Bethesda Cannot Be Saved

In this video we discuss the recent decades worth of faults coming from Bethesda, including Starfield, Fallout 76, and the studios recent loss of many veteran developers and employees at the company.
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#starfield
#fallout
#bethesda
#fallout76
#starfieldshatteredspace

[@kenmck7802]

Todd said it himself. They OBSESSED over...food packs. Noooo talk about obsessing with the STORY, characters, gameplay. Todd couldn't wait to talk about the food packs. Kinda shows WHERE their "priorities" were/are.

[@tj-co9go]

I love the clutter and detail in Skyrim, for example, but they have wemt too far with it. The story and gameplay mechanics are more important

[@flouserschird]

See that sandwich? You can collect them and put them in your ship.

[@samuelfawell9159]

@@flouserschird”you can’t do anything but eat them, and it has no effect, why are you bored?”

[@maxwellvindman7212]

Its like they focused on stupid meme additions, but neglected actually making a good game. It doesn’t help this game that there are 4k hyper realistic food models if the game is extremely boring.

[@kenmck7802]

@@maxwellvindman7212 Absolutely agree

[@JHiggins67]

Like you, I was a huge Bethesda fan and I bought Starfield on day one. I put in about sixty hours, mostly because the game is designed to be a time-sink, but also because I kept hoping it got better. It couldn't be that bad, right? I waited for it to get better. I don't mind loading screens so much, but the writing.... Ugh. It's abysmal. Huge, sloppy plot holes -- sophomoric dialogue. Child-like NPCs and scenarios. It's like how a twelve-year-old would imagine the future. Emil is more a corpo than a creative, much more. Consider the starting point of the game -- it's after everything exciting has happened and everything is explored (you find cookie-cutter, duplicate POIs everywhere), so Bethesda thought sticking the player in an explorer's guild was the right thing to do... when there's no exploration to be done. Maybe if they had started the game just as colonization was starting and factions were forming and none of those 1,000 planets had yet to be visited.... maybe that would have been an interesting point to start. Political intrigue beginning, wars or skirmishing just starting out, and the player can zip around and actually discover stuff on some of those planets. Maybe New Atlantis has some artifacts to discover as the settlements are starting out. I mean, it is SO EASY to come up with a better framework for the setting. Starfield was just lazy, lazy, lazy. They clearly just created a mostly-empty vessel, hoping modders would fill it up. It's more than bad, Starfield is just boring.

[@themcknox]

It was over when Pete Hines said something along the lines of "too much dialogue is boring" when most of their older games heavily relied on dialogue.

[@magusi9029]

To be fair, the actor delivery is so dry in starfield, that it is boring. If only they had cared enough to make the dialogue/story engaging.

[@GameBoyDame]

Step 1. Fire Emil and Todd Step 2. Hire some damn writers (Chris Avellone anyone?) Step 3. Clean up the trash on the "creations store." Step 4. Add meaningful content (mechs, space station building) Step 5. Free updates like no mans sky. Step 6. Comeback story.

[@publiusdos5925]

All Bethesda needed to do with Starfield, story wise, is hire a name SF writer to create a background world for them that was interesting, like FromSoftware hired George RR Martin for Elden Ring, instead of having a collection of quest programmers pull something out of their collective asses. They should probably hire someone to create some good lore for ES6 while they can.

[@boopuchannel]

none of these things will ever happen

[@Primarch19th]

You forgot something really important: Add breast removal scars to the character creation menu. It is politically correct and very inclusive. A game changer .

[@8888UNIVERSE8888]

Also Kurt Kuhlmann - THE LAST TES father that was at Bethesda also left.

[@IKIGAIofficial]

Im scared for ES6.

[@numberonedad]

*starfield was divisive, the audience was divided

[@BUDA20]

trust me, start playing Mass Effect 2, and pay attention to the dialog and cutscenes, options, overall quality of life... and is a game from 2010..., anything after that should be taking notes...

[@momsspaghetti4064]

Good games.

[@momsspaghetti4064]

Even 3 but the ending was corny af. Lol

[@BlackPillVillain]

Well said . Mass effect 2 is sci Fi perfection in terms of dialogue, choices and just fun gameplay.

[@randomthings1293]

Hey man... So you played 76 and you STILL were a Bethesda fanboy... Can you recognize that you were part of the problem?

[@mysticranger6894]

Yes he was 😂 but I don't think he can.

[@momsspaghetti4064]

Players who played to realize it wasn't good are definitely not the problem. 🤣🤦‍♂️

[@momsspaghetti4064]

You must just go by what a Daddy streamer or someone says huh? It shows man. Most think for ourselves. Try it bubb. 😅 Starfield barely anyone eveb bought or played. Gamepass. Only fools bought Starfield and for content creators. Idk if you still blind to it but a good or bad game is still content to them. Like bruh. 😂

[@Primarch19th]

@@momsspaghetti4064 True dat. I never saw so many tard tubers post content about the game, then ever before. And, when you watch the tubes, they have 100 views, Ugh I would rather watch replays of "Two girls and a cup".

[@Jezza_One]

When was the last time you played FO76. Its improved massively since launch.

[@The_Jagged_Icon]

Starfield is a game full of guns and armed spaceships but in a galactic peace. There's barely any reason to fight, no crisis, all mechs and morphs outlawed. Can you imagine if in Fo4, the BoS, Institute, MM, and Railroad lived in peace? Yeah, we'll all agree to not use power armor, synths, spies, nukes, etc. It would be completely ridiculous and boring.

[@Cloud_Seeker]

Seems you are forgetting a chosen one, or someone looking for a missing family member.

[@momsspaghetti4064]

​@Cloud_Seeker WHERES MY SON GOD DAMN IT!!!! 😂😂😂😂 As you are absolutely slaughtering everyone like a maniac. 🤣

[@TrynePlague]

It's just how the industry works. And any company in any sector even. Companies are created, companies die. They made some good games 20 years ago and have been surfing on that ever since without trying to improve themselves. When a company tells you not to expect too much from their next product, you know it's the end.

[@Primarch19th]

ah yes, but bra, there is always Ubisoft and their character creator: Ya know, the one that has breast removal scars for your toon. Very sexy. Very inclusive.

[@wdf70]

I'm just annoyed at how little there is in terms of viable build variety. Stealth is garbage, Speech and Intimidation skills require too much button fiddling (Bring up your scanner, meaning you cant shoot which means you're probably gonna take some damage yourself from the gunfire, hover over the enemy, select the social skill you want to use and press the button, fail and try again,) when shooting the gun is faster and more effective. There's only 5 weapon types in Pistols, Rifles, Shotguns, Heavy Guns and Melee. But once you find a particle or Mag weapon, all of that becomes obsolete because of their insane damage output. There's no real reason to use your ship other than a portable home and a fast travel hub because it doesn't do anything other than blast pirates in space. You can't be a space trucker because of how merchants work. You can't really be a pirate because every ship requires you to "register" it before you can sell it. Meaning that all your cost went into that. Which is INSANE to me because they already ruin their economy by giving you an astronomical amount of credits up front when you start the game. Go to any random location, loot all their guns, sell them, and you can now build an entire spaceship. It's just asinine that they didn't think any of these things through and just wanted to make "Space game: The Bethesda Game."

[@JAIMEGARCIA-gw9re]

You forgot about Bruce Nesmith. He was the lead designer for Skyrim and was the designer for the ship building in starfield.

[@SeenInMirrors]

And Kurt Kuhlmann.

[@Kasaron]

Low quality content. To be clear, im not addressing Starfield or BGS, i am addressing the creator of the video.

[@DV-ou1yu]

Lmfao

[@noneeris]

And the funny part is that Fo 3 still has a pretty forgettable main history

[@Grombrindal]

Bethesda employees have decided that Starfield is perfect and that its the fans who suck. "Most of us had already finished the game" Why did you buy it? You're part of the problem just like all the other consoomer shills.

[@gamertrub]

I pirated it before release, played 4 hours, was so disappointed, deleted it. Literally felt unfinished like a beta version of a game

[@TRG_TheRantingGerman]

That is the point, init? I also think: Bethesda isn't actually worse than it was 15 years ago, it's more like: Everyone else surpassed their quality standards and Bethesda never caught up with those steadily increasing standards. If we compare the dialogs of games like Morrowind, Oblivion or Skyrim with Starfield, one thing sticks out to me: Their dialogs and the player interactions with the characters are qualitatively not much better than what we see in Starfield. The difference is that TES games can source a lot of their character interactions and dialogs from the decades spanning vast lore this franchise has. So it might just look better than it actually is. Stafield, on the other hand, has to stand on its own. And that uncovered the bad writing this studio actually applies for their games in general. Emil Pagliarulo's motto "Keep it simple, stupid!" is a nice sentiment to have... if you make games for five-year-olds. But most of their playerbase are at least young adults. We expect more depth and complexity from a story than what Emil is ever willing to give us. So, as long as Emil Pagliarulo is the main writer of the stories behind Bethesda games, egregiously (and quite frankly intellectually insultingly) simplistic stories is what we will get for those same games. The bad writing, and the technology that is at least a decade behind what is the industry standard now, is not going to cut it. In my subjective view: Given that Pagliarulo is so resistant to criticism and even deludes himself to see his creation to be the "best" Bethesda ever made, Starfield is unsalvageable as long as people like him are in charge of game development at Bethesda Games Studios. There will be no pheonix-rising-from-the-ashes type of redemption, as we have seen with Cyberpunk 2077, simply because the lead designers of Starfield refuse to accept defeat and have no intention to make it better or to just mend the disaster they produced (and demand a criminal 70 bucks to buy it). Also, Pagliarulo said if you don't know how games are being made, you should not criticize; I would have to say this to Pagliarulo: As a 3D & VFX artist I worked for videogames too in my career, and I am telling you now, your game, Emil, is shit.

[@Hero_Of_Old]

God help TES 6

[@musamba101]

I am definitively not preordering the next Elder Scrolls after this meh DLC. I will wait and see (like I did with this DLC). I have replayed Skyrim recently. I have NOT replayed Starfield since December of 2023!

[@EllisWolf]

The over-reliance on meetings for large teams could be dwarfed as a problem by the use of a centralized internal design document or wiki accessible by all studios without having to do said live meetings over and over. Nobody truly knows why Emil decided using design documents was a bad idea, the urban legend pretends that he was traumatized from fucking up Fallout 3 being set 20 years after the Great War, and added a zero / chose to not rely on documentation any longer in order to fix it and wing it, and they've been supposedly doing this (fix and wing it) at all times ever since.

[@xIcyStarzz-yz7my]

I want to make a video, showing the reddit posts.. the cope on the subreddit is INSANE. youre not allowed to talk anything criticism, AT ALL. Theres literally posts saying "2000 hrs in, the game is getting fun!" It is SAD to read. Its sad to see. These people are being serious...

[@joshf2218]

BGS also fired Kurt Kuhlmann right after Starfield released, Kurt was the main Elder Scrolls lore guy left

[@TheBHAitken]

When I first tried Starfield the first thing I noticed was how stripped down the new engine was.

[@BlackPillVillain]

Same

[@flouserschird]

I’m currently (literally) playing Starfield shattered space as I type this… bored as hell in dialog. This game is boring!! The lore sucks!!

[@Hexiad]

I think Hines was the one who famously said on X that, since there were Super Mutants in Fallout 4 he wasn't going to hear a critique related to realism. But maybe that was burnout. The way he and EP behave toward fans on social media was/is bonkers unprofessional.

[@ChessArmyCommander]

I'm having a shit ton of fun playing Skyrim right now! With a bunch of INCREDIBLE mods. I played Starfield, it wasn't my cup of tea.

[@proudherouser4069]

Todd thinks Starfield is perfect.

[@Willcollective]

Skyline Valley was the first time I went okay this is starting to feel like a game finally. The only other thing I liked about it was the atmosphere. It’s still not enough and after all the shit they pulled turning their newest fallout game into a contentless storefront if they had charged even 30 dollars for that I would have screamed

[@magusi9029]

Correction: They should to be on something to escape the boredom they’ve been writing.

[@FerunaLutelou]

I still remember how people complained about Outer Worlds being too small. IMO it just reduced the amount of useless bloat Bethesda games were known for. Sure, it wasn't a perfect experience, some things really should've been expanded and hopefully they will in the sequel, but overall it was a really fun and streamlined gaming experience. Now we got Starfield from Bethesda which is nothing but the useless bloat they're known for.

[@adamstanley3278]

Dude I was hyped for starfield - started playing it and within about 6 hours I was completely bored, and from there, the more I played it, the more of a miserable chore it felt like - EVERY system in the game, from weapon upgrades (sorry can't remove mods anymore and you have to research?) to the 80% entirely useless skill tree, to the terrible dialogue, to the quests literally changing nothing in the world, to the "cities" being like 12 people that all just stare at you - like the "night club" in Neon? really? it's an empty room with like 20 NPC's with "NPC personality and movement pattern 12" - like literally top to bottom every system felt half thought out, half finished, lazy, or worse, maliciously designed to be as grindy and tedious as possible. When you get to level 40 and you still can't craft a silencer on a gun, but it doesn't matter anyway because the entire stealth system is non-functional garbage, and the companions are all the same personality with the same voice lines.....like MAN. I got progressively angrier and angrier until I uninstalled the game lol - I felt insulted - like Bethesda thinks the players are stupid

[@samuelfawell9159]

Bethesda could be saved, but only in ways that they will never do, Emil would need to be removed or replaced, Todd would need to stop talking, they need to have a focus and leadership. None of these things would they ever do.

[@WillParkforcheese]

I’m used to getting screwed over by game studios, I am a Sims player after but are we sure Bethesda can do good work? I don’t know if they can anymore. Maybe they are just too old fashioned and can’t keep up.

[@Cloud_Seeker]

The issue with Bethesda is that they are just doing what they have been doing so far. They never changed, they never “lost it”. This is the behavior they have been praised for all this time. It is only now people have started to notice it for themselves on a massive scale.

[@jackplisken4738]

Bro said Fallout is his beloved Franchise , yet not 1 Mention of F1 or 2 . nah lil bro , youre just a Tourist

[@o0TraceuR0o]

the only good thing about bethesda was jeremy soules music, their games were always shitty but there was no point of reference of what an actually good open world rpg should be back then.

[@nifftbatuff676]

Gamers are beyond saving too.

[@matthew-dq8vk]

Awesome new MJ video on Bethesda. Hoping you do a video on the new Dragon age when it comes out.

[@MJ__Hernandez]

That's the plan!

[@rottenapple_]

This is like the 10th video I watched of somebody shitting on the game and I can't stop.

[@MJ__Hernandez]

It's everywhere now 😂😂

[@adcaptandumvulgus4252]

If they get out of the line too much Microsoft will step in and set things straight is my guess

[@DV-ou1yu]

Dude sounds like lollipop and complains like one lol

[@djstef4549]

They have a public test server already the betas on steam. Is there something else you mean though?

[@KevinMole-cj3kl]

All the great people have left it happens

[@adcaptandumvulgus4252]

Star filled with their last chance to do something more or less without Microsoft interference and they blew that so expect the next fallout or elder scrolls to be by the book what all the fans want

[@RachelLouren28]

you make a lot of good points. I feel like i'm in the middle. I love CP2077. Starfield is nowhere as good as that, but i'm playing thru the Shattered space dlc and I'm still having fun. It's a meh game, but i like the slower pace (at least how I play it) . it's a relaxing game at times. I've played BG3 too. Bethesda definitely feels behind the times in quality compared to that.

[@gaius2451]

This game is in desperate need of good writing, the gameplay in fonv is shit, but the writing hard carries.

[@anrom23]

Sure they can be saved they just need to go back to their roots good game design care in the story and characters getting away from cash grabs and the main big one! Making games playable not buggy stuttering fps dropping messes

[@wfogapgfahfnog35]

What will happen to Fallout if Bethesda continues like this?

[@MJ__Hernandez]

I guess we have to hope they can make it that far so we can find out

[@asddap]

Fallout 4 was already meh compared to New Vegas. Story, factions, npc writing, roleplaying, RPG system, etc. were all dumbed down. I don't have much faith in Bethesda future projects.

[@tylerdunn9683]

​@@asddap anything fallout related Bethesda does turns to shit real quick

[@АлександрГаврилов-п7з]

It's not bad to wish bethesda to be saved. Just don't buy their starfields 76 if you want them to make good games. Money is the only language they want to hear.

[@AB-hi6ru]

ty

[@Haarba1]

bethesda should not be saved, why? It looks like time has come to just forget about most big names from the 90s, 00s, and 10s, free space for new devs who understand what players actually need, devs from China, SKorea, JP. Some western can stay, Larian, R* maybe, well see soon enough if they deserve to stay, perhaps few others, rest are just waste of space. Its not like people who actually made good games are even work there, in 2024 all of them are nothing more than a name, empty names.

[@hunt_club_1]

agreed

[@anonymous-pr2sy]

the writing in the outer worlds is trash, there's no reason to play it. All that good level design and game design is just wasted

[@WiseOwl_1408]

An honest shill is still gross

[@VenomGamingCenter]

Wheres that dude sister shill that's been harassing you? Shouldn't that guy be here defending Bethesda?

[@ronniebattle6756]

At least we still have fromsoft and Larian😊

[@richmckill4471]

the outer worlds is trash

[@Jezza_One]

A very deep and insightful review.

[@АлександрГаврилов-п7з]

The only problem of this game is low budget.

[@richmckill4471]

@@АлександрГаврилов-п7з Cons: was churned out in 5 days. Pros: Tries to look like new vegas so people will be inclined to like it by default.

[@richmckill4471]

It's a lot like new vegas if everything you did had a completely surface level impact on the world and if half the characters were an even more cringe version of sheogorath

[@Talulah_Artorius]

Uh... Don't mean to be that guy's but a couple things. First the games you are comparing Starfield to are not even remotely comparable, cyberpunk, outerworld, etc. The appeal of bethesda games comes from the exploration and finding things around the world, has always been, cyberpunk and outer worlds are fundamentally different in that aspect, since they are more narrative focused and exploration takes a second or sometimes third seat compared to that like in the case of cyberpunk which has basically almost zero reason to explore night city, the main story of bethesda games have always been exceptionally shit, which leads me to the next thing About emil plagiarulo. Yeah he is a hack, but I think you might also be smoking something or way too blinded by nostalgia, since obiviion Bethesda has wrote the same story for every game Oblivion: world is ending, you are the chosen one, save it Fallout 3: father gone, go find him skyrim: world is ending, you are the chosen one, save it Fallout 4: child gone, go find it Fallout 74: overseer gone, go find it Starfield main game: explore yipee Fallout TV show: family gone, go find it Fallout has used [family figure] is gone trope since fallout 3 with ff fallout new vegas being the only exception to the rule And elder sxrools have made you "the chosen one" since morro wind Bethesda has never been good at writing main story lines, their appeals has always been huge immersive world filled to the brim with hand crafted content to explore and discover, that's what we lost with Starfield... And said, that they have now demonstrated they are incapable of doing anymore with shattered spaces

[@lordhighwind6230]

I’m happy being a PlayStation user knowing that teams at Microsoft are now stuck with that garbage dump Bethesda

[@rave1704]

I agree with you partially but cyberpunk 2077 is a complete piece of garbage

[@stonecoldsteverharvey7862]

Too much woke not enough good game

[@Primarch19th]

What is wrong with you?????? Who WANTS to save Bethesda? Are you a Todd sycophant?

[@scarletina5137]

The people you named like Hines, Shen etc are all just as responsible for Bethesda going downhill as anyone. No idea why you are naming them like Bethesda in trouble because they left. Hines is a marketing guy and a fluffer thats all. Quite frankly they need more people to leave Bethesda like Emil and perhaps even Todd Howard. The quality of their games is awful and nothing is going to change going forward as its clear they have learned no lessons, they dont think anything is wrong.

[@djstef4549]

Honestly just think Todd is there just to promote their games. Basically just there cause if his name because when he talks people glaze tf outta everything lol