So, Bethesda was founded by a person who wanted to use the company to help sick children and provide coordination for other publishers to give back to society, who was passionate about technology, and adamant about innovation. But it was stolen and taken-over by a devil, Robert Altman, who pioneered abusive industry practices, sued everyone in sight, stripped the company of innovation and ignored the importance of actual talent for making games, and reportedly never touched a game in his life.
Bethesda games over the past 17+ years would probably have been far better had Christopher Weaver not had his own company stolen from him by Robert Altman. Weaver, Bethesda / ZeniMax' Chief Technology Officer, was actually passionate about game-making, which was why he asked Altman to manage the financial side of the company while he focused on design aspects.
Robert Altman is undoubtedly a tragedy to have befallen Bethesda / ZeniMax and the games industry, and probably one of the worst things to have ever happened to the games industry.
todd seems to have truly liked the guy so who can say
I've never seen Todd as being regarded for having good sense. He speaks like a simpleton who thinks the most mundane, unspectacular, and often detrimental ideas are somehow revolutionary, and seems pretty clueless, to me. He's made every next Bethesda game more dumbed-down than the previous one, demonstrating himself to not actually know how to be creative, but only destructive and develop downwards by obliterating depth and meaningful complexity from games he works on. And he's always avoided commenting on ZeniMax' business practices, saying he isn't involved in that stuff, he just focuses on making games - indicating he knows there's something rotten going on but wants to keep getting bags of money while ignoring any responsibility he has from being a willing party to that rottenness.
So, Todd liking the guy who gave him tons of money while Todd looked the other way concerning his actions isn't a strong testimonial to Altman's character.
Bethesda's games would probably also be a lot better if Todd hadn't working on them. That guy only seems to only know how to take things away from better game design until there's nothing special, quality, or meaningful remaining in the designs of the games he makes.
Can you give a single, documented, example?
I mentioned different things, so an example of what, in particular? But everything that I said is documented, even though I don't know offhand in which videos and interviews certain information can be found. If anyone knows where the things I mention below can be found, please post them.
Todd has been asked about ZeniMax's practices and lawsuits, and separated himself from them, saying that he isn't involved in any of that stuff and just makes games.
There's only one existing example of my claim that each next game Todd makes is more dumbed-down than the previous, just as there's only one history of games Todd has made. So, that's pretty easy to think of an example for: Morrowind -> Oblivion -> Fallout 3 -> Skyrim -> Fallout 4 -> Fallout '76.
The banality of his expressed ideas is present in his presentations of them. You can watch some videos of him talking about stuff. Listen to him explain how poignant he though Fallout 4's story setup was with the protagonist's imperative to find their son - which he ultimately admitted didn't work-out at all because upon leaving the vault, the player has a ton of other things to do and finding the son is put on the back-burner.
Elsewhere, he's explained his attraction to simplicity and how he thinks it's ingenuous to reduce the complexity things, like Skyrim's uninspired levelling system (or maybe its combat system, or Fallout 4's practically-not-even-serviceable inventory system) - which is actually the problem and extreme stupidity in Todd's game design and why the phrase "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle" was coined to describe Bethesda games. They're far too simplistic to be satisfying, except maybe to LCD simpletons. And it's a simpleton's mind which feels relieved and dumbing-things down, because it can't support any notable degree of sophistication. Such a mind is clearly expressed through the designs of BGS games.
In one presentation where Todd was imparting his game design 'wisdom', he talked about a mobile game he was playing and showed how flashy and congratulatory the graphics are when a level is completed. Todd explains how pumped-up and good about himself that makes him feel, and that it gets him to play more, treating this like a design revelation. With the way Todd described things, I'm pretty sure a lot of the audience would have thought he must have been joking, given how simplistic that suggested he is, but I think he was being very sincere about it. If a person is actually affected by such things like that, they're a simpleton chasing after 'reward' sensations like a sociopath.
There's been Todd describing himself and the usual Bethesda writer, Emil Pagliarulo, high-fiving each-other over some dialogue that is worthy of a lamer Beavis and Butthead and which reduces the integrity of the game but Todd thinks it's awesome. Emil Pagliarulo's writing is consistently harebrained and cringily moronic, and it's among the very worst in the games industry. It's utterly broken all over the place, things don't connect and the writing simply doesn't work. It's just a bunch of disparate ideas placed next to each other, with the ideas not reasoned together into a coherent thing - which is why the setup for Fallout 4. And it takes a clueless person at the helm to not realize and accept that their writing is greatly hindering the overall quality of the package, and finding someone a lot more competent to take the job.
The Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3, Part 1
The Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3, Part 2
The Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3, Part 3
The Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3, Part 4
The Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3, Part 5
One of these series can be written for each game Emil Pagliarulo wrote. They're all moronic. And the only way I can figure people can stand them is that either they are morons themselves, or their minds are too turned-out and in a vegetative state to notice or by bothered by the painfully-idiotic writing they are being fed. So, Bethesda games appeal low-mental-complexity casuals.
You know what people can't work with complex information and so reduces and compartmentalizes everything into lowest-common-denominator determinations? Psychopaths and sociopaths. You know what people chase after 'reward' sensations and is completely enamoured by little colourful blinky dots of confetti on a screen telling them they completed a level in a mobile game? Psychopaths and sociopaths. Everything about Todd Howard's game design is about reducing things beyond a level that is enjoyable anymore, and creating dumb gratification tricks that don't work except on stupid people. Todd Howard and Emil Pagliarulo are sociopaths with basically no design talent or skill.
Is Todd Howard a good game developer?
Enjoy Bethesda games all you like. I try to, too, every now and then - for the environments and with mods. But they're moronic and bland, far beneath their easily-graspable potential, and Todd Howard's design skills are those of a hack. And Emil Pagliarulo's writing is awful and broken, and in the manner it's been, probably shouldn't feature in any serious or professional production, let alone what's one of the industry's biggest productions, when there are other writers available.
So, Bethesda was founded by a person who wanted to use the company to help sick children and provide coordination for other publishers to give back to society, who was passionate about technology, and adamant about innovation. But it was stolen and taken-over by a devil, Robert Altman, who pioneered abusive industry practices, sued everyone in sight, stripped the company of innovation and ignored the importance of actual talent for making games, and reportedly never touched a game in his life.
Bethesda games over the past 17+ years would probably have been far better had Christopher Weaver not had his own company stolen from him by Robert Altman. Weaver, Bethesda / ZeniMax' Chief Technology Officer, was actually passionate about game-making, which was why he asked Altman to manage the financial side of the company while he focused on design aspects.
Robert Altman is undoubtedly a tragedy to have befallen Bethesda / ZeniMax and the games industry, and probably one of the worst things to have ever happened to the games industry.
todd seems to have truly liked the guy so who can say
I've never seen Todd as being regarded for having good sense. He speaks like a simpleton who thinks the most mundane, unspectacular, and often detrimental ideas are somehow revolutionary, and seems pretty clueless, to me. He's made every next Bethesda game more dumbed-down than the previous one, demonstrating himself to not actually know how to be creative, but only destructive and develop downwards by obliterating depth and meaningful complexity from games he works on. And he's always avoided commenting on ZeniMax' business practices, saying he isn't involved in that stuff, he just focuses on making games - indicating he knows there's something rotten going on but wants to keep getting bags of money while ignoring any responsibility he has from being a willing party to that rottenness.
So, Todd liking the guy who gave him tons of money while Todd looked the other way concerning his actions isn't a strong testimonial to Altman's character.
Bethesda's games would probably also be a lot better if Todd hadn't working on them. That guy only seems to only know how to take things away from better game design until there's nothing special, quality, or meaningful remaining in the designs of the games he makes.
It seems interesting to me that you think someone doesn't have integrity if they won't go "yeah the guy that signs my paychecks is a greedy piece of shit
))"
Todd Howard:
- was a varsity athlete in high school
- directed morrowind, one of the most beloved RPGs on the Codex
- directed Oblivion, one of the best selling RPGs on Xbox 360
- directed Skyrim, the best selling RPG of all time
- saved the Fallout franchise from awful console spinoffs and obscurity with the best seller Fallout 3
- directed Fallout 4, the best selling fallout game of all time(30+million copies and counting)
- only ever plays a human male barbarian in DnD and other RPGs
- got you to buy Skyrim four times, laughed about it, and then released another version of Skyrim for the switch
- got Microsoft to buy Skyrim and the entire company
- basically responsible for putting serious RPGs on the consoles
Is this you also saying that Nickleback is one of the best rock bands of all time?
Nickelback - 50 million albums sold in 15 years
Rush - 40 million albums sold in 47 years
Did Todd even know about the deal with Microsoft before it happened - didn't he say the deal was a surprise to everyone at the studio and they were all hearing about it at the same time as the public?
Your response to my saying that Todd's a hack with no particularly demonstrated talent for making good games, which is a list of how much money he's made the company, makes the point: If there existed a list of creative or design-quality accomplishments, you'd have cited them, instead. But there doesn't exist such a list because everything in a Todd Howard game is maximum dumbed-down, to appeal to the lowest-common-denominator casual gamer. A Todd Howard game lets the player's imagination go wild. Actually, it requires the player's imagination to go wild because there's so little creativity and quality in the game itself that it can't much be enjoyed unless the player imagines that there's actually good writing, good quests, good combat, good animations, a good UI and menu system, good graphics, good character-building, etc.
Todd's made the company a lot of money. And he's a shit game designer who seems to only know how to reduce things into banality, and Bethesda games would probably have been far better if he hadn't worked on them.
And Oblivion and Skyrim aren't even RPGs, they're Action-Adventures, so they couldn't be "best selling" RPGs.
