https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/926/05572c21-0d2c-4a65-9bfb-4f3d1baa96df/image.png
"Just change a few words so they can't tell..."
What the fuck happened to Bethesda? It's like they're deliberately trying to be bad.
I sometimes wonder if Todd is actually a ying-yang figure and has an evil doppelganger who has recently taken control, whilst the good Todd is just stuck with a perpetual cycle of "You've lost karma" and looping audio of "It just works" blasting through his pair of Apple AirPods that never. run. out.
Tudd howard
This is basically copying your homework-tier laziness.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/1844/2747eaad-c96f-479e-8fbf-1cd319dc5dbf/chrome_2019-05-09_20-11-14.png
Trying?
They were always like that.
Why make good and polished games with less bugs when their games sells like hot cakes?
I don't think that's fair. Bethesda have made a lot of solid games over the years I've sunk more than a thousand hours into collectively. Yeah, they're buggy and have some questionable design philosophy sometimes, but they didn't used to be bad games, or even mediocre - they were good. However, recently, their stuff has taken a rapid turn to the shitty.
This was acceptable in 8th grade english. Not sure it would fly in high school. Certainly wouldn't in college. So why the fuck would it in the real world
Pretty sure Beth is high school level
Hodd Toward
How fucking low can you get, taking from Adventurer's League of all things. Most of their writing is terrible and inconsistent to begin with.
I love how little flair there is, and how they just made it a shit version
Horse armour DLC
Taken from reddit:
"Probably going to get buried at this point, but this article is bad, clickbait journalism. This isn't intentional plagiarism, the DnD campaign was just being run for fun by a group of Bethesda Netherlands employees. Like almost every DnD campaign, they reused information from the Wizards of the Coast source books--which is the entire point of these books being published, that's what they're for, so DMs don't have to write entire campaigns from scratch. The Elder Scrolls Online official Twitter account heard about it and retweeted a link to their Dropbox.
It was a dumb mistake from the Twitter account. But this was never meant by the DM that created it to be an official promotional product, and omitting that fact and making it seem like this was some professional product is pretty poor journalism IMO."
BADthesda
Bethesda have published a lot of great games, but they don't seem to actually make all that many.
I think that's one of the reasons their games are good. Them rushing 76 out the door is one of the reasons their recent quality is lacking.
Bethesda has always made broken games that sometimes bordered on unplayable and required massive patchjobs before they worked, even in the 90s. People only forgave them because their games used to at least be somewhat decent if you look past the bugs.
morrowind was basically socio-political mythos of mushroom wizards doing what they want, false demi-gods carving cities, real demi-gods conspiring against them, an overarching question of whether destiny is real or hindsight, racial overtones that made you sniff and have an excuse to loot bodies, racial undertones that highlighted the links between rivalry economics and xenophobia, really hot guards, a main villain who talks to you jovially for hours at the end of the game and who is really in the end only trying to avenge your former self (if you believe you're re-incarnated, if it matters because everyone else does).
Your main-mission giver is a heroin addict spymaster who lives in the back of a slum trading town, you contract a disease that curses or blesses you based on your religious beliefs, you travel from cobblestone middle-ages towns to sand and shell desert cities to giant bulbous towers of moss who's lords all bicker with each other for their thousand year lives to 12 ziggurats floating in the ocean, all connected by bridges and the landmass's capital city. There's a fucking meteorite in the sky over that one too, that was suspended in the air by Vivec because he taunted a daedric prince like a child, and that rock is now a hollowed out prison called the "Ministry of Truth". It'll eventually fall down though because Vivec's power is fading as he's a god who gained godhood by stabbing a dead god's heart with a rusty knife seated within a dwarven mecha inside a volcano and he lost the keys to the volcano.
Sure, missing a rat standing in front of you 70 times because you didn't put points into short blade sucks. It's a game from 2001. But while technology has gotten better, bethesda's writing and cohesive world-building has gone out the fukken window.
I don't really see how it's "bad clickbait journalism" to not have inside contacts in the Netherlands, I'd be willing to wager a lot of people don't know the DND group inside Bethesda's Dutch office. If it truly did originate as a GM just working out a game for fun then that's fine for him, but Bethesda's TOS:Online marketing team decided to publish the thing to sell their upcoming DLC, it's their fault for clearly not even trying to check if it was an original work before putting it out there.
Tobb Howard
I find Morrowind really hard to get into because of just how dated much of the game is, but seeing such a unique and esoteric setting slowly boiled down to generic fantasy with occasional nods to the more outlandish elements makes me pretty sad.
Unpopular opinion I'm sure, but I honestly don't even care overmuch about how Bethesda "streamlined" gameplay in the Elder Scrolls.
Sure it's not great, and I'd obviously prefer more depth. But even so If Skyrim had exactly the same extremely basic skill/perk system, but with writing, tone, and plot more reminiscent of Morrowind it would probably have been my favourite game ever.
As it stands the stuff that really separated Skyrim from the most generic fantasy setting imaginable to the casual observer was really small shit like "Elves weren't just really attractive humans with pointy ears, and instead looked fucking alien and strange", lore found inside in-game books or NPCs briefly mentioning something connected to the wider lore in as vague a manner as possible.
And even then those small distinctions are slowly being dropped. For example, Orcs in TES are supposed to be master smiths, not the brainless barbarians common in fantasy settings.
So instead of wearing primitive armour made of scuffed metal and tufts of fur, they have these fucking cool samurai looking plate sets. But what was the orcish armour like in Skyrim? primitive armour made of scuffed green metal and tufts of fur.
I don't get why Bethesda has been half-assing their writing so much in recent years. It's not like they have to dumb The Elder Scrolls or Fallout down to appeal to a wider market, they already have enough brand recognition behind these games that they would sell really well even if the plot was barely comprehensible gibberish to a casual player.
I think it's actually the best they can do. I honestly don't think that anyone at Bethesda is capable of writing to the level of the guys who worked on Morrowind, since most of the writing duties are now passed off to level designers or anyone else who has an idea, and the guy they've got in charge of overseeing it all is an incompetent moron. Watch his talk on the story of Fallout 4 if you want a laugh:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi51-wjcwp8
Compare that talk to the one by Josh Sawyer on Fallout: New Vegas and the difference is like night and day. Luckily he might not be writing for the next Elder Scroll's so hopefully it'll get better.
Insulation.
-> Skywind, for example, I am frothing over.
And yeah, there's been this weird horseshoe effect with bethesda's lore where they started out basically just LoTR fanfiction, then swept away into it's own thing, then slowly regressing back into "popular" Tolkeinised tropes after Oblivion was a massive success.
As a "fan" of F76 I feel obligated to tackle this. You see, when looking to expand, Bethesda decided to build their new headquarters on an Indian burial ground. An anchient curse has swept through them, and it's evident with F76 - everything that could go wrong pretty much did.
No not really! But it would make sense!
To be fair, as far as writing goes Morrowind is kind of the exception to the rule. Bethesda haven't written on that level before or since, the closest thing they got was like Shivering Isle. Arena and Daggerfall where shlock, Oblivon was shlock and Skyrim continues the trend by being shlock, same with the two Fallouts developed by Bethesda.
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