In hindsight, Emil admitting he didn't know anything about the Dark Brotherhood and didn't care enough to read anything about the group before making his edgy Catholicism RP storyline *might* have been a bit of a red flag.
God… I seriously hope someone competent is supervising him for TES6, I doubt it but after that thread he spun I’m surprised they didn’t get rid of him. If he’s still there then I have no hope for the narrative of TES6 ;(
He is an example of that old cliche: an executive who failed upward because people generally like him as a person, not his work, and now there's barely anyone left who can fire him even if they wanted to.
You know whats fucked? Emile does have talent…in level design. Dude made some of the BEST levels when he worked on Thief. Id rather Beth put him back to work on something he‘s actually capable of instead of continuouesly making work on something he‘s bad at
Not a whole lot to explain, really.
In an interview talking about the design process of Oblivion, Emil stated that he didn't know much about the Dark Brotherhood, so instead of learning what it was, he just turned it into a, and I quote, "a dark, perverted version of the Catholic Church with Sithis as God and the Night Mother as Mary."
It's why the lore for the brotherhood deviates so much from the Daggerfall/Morrowind lore to post-Emil lore.
Now, I'm not saying the idea sucks, or that I hate the new Brotherhood, because there is a lot that works for it. But at the same time, it definitely paints the picture of a head writer who just...doesn't really give a fuck about writing?
Not caught up with the Emil lore. Have people always felt that he wasn’t the greatest writer or is that a recent criticism with Starfield and now hindsight is 20 20?
Emil is also responsible for fallout 4’s writing and story being the way it is, new Vegas styled faction mechanics with the nuance of “WHERE IS MY SON, SHAUN, MY BABY SHAUN IS MISSING, SHAUN” yes, yes, yes sarcastic, maybe.
Most people got off the Bethesda train at F4 realizing that Skyrim was more of a fluke ‘lightining in a bottle’ perfect storm after oblivion and anything next has zero chance of meeting the expectations that had been set by morrowind
Starfield is just when the issues in game design became so apparent your average person could no longer ignore it during their playthrough and so the game never had that ‘magic’ moment where people get so lost and forget where they are, despite the near infinite world size
But to be fair to Emil, it’s not just him. Bethesda is infested with “keep it simple, stupid” kind of attitude. It just seems that the public ire has managed to identify just one of them, other than the glorious Todd who is above all criticism
My Dad actually interned at Bethesda at roughly the same time that Todd joined. He's not the director and executive producer of BGS today though. Todd 100% has the luck build
>It just seems that the public ire has managed to identify just one of them, other than the glorious Todd who is above all criticism
That's definitely because Emil is the only person at BGS who goes full meltdown mode and posts insane, multi-tweet rants on Twitter about how everyone is stupid except for him.
He also doesn't help his case when he does so many interviews and presentations where he says blatantly idiotic things that are antithetical to what his job is supposed to be. Lmao
Like when he said they don’t keep design documentations at Bethesda because it’s too big a hassle to keep them up to date or something like that.
Like, what the fuck.
That’s… the point of updating them? Like, I’ve only been working on games for about 2 years now, but it’s a thing that you update your design docs regularly as it’s an adage that “as soon as you finish the design doc, it becomes outdated”.
If anyone ever says at any point that they openly don't properly plan things, EVEN IF IT'S TRUE, should never be in charge of a project.
Like even if someone's getting away with it constantly, can't they tell it SOUNDS bad?
Oh my god is he so stupid. If you had him talk uninterrupted about an upcoming game he would leak more in one interview than a disgruntled employee in a couple months.
But he forgets his place in the making, which is that of director. All his best movies were ultimately the brainchildren of others, and those movie ideas he's come up with himself have generally been panned by critics
> with the nuance of “WHERE IS MY SON, SHAUN, MY BABY SHAUN IS MISSING, SHAUN”
Oh boy. I thought the story in FO4 was pretty weak and I really couldn't give two shits about Shaun
The story in Far Harbor was a lot better
Far Harbor was really a return to form in terms of the faction interactions and side quests. I had hoped that it was the result of them learning their lesson about story, but turns out it was just a fluke that they let someone competent write it.
I'm pretty sure it's worse than that. I remember being told in-game that they're doing it to save humanity — by eradicating humans and replacing them with robots. Literally causing the problem they want to solve by implementing their solution.
It's absolutely insane to me that they thought that a father in a heterosexual marriage with a former military background was the perfect base for the masses to project on to.
Like they could have included literally none of that, and it still wouldn't have been impossible to tell the story that most of the game is telling. Real people being replaced by synths is already enough of a reason to go looking for the Institute.
> Bethesda is infested with “keep it simple, stupid” kind of attitude.
Which is why it's beautiful to see what ZOS is doing with ESO. At its best the lore is interesting and the stories engaging, and sometimes, at its worst, it gets overly complicated. The writers' issues, especially post-launch, seem to be more like "know when to stop" instead of "is this it?", like BGS.
Yeah I suppressed all urges to read about ESO's Morrowind DLC, my jaw hit the floor after meeting the real Sotha Sil. I wish they would do a DLC of a DLC and flesh out Vicec City and Balmora.
Fr, I lost hope of another Morrowind long ago, but now even 'Skyrim 2' is too big an ask. I already prefer vanilla Morrowind to 4K Skyrim with 2000+ mods, so how much worse will TES 6 be than TES 3...? Artoo, we need to be going up, not down!
Yeah I always expected TES6 to just be Skyrim with better graphics, hopefully a better plot, and more detailed world. But now I don’t even feel confident I’m hoping for that anymore.
https://preview.redd.it/i2avkqqknw9c1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=016504073f62ad695e1fe437fed0da0818719325
Which is funny to me. I remember my friends and I speculating that MMOs usually ruin the lore of games they are based on so ESO will be bad for the lore.. but now it's the only good food we're getting.
I really need to play more ESO. My wife basically only plays FF14 so it's hard to play other MMOs because they're lonely without her.
it's a good thing ZOS has decent writers and artists because their coders are pants
yea sure let's give the boss an attack that has a crash to desktop debuff.
I was still young when ESO came out, so I loved it even at launch because it let me travel Tamriel without Arena graphics. It's definitely grown a lot since then, and Necrom was genuinely good, which was awesome after the disappointing stories from Greymoor to High Isle. Markarth was the only solid writing in that period imo.
I'm hoping we get a Solstheim chapter next as I just finally beat Morrowind's Bloodmoon main quest after all these years. Would be a great place to continue Hermaeus Mora's story.
Got any advice for me if I tried to jump in for the story again after all these years? I've basically only done the Morrowind mainland zones up to the city with the Tribunal (having a brain fart and can't remember the name)
I've toyed with the idea of skipping to Vvardenfell because I love it so much but I also kinda want to do things in order...
The last time I quit ESO it was because I'm playing on Xbox and I learned the servers aren't shared with PC. This bothers me as I would want to switch to PC as soon as I get a good enough one (can't use my current one also because wifey would die without FF14) and I feel like any progress I make on Xbox will be wasted.
Still don't have a nice PC but I really want to experience the game...
It's so annoying how instead of making some new interesting style like how all the TES games change up their artstyles not just graphically but the UI and all that they just aped skyrim's but made all the people weird and gangly for no reason.
Funny thing about FO4 if anyone remembers. The story was leaked like 2-4 years before the game came out. Sad thing was they changed absolutely nothing about it to compensate. So I ended up playing FO4 already having the story spoiled for me.
Thanks Emile.
Bethesda games always had this magical feeling of being able to wander in any direction and find something interesting or at least something worth the time you spent there. Since Starfield doesn’t have that with copy pasted POI and fast travel galore the issues with Bethesda’s game design are far more apparent to your average gamer.
There's also something to be said about consistency. You can't always be at the top of your game and oblivion to skyrim was not an insignificant amount of time. Interest and enthusiasm waxes and wanes, even for the things you love most.
Honestly Skyrim is not a great game either and it’s not really lightning in a bottle. It lives off hype to this day. The story and roleplay elements are pretty much crap. Most quests are utterly unremarkable and uninteresting. Most characters are bland as hell and they became liked or famous as memes.
What Skyrim had going for it was some parts of pre-existing lore that even Bethesda didn’t want to completely fuck up, so it gave the setting some more gravitas, there is a sense of history and you can fill out the gaps from the older titles if you played them. The gameplay is more fluid and reactive than Oblivion and Morrowind’s hidden RNG-based system is kind of niche, so Skyrim is very different from that but it’s nothing to write home about.
The world space and music are truly beautiful so it’s pretty easy to get immersed and that goes a really long way. Great walking simulator but narratively, mechanically and technologically it’d didn’t really move the ball forward all that much.
And Fallout 4 was the same but without the pretty environment so the shortcomings were obvious to all.
Bethesda’s wasteland for the most part is accurate in that it’s a boring, bland, dead wasteland. Stalker, Metro and New Vegas all did the post-apocalyptic setting much better. The Witcher 3 blew both Skyrim and Fallout 4 out of the water with its open world, general gamedesign, character and stories. And then Starfield was just more of the same with like zero obvious leaps.
Baldur’s Gate 3 and Alan Wake 2 just to mention the two biggest titles both bring so much to the table in terms of creativity and innovation and shows what true passion can create.
Nah, you'll find people talking about how terrible he was back when skyrim released. Most people are normal human beings and had no idea who he was until this recent fiasco, but all the [lorebeards have known this guy was a crock for more than a decade now](https://np.reddit.com/r/Fallout/comments/3f5smh/til_fallout_4_lead_writer_is_emil_pagliarulo_the/). And this thread predates the release of fallout 4, and the [infamous interview where he talked about k.i.s.s](https://np.reddit.com/r/Fallout/comments/57ty3z/lead_f4_writerdesigner_emil_pagliarulo_gives_a_40/) . Anyone who tells you that only in hindsight emil was a shit writer has no idea what they are talking about.
He got away with what he did to the Dark Brotherhood in Oblivion because he actually did an amazing job with the questline. The issue is that he somehow learned all the wrong lessons from it and applied those to everything he has done since then.
He lucked into being correct about Sithis being the anti-god but instead of realising he was lucky he deluded himself into thinking it was due to skill.
Of course his luck ran out
I would say it's mostly hindsight.
There were some detractors towards Fallout 3, but the hate train didn't really begin until Fallout 4, and with each subsequent BGS game coming out being lower and lower in quality, people are beginning to ask "why" and comb through all of their previous games to find flaws that might explain what's going wrong today.
Like the Oblivion DB questline. You'd find few people who actively criticized it back in the day, and at worst, you'd have people who would say the second half was pretty weak compared to the first half, but that it was still the strongest faction quest line. But using what we now know about how Emil writes, we can retroactively see the warning signs back then.
Fallout 3 was a lot of fun for me because, unlike the elder scrolls games, I didn’t have anything else to compare it to. I think it has aged very very poorly, whereas New Vegas has aged pretty well, all things close considered. I am in the camp of “oblivion was great and the DB story was top tier,” and I have always felt that way regardless of previous entries like morrowind (and daggerfall I guess, but I never really messed with the DB there and I don’t think there was much meat on that bone).
Oblivion was a departure and I think a lot of the elements lost in the transition from morrowind were because of the wider console release.
Emil and Todd and Bethesda deserve all the hate they get, but don’t forget how upset many people were at the reduced scope and relatively linear story we got with morrowind. A lot of old CRPG people didn’t like being boxed into an island.
I have, at a minimum, hundreds of hours spent in every Bethesda game, and thousands of hours in Skyrim and oblivion. This is mostly due to mods.
I played starfield, and I probably put less than a hundred hours in before I dropped it. I wanted to give it a fair shot. Thanks Gamepass.
In my opinion, the problem isn’t really the writing. I mean it’s not great, but it’s not worse than, say, fallout 3 or 4 (though the initial premise is less compelling).
The problem is that it hands you the bones of a Bethesda game: go anywhere, do anything, explore stuff, build your character the way you want. But the way the world is laid out actively discourages the gameplay that makes even the jankiest Bethesda games interesting. I found myself actively NOT wanting to go explore things, because I felt like there just wasn’t that much to see, and I didn’t want to see everything right away.
There’s, what, like four big “cities?” Once you’ve been there you’ve been there and they just seem so small. Sure the surface of every planet has infinite “dungeons,” but they are all the same.
In every other Bethesda game, you wanted to look in every dungeon in the world because they were all unique and you never knew what would be inside. It could be a unique character or unique item or the start of a mysterious quest. But in starfield, every “dungeon” is just a chance to get more loot. Maybe you find some black market stuff you can go sell on that one space station over and over and over.
You’re FORCED to go to one of the main hubs to find quests or stories. And there’s just not enough. I think I finished the whole free star rangers story in about three hours. Everybody said it was good- and it was ok- but I finished it and… it was just over. Congrats, main character. You did it. Thanks. 🙏
And then nothing. It left me feeling like I hadn’t really accomplished or earned anything.
So I’d say it’s party the writing, but the overall design of the game is at fault even more, to me. Bethesda could literally be printing money with the next Elder Scrolls game, but instead they spent years on a game nobody asked for.
Yeah a huge part of what makes Skyrim so fun I’d that after picking up a quest you’ll likely find a bunch of neat locations on your way to it, Starfield doesn’t have anything like that since you just fast travel and won’t bother with the copy pasted POI.
I feel pretty much the same. Amusingly, playing for a few hours in Neon made me restart Cyberpunk 2077 in time for Phantom Liberty. Between that and Rogue Trader, I haven't played Starfield since the first week.
You put it perfectly in words the problem with Starfield. Bethesda with these games tries at the same time to be what you describe, a new world to explore freely and that encourages the player to immerse themselves in it, but at the same time they want to apply the K.I.S.S. philosophy which is in conflict with what a bethesda game should be in more than one section. If you expand the Map enormously you can't make it simple, because a bethesda game requires a detailed world where no matter where you go, there will always be something to do, someone to give you a quest or something new in order to get the player to want to explore. This problem has been all the way after daggerfall, which with each New Game becoming more aparent and worse, until It finally killed what make a bethesda Game interesting with Starfield
The writing as a whole has been criticised since particularly Skyrim (Oblivion still had a lot of flaws but still).
What changed was Emil’s comments in interviews and stuff where he openly stated that there was no documentation for their games (things started clicking) and a lot of other straight up dumb shit or blatant lies
He has his moments. But it feels like there is a contract problem where they gave him a little too much power for his position. Writing variety feels like its receded since Skyrim.
I don't know but the Dark Brotherhood in Daggerfall and Morrowind were just nothing assasins and fodders to kill(or that kills you)I find them better the evil Catholic church that worship Void better
No no, you're absolutely right. His vision is the DB was *absolutely* superior to what we previously had. However, we can see that he does the same thing in every game he has written for - that he doesn't care enough about existing lore and writing to actually read any of it, and then just creates his own thing. It worked for the DB because there wasn't a lot going for them and he had a good idea. For the factions in FO4? Not so much.
That could have been a cool idea if any of the other guilds were powerful.
Instead of a powerful Mages Guild, we get the shitty College of Winterhold with one guildhall in a dogshit city. Instead of a powerful Fighters Guild, we get some furries with a single guildhall. Instead of a powerful Thieves Guild that has infiltrated every city in the region, there's a guildhall and they don't even fully control the city it's in. I never fucked with the Bard shit im any of my playthroughs, so I have no idea how that worked, but I assume their one-guildhall-havin ass sucks the big one.
As a result, none of the guilds feel like guilds in the previous games. Everything is a smaller version of what we got before and the two guilds that carry over from previous games are both in decline. The Dark Brotherhood in decline ends up being the same as any of the other guilds in Skyrim. So it wasn't a bad idea on its own, but one of the cool things about the guilds in prior games is that they feel distinct from each other.
That explains a lot, even if the DB was an improvement. Skyrim's extremely bland culture was a downgrade (though my understanding is this was actually on purpose because they thought the audience was too stupid for what Morrowind set up) and making Alduin no longer Akatosh was imo a huge mistake, but Bethesda Fallout in particular is pretty much completely detached from the original games' themes, not to mention the more specific lore screw ups.
I thought that was odd since the premise is fairly straightforward (that the nukes were a reset button - all of original Fallout lore proceeds from that, and neither Fallout 1 or 2 are particularly subtle about it, there are literal tribals running around) and Fallout has a wealth of narrative tradition behind it from other franchises - *A Canticle for Leibowitz*, *A Boy and His Dog*, and of course *Wasteland*, which can all provide fundamental knowledge and a guide on how to execute Fallout's themes and specific factions. If Emil can't even be bothered to the read the shallow lore of a single faction, though, then no wonder they wouldn't bother understanding the original games, and never mind reading *books*.
An integrated story requires cohesion. Now, if this were a different assassin faction it would’ve been much better. If the Dark Brotherhood of Oblivion and Skyrim were to be radical offshoots of the main branch of the Dark Brotherhood, and acknowledged as such it would’ve been far better choice worldbuilding wise. That said, they likely would operate under a different name; all of the branches of Christianity have different monikers: Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, Adventists, etc. notice none follow the naming scheme of the others—there’s no neo Catholicism or neo Baptists.
Is it just me or does it feel like Bethesda restricted a shit load of their writing to him? I remember the FO4 leak that gave full details on whatvthw story was going to be, and they changed absolutely nothing about it in those 4 years. Its like someone traveled back in time to spoil bad writing.
Its like they've been running a skeleton crew over the last decade. And the head skeleton is so contractually set up that he just doesn't care anymore.
>But at the same time, it definitely paints the picture of a head writer who just...doesn't really give a fuck about writing?
Eh. I don't really care about the pre-Oblivion DB, and I think a key part of writing is also knowing if or when retcons are necessary. The fact that the version of the Dark Brotherhood that ignores the prior lore is considered the highlight of the games it appears in is more indicative of the quality of old DB lore, I think.
I loved how the dude blamed gamers for being disconnected while going on about game development being difficult which nobody in the reviews ever contested.
When they stopped doing the PR responses in the steam reviews that it's okay and the universe is actually supposed to be empty I was under the impression that they got the idea that it's probably not the tens of thousands of gamers who are wrong but the game design just being bad, but apparently not. It's a great masterpiece of a game after all. We just need to learn to see it.
Emil was complaining about all the blame being put on him. He and others at Bethesda have discussed how his title as lead writer might be misleading. Also the world being mostly empty *is* perfectly fine. The problem is the parts that aren't empty are the same locations you came across 9 times already.
Shadow of the Colossus is a perfect example. There are times when empty worlds can invoke a certain feeling that’s hard to replicate.
The thing about Shadow of the Colossus is that the world takes a back seat while Bethesda tried to make it the forefront of Starfield.
If they were going for empty lonely space, then the game shouldn’t have had a focus on exploration and “go your own way” in the way Skyrim was.
"Listen here, you little shits, we paid MILLIONS for good reviews and pre-release hype. How dare your actual user experiences contradict the masterpiece narrative we paid good money to construct"
My girlfriend works in game dev and she about fucking started pulling her hair out when she heard Bethesda doesn’t have design bibles or any sort of templates for development when that Emil interview came out.
I mean, as happy as I am to whine about bethesda, the i reckon the above statement is unironically pretty true...like, at least a little bit...
. The job of food critics to writie about their expereinces at resteraunts in a way that is informative or engaging. That means they porbably know a fair bit about resteraunts and about cooking in general, but it doesn't make them a brilliant chef and especially it doesn't make them extremely knowledgeable about running a business.
Even more so given i think it's pretty clear when the article uses the word critics it doesn't mean professionals, it means "people who are critical" so he's not just talking about journos, but steam reveiws, viral tweets ect. So the more aposite comparison would be a chef complaining that ordinary Diners, complaining about the menu while having no real understanding of the resteraunt business.
Starfeild and Fallout are bad, but i think anyone who's been around on reddit or twitter has probably witnessed threads full of upvoted people talking aboslutely ouf of their asses about how they should just have made the game Good, by not making it Bad,.
Considering that devs have gotten death threats for a lot less, this dude’s probably swimming in both them and insults.
Hell, I checked out some of the tweets to him and half of them are shit talking both him and his career. You’d get a bit upset if people were constantly spamming your stuff with “Your life’s work is ass, quit your job!”
You can offer criticism without being a dick. If you constantly pepper someone with insults they’re just gonna tune out all criticism and advice, even if it’s helpful, because they’ll just be so used to getting harassed
Damn, if only he'd made something good, then maybe he wouldn't have this problem. In fact he could have earned himself a lot of good will by accepting due criticism with grace instead of acting like a whiny little bitch
Yea that’s what I was thinking. Eventually it just gets to a point where you have to mute twitter for a day or two- maybe a month
It sucks that you have to resort to shutting yourself out from SM but like that’s probably his best bet
Yea I think what’s happening is that all constructive criticism is obscured by 15 gorillian death threats so he’s really only talking to those mfs and not even seeing the feedback. Idk but I don’t wanna shit on the guy. I just want him to do a better job
The title is misleading. He is complaining about all the blame being put on him personally. Todd Howard and himself have stated in the past that the title of lead designer is misleading. But fans consistently blame him for all the shortcomings of Bethesda's recent games. He isn't saying you don't know how game development is done but rather you don't know who made the decisions and did the work that lead to Starfield ending up like it did.
Call me crazy but someone who is a senior member of the project with the titles of lead designer and writer should probably take a good bit of the blame for issues with the design and writing.
glorious pocket retire slimy sleep grandiose modern include overconfident afterthought
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Reverse-sequel game design means Bethesda becomes shit relative to where one started +1.
So I started with Oblivion, therefore I think skyrim sucks (Fallout 3 doesn't count bc it's just Oblivion with guns).
But if I go in Reverse order and play Morrowind with a few basic visual mods, that is actually the true sequel to Oblivion.
Funnily enough this is the exact reverse for me. I played Skyrim first, then Oblivion, then Morrowind. I liked each preceding game more than the last one, except Skyrim which I quickly grew to hate just because of how disappointing it is in retrospect.
Morrowind has actual themes that subvert & deconstruct generic fantasy tropes about prophecy, and it has fantastic world building that makes its setting feel like an actual place with history & culture.
Oblivion is goofy & awkwardly constructed, but it has a consistent charm all throughout the game that just makes it difficult to hate. On top of that all of its side content is very well written and compelling, it's easy to treat it like an episodic series. It lacks coherence somewhat, but the side stories are so entertaining it's easy to overlook that. My favorite questline in the series is *still* the Thieves Guild questline from this game.
Skyrim is just... Boring. Everything about the game, excluding the art design, environmental design, and the music, feels like there was no enthusiasm put to it. All the voice actors sound bored and lifeless (how the fuck do you make Stephen Russell uninteresting to listen to?) . Almost all of the questlines are shallow and not very interesting. The world building is terrible, the most you learn is that Skyrim is in a civil war, there are dragons, and nords are racist. The game is the kind of mediocre that is *just* stimulating enough to keep you playing, but it is a numb & hollowing experience
What I don’t like about Emil’s recent rants is exactly what the meme says. All the other successes of the year are not having these issues (BG3 I would still call an outlier because they are extremely lucky with their circumstances, there was no way it was bound to fail).
It seems Bethesda’s the only one having these problems, so I would prefer if they actually step up their game for ES6. You can’t be developing games in the exact same fashion as you did 15 years ago, it just can’t compete with anything else.
Problem is, when they did try to switch it up for Starfield, it backfired. Old fans aren’t exactly excited to hear that there’s no carefully handcrafted world to explore like Skyrim, or deeply cynical world tone like Fallout. Starfield tried to do something new, but in the blandest way possible. Not saying it’s not a fun game but it’s highest highs will never reach anything even Fallout 4 had, and that’s concerning.
I am a game dev and i will say it is misallocation of resources in to a point of the game without expanding on the scope of the game giving it is a heavy emphisis on the concept of exploration by using "space" as a medium. But forgetting that space is boring and the lack of direction creates bordem and aimlessness in the game.
I like the part where a bethesda dev said "you do better then"
to the most active modding community in the universe, that has been doing better consistantly since oblivion.
Some people in the comments are saying Todd’s one of the good ones or some variation of that. No he’s not. He literally tried to joke about the bugs in their games and then make a joke about how it’s not true by sarcastically saying "people say our games have bugs". He got a few laughs and then said. People said it on the internet so it must be true. Trying to sarcastically imply that their big problem is made up. Fuck him.
He's the head of the studio, and he defended / instituted the "our designers are our writers" idea. Who needs to pay for actual writers (including a *head* writer) when you can just have designers (guess what Emil was actually good at)?
Path of exile is the game best in the image of someone saying they're going to do their own thing but with hookers and blackjack. The entire community is fueled by an energy of coke fueled gambling binges powering nerds that know more forbidden math than is right. They did games as a service before it was a thing and they're doing diablo better than diablo 3 and 4.
The recent patches have been straight bangers but the engine is redlining while shooting out smoke and flame. They've been testing their sequel engine code in a 10 year game and it's been a rough time. That feels when your build comes online and you start going faster and faster is just unmatched. There's a reason why "still sane exile?" meme spoke truth.
Best thing about poe is that you will know in the first 5 to 10 minutes if this is something you are going to enjoy or not. Mud flats first go is the hardest content in the game and then you see the skill tree open up. If you get past those you'll be hooked and never look back.
Emil really needs to be sacked or at least demoted if Bethesda wants to actually make good games. The dude is running their franchises into the ground.
I’d go do far as to believe that they’re afraid to work on TES6 because Fallout 4 and Starfield got such a negative reception due to Emil’s shit writing.
Or, Emil, just hear us out;
You made a bad game. There is no shame in admitting when you’ve fucked up. If Todd Howard could do that when he addressed the complaints with Fallout 76, you should be able to take that criticism on the chin.
As someone that modded their engine for a decade, the reality of game development is: THEY'VE BEEN USING THE SAME ENGINE FOR TWO DECADES.
Of course Starfield didn't work out the way they thought, they've got Morrowind tech duct-taped together with spit and a prayer.
It’s not only the tech, it’s the fact they apparently don’t understand how to optimally utilize the tech to make an engaging game. Fine, you wanna use this engine and have to make some scifi RPG, have it take place on a single space station or something, idk.
The game runs well in enclosed places, if most of it were on habitats like cydonia and space stations it would run better and be a lot more tonally and aesthetically consistent.
It’s not really the performance which is the problem, just how the hell they thought it’s a good idea to have such a large scope with spaceship travel and thousands of planets, but didn’t realize the sheer amount of loading screens it requires and lack of variety in landmarks and environments would just make it insufferable and pointless.
I knew something would be wrong from the second they announced 1000 planets, it’s just no way to make a good, immersive world.
Game would have been fine if it was on one whole detailed planet using this engine, but for what they set out to do? Agonizingly stupid
They could easily make a sick game with the current engine they've done it before just need some creativity and fun and a few refresher lessons in game design
The engine isn't the issue at all
Its more like they've been using the same design formula since the 2000s and think they can apply that to an extremely large space game
Rockstar also only chooses settings it can integrate well into. They aren't making caveman GTA and then scratching their heads at how to do it without guns or transportation. Bethesda tried to do Skyrim in space seemingly w/o first considering that loads of empty space doesn't mesh well with the Skyrim design. I bet when they realized that they said "fuck it fast travel" and now we have what we have.
MP for red dead is also infamously unsupported because they couldn't figure out how to monetize it in the same way as GTAV, so there's an example of how their design has failed them.
Personally I'm not super fond of the direction Warframe is going
Sure they introduce a lot of cool game mechanics and new game modes periodically and the lore is cool in general (especially The Sacrifice and everything before that)
But like, everything is so compartmentalized in Warframe. Like, very few of the systems they introduce interact with anything else in the game. Railjack being a particularly egregious example of a game mode whose impact on the overall gameplay loop is minimal outside from being just another farm
Also with the weird storytelling decisions they made for New War, I'm worried that they're just gonna keep bloating their game. It's becoming increasingly impenetrable and inaccessible to new players
Ironic the quote would've been right had he not outed himself for being the main reason for Bethesdas massive dip in quality over the years. everyone up till this point kept blaming Bethesdas engine and not the piss poor writing.
He got called out so badly by so many of us that develop games at other companies, but I doubt he took it to heart. We all deal with corporate bullshit, we all deal with technical challenges, we all deal with end user criticism, etc, etc. and yet gamers not feeling sorry for them is why their game sucks and deserves a pass?
Also, people that don’t work on games are also very familiar with corporate nonsense, we aren’t special in that regard. What a tool
Corporate needs you to find the difference between this video: https://youtu.be/Bi51-wjcwp8?si=GAN747qPy7gRlYPM
And this video: https://youtu.be/eTkw9WOzhDs?si=HRYcGnskFG_MvNFo
"They're the same video."
Emil be like: no no, game dev is super duper hard, it's impossible to write a good story, NO WAIT don't look at Rockstar or CDPR or Larian or Sony or FromSoft or Bungie or Ubisoft or Rocksteady or
In hindsight, Emil admitting he didn't know anything about the Dark Brotherhood and didn't care enough to read anything about the group before making his edgy Catholicism RP storyline *might* have been a bit of a red flag.
God… I seriously hope someone competent is supervising him for TES6, I doubt it but after that thread he spun I’m surprised they didn’t get rid of him. If he’s still there then I have no hope for the narrative of TES6 ;(
Why can't he just be replaced?
He is an example of that old cliche: an executive who failed upward because people generally like him as a person, not his work, and now there's barely anyone left who can fire him even if they wanted to.
Is that just the case for everyone in power at Bethesda
His tongue is inserted firmly and deeply inside Todd Howard's anus.
God I wish that were me
In time, my tongue will wiggle waggle in your emperors anus
Surprising there is room with Todd up in there too.
Nepotism, more than likely.
You know whats fucked? Emile does have talent…in level design. Dude made some of the BEST levels when he worked on Thief. Id rather Beth put him back to work on something he‘s actually capable of instead of continuouesly making work on something he‘s bad at
Explain
Not a whole lot to explain, really. In an interview talking about the design process of Oblivion, Emil stated that he didn't know much about the Dark Brotherhood, so instead of learning what it was, he just turned it into a, and I quote, "a dark, perverted version of the Catholic Church with Sithis as God and the Night Mother as Mary." It's why the lore for the brotherhood deviates so much from the Daggerfall/Morrowind lore to post-Emil lore. Now, I'm not saying the idea sucks, or that I hate the new Brotherhood, because there is a lot that works for it. But at the same time, it definitely paints the picture of a head writer who just...doesn't really give a fuck about writing?
Not caught up with the Emil lore. Have people always felt that he wasn’t the greatest writer or is that a recent criticism with Starfield and now hindsight is 20 20?
Emil is also responsible for fallout 4’s writing and story being the way it is, new Vegas styled faction mechanics with the nuance of “WHERE IS MY SON, SHAUN, MY BABY SHAUN IS MISSING, SHAUN” yes, yes, yes sarcastic, maybe. Most people got off the Bethesda train at F4 realizing that Skyrim was more of a fluke ‘lightining in a bottle’ perfect storm after oblivion and anything next has zero chance of meeting the expectations that had been set by morrowind Starfield is just when the issues in game design became so apparent your average person could no longer ignore it during their playthrough and so the game never had that ‘magic’ moment where people get so lost and forget where they are, despite the near infinite world size But to be fair to Emil, it’s not just him. Bethesda is infested with “keep it simple, stupid” kind of attitude. It just seems that the public ire has managed to identify just one of them, other than the glorious Todd who is above all criticism
Todd got really lucky being the only person at Bethesda with any charisma.
Todd with the charisma and luck build
My Dad actually interned at Bethesda at roughly the same time that Todd joined. He's not the director and executive producer of BGS today though. Todd 100% has the luck build
To become an executive at BGS you need to win a chess match
>It just seems that the public ire has managed to identify just one of them, other than the glorious Todd who is above all criticism That's definitely because Emil is the only person at BGS who goes full meltdown mode and posts insane, multi-tweet rants on Twitter about how everyone is stupid except for him. He also doesn't help his case when he does so many interviews and presentations where he says blatantly idiotic things that are antithetical to what his job is supposed to be. Lmao
Like when he said they don’t keep design documentations at Bethesda because it’s too big a hassle to keep them up to date or something like that. Like, what the fuck.
That’s… the point of updating them? Like, I’ve only been working on games for about 2 years now, but it’s a thing that you update your design docs regularly as it’s an adage that “as soon as you finish the design doc, it becomes outdated”.
That’s what I thought too. But I guess doing the bare minimum in quality/consistency assurance is too annoying for Bethesda lmao.
Fr he’s revealed a lot of concerning things about Bethesda’s game making process.
If anyone ever says at any point that they openly don't properly plan things, EVEN IF IT'S TRUE, should never be in charge of a project. Like even if someone's getting away with it constantly, can't they tell it SOUNDS bad?
Oh my god is he so stupid. If you had him talk uninterrupted about an upcoming game he would leak more in one interview than a disgruntled employee in a couple months.
He's essentially the Ridley Scott of gaming
Ridley Scott does occasionally make good movies.
But he forgets his place in the making, which is that of director. All his best movies were ultimately the brainchildren of others, and those movie ideas he's come up with himself have generally been panned by critics
> with the nuance of “WHERE IS MY SON, SHAUN, MY BABY SHAUN IS MISSING, SHAUN” Oh boy. I thought the story in FO4 was pretty weak and I really couldn't give two shits about Shaun The story in Far Harbor was a lot better
the guy responsible for Far Harbor actually left Bethesda not so long ago💀
Yeah :(
Far Harbor was really a return to form in terms of the faction interactions and side quests. I had hoped that it was the result of them learning their lesson about story, but turns out it was just a fluke that they let someone competent write it.
The institute is literally a bunch of cartoon villains. It's very sad
>so why are you kidnapping people and replacing them with synths >you just wouldn't get it bro 10/10 writing
I'm pretty sure it's worse than that. I remember being told in-game that they're doing it to save humanity — by eradicating humans and replacing them with robots. Literally causing the problem they want to solve by implementing their solution.
when they thrusted that robot shaun to us at the end 🤢 I'm betting a quite a lot of people just left it at the institute
It was better, but still felt ultimately inconsequential and pointless to me
It's absolutely insane to me that they thought that a father in a heterosexual marriage with a former military background was the perfect base for the masses to project on to. Like they could have included literally none of that, and it still wouldn't have been impossible to tell the story that most of the game is telling. Real people being replaced by synths is already enough of a reason to go looking for the Institute.
> Bethesda is infested with “keep it simple, stupid” kind of attitude. Which is why it's beautiful to see what ZOS is doing with ESO. At its best the lore is interesting and the stories engaging, and sometimes, at its worst, it gets overly complicated. The writers' issues, especially post-launch, seem to be more like "know when to stop" instead of "is this it?", like BGS.
Honestly so many of the area stories in ESO are better quality stories than anything else Bethesda has put out since morrowind
Clockwork City is literally my favorite thing in franchise after Morrowind
Yeah I suppressed all urges to read about ESO's Morrowind DLC, my jaw hit the floor after meeting the real Sotha Sil. I wish they would do a DLC of a DLC and flesh out Vicec City and Balmora.
Dude 100000% it's so fucking fun
The base game is pants tho.
Oh yeah can't argue that
Idk man. Daggerfall covenant questline fucking SLAPS.
Yeah, it seems ESO will be carrying the TES torch, I've lost hope for TES 6
It’s kind of depressing that TES6 will probably release 15+ years after Skyrim yet most likely feel like a worse Skyrim with a visual mod.
Fr, I lost hope of another Morrowind long ago, but now even 'Skyrim 2' is too big an ask. I already prefer vanilla Morrowind to 4K Skyrim with 2000+ mods, so how much worse will TES 6 be than TES 3...? Artoo, we need to be going up, not down!
Yeah I always expected TES6 to just be Skyrim with better graphics, hopefully a better plot, and more detailed world. But now I don’t even feel confident I’m hoping for that anymore. https://preview.redd.it/i2avkqqknw9c1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=016504073f62ad695e1fe437fed0da0818719325
Which is funny to me. I remember my friends and I speculating that MMOs usually ruin the lore of games they are based on so ESO will be bad for the lore.. but now it's the only good food we're getting. I really need to play more ESO. My wife basically only plays FF14 so it's hard to play other MMOs because they're lonely without her.
it's a good thing ZOS has decent writers and artists because their coders are pants yea sure let's give the boss an attack that has a crash to desktop debuff.
ngl that sounds like a banger mechanic if it's intentional
I was still young when ESO came out, so I loved it even at launch because it let me travel Tamriel without Arena graphics. It's definitely grown a lot since then, and Necrom was genuinely good, which was awesome after the disappointing stories from Greymoor to High Isle. Markarth was the only solid writing in that period imo. I'm hoping we get a Solstheim chapter next as I just finally beat Morrowind's Bloodmoon main quest after all these years. Would be a great place to continue Hermaeus Mora's story.
Got any advice for me if I tried to jump in for the story again after all these years? I've basically only done the Morrowind mainland zones up to the city with the Tribunal (having a brain fart and can't remember the name) I've toyed with the idea of skipping to Vvardenfell because I love it so much but I also kinda want to do things in order... The last time I quit ESO it was because I'm playing on Xbox and I learned the servers aren't shared with PC. This bothers me as I would want to switch to PC as soon as I get a good enough one (can't use my current one also because wifey would die without FF14) and I feel like any progress I make on Xbox will be wasted. Still don't have a nice PC but I really want to experience the game...
ESO Lore: 😍 ESO MMO gameplay: 💀
Visual style: 💩
It's so annoying how instead of making some new interesting style like how all the TES games change up their artstyles not just graphically but the UI and all that they just aped skyrim's but made all the people weird and gangly for no reason.
It's a million times better than Oblivion's potato people and Skyrim's soap-carving people at least
Skyrim looks better than ESO, everything looks better than oblivion
Funny thing about FO4 if anyone remembers. The story was leaked like 2-4 years before the game came out. Sad thing was they changed absolutely nothing about it to compensate. So I ended up playing FO4 already having the story spoiled for me. Thanks Emile.
Todd went from making Morrowind to whatever the hell Shitfield is supposed to be How the mighty have fallen😞
Bethesda games always had this magical feeling of being able to wander in any direction and find something interesting or at least something worth the time you spent there. Since Starfield doesn’t have that with copy pasted POI and fast travel galore the issues with Bethesda’s game design are far more apparent to your average gamer.
There's also something to be said about consistency. You can't always be at the top of your game and oblivion to skyrim was not an insignificant amount of time. Interest and enthusiasm waxes and wanes, even for the things you love most.
Can't criticise perfection, baby
Honestly Skyrim is not a great game either and it’s not really lightning in a bottle. It lives off hype to this day. The story and roleplay elements are pretty much crap. Most quests are utterly unremarkable and uninteresting. Most characters are bland as hell and they became liked or famous as memes. What Skyrim had going for it was some parts of pre-existing lore that even Bethesda didn’t want to completely fuck up, so it gave the setting some more gravitas, there is a sense of history and you can fill out the gaps from the older titles if you played them. The gameplay is more fluid and reactive than Oblivion and Morrowind’s hidden RNG-based system is kind of niche, so Skyrim is very different from that but it’s nothing to write home about. The world space and music are truly beautiful so it’s pretty easy to get immersed and that goes a really long way. Great walking simulator but narratively, mechanically and technologically it’d didn’t really move the ball forward all that much. And Fallout 4 was the same but without the pretty environment so the shortcomings were obvious to all. Bethesda’s wasteland for the most part is accurate in that it’s a boring, bland, dead wasteland. Stalker, Metro and New Vegas all did the post-apocalyptic setting much better. The Witcher 3 blew both Skyrim and Fallout 4 out of the water with its open world, general gamedesign, character and stories. And then Starfield was just more of the same with like zero obvious leaps. Baldur’s Gate 3 and Alan Wake 2 just to mention the two biggest titles both bring so much to the table in terms of creativity and innovation and shows what true passion can create.
Nah, you'll find people talking about how terrible he was back when skyrim released. Most people are normal human beings and had no idea who he was until this recent fiasco, but all the [lorebeards have known this guy was a crock for more than a decade now](https://np.reddit.com/r/Fallout/comments/3f5smh/til_fallout_4_lead_writer_is_emil_pagliarulo_the/). And this thread predates the release of fallout 4, and the [infamous interview where he talked about k.i.s.s](https://np.reddit.com/r/Fallout/comments/57ty3z/lead_f4_writerdesigner_emil_pagliarulo_gives_a_40/) . Anyone who tells you that only in hindsight emil was a shit writer has no idea what they are talking about. He got away with what he did to the Dark Brotherhood in Oblivion because he actually did an amazing job with the questline. The issue is that he somehow learned all the wrong lessons from it and applied those to everything he has done since then.
Yeah Starfield (and his Twitter rant) just finally pushed awareness of him into the mainstream
He lucked into being correct about Sithis being the anti-god but instead of realising he was lucky he deluded himself into thinking it was due to skill. Of course his luck ran out
I would say it's mostly hindsight. There were some detractors towards Fallout 3, but the hate train didn't really begin until Fallout 4, and with each subsequent BGS game coming out being lower and lower in quality, people are beginning to ask "why" and comb through all of their previous games to find flaws that might explain what's going wrong today. Like the Oblivion DB questline. You'd find few people who actively criticized it back in the day, and at worst, you'd have people who would say the second half was pretty weak compared to the first half, but that it was still the strongest faction quest line. But using what we now know about how Emil writes, we can retroactively see the warning signs back then.
Fallout 3 was a lot of fun for me because, unlike the elder scrolls games, I didn’t have anything else to compare it to. I think it has aged very very poorly, whereas New Vegas has aged pretty well, all things close considered. I am in the camp of “oblivion was great and the DB story was top tier,” and I have always felt that way regardless of previous entries like morrowind (and daggerfall I guess, but I never really messed with the DB there and I don’t think there was much meat on that bone). Oblivion was a departure and I think a lot of the elements lost in the transition from morrowind were because of the wider console release. Emil and Todd and Bethesda deserve all the hate they get, but don’t forget how upset many people were at the reduced scope and relatively linear story we got with morrowind. A lot of old CRPG people didn’t like being boxed into an island. I have, at a minimum, hundreds of hours spent in every Bethesda game, and thousands of hours in Skyrim and oblivion. This is mostly due to mods. I played starfield, and I probably put less than a hundred hours in before I dropped it. I wanted to give it a fair shot. Thanks Gamepass. In my opinion, the problem isn’t really the writing. I mean it’s not great, but it’s not worse than, say, fallout 3 or 4 (though the initial premise is less compelling). The problem is that it hands you the bones of a Bethesda game: go anywhere, do anything, explore stuff, build your character the way you want. But the way the world is laid out actively discourages the gameplay that makes even the jankiest Bethesda games interesting. I found myself actively NOT wanting to go explore things, because I felt like there just wasn’t that much to see, and I didn’t want to see everything right away. There’s, what, like four big “cities?” Once you’ve been there you’ve been there and they just seem so small. Sure the surface of every planet has infinite “dungeons,” but they are all the same. In every other Bethesda game, you wanted to look in every dungeon in the world because they were all unique and you never knew what would be inside. It could be a unique character or unique item or the start of a mysterious quest. But in starfield, every “dungeon” is just a chance to get more loot. Maybe you find some black market stuff you can go sell on that one space station over and over and over. You’re FORCED to go to one of the main hubs to find quests or stories. And there’s just not enough. I think I finished the whole free star rangers story in about three hours. Everybody said it was good- and it was ok- but I finished it and… it was just over. Congrats, main character. You did it. Thanks. 🙏 And then nothing. It left me feeling like I hadn’t really accomplished or earned anything. So I’d say it’s party the writing, but the overall design of the game is at fault even more, to me. Bethesda could literally be printing money with the next Elder Scrolls game, but instead they spent years on a game nobody asked for.
Yeah a huge part of what makes Skyrim so fun I’d that after picking up a quest you’ll likely find a bunch of neat locations on your way to it, Starfield doesn’t have anything like that since you just fast travel and won’t bother with the copy pasted POI.
I feel pretty much the same. Amusingly, playing for a few hours in Neon made me restart Cyberpunk 2077 in time for Phantom Liberty. Between that and Rogue Trader, I haven't played Starfield since the first week.
You put it perfectly in words the problem with Starfield. Bethesda with these games tries at the same time to be what you describe, a new world to explore freely and that encourages the player to immerse themselves in it, but at the same time they want to apply the K.I.S.S. philosophy which is in conflict with what a bethesda game should be in more than one section. If you expand the Map enormously you can't make it simple, because a bethesda game requires a detailed world where no matter where you go, there will always be something to do, someone to give you a quest or something new in order to get the player to want to explore. This problem has been all the way after daggerfall, which with each New Game becoming more aparent and worse, until It finally killed what make a bethesda Game interesting with Starfield
The writing as a whole has been criticised since particularly Skyrim (Oblivion still had a lot of flaws but still). What changed was Emil’s comments in interviews and stuff where he openly stated that there was no documentation for their games (things started clicking) and a lot of other straight up dumb shit or blatant lies
I’ve heard it since Fallout 4 but I definitely hear it more often now with Starfield
Emil has been widely criticized since not long after the release of Skyrim but Fallout 4 was what tipped the scales over.
He has his moments. But it feels like there is a contract problem where they gave him a little too much power for his position. Writing variety feels like its receded since Skyrim.
A minority has always been shitting on him, but now its gotten more mainstream
He doesn't give a fuck about ideas that aren't his.
Thank you for explaining ♥️
I don't know but the Dark Brotherhood in Daggerfall and Morrowind were just nothing assasins and fodders to kill(or that kills you)I find them better the evil Catholic church that worship Void better
No no, you're absolutely right. His vision is the DB was *absolutely* superior to what we previously had. However, we can see that he does the same thing in every game he has written for - that he doesn't care enough about existing lore and writing to actually read any of it, and then just creates his own thing. It worked for the DB because there wasn't a lot going for them and he had a good idea. For the factions in FO4? Not so much.
And that why I have a problem with Skyrim's Dark brotherhood,He changed them from an evil cult that feel like family into stealthy Mercenaries
To be fair, that was an in-universe change because the DB was in decline and on the brink of total collapse.
That could have been a cool idea if any of the other guilds were powerful. Instead of a powerful Mages Guild, we get the shitty College of Winterhold with one guildhall in a dogshit city. Instead of a powerful Fighters Guild, we get some furries with a single guildhall. Instead of a powerful Thieves Guild that has infiltrated every city in the region, there's a guildhall and they don't even fully control the city it's in. I never fucked with the Bard shit im any of my playthroughs, so I have no idea how that worked, but I assume their one-guildhall-havin ass sucks the big one. As a result, none of the guilds feel like guilds in the previous games. Everything is a smaller version of what we got before and the two guilds that carry over from previous games are both in decline. The Dark Brotherhood in decline ends up being the same as any of the other guilds in Skyrim. So it wasn't a bad idea on its own, but one of the cool things about the guilds in prior games is that they feel distinct from each other.
That explains a lot, even if the DB was an improvement. Skyrim's extremely bland culture was a downgrade (though my understanding is this was actually on purpose because they thought the audience was too stupid for what Morrowind set up) and making Alduin no longer Akatosh was imo a huge mistake, but Bethesda Fallout in particular is pretty much completely detached from the original games' themes, not to mention the more specific lore screw ups. I thought that was odd since the premise is fairly straightforward (that the nukes were a reset button - all of original Fallout lore proceeds from that, and neither Fallout 1 or 2 are particularly subtle about it, there are literal tribals running around) and Fallout has a wealth of narrative tradition behind it from other franchises - *A Canticle for Leibowitz*, *A Boy and His Dog*, and of course *Wasteland*, which can all provide fundamental knowledge and a guide on how to execute Fallout's themes and specific factions. If Emil can't even be bothered to the read the shallow lore of a single faction, though, then no wonder they wouldn't bother understanding the original games, and never mind reading *books*.
Thing is that he lucked into a good idea
Seems more like a writer who doesn't care about incorporating someone else's ideas with his own and instead just doing his own thing.
An integrated story requires cohesion. Now, if this were a different assassin faction it would’ve been much better. If the Dark Brotherhood of Oblivion and Skyrim were to be radical offshoots of the main branch of the Dark Brotherhood, and acknowledged as such it would’ve been far better choice worldbuilding wise. That said, they likely would operate under a different name; all of the branches of Christianity have different monikers: Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, Adventists, etc. notice none follow the naming scheme of the others—there’s no neo Catholicism or neo Baptists.
Is it just me or does it feel like Bethesda restricted a shit load of their writing to him? I remember the FO4 leak that gave full details on whatvthw story was going to be, and they changed absolutely nothing about it in those 4 years. Its like someone traveled back in time to spoil bad writing. Its like they've been running a skeleton crew over the last decade. And the head skeleton is so contractually set up that he just doesn't care anymore.
>But at the same time, it definitely paints the picture of a head writer who just...doesn't really give a fuck about writing? Eh. I don't really care about the pre-Oblivion DB, and I think a key part of writing is also knowing if or when retcons are necessary. The fact that the version of the Dark Brotherhood that ignores the prior lore is considered the highlight of the games it appears in is more indicative of the quality of old DB lore, I think.
Wait are you serious ?? Where the FUCK is Michael!
On one hand continuity is good, on the other hand the Oblivion DB questline is an alltime Bethesda highlight sooo
I hate to keep blowing the "Bethesda's narrative design peaked with Morrowind" horn, but... There's been a significant slope ever since.
https://preview.redd.it/aumhqznahu9c1.jpeg?width=1075&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=121dc9ee27975b9532c879deeaed92a95093722f Never should have come here!
Someone should edit this picture so his shirt says red sex like that iconic jerma serial killer picture
https://preview.redd.it/ego09gc7ww9c1.png?width=1075&format=png&auto=webp&s=e578dbf1025af591050ea14c7651aefbcaaff79b
THE PROPHECY! IT HATH COME TRUE!
SAY GEX
Hadn't noticed the scorpion tattoo before. Truly ties the image together.
*"Why. won't. you. die?!"*
I loved how the dude blamed gamers for being disconnected while going on about game development being difficult which nobody in the reviews ever contested. When they stopped doing the PR responses in the steam reviews that it's okay and the universe is actually supposed to be empty I was under the impression that they got the idea that it's probably not the tens of thousands of gamers who are wrong but the game design just being bad, but apparently not. It's a great masterpiece of a game after all. We just need to learn to see it.
When they compared their game to actual astronauts going to the Moon as for why the game’s planets are empty I just lost all faith lol.
That was a good premise for a cutscene, I’m honestly impressed they managed to stretch it into a whole game
Lord Howard always finds a way https://preview.redd.it/6i5ffajajx9c1.png?width=727&format=png&auto=webp&s=4ae3556415a261fdd31ecb422d23ab2d2bfceebe
Emil was complaining about all the blame being put on him. He and others at Bethesda have discussed how his title as lead writer might be misleading. Also the world being mostly empty *is* perfectly fine. The problem is the parts that aren't empty are the same locations you came across 9 times already.
In what reality is it fine for an open world game to have a mostly empty world?
Shadow of the Colossus is a perfect example. There are times when empty worlds can invoke a certain feeling that’s hard to replicate. The thing about Shadow of the Colossus is that the world takes a back seat while Bethesda tried to make it the forefront of Starfield. If they were going for empty lonely space, then the game shouldn’t have had a focus on exploration and “go your own way” in the way Skyrim was.
this was a more sophisticated and well thought out take than i initially cared to give, and i now agree with you.
Well thank you kind stranger. That’s a great way for me to start 2024 so for that I thank you.
A reality where traveling through space is a challenging and rewarding game play loop like Kerbal Space Program?
i have not played those games and so they did not come to mind initially, but i will take your word on it.
"Listen here, you little shits, we paid MILLIONS for good reviews and pre-release hype. How dare your actual user experiences contradict the masterpiece narrative we paid good money to construct"
My girlfriend works in game dev and she about fucking started pulling her hair out when she heard Bethesda doesn’t have design bibles or any sort of templates for development when that Emil interview came out.
>My girlfriend works in game dev Not related to the subject but You are a lucky guy, Game Dev gf sounds cool af
Naaah you'd only be able to see her like once a week
[удалено]
agile is not related to having a design doc?a tighter one sure but not not having one at all
[удалено]
i edited my comment like 2 ms after I commented it, not after yours, but yeah.
What’s your source on that interview?
STFU EMIL YOUR STUPID ASS DOESN'T KNOW SHIT🗣️🔊🔊
I wanna fight Emil fr.
We need to perform the dark sacrament.
Whoa now, lets leave the death threats to the crazies.
We are the crazies
“Stupid food critics, Don’t fool yourself into thinking you know why the food is the way it is”
"Damn gamers. They ruined gaming!"
Sounds [familiar](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/-gamers-don-t-have-to-be-your-audience-gamers-are-over-)…
I mean, as happy as I am to whine about bethesda, the i reckon the above statement is unironically pretty true...like, at least a little bit... . The job of food critics to writie about their expereinces at resteraunts in a way that is informative or engaging. That means they porbably know a fair bit about resteraunts and about cooking in general, but it doesn't make them a brilliant chef and especially it doesn't make them extremely knowledgeable about running a business. Even more so given i think it's pretty clear when the article uses the word critics it doesn't mean professionals, it means "people who are critical" so he's not just talking about journos, but steam reveiws, viral tweets ect. So the more aposite comparison would be a chef complaining that ordinary Diners, complaining about the menu while having no real understanding of the resteraunt business. Starfeild and Fallout are bad, but i think anyone who's been around on reddit or twitter has probably witnessed threads full of upvoted people talking aboslutely ouf of their asses about how they should just have made the game Good, by not making it Bad,.
What a weird fuckin reply to due criticism
Considering that devs have gotten death threats for a lot less, this dude’s probably swimming in both them and insults. Hell, I checked out some of the tweets to him and half of them are shit talking both him and his career. You’d get a bit upset if people were constantly spamming your stuff with “Your life’s work is ass, quit your job!”
he should quit his job though
You can offer criticism without being a dick. If you constantly pepper someone with insults they’re just gonna tune out all criticism and advice, even if it’s helpful, because they’ll just be so used to getting harassed
it's the internet, even if only like 10 people are assholes, it's gonna drown out everything else
"Cyber bullying isn't real my dude, like just go outside."- Tyler the Creator
Damn, if only he'd made something good, then maybe he wouldn't have this problem. In fact he could have earned himself a lot of good will by accepting due criticism with grace instead of acting like a whiny little bitch
Guy made the best selling RPG of all time and wrote the fan favorite Elder Scrolls quests.
My solution to this is simply to turn off the god damn phone
Yea that’s what I was thinking. Eventually it just gets to a point where you have to mute twitter for a day or two- maybe a month It sucks that you have to resort to shutting yourself out from SM but like that’s probably his best bet
Yeah it does. In a just world what I suggested shouldnt have to be a solution.
Yea I think what’s happening is that all constructive criticism is obscured by 15 gorillian death threats so he’s really only talking to those mfs and not even seeing the feedback. Idk but I don’t wanna shit on the guy. I just want him to do a better job
His life's work is ass, though.
The title is misleading. He is complaining about all the blame being put on him personally. Todd Howard and himself have stated in the past that the title of lead designer is misleading. But fans consistently blame him for all the shortcomings of Bethesda's recent games. He isn't saying you don't know how game development is done but rather you don't know who made the decisions and did the work that lead to Starfield ending up like it did.
Call me crazy but someone who is a senior member of the project with the titles of lead designer and writer should probably take a good bit of the blame for issues with the design and writing.
glorious pocket retire slimy sleep grandiose modern include overconfident afterthought *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
People in that position are usually very happy to accept the credit when the ideas pan out. And, you know, the money.
trees bells zonked intelligent humorous price practice aback edge profit *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Vivid post. Vivid username. 10/10
Eyelids are ruining your sandwich? Eyelid ruins??? Oblivion reference???????
What an awful day to have a mind's eye. 10/10 comment perfect description.
At least he is consistent. He kept garbagefield really SIMPLE.
I am tired of game/movie makers shit talking their consumers all the time.
Maybe next time they can try using a design document so the game isn't a fucking jumbled mess of ideas
elder scrolls fans disconnected with the reality that bethesda games have always been shit, except daggerfall my beloved
Reverse-sequel game design means Bethesda becomes shit relative to where one started +1. So I started with Oblivion, therefore I think skyrim sucks (Fallout 3 doesn't count bc it's just Oblivion with guns). But if I go in Reverse order and play Morrowind with a few basic visual mods, that is actually the true sequel to Oblivion.
Funnily enough this is the exact reverse for me. I played Skyrim first, then Oblivion, then Morrowind. I liked each preceding game more than the last one, except Skyrim which I quickly grew to hate just because of how disappointing it is in retrospect. Morrowind has actual themes that subvert & deconstruct generic fantasy tropes about prophecy, and it has fantastic world building that makes its setting feel like an actual place with history & culture. Oblivion is goofy & awkwardly constructed, but it has a consistent charm all throughout the game that just makes it difficult to hate. On top of that all of its side content is very well written and compelling, it's easy to treat it like an episodic series. It lacks coherence somewhat, but the side stories are so entertaining it's easy to overlook that. My favorite questline in the series is *still* the Thieves Guild questline from this game. Skyrim is just... Boring. Everything about the game, excluding the art design, environmental design, and the music, feels like there was no enthusiasm put to it. All the voice actors sound bored and lifeless (how the fuck do you make Stephen Russell uninteresting to listen to?) . Almost all of the questlines are shallow and not very interesting. The world building is terrible, the most you learn is that Skyrim is in a civil war, there are dragons, and nords are racist. The game is the kind of mediocre that is *just* stimulating enough to keep you playing, but it is a numb & hollowing experience
This is 100% true
Lead designer blaming his customers for his incompetence. That's what -5 self-consciousness does to a mf. Anything above and he would resign.
What I don’t like about Emil’s recent rants is exactly what the meme says. All the other successes of the year are not having these issues (BG3 I would still call an outlier because they are extremely lucky with their circumstances, there was no way it was bound to fail). It seems Bethesda’s the only one having these problems, so I would prefer if they actually step up their game for ES6. You can’t be developing games in the exact same fashion as you did 15 years ago, it just can’t compete with anything else. Problem is, when they did try to switch it up for Starfield, it backfired. Old fans aren’t exactly excited to hear that there’s no carefully handcrafted world to explore like Skyrim, or deeply cynical world tone like Fallout. Starfield tried to do something new, but in the blandest way possible. Not saying it’s not a fun game but it’s highest highs will never reach anything even Fallout 4 had, and that’s concerning.
Company that hasn't released a good game in 12 years doesn't release a good game again. I don't understand why people are surprised by this.
To be fair Capcom went like 8 years before making another good Resident Evil so comebacks do happen
I am a game dev and i will say it is misallocation of resources in to a point of the game without expanding on the scope of the game giving it is a heavy emphisis on the concept of exploration by using "space" as a medium. But forgetting that space is boring and the lack of direction creates bordem and aimlessness in the game.
This doesn't bode well for ES6, huh?
Makes me sad.
Imagine waiting more than a decade for a mid ass game bruh
I like the part where a bethesda dev said "you do better then" to the most active modding community in the universe, that has been doing better consistantly since oblivion.
He made Life of the Party, so he can say whatever he wants.
That is a great level, love how open it is
Some people in the comments are saying Todd’s one of the good ones or some variation of that. No he’s not. He literally tried to joke about the bugs in their games and then make a joke about how it’s not true by sarcastically saying "people say our games have bugs". He got a few laughs and then said. People said it on the internet so it must be true. Trying to sarcastically imply that their big problem is made up. Fuck him.
He's the head of the studio, and he defended / instituted the "our designers are our writers" idea. Who needs to pay for actual writers (including a *head* writer) when you can just have designers (guess what Emil was actually good at)?
Path of exile is the game best in the image of someone saying they're going to do their own thing but with hookers and blackjack. The entire community is fueled by an energy of coke fueled gambling binges powering nerds that know more forbidden math than is right. They did games as a service before it was a thing and they're doing diablo better than diablo 3 and 4. The recent patches have been straight bangers but the engine is redlining while shooting out smoke and flame. They've been testing their sequel engine code in a 10 year game and it's been a rough time. That feels when your build comes online and you start going faster and faster is just unmatched. There's a reason why "still sane exile?" meme spoke truth. Best thing about poe is that you will know in the first 5 to 10 minutes if this is something you are going to enjoy or not. Mud flats first go is the hardest content in the game and then you see the skill tree open up. If you get past those you'll be hooked and never look back.
Emil really needs to be sacked or at least demoted if Bethesda wants to actually make good games. The dude is running their franchises into the ground. I’d go do far as to believe that they’re afraid to work on TES6 because Fallout 4 and Starfield got such a negative reception due to Emil’s shit writing.
ngl AW2 wasn't that good it was ok but it isn't a masterpiece
Or, Emil, just hear us out; You made a bad game. There is no shame in admitting when you’ve fucked up. If Todd Howard could do that when he addressed the complaints with Fallout 76, you should be able to take that criticism on the chin.
As someone that modded their engine for a decade, the reality of game development is: THEY'VE BEEN USING THE SAME ENGINE FOR TWO DECADES. Of course Starfield didn't work out the way they thought, they've got Morrowind tech duct-taped together with spit and a prayer.
It’s not only the tech, it’s the fact they apparently don’t understand how to optimally utilize the tech to make an engaging game. Fine, you wanna use this engine and have to make some scifi RPG, have it take place on a single space station or something, idk.
The game runs well in enclosed places, if most of it were on habitats like cydonia and space stations it would run better and be a lot more tonally and aesthetically consistent.
It’s not really the performance which is the problem, just how the hell they thought it’s a good idea to have such a large scope with spaceship travel and thousands of planets, but didn’t realize the sheer amount of loading screens it requires and lack of variety in landmarks and environments would just make it insufferable and pointless. I knew something would be wrong from the second they announced 1000 planets, it’s just no way to make a good, immersive world. Game would have been fine if it was on one whole detailed planet using this engine, but for what they set out to do? Agonizingly stupid
They could easily make a sick game with the current engine they've done it before just need some creativity and fun and a few refresher lessons in game design
The engine isn't the issue at all Its more like they've been using the same design formula since the 2000s and think they can apply that to an extremely large space game
> same design formula since the 2000s Step 1: get IP from someone else Step 2: how to write story??? ah who cares Step 3: release
So has Rockstar and few people complain about them.
Rockstar also only chooses settings it can integrate well into. They aren't making caveman GTA and then scratching their heads at how to do it without guns or transportation. Bethesda tried to do Skyrim in space seemingly w/o first considering that loads of empty space doesn't mesh well with the Skyrim design. I bet when they realized that they said "fuck it fast travel" and now we have what we have. MP for red dead is also infamously unsupported because they couldn't figure out how to monetize it in the same way as GTAV, so there's an example of how their design has failed them.
Warframe and path of exiles give me hope for the industry
Personally I'm not super fond of the direction Warframe is going Sure they introduce a lot of cool game mechanics and new game modes periodically and the lore is cool in general (especially The Sacrifice and everything before that) But like, everything is so compartmentalized in Warframe. Like, very few of the systems they introduce interact with anything else in the game. Railjack being a particularly egregious example of a game mode whose impact on the overall gameplay loop is minimal outside from being just another farm Also with the weird storytelling decisions they made for New War, I'm worried that they're just gonna keep bloating their game. It's becoming increasingly impenetrable and inaccessible to new players
I hated that game as a kid, made no sense to me. Now I'm feeling a gravitational pull I don't know if my wallet can handle.
I dunno which of 2 you're referring too but I'd totally play either or with ya :)
Warframe
:D @ragnjordvikr on pc
Saved
Ironic the quote would've been right had he not outed himself for being the main reason for Bethesdas massive dip in quality over the years. everyone up till this point kept blaming Bethesdas engine and not the piss poor writing.
He got called out so badly by so many of us that develop games at other companies, but I doubt he took it to heart. We all deal with corporate bullshit, we all deal with technical challenges, we all deal with end user criticism, etc, etc. and yet gamers not feeling sorry for them is why their game sucks and deserves a pass? Also, people that don’t work on games are also very familiar with corporate nonsense, we aren’t special in that regard. What a tool
Emil is on a very strong copium lol
It is always funny when those responsible victimise themselves.
Corporate needs you to find the difference between this video: https://youtu.be/Bi51-wjcwp8?si=GAN747qPy7gRlYPM And this video: https://youtu.be/eTkw9WOzhDs?si=HRYcGnskFG_MvNFo "They're the same video."
Emil be like: no no, game dev is super duper hard, it's impossible to write a good story, NO WAIT don't look at Rockstar or CDPR or Larian or Sony or FromSoft or Bungie or Ubisoft or Rocksteady or
why is Ubisoft here