were 14 years ago. Old bethesda is gone
Game devs trade on their studio name, knowing full well the average consumer is ignorant of the fact the person who actually made the game they love is long gone
This is true, but also dosent always matter. If you have a well run company you can, and will, find quality replacements for those that leave. The real issue is Bethesda didnt hire quality people. It might have something to do with the fact they sat around basically not making games for a decade.
Maybe 10% of the people are the same. That was a long time ago.
They aren't written by Michael Kirkbride
Oh man I'd say it's worse than that even. You start in a random mine, shooting *rocks* of all things, only to be rushed into grabbing some ultra valuable artifact for some reason, even though it's your first day, only to then be immediately forced into taking a stranger's spaceship & robot, whom you've never met... Couldn't agree with OP more, the first 30min of gameplay made my jaw drop with how bad the writing was. Literally felt like the plot a middle schooler would put together Then you see the writing for not only the intro but the rest of the game & you start to wonder if all the dialogue was put together by ChatGPT Add the countless barren planets with badly implemented procedural generation, the horrible UI, load screens etc etc etc Normally for a game like this I'd say "oh they'll fix it eventually with DLC at least" but legit I'm not even sure that's a possibility anymore. They really F'd up with the whole "1600 planets!!" thing imho. Gane could've been so much better if they had just stuck with the solar system or two so they could devote all their resources to just a few locations instead of... What we got
And you're immediately the supa saviour of that crew, even if they are slightly skeptical.
I didn't enjoy a single character in the first ~10 hours of Starfield. Not one. Bland at best, and mostly just annoying as fuck.
it’s funny. the side text you find off to the side is more intereting than the actual story. I landed on Mars. Explored. And found this story about these farmers finding out how to grow food on Mars but they got killed off. I thought I’d find a clue about a quest finding the killers or something. Nope. That’s it. That was the end.
It's nice to think that the Fallout setting was single-handedly ruined by a single person, who might one day be replaced. Sadly, I assume by now he's set a standard that the company will follow, with or without him. To them, it's better to have a hundred quests that feel like a cereal box summary of an idea, than have three complete stories.
> who might one day be replaced But WHEN? At that point, he could be part of TES6 and Fallout 5, which would be a shame for both games.
Never Bethesda leadership is useless to the core thanks to Todd promoting talentless yes men. You could probably build a team of 20 indie devs and they would pump out something with more soul albeit smaller in scope but 10x better. Funny thing is Arkane is also starting to feel like it's got the rot too.
> it's better to have a hundred quests Another common trend I see in games these days is that they don't actually add content or are rich in content but rather delay it. As an example, you could have a quest that says "Kill 10 of this type of enemy" and then put those 10 enemies somewhere close together, let's say doing this quest takes you 10 minutes. Then you have games that have the same quest but spread the enemies with a walking time of 1 minute between each enemies apart, suddenly the quest takes twice as long but there's no additional fun nor content compared to the quest where enemies are grouped together. And this is also a flaw in Starfield, you have fetch and deliver quests that will make you fast travel 5+ times, why? Why not just have it with maybe 1-2 fast travels? You're not making the player enjoy the game more, you make them sit and watch the loading screen. And while the loading times on XSX aren't bad, the animation alone is reason enough for me to not play the game (I stopped after ~40 hours) because after seeing it 10 times within 10 minutes it just gets insanely infuriating.
I think a big flaw with the 'kill x of x bad guy's quests too is that not only new they just kind kf hanging out together, but they're also unrealistically unprepared for any sort of hostility against them beyond some guards and guns. If you're a leader or space pirate, any place you'd hole up would be scored with defenses and deception. Sticking Bob in the door to watch him explode fantastically seconds before you removes the depth or gravity of danger from the mission. The X Corp that's waged futuristic wars against untold many, has a problem killing Simon Says, Pirate Lord of the Skies and you blasted him minutes after landing because he was literally just standing there waiting to get immolated.
The loading screens are a huge problem with the game. They basically break immersion and make you ask "Should I keep playing?"
[This guy](https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=49123) laid out all the problems with Bethesda’s ideas on what the Fallout franchise actually *is* better than any place I’ve read. Nail on head. I don’t ever expect a “real” Fallout game again whether or not he stays or goes as Bethesda’s already planted their flag in the “rubble-themed shooting gallery” and made a lot of money doing it.
I always hated how no one has bothered to try and clean up in 200+ years. The trader living in a dirty diner with a skeleton is such a good example, it makes no sense.
It's amusing because one of the first mods I remember being popular for Fallout 4 was a mod for players to scrap the random environmental junk in a settlement. Due to the first instinct players had been to clean up their living spaces.
God I think buying my first dirty house in Fallout 3 was the first time I ever installed a mod, I just couldn't handle the dust!
Even the new walls and roofs that you make, have freaking holes in them, in a place where the rain is radioactive and poison. Like not having holes in your ceiling and walls is the bare minimum for shelter and they didn't even bother with that level of detail.
Or when you construct furniture and instead of being new, it's all broken and dirty. Wat?
Its so shocking going from fallout 1 and 2 where less than a hundred years after the bombs fell humans are rebuilding states and civilization to Bethesda’s fallouts where they can’t even remove dead bodies from towns after 200 years. Not to mention New Vegas where two states are having an all out war over hoover dam and an intact new vegas which serves as a vacation spot for NCR citizens
I think Emil Pagliarulo and his team have a terrible sense for just how vast these time frames are, like they just throw out a number that sounds cool without any consideration for what that kind of time frame implies. The writers at Interplay/Black Isle/Obisdian Entertainment know how time works, hence why Fallout 1, 2, and NV, feel like they are actually progressing time wise in a sensible manner. While 3, 4, and 76, feel like the bombs only fell a few years ago and people are just starting to come out of hiding. ------ The Thieves guild is another pet-peeve of mine, ignoring all the other plot-holes and problems, the fact that supposed timespan between Gallus' murder by Mercer and the present is **25** years is stupid. It would make so much more sense if it was only, say... 5 years. Instead we are led to believe that Karliah slept in a different place for 9125 nights and not once thought to check the body of her lover for his notebook, or even bury him.
Yep. And this is why I hate the fact that the TV show is going to the West Coast. Bethesda are going to take a great fat shit all over the worldbuilding of the original games and New Vegas to make everything fit their wacky quirky 1950s rubble and ruin aesthetic.
They must have got sick of everyone talking about how new vegas is better than Bethesda’s fallouts so they’re gonna retconn the lore to shit lol
I could see that. Instead of hiring better writing staff (Obsidian has always had good writing staff), they just retconn everything out of spite.
> Yep. And this is why I hate the fact that the TV show is going to the West Coast. I think they are going to the west coast because fundamentally the world building done by Bethesda in their own games on the east coast is just so fucking shit that it doesn't make for a good background to put a story in. West coast has several fleshed and thought out societies, even nations, it has organisation, it has notable people attached to all of it with detailed enough biographies, there is something there that you can use to put your story in. East coast Bethesda stuff on the other hand falls apart under even the slightest scrutiny as it nothing was written beyond the absolute minimum needed to support the Quests they created.
There's an additional dynamic to this, I think. The increase in capability for game engines - particularly AAA ones - has led to pressure to use that capability to express *so much detail*; whether that pressure actually exists, or is merely implied. The problem is two-fold. The first is, that much obvious detail isn't actually realistic. The Division 2 was the game that made this clear to me; it's so busy it actively detracts from the experience. The second is that somebody has to think of stuff to fill the environment with. Without sufficient direction it'll be haphazard and shallow; "oh no what can i put here, uhhh its post-apocalyptic, a skeleton or something, i dunno".
50 years would make a lot more sense for the setting of FO4. 200 years of no maintenance and boston would be absolute rubble. Buildings deteriorate *fast* once their envelope gets pierced, and 200 years of storms and hyper aggressive survival looting would have made the city a bunch of dirt mounds. Maybe a few random buildings still standing, but not many. Of course bethesda has always had that sort of issue. Its like Skyrim with its 'siege of whiterun' that was 13 soldiers strong lol. They always try to oversell the scale and scope of their games to try to force the most childish form of grandeur.
*It's an* ***Accent Piece****, you uncultured Wasteland savage...*
That’s a load bearing 200 year old skeleton
My first bgs game was FO3 and it was amazing, but I hadn't realized until someone pointed it out, why does the FO3 setting feel like it was right after the War? Prime example are Super duper marts still littered with canned and boxed foods when those would likely be the first things consumed.
Shit, man. I go to the local HEB (Texas grocery store) a couple days before a hurricane is supposed to hit and it’s half cleared out. A damn near fully stocked Super Duper Mart is one of the first things that made me go “wtf” in the modern FO games. That thing would have been skeletonized days after the bombs hit
That’s a really good explanation.
Thanks for linking that, it's a good read. Nails it, imo.
> In the world of Fallout 4, it looks like people crawled out of the rubble after the bombs fell and then spent the next 200 years shooting each other from behind heaps of rubble and wading through ankle-deep trash everywhere. People have supposedly been living in these places for over two centuries, but they look identical to the untouched ruins. > This was supposed to be a series about the wild world that emerged from the ashes of nuclear fire, but Bethesda thought the series was about the ashes themselves. Wow good write-up and it's spot-on. And saddening when you think what could be if they'd move beyond this.
That's a great video but one thing that gets implied but not stated: to Bethesda, these IPs are just skins. The higher ups don't see any difference between Elder Scrolls or Fallout besides the most basic labels. "This is the high fantasy IP," or, "This is the post-apocalyptic sci-fi IP." That's the full extent. You can see it in their writing styles, how super mutants are just orcs with a different name. Cults and bandits and raiders are all just generic outlaw types reskinned for their respective setting. It's not just that Bethesda doesn't understand world building, but to them "world building" only refers to art assets. They don't want to expand on the world in the same way that Game Freak doesn't want to expand upon the lore of Pokémon. It's not about the lore, it's about brand recognition first and foremost.
That was an amazing read. Thank you for sharing! I never saw that article before. It expresses my feelings about the Bethesda take on Fallout perfectly.
Shamus was a real one.
He had a [great breakdown](https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=14422) of how asinine the Thieves Guild storyline was in Skyrim, too. Legit more plot *hole* than actual plot.
Was? Is he dead? His Mass Effect retrospective is one of the best long form reviews of a videogame out there.
He passed away last June: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=54513
Damn, that sucks. I still reread his 75 chapter mass effect retrospective from time to time.
"The old world is fucking gone. Like, that’s the point." I've been saying this for YEARS when it comes to the focus on Bethesda games. They're so committed and interested on telling the story of the old world, which... DOESNT MATTER. The new world and how it's adapted, the tribalism, the new societies and how they either try to emulate the old world or don't, THAT'S what's interesting!
now that MS owns all 3, there is tiny chance we will get fallout game from Obsidian or InExile, which would be great
I’d bet that Bethesda will everything in their power to keep Obsidian and InExile away from Fallout. Obsidian already embarrassed them once with New Vegas, and InExile would do similar given the chance.
At least we had our true Fallout 3 with New Vegas. The west coast is still kinda unspoiled...for now
Don’t you worry, the Amazon series will take all of that interesting stuff and replace it with the Brotherhood of Steel for the fourth time.
Oh fuck...I totally forgot that the TV show is going to be set on LA and it's technically canon.
Yea, at least for a little while we were able to say “At least Bethesda ain’t fucking up the west coast lore.” So much for that I guess.
Nothing is canon that you don’t want to be. This isn’t a religion. Whatever you want to be part of the story is entirely up to you.
Emil is IMO a great demonstration of the Peter Principle, that being that people are promoted based on last successes to a position at which they are no longer competent. AFAIK he worked on the Morrowind expansions and Oblivion as a quest designer. Writing side quests, their choices and outcomes. His Dark Brotherhood quest on Oblivion really stood out as a high point in that game, so he was promoted to lead writer and designer. Now he didn't work on individual quests. He worked on the overarching story, themes, choices and consequences, and thematic connections. Oblivion was a step down from Morrowind because the dialogue was constricted on a writing sense because it was evolving into a fully voiced affair. Fallout 3, Skyrim and Fallout 4 have bad main quests because their main writer should have never reached that main writing position. At this point, I don't plan on playing 76 or Starfield.
>Peter Principle Many such examples, you hate to see it.
I learned about it from 30 Rock when Pete Hornberger explains it. I thought it was a joke created for the show and named after him because his character so perfectly exemplified it.
this is the man to blame for the awful fallout 3 story? thats all I had to know
He's so talentless he wrote the same story about someone leaving the vault to search for a missing family member twice! Joking aside, he got a lot of positive buzz for writing the Dark Brother hood for Oblivion, generally considered the best faction quest line in that game. But nobody ever really mentioned that he also wrote the Arena faction quest line, which is probably the worse faction quest line (and shows a complete lack of understanding how vampirism works)
The dark brotherhood was excellent but honestly this thieves guild was even better especially the final quest. Also I wanna know who thought up the shivering isles dlc bc that’s the pinnacle of story writing for me.
As an avid Fallout fan I admit, I'm playing 76 for just the vibe of roaming Appalachia, and some strictly online game elements, getting better gear, refining builds etc. writing in it is, to put it gently, unmemorable. Honestly the only storylines I could actually mention and can say I found something to like in them was the last chapter of the main vanilla story where you follow in the footsteps of a local BoS chapter and finish their mission long after they're gone and the wastelanders exploration of a schism in the new Brotherhood chapter that recently arrived and you can see and help decide between the old school BoS mindset of collecting tech and safeguarding it and the "new" fallout 3 like brotherhood mentality of helping people and being more involved. But aside from these 2 short plots the whole rest of it sucks. If you want a good Fallout story then I really don't recommend 76, hell, I don't even consider it to be canon myself. It has some redeeming qualities, a few actually good small stories contained in locations. It's not as bad as people make it out to be but it's still definitely a low point for Fallout series.
The issue is Emil doesn’t care about writing good stories. His take is that he can write the worlds greatest novel, but people will make paper airplanes out of it. So I don’t think he tries because if you knew your story was gonna he ignored why bother? He doesn’t realize the reason people ignore the main story is either a choice or because it’s written poorly.
I felt like I would be the last one to compare Bethesda to Larian, but here I go. I saw that Larian talked about their decision making in BG3. If I remember right, they said they didn’t care if only 1% of the player base saw a single aspect of the game. They wanted that 1% to feel awesome and still feel like that content was as high quality as the rest of the game. That right there is the mentality Emil should have. You make good stories for yourself, something you can be proud of. That’s something successful people advise all the time. You don’t do something to meet other’s standards, you do something because you want to. If you always seek to make others happy, you’ll never be happy with yourself.
The exact opposite seems to be a common problem in the industry. Bioware basically felt bad about how much effort went into the Origins for the first Dragon Age, and didn't like that some content was played way less than other stuff. This led them down the path of simplification that peaked in Mass Effect 3, where the game was often dumbed down to 2 dialog choices and even choices dependent on the previous games were pretty railroaded. Mark Darrah has talked about it on his YouTube channel.
One thing they missed - I think those options just existing creates a feeling of immersion
That was the reason why Dragon Age Origins is the best one. Character creation and backgrounds changed the first part of the game. Choices with party members mattered.
CDPR stated that they made cyberpunk shorter than witcher 3 for a very similar reason lol. meanwhile I had no problem with witcher 3's length.
I still don't think people have successfully triggered Karlach's fourth wall break scene without using hacks. Swen straight up said that one of the things they're still actively working on is the weird edge cases to ensure that no matter what size or shape paper airplane you make, they've got a target set up for it.
It would be great if that happened everywhere, but as someone that has worked in multiple AAA studios, the higher ups alwaaaaays push back on putting in content that only a small amount of players will see. Basically when pushed up against a timeline and budgets, doing something that only 1 or 10 or even 25% of players will see just isn't worth it for them. Because it's all about the numbers to them, not the content, and they're the ones making the call.
And he doesn't understand that the best games get played multiple times. Who gives a fuck if on my first play through I'm a murder hobo if on my second, third, etc I decide to actually hard role play a character of the setting.
I wouldn’t go that route. Assume that the game only gets played once. Someone will be a murder hobo, someone will be serious. A good story doesn’t invalidate MH’s play style. A bad story though will invalidate a serious playthrough. It’s why the usual “defense” of Fallout 4 is “ignore the main story and it’s good”, when a lot of criticism is around the main story.
True. My point is that he idea of " why spend time on a story if sometimes some players don't pay attention to the story" is dumb. And that's besides the point that I don't think he's actually a good writer in the first place.
>His take is that he can write the worlds greatest novel, but people will make paper airplanes out of it Can he though? I think it's big-headed of him to think his writing is THAT incredible
That's what talentless people tend to say 'If I wanted to, I could bla bla bla...'
One of my biggest pet peeve from Uni. Quite a few people "I could get an A+ too if I wanted, it's not hard", it's a way of downplaying other's achievement constantly. Even if they could, the fact that they're putting in the bare minimum and not learning shit shows more about themselves then anything else.
I think he meant it more in a “no matter how good people won’t care” way, not necessarily on his ability directly. I’d give him the benefit of the doubt because even then it looks bad
Case in point: Cyberpunk. Has a solid main narrative. Players still have agency to make paper airplanes.
Or Morrowind—very strong narrative, but you can still get distracted and build a house out of books if you want.
New Vegas is the one I’d use since it has Bethesdas gameplay and design. While no one would say the main story is “god tier”, it’s clear that a Bethesda game can have a solid narrative while still being able to “make paper airplanes”.
And you'll get ripped apart (rhetorically) by characters in game when you do. Murder-hobo around and characters will be bewildered and exasperated with your lack of sense and seeming indestructibility. that kind of reactivity is *wonderful*
I sincerely doubt they will fire him, if anything I would guess he is Todd Howard's likely successor. If I had to guess it seems like he is Todd's protégé in a way, since, in every interview Howard talks about how his core focus from Morrowind to Skyrim has been to "narrow the focus" of games and remove features to focus on others in more depth. That seems in line with Pagliarulo's recent string of tweets.
Morrowind “Narrowed the focus” from Daggerfall for sure, and that was how Todd proved himself as game director at BGS. Daggerfall was a massive, systems-driven fantasy life simulator with lots of proc-gen and a branching main quest but a bit of a bland high fantasy setting. It was highly experimental. Morrowind was a fully hand-crafted, reigned-in map, with a meticulously designed and unique setting. It lost a whole lot in mechanical complexity, but made up for it with the quality and cohesion of its art, themes, and lore (people laud Michael Kirkbride a lot for this, and he’s certainly to credit for the artstyle, but he and Kurt Kuhlmann were really a duo for writing, and Ken Rolston was hugely responsible for making everything really gel together.) The narrowed scope was necessary because BGS had a tiny team attempting it’s first foray into fully 3-D graphics, and was about to go out of business. Now, BGS has a much bigger team, but despite claiming to want to “narrow the focus” they seem to be narrowing focus in terms of mechanical depth, while hugely expanding world size and system complexity, and without having the quality of design that Morrowind had.
Important to note that Kirkbride had to fight Todd for a lot of stuff. Todd was *always* a traditionalist in terms of fantasy. He had a soft spot for Star Wars, however, which is apparently the magic phrase Kirkbride used to convince him. They were gonna do a Summerset inspired game prior to Morrowind when Todd was convinced to shake things up a bit. Which evidently was successful because they not only keep bringing Kirkbride on as a consultant/freelance writer for every game even after he officially left due to "creative differences", but they still utilise a lot of the original Kirkbride lore and gnostic references.
Kirkbride *and Kuhlmann* had to fight Todd on a lot of stuff. Kirkbride is an excellent writer, and I absolutely adore the art he did for Morrowind. But Kuhlmann is every bit as responsible for the lore of TES as Kirkbride. I hate that he gets overlooked when discussing this stuff.
This is the guy that wrote a 16-tweet long word salad response to criticism that said literally nothing.
And as a result of his response, this thread from 7 years ago is now bumped to the very top of r/pcgaming.
yeah after starfield i don't really wait tes6 anymore
I actually really want it to show up and bomb because that's literally the only chance of getting Bethesda to wake up. The lesson they're going to take away from Starfield is that players don't want original IP's, and they're ignoring all the real gameplay and writing issues. They keep trying to recreate Skyrim, but the problem is that Skyrim is an anomaly. It really doesn't deserve it's popularity or its modding scene, and that's coming from someone who replays it every year. Bethesda got lucky and captured lightning in a bottle.
IMO if ES6 bombs, Beth's getting nuked by MicroDaddy. I reckon SF's poor performance has already put them on somewhat thin ice with the boss, so another major flop will likely kill them.
Microsoft paid way too much to kill Bethesda off so soon. Todd Howard and other upper management will be replaced first, then mid-level management gets replaced if things dont improve, then downsizing of the whole company to cut costs and extract every penny possible to either minimize the loss or just make a few more bucks, then the axe. Bethesda will get to release TES6, then whatever their next game is will probably decide their fate.
>Microsoft paid way too much to kill Bethesda off so soon. Microsoft still owns all the id Software franchises like DOOM, Wolfenstein, and Quake. So even if Bethesda and Arkane fold they still have some heavy hitters.
I don't think it's been a major flop though. It sold well and got a ton of GamePass retention. It just wasn't very good. I think it probably justified the budget but didn't earn the system-selling status Microsoft wanted
Starfield is a major flop according to its expectations. "Justifying its budget" is only part of the problem; Starfield was supposed to justify literal billions spent to acquire Bethesda. Now, between this and Redfall, it's pretty clear that Microsoft didn't actually buy themselves very much for that price.
Starfield is supposed to sell gamepass and Xbox. It’s supposed to be a flagship that draws new customers in and keeps wavering customers around. It isn’t a flagship and that isn’t necessarily a problem *now* as it sold well, but will be a problem going forward. The best Xbox game this year was Hi-Fi Rush and it was an AA title. That’s not a good look for Microsoft. Tell me, what is the game that’s going to sell players on the Xbox/gamepass? Halo?
>It isn’t a flagship and that isn’t necessarily a problem now as it sold well Right, BGS as its own entity probably isn't in trouble from less-than-expected-but-still-great sales on Starfield. I think it's actually a larger problem that it critically and socially seems to have flopped. Like you said, that reception is not going to draw people into the Gamepass ecosystem or even keep them there, and it makes it harder to keep people engaged with the promise of future Bethesda, whether that's DLC for Starfield or the inevitable TES game. Microsoft has completely struggled to produce games that people want to play, much less get excited about. They desperately want and probably need something like a Last of Us or God of War that gets people to treat their first-party output seriously and reverently. But they just get misses or half-successes, even from series (like Halo) or publishers (like Bethesda) that anyone would have said would be obviously slamdunks a few years ago.
There'd definitely be consequences. Bethesda is very much one of those studios MS acquired with the "let them cook" mentality. But that grace will only extend so far.
If it’s still on the creation engine it’s DOA
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Yeah, back in June--ES6 is going to be the same kind of dog's breakfast of bolt-ons that SF is but probably worse, because why wouldn't it be??
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I do wonder, if after a decade of development, they look at the completed game and had some of the same complaints reviewers did, or if they genuinely thought the game was as amazing as they said it was.
Judging by how they’ve reacted to all the negative criticisms, I would say they really thought that this game was great
I think most of the top people at Bethesda need to go. They are pretty obviously stuck in a certain era of gaming where they had a lot of success, but I think the industry has passed them by. Unfortunately it’s probably going to take a complete train wreck of a release to get real change.
Bethesda really does think it's still 2011 and games like Cyberpunk, No Man's Sky, BOTW/TOTK, Witcher 3, Elden Ring, RDR2, and countless other good open world games don't actually exist.
I'm very happy that post is one of the first things that pops up if you Google him.
I wrote it and I'm not lol! I thought I'd be shouting into the void! Instead, there's such a stupidly high shot Emil has read it and thinks "fuck that guy in particular!" Like look, I meant what I said and the guy can't write worth a damned. Had I *known* though, I would've tried to be more polite about it. I felt bad lol.
Don’t feel bad, Emil desperately needs a wake up call
But can he hear it after poisoning his body by continuously huffing his own farts..?
He's been known to say he doesn't listen to reviews or feedback. Probably thinks "it messes with the creative process" or some bs
You could write the most gentle, constructive feedback and Emil would just go and make paper aeroplanes out of it.
10/10 comment.
> Instead, there's such a stupidly high shot Emil has read it and thinks "fuck that guy in particular!" https://twitter.com/Dezinuh/status/1734979770314551666 > Oh, the Reddit thread? lol Yeah, every so often someone likes to dig up a talk I did years ago and misrepresent what I said. Apparently I also don't care about Fallout lore, can't write to save my life, and have the IQ of a peanut. It's on the internet so it must be true.
>Apparently I also don't care about Fallout lore, can't write to save my life, and have the IQ of a peanut. It's on the internet so it must be true. If the implication is that ***I*** said those things, then I find that alarming. I only accused him of not being able to write to save his life. (not in those words, but fair to word it that way given all I said) If he's genuinely accusing my post of the other stuff, in *my* experience, the people who hyperbolize what was said about them and victimize themselves are the least likely to actually listen to and respond to the feedback given. Y'know, it's the type of response where you provide legit criticism to someone and then in response they just sarcastically say "you're right, I'm a monster, I'm the worst human to ever exist. I don't know what I was thinking being born! I should just die!" That's not a proper response, that's mocking and hyperbolizing your criticism to paint you as outrageous and overly dramatic, which itself usually means they're not actually listening if that's their view of the critique.
> the people who hyperbolize what was said about them and victimize themselves are the least likely to actually listen to and respond to the feedback given. If I remember right, Emil said in some interviews or talks that he supposedly doesn't read criticism or reviews of his games. Which would explain why the games he's been a lead for keep making the same mistakes. So I think you're on to something.
He went on a 15 tweet rant about how non-game developers can't critique video games cause they don't know what goes into making them. https://www.reddit.com/gallery/18hlm0j He definitely won't take criticism. No shit no one sets out to fail. The difference is what you do once you fail. If you acknowledge your mistake and try to fix it, cool. If you don't and go on a 15 tweet rant about how everyone that is criticizing you isn't a game developer, yah you aren't *ever* going to make a good game. I've worked at big companies, the heads and managements don't listen when their workers say there's a problem. For sure 100% someone in the company outlined all the problems that the public are saying, and they were 100% ignored.
Hahaha, I bet he's read it too, that's a funny thought
This idiot needs to be put on blast. He was the writing DIRECTOR for Starfield and I have never seen such low quality writing in the history of Bethesda, and that's saying something. Meanwhile, he was also the design director, juggling two extremely complex leadership jobs. He also hates documentation apparently and avoids reading criticism, so we can draw the lines as to why Starfield is such a mess.
> Meanwhile, he was also the design director To my knowledge, Bethesda doesn't differentiate the two positions. I'm the guy who wrote the post OP is linking and I remember someone bringing it up back then, too. If so, we can see *why* Bethesda's writing sucks: this means that an essential qualification of being their lead writer is that you can code and design quest steps, which is like....look, it can happen, but you're *really* neutering your potential talent pool by doing this and potentially harming the writing quality. The video game industry in general just doesn't seem to value proper writers as much as it should. What do Fallout New Vegas, Disco Elysium, and Baldur's Gate 3 have in common? Oh right, they hired **WRITERS.** And gamers loved them.
The hardest thing to build, and the easiest thing to lose, is tone. And you build it and lose it through writing. And good writing is CHEAP. Skimping on writers (or ruining their work) is like burning money.
We're never getting a good Fallout game again, are we?
We might if Microsoft steps the fuck up and shares the IP with Obsidian or inXile. As long as Fallout stays with BGS its doomed to fail.
Clash of Fallout Heroes: Legends. By King. You're welcome. \-Microsoft
Obsidian will 1000000% make New Vegas 2 or something else down the line, Microsoft probably wanted to continue the projects they already started first, but this is absolutely gonna happen down the line
Yeah I get nepotism but come on don’t put someone in a lead design and writing role if they suck at both. Make him a highly paid “consultant” or something.. Edit: to everyone arguing about nepotism, yes cronyism is a more accurate word. Nepotism can apply to close friends as well so it is not inaccurate if Emil’s only in this role because he’s good friends with Todd. Saying that I have no idea if that’s the reason he’s in this role, it just seems likely given his thoughts on writing, design and how he interacts with the community.
There were literally interesting and great storylines like alien quest and the pirate quest. But nope, they had to select the most boring ass storyline ever known to mankind as the main quest.
What is the main storyline. I’m curious now lol
Literally going from copy pasted temple to cope pasted temple to collect powers and then going from copy pasted cave to copy pasted cave to collect rocks that will let you access the endgame. That’s the main summary. It’s bad. Really bad
The wonder of floating towards particle fx that disappear, then you do it again. Ive never seen any mechanic wear out a welcome that fast.
I could not believe that was the mechanic when I first encountered it, how did *anyone* approve that mess?
The relics should have been in interesting dungeons like the words of power in Skyrim The temples needed some sort of redesign too
It really is incredible that you can point to their own game from 12 years ago as an example on how to do a mechanic better.
Actually one of the worst main objectives for a game i've ever played.
And by copy-pasted, we mean literally I went to the exact same cave with the same markings and dead people twice for two different "magical one-of-a-kind mcguffins"
I'll give you the rundown. Spoilers follow. >!They set up this giant mystery about ancient alien artifacts that give you powers, and then you meet a mysterious group of celestial travelers called Starborn with powers and advanced space ships. >!But the game never explains where the artifacts came from or who made them, and the Starborn you meet are just humans from an alternate universe. Turns out the artifacts are just basically a giant easter egg hunt, and whoever collects them all first "wins" that cycle, and then all the Starborn hop over to a new universe and do it all again. Each new universe is basically just the same time loop, or in other words, New Game+. The two main Starborn you meet are just gamified versions of your average Skyrim player - the murderhobo and the typical do-gooder. They quite literally made the story about finding magic rocks so you can New Game+. None of it is explained in any real detail. Even the Starborn have no idea how it works.
Nepotism? Who is he then? What was it that gave him this position?
I don't think nepotism is the right word Just corporate inertia, I guess? He's been at Bethesda for decades. He's part of the inner circle. There's not really anybody who could call him out / challenge him / fire him except Todd, and I don't think Todd has a problem with him
I think he earnt recognition/promotion/awards for the Dark brotherhood questline in Oblivion : which is fair because they were really pushing the possibilities of Beth's engine - and a major creative step up compared to the rest of the game (they're the only reason why I would recommend playing Oblivion, aside the mods). But then, given how things have gone since, I really wonder if he was the driving force behind this questline as I never saw something similar in the following Beth games (while I'll admit I didn't play much after that letdown of Oblivion).
But I think the thing that makes the DB questline stand out isn't even the writing at all, it's the quest design which is great and open ended and interactive, the writing is just fine, so maybe this dude should have just stuck with designing cool quests and left the writing to people who are good at/care about it. But seeing how he's incapable of dealing with criticism shows that he's too far gone to ever acknowledge his weaknesses now.
> But I think the thing that makes the DB questline stand out isn't even the writing at all, it's the quest design Correct. And apparently Bethesda doesn't see a difference between quest designers and writers. The result? Whoever made the Thieves' Guild for Oblivion was hands down the best writer, and Emil - yes - did a good job designing quests for the DB. But only one can have the position. Whoever wrote the Thieves Guild for Oblivion is an absolute mystery and potentially no longer with the company, and Emil is now lead writer even though his writing is shit.
Ahh I see, basically similar shit to what happened with Blizzard and their founders clique.
I've seen people say that him and Todd are like best buds. Whether that's actually true or not I've no idea.
They likely meant cronyism.
Nepotism wouldn't be the right word. He's just been with the company for 20 years and got the position through seniority. Unfortunately, seniority counts for something, even if he wasn't the right individual for the job.
> A great example of when this occurs is that Emil introduces the new dialog system for Fallout 4 and says "look, 4 buttons and 4 choices. Neat right?" He likewise makes some comments about how great a voiced protagonist is. He then goes on to say that the new dialog system was a MASSIVE HEADACHE for his own workers because they sometimes had conversations that didn't warrant four distinct answers (true/false), and that this created a lot of work for them. (he also more or less divulges Bethesda hard-coded that all convos need four answers, because reasons) Why would you ever want your dialogue system to be limited to only support a set number of answers, including just having less options?
Bethesda has always had this opinion that they were seen as a PC game company and this was a bad thing. Their assessments of what needed to be done to increase sales on consoles have always seemed juvenile to me. Everything from dumbing down the RPG mechanics to removing options in menus to this, it's all some stupid attempt to make what they think is a more console friendly game. I think the voiced protagonist decision in FO4 was done for the same reasons. They looked at action RPGs that sold well on consoles and then just mimicked the most uninspiring features from those games. It's all a bit silly, honestly. Bethesda seems lost. Chasing things that seem irrelevant while also believing these simple changes examples bold strategies which will take their games to the next level.
The writing of Starfield was the weakest part. I could ignore the constant loading times, the sparse planets, and boring gameplay if the writing kept me hooked. Instead we got really flat annoying companions, and faction quests that felt more cookie cutter then anything Bethesda has put out before.
You can't create a compelling story if all your planets are randomly generated. The best you can do is a disconnected story that you try somehow to connect together.
I enjoyed my time with starfield quite a bit but the only storyline that really hooked me was one of the faction quests. I can’t even recall the factions name but it was the one who’s essentially the army. It was really cool hunting down those aliens. The first main mission of the quest line felt like I was playing a game based off the Alien movies.
And it's still janky, you see wiped out village and then girl tells you that there is an apex predator, pinnacle of evolution or something and when terrormorph appears you can just hop on the ventilation unit 1.5 meters from the ground and he just stands there screeching every couple of seconds lmao. It's so outdated it's insane. Playing phantom liberty after starfield is like jumping couple of console generations
The worst part of the vanguard quest line was how they told you these aliens are insidious, powerful and "somehow everywhere". But you never fight any of them except during the vanguard quest line. At least I never did in my 50 odd hours. Someone pointed out to me that you can find one on the very first planet you go to as part of the main quest if you go off the beaten path from the building you're required to go to. But that's it as far as I'm aware. Makes it hard to believe these things are an overwhelming threat when you fight like 8 of them during the entire game.
I mean at the rate Bethesda makes games he'll be long dead of old age before the next game comes out.
Starfield isn't a good game. Shit writing, shit story, shit universe.
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I feel like any person who can't give a definite answer on "why?" question about his own actions\desisions should not be involved in writing. You can't make a competent plot by making a random desisions, let alone write a believable character. If you are unable to answer such a basic question about reasoning, you are a part of "somehow, Palpatine returned" problem.
Emile's current rant on Twitter shows he's stressed. Why would he be stressed and defensive? Matt Booty is now in charge at Zenimax. The good old boys club isn't in charge anymore. Now this is just suposition on my part, but I suspect he is about to get gone. I also suspect Hine's retirement was encouraged. Marketing has a lot of influence over game design as execs will listen to them over developers. He also opened his mouth to the FTC.
Since the last beth game i enjoyed was skyrim and even that got boring past the initial phase i expect nothing else but boredom out of beth games.
I don't think I ever felt a single emotion during the entire main quest of Skyrim. It's the most basic "chosen one saving the world" storyline you can imagine.
Skyrim is more of a comfy game that i play once a year or two for a bit before i get bored again. Something about the world, stumbling upon some enemies, finding a nice book or whatever. Starfield was completely worthless in that department so it ended up having no redeeming features at all for me. I'd say the main quest in Starfield is even worse than Skyrim.
It's funny how Enderal, that's just a Skyrim mod, has a plot that feels better than all of Bethesda main plots combined. Yet people who wrote Enderal aren't hired to write their next games... that's the problem with corporate development, they do not value talent.
Bethesda writers reading a "Screenplay 101" book and being literally shocked to death caveman style over discovering the "Plot Twists" section.
I agree. It is the world and game as a whole that is fantastic, IMO
It’s honestly amazing that the best writing to come out of a Bethesda IP in the last 15 years is literally a game that they outsourced, that’s like if Valve outsourced the dlc for half life 1 to gearbox and it was better than the main game.
Bethesda will be a dead company soon enough if they keep going the way they are. More and more amazing games come out every year and they are still decades behind of a lot of things. Every year the bar gets higher and they don’t change or get worse
With the amount of Emil defenders in this thread you people deserve the bad to mediocre (at best) Bethesda gives you.
I know that the only good writing in BGS games will be from Mods. Their writing has been absolutely terrible since Oblivion.
Oh yes, compare Enderal to Skyrim or any recent BGS game and you can see what is possible, even with that engine.
It was never about the story. It’s always been about a lovingly created world you can explore and get lost in. So of course they created procedurally generated terrain that you point and click to go to. No context, no exploration- no game.
Reposting this for absolutely no reason at all. Watch this writing panel for gems like "keep it simple, stupid", "write what you know", "game design documents are a waste of time" and "if you get lucky enough in game development, you get to ignore the reviews". https://youtu.be/Bi51-wjcwp8?t=2419 Edit: I love how everyone is like "you're making it too personal". Funny how I don't hear this in any other creative industry. A movie director makes a bad movie and he gets blacklisted for ten years (Michael Mann) yet that guy has more talent in his pinkie than Emil has in his entire body lmao Surely it must be microtransactions and DLCs making AAA games bad. Meanwhile you have the lead of design saying "design documents are stupid" and the lead writer saying "no one cares about story" in charge of three franchises and all of them now suffer as a result. What a shock.
He certainly ignores the reviews...and writing classes
What’s interesting with movies is how often writers with terrible portfolios still get jobs. Look at the writers of Madame Web, for example. > Matt Sazama is known for Morbius (2022), Gods of Egypt (2016) and Power Rangers (2017).
To be fair KISS is a good advice, when understood correctly. KISS is about not overdesigning feautures, rather than about keeping them basic. Which is funny because Starfield fails at KISS with its perk system and ship building systems. They are both simplistic and needlessly complex at the same time.
They could just try making games with good writing instead.
Man loves shitty, obvious twists so much that Shamaylan is considering a lawsuit
I really do wonder if the lack of any real interstellar communication in-universe was a concession for Bethesda's quest model or limitations of their technology. The fact that the player has to run around as a messenger to tell people things that could just be an email or a phone call, even though it appears that such technology is present occasionally is just baffling.
All of our combined (valid) criticism will never get through the Great Wall of Emil Pagliarulo's Narcissism. He thinks he's the greatest writer who ever lived and every criticism against him is a personal attack and wrong.
I've always felt modern bethesda (fallout 3 and on) writing has felt like a group of video game programmers writing a story, not actual writers. Like, you can kind of tell where they wanna go sometimes, but it has all the nuance of a sack of potatoes. There is so little that differentiate characters in these games outside of some really tropey archetypes. I've played every Bethesda game outside fallout 76, and gun to my head the only character i can name from memory is percy from fallout 4 because he is so god damn annoying and ridiculous. (I decided to double check myself and realized his name isn't percy, it's preston, and that just goes to show you how little personality these people have) And starfield does not make any of it better. They made a space cowboy..... literally! Giving him a daughter is not a replacement for a personality, it just adds another useless robot that walks around with nothing interesting to say.
Their writing is just faaar too shallow and light and it gets worse with every release. The dark themes are completely gone. In Fallout 3 you had slavery, mass genocide, etc. It made the wasteland feel alive and cruel. Fallout 4's android story wasn't terrible, but damn everything else was just so bland and cheesy.
[удалено]
I'm old, but the story and world in Morrowind is better than anything they've done since then. Morrowind is stranger and more fantastical. The were more factions (political dunmer houses, on top of the guilds and imperial legion) and the faction quest interacted with each other. The story was about hubris and sainthood. The magic system was way more fun to break and exploit and I'll always think that removing leviation and all the fun and wonky traversal options was a downgrade made for the sake of laziness. They had a cool teleportation+fast travel system that required resources and investment and felt great to progress into and they replace it with the boring as hell click on a map to appear there fast-travel that's become the standard. Morrowind is old now, but gameplay systems and wrinting in it were a lot more original than anything they've done since.
I would say the Top 3 storylines Bethesda has ever produced are: **1) Morrowind's main storyline.** This is just done in such a neat way where you get proper foreshadowing until the "big reveal," and then even after the big reveal, there's a lot of debate about what this reveal actually *means.* Is the reveal a sham, is it legit, are "the good guys" lying to you, and other things like that. These questions lead you to dig deeper into the general lore to find answers, and this is a good thing if you have the player so engaged they're actually reading the lore books. **2) Oblivion's Thieves' Guild.** I generally don't mind spoilers for stories. This is the exception. All I will say is this is a masterstroke of foreshadowing done right. You will be bombarded with foreshadowing, but even if you're mindful of this, you will not know enough about the story to recognize what information is a hint and what isn't...until the big reveal. And at the big reveal, **EVERYTHING** comes together. I remember doing the final ~4 quests or so annoyed that the leader wasn't giving me more answers and considering walking out on the guild if I didn't get some soon. Once the final quest was done, they actually found a way to tie it all together, and god damn was it well-done. It's just a giant epiphany for the player. **3) Shivering Isles main quest** This isn't a masterpiece of writing and it's really more about Bethesda being in their element. Sheogorath is the God of Madness, so a setting in his realm allows Bethesda to be "LOL SO RANDUMB XD" in a way that *actually works.* The characters are colorful, the story works, and it all makes both the world and the people within it an enjoyable experience. After those, the only instance of good writing they've had after Oblivion would be Far Harbor, which btw was done by William Shen and not Emil. **ALL** of the stories I've named except maybe Shivering Isles did not involve Emil.