Why Bethesda Was Never That Great

the last few years have not been kind to Bethesda it wasn't that long ago that they were really praised as one of the best developers in the industry and Todd hailed the mighty god Howard fast forward a few years and here we are players deceived refunds tonight helmets molding first it was the paid mods then the ungodly launcher fallout 76 and then everything else fans could not believe what they were seeing bethesdad fallen this downward spiral was free entertainment for some a heartbreaking loss of $60 for others not only a loss of $60 and possibly $300 and some years of your life if you happen to purchase one of them only red power armor helmets but also the loss of one of the last decent game developers it was a sad day but wait where Bethesda ever the Saints they're often remembered us there's no doubt that they made some good games over the years but the old Bethesda also had a big part in creating the Modern Life throw transaction market dab without with some harsh treatment of a licensed company indirectly causing 30 odd layoffs as a result and a few petty lawsuits over brand protection and you've got some pretty dodgy moves from todd and the boys but before we get into those something i'm sure you're all familiar with it's no secret the game director told Howard has invested pretty heavily into his speech it allows us to have 16 times the detail demands lies our infamous the most famous example of Todd's slide tun was probably at e3 last year really made some very interesting promises for the latest fallout as a matter of fact you'll never even see a server when you play but these false promises were never exclusive to fallout 76 if you look hard enough you can trace Todd's web of lies all the way back to oblivion when in 2005 he told everyone that oblivion MPCA I was radiant and unscripted let's take a look at the other side of the game our new reading AI system these NPCs are not scripted may you rest in peace people were excited for the day that they could jump into the game and witness this space-age AI for themselves but unfortunately the NPC's but not quite as intelligent as Todd had suggested the fact that they all alone melted cheese strings also didn't help much one year after oblivion released bethesda purchased the rights to the fallout i p and told announced that fallout 3 would have 200 different endings as of last week were over 200 endings that is not an exaggeration in reality that b 3 a few different ways to go about getting them and then lots of slight variation with the ending slideshow depending on your karma and sidequest choices during the game after having just perfected AI Todd now looked to improve quests they would also become radiant meaning that they could be redeemed infinitely until the end of time once again this was technically correct but these quests ended up being what was essentially the exact same quests but in different areas of the map he also mentioned the local economy system that could be affected by the player damaging at Allen's production lines if you actually Google this Ulta pool forum posts can be found written by a handful of people spending their first hours of Skyrim burning down a sawmill in an attempt to [ __ ] the local economy it never worked also this never happened then during e3 2015 Todd made the bold claim that fallout 4 just worked all that this just works it works it actually works perfectly and he would of course go on to continue the trend at e3 last year for fallout 76 16 times the detail all new rendering lighting and landscape technology of course you can play this solo you'll be who you you'll never even see a server when you play some argue that Todd's long list of lies over the years for features that were going to be in the game but couldn't be finished in time for launch but whichever way you look at it for the last 14 years todd has had a very special way with words who knows what todd has planned for their next release back again to 2006 and bethesda had just released oblivion it was their best-selling game at the time selling almost two million copies in the first 20 days of release and things were looking pretty good it didn't just sell well either oblivion was pretty much praised by critics across the port and believe it or not even praised for its graphics at the time a very foreign concept for any modern Bethesda title even though the NPC's weren't exactly what was promised they still worked occasionally but anyway the game sold well and people liked it but then everything changed just a month after launch they released something for $2 50 something so small something so trivial that they wouldn't hear the end of it for years to come a few pieces of armor for your in-game horse the armor didn't even protect the horse he just made it look a bit cooler making VLC like this the time wasn't very common especially for a game as big as oblivion and people were not happy but Bethesda kept on releasing these twice a DLCs although the rest were more reasonable other developers took note of what Todd and the team had pulled off here and here we are today fallout 3 in the original Skyrim missed out on the Oblivion treatment but these microtransactions plates returned in the form of the creation Club for Fallout 4 in Skyrim remastered one of the first items on sale was $3 horse armor also a fun fact about the creation Club when new mods were added and updates every mod was installed directly onto your hard drive regardless of whether you actually purchased it or not when you actually went to buy the mod you were just paying for a tiny ESP file that unlocked the mod files this bloated everyone's hard drive with multiple gigabyte mod updates every month and with a little know-how you could create these ESP files yourself some more ingenuity from the development team at Bethesda one of the immediate thoughts anyone has after hearing the very word Bethesda is the onslaught of bugs thrown your way the moment the game boots just type in Bethesda bugs on YouTube and you'll find hundreds of compilations of these small technical hiccups the most common bugs include dodgy AI corrupted game saves game crashes texture errors model errors physics errors clipping errors flying enemies sinking enemies and muscle man and that's not even really scratching the surface sometimes it doesn't just work you don't say they also forgot to cut out some voiceover mistakes in Oblivion I heard that he used broke into the arcane university the Imperial Legion compound and the temple all on the same night wait a minute let me do that again I heard that thieves broke into the arcade but I'm the character swapping voices halfway through their dialogue I could be banished for telling you okay okay I'll show you the games are buggy and fallout 76 was of course no different I've actually read multiple reddit posts claiming that the Thursday's recent patches for the game are bringing in more bugs than the ones they're fixing there's also an audio bug that has been fixed multiple times at this point and some people are still saying it's in the game bugs are a consistent feature of Bethesda games and many people in turn blame the engine the game is run on as of 2019 Bethesda's game is run on an engine that scores now actually old enough to drink as pointed out by a chance in one of my comment sections I've looked into the whole game engine argument and the common consensus is that the age of an engine isn't necessarily a problem providing you've got a team of software engineers who can efficiently update and optimize it I mean rockstars game engine for GTA 5 in Red Dead Redemption 2 is a heavily upgraded version of an engine that was used for their 2006 ping pong game the engines still perfectly capable that's right this game right here was running on an engine from this game here well how the [ __ ] do you explain this [ __ ] Todd judging by their last two games because that doesn't quite have the same level of proficiency in their software development team the current engine being used the creation engine is a heavily upgraded version of the 1997 Natomas engine which was the core engine used to make every game for moral wind to fall out 76 others claim that prefers to don't put enough work in to bug testing but regardless of how the folks actually get in there the worst part about them is that they always end up staying because prefers to rarely ever bother to patch them out there are still hundreds of known bugs in Skyrim and even the recent Skyrim remastered and mothers have been left to do Podesta's dirty work Bethesda know these bugs exist but they still just sort of stand there like bugs oh well so basically for the last fourteen years every single one of bethesda games has been a massive buggy mess left to be fixed for free by avid fans who just wanted to go five minutes in their game without being launched into the stratosphere apparently that was too much to ask some see it as the games being made more accessible and efficient others call it dumbing down and streamlining whichever way you look at it you can't really argue that Todd hasn't been flushing away features for the last 14 years a good example of this is the development of full Alice progression system fool out threes progression had depth and was pretty consistent to the original to fallouts including the special attributes skills and perks then for Bethesda's next fallout todd went with the less is more approach and thought let's integrate skills and perks into the special attribute table for Fallout 76 Todd just said you know what just give them a pack of cards okay compared to the older fallout Fallout 4 also had much simpler dialogue so much so that two of the most popular mods for Fallout 4 actually reverted the dialogue tree to the original former and removed the character's voice over lines also the dialogue choices themselves pretty much equated to saying yes three times with different layers of paint and then the option to ask a question as opposed to the much more complex new vegas style of dialogue the repair feature was removed there was no karma system and side quests no longer added at the ending slideshow there also wasn't much room to play as an evil character either which was a staple in previous releases and so on people felt like there was a lot missing although we all paint him as the villain Todd isn't really the one who pulls the strings the real decisions are made by the people as Animax media who were the parent company of Bethesda Softworks who were the parent company of pathetic game studios ever since denim acts were set up in 1999 it's been caught up in a number of lawsuits many of them quite questionable the stances Bethesda Softworks started out in the 80s developing sports games with a game called gridiron in 1986 being in the game the company was built on one of the key players behind the earlier thursda games was a guy called Chris Weaver and after the success of Bethesda's early games Chris approached a lawyer named Robert Altman together they co-founded Cinemax in 1999 with Weaver in charge of the games and Oatman in charge of the business three years later executives gathered round the high table as Animax and voted to flush Chris out of the business a pretty cutthroat decision considering it was the man who partially built the company and then there was Bethesda's contract with obsidian entertainment for Fallout New Vegas after the immediate success of fallout 3 Bethesda wanted to capitalize on another fallout release they licensed obsidian a development team comprised of ex fallout one and two developers to create a spin-off fallout on Bethesda's flawless game engine obsidian were then given 18 short months to develop the game they were paid upfront by Bethesda for the development and signed a contract that meant they only receive royalties on the game if it reached a score of 85 on Metacritic New Vegas fell short of the royalty requirement by one point hitting 84 and thus no royalties was in their way that coupled with Microsoft cancelling a seven-month D project with them ultimately resulted in 20 to 30 layoffs from obsidian staff Bethesda has also been extremely aggressive in their marketing and branding practices waving around hefty lawsuits to companies and founds over brand protection they threatened Mojang with a lawsuit in 2012 due to Mojang naming a game scrolls and more recently a small indie developer had problems because their game was titled pray for the gods in both cases the names had to be changed just over a year ago bethesda released fallout 76 and the lid finally blew a decade of frustrations and complaints all neatly packaged into one $60 barely functioning online experience fallout 76 had little the lies bugs brushes microtransactions awful PR it was glorious Todd's finest creation his magnum opus but people weren't happy with it and now over a year after its release people are somehow we've been less happy with it but Fenster has made some good stuff over the years but you'd be wrong to say that they were ever the god-tier developer they're often remembered as if you look at the last decade and a half's worth of actions from the company their recent actions seem to be reasonable progression and as much as the executives at ZeniMax aren't to blame but as does PR and development teams really don't help themselves the infamous tales of how they handled the canvas bags the refund denials the banning of innocent players and some of this stuff is still going on a few weeks ago bethesda found one of fallout 76 his most loyal players who'd gone out of his way to develop an online interactive map of the game and also found in reported bugs to Bethesda also releasing a video called save player one a year before they took their traditionally single-player game online wasn't the brightest idea but Bethesda will learn from this though right how can they not learn from this whole thing well if recent events are anything to go by it doesn't look like they have much interest in putting out the flames currently engulfing their public relations and if fallout first is anything to go by it looks like they're actually having a good time making it worse but the hopeful fans of this very confused company will continue to watch from the sidelines as they run about rapidly throwing atomic shop sales and dodgy bug patches around until the next groundwork is finally revealed with one man and one man alone knowing where there will be worthwhile or just another big fat lie

Channel: big boss

Views: 2,548,654

Rating: 4.8167491 out of 5

Keywords: Why Bethesda Was Never That Great, big boss, bethesda, fallout 76, skyrim, elder scrolls, fallout, bethesda streamlining, bethesda lawsuit, bethesda bugs, bethesda downfall, bethesda greed, todd howard, todd howard lies, bethesda starfield, starfield, tes 6, was bethesda ever that good, bethesda news, bethesda e3, bethesda game studios, zenimax, fallout lawsuit, bethesda microtransactions, microtransactions, creation club, todd sweet little lies, bethesda fail, bethesda scam

Id: FGjTtMQwHOM

Length: 14min 9sec (849 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 10 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/MaksWithAK]

Dishonored is pretty awesome.

[u/MeridianBae]

Bethesda has become a better publisher than developer

[u/CaptainPryk]

Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Skyrim... BGS released commercial/critical success for like 8 years. They were great despite their downfalls. Fallout 4 may have been dumbed down in some ways but it's still a damn good game and a good experimentation for Bethesda. 76 was the only time where I thought BGS was shit, and they can turn things around with Starfield. If they don't, then I'd consider them shit in general.

They are a dumb fucking development studio, though. To choose to make Fallout 76 and Starfield before making TES VI is possibly the dumbest move they could have made. People want another TES entry, not fucked up Frankenstein excuses of games. If they were smart they'd build another studio from the ground up to work on Fallout while BGS Maryland worked on TES

[u/Couch_monster]

Oblivion and Skyrim are some of the greatest games ever made