How the illusion and myth of Todd Howard as a good game designer came to be - Todd's Bethesda has never been a quality developer

[Delicieuxz]

In this post, I assert that what Bethesda has done in recent years is no different than what Bethesda ever did under Todd Howard, and provide a detailed explanation of what I believe is why Todd's Bethesda was ever (undeservedly) regarded as a quality studio. As I say in this post, each-next game Todd worked on is more dumbed-down than the previous. And except for Morrowind, whose creative quality bore more unmolested residual influence from pre-Todd's Bethesda than all subsequent Bethesda games, I don't think that Todd's Bethesda has ever made a good game. People also say that Morrowind was the start of the dumbing-down of TES, which helps make that point. I also rip on Bethesda's writer, Emil Pagliarulo, who I posit is one of the worst and most inept writers in the history of the games industry. "Every literary idea in Emil Pagliarulo's writing is the Ralph Wiggum version of what it should actually be"


Outside of the past several years, the huge amount of praise and hype that Todd has been given over the years implies that he was actually doing something hype-worthy, and that he was an important influence in products that, themselves, were hype-worthy. But I think Bethesda games were popular in spite of Howard, and not because of him. I think the blunt fact, as I've seen it since Oblivion, is that Todd is a really dumb guy, and Bethesda's writer, Emil Pagliarulo, is a really dumb guy, and, together, they're like Beavis and Butthead and they make really, really stupid game-and-story-design decisions. Pete Hines, who left Bethesda not too long ago, also seemed to me like he isn't a smart guy. And I think that troupe cultivated Bethesda into a low-skill and low-talent studio that always aimed low. But because that group of Dunning-Krugers were repeatedly praised and hyped, they believed they were doing great and felt affirmed in continuing the path Todd's negative design philosophy took them on.

TES is successful because it is a rich concept, filled to the brim with exciting and deep ideas... ideas which weren't created by Todd's Bethesda, but by the Bethesda that was destroyed when the psychopath lawyer, Altman, who reportedly never played a game in his life, stole the company from its creative-and-tech-enthusiast creator, Christian Weaver, and then Julian Le Fay was sidelined during Morrowind and left the company. Todd Howard has no really appreciable design talent: if you look at the changes made from one game to the next that he lead, his game design consists of one thing: taking things away, and simplifying the formula. Todd even said, himself, that that's his design philosophy - which is why the Bethesda slogan became "keep it simple, stupid", when that philosophy actually translated to "keep it stupid, simpleton", resulting in a bunch of simpletons making their games far too dumbed-down, and then making them even dumber each next time around.

That philosophy isn't why TES games succeeded, and it only harmed them. That philosophy isn't creativity, but is designing downward, and is reduction and destruction of more creative ideas. It's the trajectory of psychopathic thinking, and is why psychopathic CEOs are known for producing short-term gain, at the expense of long-term success and growth. I think the management decisions that are expressed in Bethesda products show that Todd Howard is a psychopath in his thinking. And that also seems apparent whenever he talks, saying trite and pretentious things as if he feels like he's saying something lofty and deep, with a vapid smile / grin that shows there's no depth of mind behind it.

People criticise Starfield and Fallout '76, and talk as if Bethesda has gone downhill, but what Bethesda did with Starfield is only what Bethesda has always done. And I'm sure that Todd doesn't have a grasp of why it didn't work again, when he's never, ever done anything different than what he did with Starfield, yet was always praised for it. But the shortcomings of Starfield were just as bad in previous Bethesda games, and so Todd Howard's Bethesda has never deserved the praise it received.

What happened is that, as technological advancements brought dozens of millions of more people into gaming through improved graphics and better accessibility, while Microsoft and Sony were marketing their Xbox-onward era of consoles with hundreds of millions of dollars, all these millions of people played Oblivion or Fallout 3, and were experiencing those games' concepts and systems for their first time (and so were the least judgmental of them they'll ever be), and then they incorrectly attributed those ideas and that creativity to Todd Howard and his team, and gave them undeserved praise. And Todd received immense false validation for his philosophy of just dumbing everything down, ensuring that he would continue on that abysmal path. And the writing in Bethesda's games were overlooked because there was so much else for people to be excited about, especially with mods.

But as the people who were excited and amazed by the earlier Todd Howard games they played, who had come into gaming with maybe Oblivion, Fallout 3, or Skyrim, played more and more Bethesda games, what used to be fresh to them became really stale, and the negativity of Todd Howard's game-design trajectory suddenly started being visible to them, too - but because their first Bethesda game experiences were all fresh to them at the time, and so created memories of enjoyment, they've mistakenly thought that Bethesda has gotten worse over the years. But Bethesda hasn't. What Todd and Bethesda have been doing in their most recent years and releases is only exactly, precisely what Todd has ever done since he started leading TES development, what Todd has never done anything other than, and is exactly what Todd was also doing the entire time when the people now-disillusioned with Bethesda were having their first Bethesda game experiences and being amazed by what they were playing.

In the non-pejorative sense, Todd doesn't appear, to me, to be a talented or smart guy, but a pretty dumb one - yet probably has a greatly-inflated sense of his talent and skill, due to receiving huge amounts of undue praise and hype over the years. The idea of Todd Howard being a skilled designer is an illusion akin to people in Dragon Ball Z believing that Mr Satan is the strongest fighter in the world. All that Todd did is inherit a magnificent formula from the creators of TES (who were sidelined or forced out of the company around the time Todd took over TES), and then progressively remove more aspects from that formula with each successive game. When that formula met with improving industry graphics (though Bethesda graphics have always been behind the curve - despite Bethesda being one of the most profitable developers in the industry), creating an accessibility inflection-point, and millions of people got into gaming for their first time with the Xbox-onward console generation, people assumed that what they were seeing and experiencing was something new and revolutionary, and assumed the responsibility for those things lay with Todd Howard and his version of Bethesda. But it doesn't. TES and the formula that was then applied to Fallout (another series Todd's Bethesda ruined) has been successful, completely in spite of Todd Howard and his Bethesda, and not because of it.

BTW, just as I think Todd Howard's speech, self-presentation, and design decisions bear the hallmarks of a psychopath (which I mean it in a clinical sense, not a hyperbolic, menacing-freak sense), Todd's Bethesda team bears the hallmarks of a low-talent, low-skill studio - which would be another expression of Todd's own management decisions, by which he influenced who was hired and what they should focus on, and what was deemed progress in the right direction. Just as a psychopathic CEO's short-sightedness and lack of awareness and appreciation for nuanced-but-important things ruins a company in the long-term, Todd's management of Bethesda has turned it into a low-quality, B-grade studio, but one that's in possession of a magnificent, top-tier IP.

Something I should've included in the OP is that the undue success of Todd's Bethesda's TES is certainly also a product of their soundtracks. If they didn't have unique and gorgeous soundtracks, people would've cared about them far less.

If I could get a message to Phil Spencer, it would be this: the best thing Microsoft can do to improve Bethesda's quality and fortune is to let Emil Pagliarulo go. He has no writing skills: he is the quintessential definition of a hack, and is one of the worst writers in the history of the games industry, and probably beyond it. He has a reverse-Midas touch: everything he touches is turned to garbage. He hasn't written a passable story in his career. Bethesda would've been so much more without him as a writer on its games. And Bethesda will be so much more without him as a writer on its games. And possibly let Todd go, too. He's kind-of the same, riding on an image he hasn't earned and doesn't deserve. All he's ever done is strip away more things from the TES his Bethesda inherited from the TES creators, dumbing each-next game down more than the previous. People only mistakenly attributed TES' success to him, when it was in spite of Todd's influence and not because of it. And then start forming a Bethesda development team that's based around positive and confident creativity, talent, and skill - with someone who can recognise what those things are being in charge of the studio's reformation. Todd doesn't have an eye for those things in himself, or in others.



This 5-part article series on Fallout 3's abysmal writing highlights what is emblematic of all of Emil Pagliarulo writing, and is only scratching the surface - his writing is harebrained and simply doesn't make sense, or work: The Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3, Part 1

I couldn't even bear to finish Fallout 3 because of it - and I tried to push myself to. I couldn't even bear to finish Fallout 3 because of it - and I tried to push myself to. Every literary idea in Emil Pagliarulo's writing is the Ralph Wiggum version of what it should actually be. On a near moment-to-moment basis, in a way that article doesn't even delve into, the writing is so stupid that it makes me want to scream, and I genuinely feel like it will make me dumber if I keep playing it - and maybe it did that to Bethesda's general audience, setting people's expectations super low, which is a part of why Bethesda got a pass on its terrible development quality for so long.

Unfortunately, the "Bethesda's Game Design is Insulting" video has been made private. But here are some other testaments to the extremely low skill-level of Bethesda, which is a detrimental effect of Todd's management and his own absence of skill and talent, and sight for those things:

 

[Delicieuxz]

 

[Lemming42]

It's pretty simple - people are willing to put up with garbage gameplay if they like the story and setting. Fo4 and Starfield alienated people because the settings were profoundly boring. Morrowind, on the other hand, gets a free pass for being basically shit because the world is one of the most interesting ever presented in a videogame.

I guarantee you that if Starfield had been a Star Wars game - same engine, same small handful of crap settlements, same middling-at-best quest design, same mechanics, same dungeons, but with better dialogue, Star Wars characters and a Star Wars skin - the gaming mainstream would have heralded it as a glorious return to form for Bethesda. But because it's a boring-ass world that Emil shat out in half an hour, nobody wants to play it and nobody cares about anything that happens in it.

Morrowind and New Vegas are the proof of this; they're both riddled with many of the same issues as the other post-DF Bethesda games (boring copypaste dungeons, terrible half-implemented stealth mechanics, combat being both mechanically uninteresting and also shit to play, little challenge to start with and virtually no challenge by about level 5, and - in Morrowind's case - truly awful quest design) but they're beloved because the whole appeal of these games is in entering an interesting world and "living" within it. If the world is engaging and memorable, the game succeeds in spite of itself - hence Skyrim and Fo3's success with the mainstream. I enjoyed Skyrim quite a lot in the end, but never enjoyed Fo4, despite them being in many ways the same game - the only real reason for this is that I really like the Elder Scrolls setting and really hate the soft reboot of the Fallout setting seen in Fo4. I could spend all day posturing and listing mechanical differences but really, that's the actual reason.

The same is true of Daggerfall to an extent; there's a lot more going on in it than in subsequent Bethesda games but it's still mostly a case of being caught up in the wonder and mood of the setting, and thus tolerating the fact that you're going through the same dungeon blocks over and over and getting into trivially easy combat with the same handful of dimwitted enemies. If someone's imagination isn't grabbed by Daggerfall's setting, I can't imagine they'll have any fun with the game. It doesn't matter that you can climb any surface unless you're already in love with the game's world and thus motivated to roleplay as an agile thief. Similarly, Morrowind's spellmaker wouldn't be of interest to anyone not entranced by the world, because if you don't care about the setting and aren't trying to roleplay in it, then the spellmaker is just a broken half-assed feature in a boring, sparse, unreactive sandbox... which is how most people perceived Starfield.

The games haven't changed much, nor have the core design philosophies (barring Starfield's misguided procgen stuff), it's literally all down to the writing, worldbuilding and visuals. New Vegas' success, which Bethesda were clearly a little embarrased by, should have proven this fact to them and led them to refocus, but unfortunately they're fucking stupid and will likely fuck Elder Scrolls VI up in ways we can't even dream of yet.

 

[mediocrepoet]

In this post, I assert that what Bethesda has done in recent years is no different than what Bethesda ever did under Todd Howard, and provide a detailed explanation of what I believe is why Todd's Bethesda was ever (undeservedly) regarded as a quality studio. As I say in this post, each-next game Todd worked on is more dumbed-down than the previous. And except for Morrowind, whose creative quality bore more unmolested residual influence from pre-Todd's Bethesda than all subsequent Bethesda games, I don't think that Todd's Bethesda has ever made a good game. People also say that Morrowind was the start of the dumbing-down of TES, which helps make that point.

I didn't read even the first paragraph, much less the rest of your textual diarrhea.

You do not need this much room to say that every TES starting with Morrowind is dumbed down from the one before and they're more and more simplified dogshit. All you need to do is read any Codex TES thread starting from the beginning of the Codex.

Go post this shit on reddit.

If you're just trolling, I give you an eyeroll and

 

[Tyranicon]

They're corpo middle-men turned spokespeople. I'm not sure what more there is to say.

I've always wanted to ask big Todd fans "what does he even do? Like specifically what has he worked on?"

It seems like he's just the boss man. I neither have anything for him or against him. He seems likable enough, but he should, since he's the face of the studio.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Late Bloomer]

I wrote a lot of useless words that nobody will read. I will go back to reddit now. I promise. Oh, I am also a homosexual.

 

[None]

6+ hours of accompanying videos. Even the thread title is longer than it should be. Christ, learn some brevity.

 

[octavius]

Bethesda is still the only company making big, open world SP CRPGs, aren't they? With no competition, Todd and his toddlers don't need to be good designers.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Bethesda is still the only company making big, open world SP CRPGs, aren't they? With no competition, Todd and his toddlers don't need to be good designers.

Ubisoft's later ACs are arguably as much of an RPG as recent TES offerings. Nevermind other things like Elden Ring or the various open world survival crafting things that often have level and skill ups. So... while this definitely used to be true, certainly from Arena to Morrowind, I think they're facing a backlash because it isn't any longer.

 

[Late Bloomer]

Ubisoft's later ACs are arguably as much of an RPG as recent TES offerings. Nevermind other things like Elden Ring or the various open world survival crafting things that often have level and skill ups. So... while this definitely used to be true, certainly from Arena to Morrowind, I think they're facing a backlash because it isn't any longer.

In terms of exploration, I feel like Elden Ring is the one that came closest to achieving a similar feel. AC's always felt so damn paint by numbers in their approach. But then again, I think Skyrim and Fallout 4 have great world design and excellent exploration as a result. Starfield was a gigantic failure in regards to their world design, including their hand crafted areas on the planets. Fallout 76 had an interesting world to explore but some very questionable design decisions for just about everything else. Although it is decent enough nowadays.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Bethesda is still the only company making big, open world SP CRPGs, aren't they? With no competition, Todd and his toddlers don't need to be good designers.

This would be true, except that Starfield is not Open World and is more of a 'looter-shooter' than an RPG (it also isn't much of a space game). Bethesda has abandoned the model it created with The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind in 2002.

Spoiler

Also, there are now other Open World CRPGs, such as Kingdom Come: Deliverance (2018) and Outward (2019), both of which have sequels in the works.

Not to mention Codex GotY 2022 Elden Ring, which combined the Souls-like Action RPG subgenre with the Open World RPG subgenre.

 

[Yosharian]

Nobody actually thinks Todd is talented, it's just a meme. And he's charismatic.

 

[ropetight]

It seems like he's just the boss man. I neither have anything for him or against him. He seems punchable enough, but he should, since he's the face of the studio.

FTFY

 

[thesecret1]

Bethesda is still the only company making big, open world SP CRPGs, aren't they? With no competition, Todd and his toddlers don't need to be good designers.

Ubisoft's later ACs are arguably as much of an RPG as recent TES offerings. Nevermind other things like Elden Ring or the various open world survival crafting things that often have level and skill ups. So... while this definitely used to be true, certainly from Arena to Morrowind, I think they're facing a backlash because it isn't any longer.

Ubishit and ER are both very different subgenres from TES and you know it; they have different target audiences.

The backlash against Starfield is both in that Beth shifted to procedural generation (and thus took off the mask and made the players realize just how generic shit boring their game design is) and because it's a new IP. Worse yet, when it comes to space, there ARE games players can compare Starfield to quite readily, and Starfield comes out short every single time.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Bethesda is still the only company making big, open world SP CRPGs, aren't they? With no competition, Todd and his toddlers don't need to be good designers.

Ubisoft's later ACs are arguably as much of an RPG as recent TES offerings. Nevermind other things like Elden Ring or the various open world survival crafting things that often have level and skill ups. So... while this definitely used to be true, certainly from Arena to Morrowind, I think they're facing a backlash because it isn't any longer.

Ubishit and ER are both very different subgenres from TES and you know it; they have different target audiences.

The backlash against Starfield is both in that Beth shifted to procedural generation (and thus took off the mask and made the players realize just how generic shit boring their game design is) and because it's a new IP. Worse yet, when it comes to space, there ARE games players can compare Starfield to quite readily, and Starfield comes out short every single time.

I guess. They all put all sorts of markers on your map to guide you to points of interest, but a significant difference is that Elden Ring and Assassin's Creed have good gameplay and more interesting combat. ER also still has significant exploration elements despite the markers whereas dungeon designs in Oblivion and to a lesser extent Skyrim seem like they may have been contracted out to the Final Fantasy XIII map team.

So... TES since Oblivion is irredeemable shit but if you want an open world rpg, you're still covered by these other series. That's what you meant by different, right?

 

[Technomancer]

Can never trust youtube drones, they will always parrot what's trending for that sweet sweet cash.

Contra opinion for balance:

 

[Lemming42]

AssCreed Odyssey is fun but it's a very different experience to Bethesda games on almost every level beyond the superficial (open world with lots of sidequests). The only real contender I can think of that clearly attempts to replicate the whole Bethesda formula is The Outer Worlds and, like Fallout 4 and Starfield, it failed for many people based on generally uninteresting writing and worldbuilding.

Which is doubly funny because almost every problem TOW had was subsequently replicated and/or amplified in Starfield - generic world, lack of space-based gameplay (Starfield obviously far better in this regard to be fair), annoying health-bloat combat, a series of small compartmentalised world maps rather than a large cohesive one. Bethesda's eyes were somehow not on their only competitor.

 

[thesecret1]

Bethesda is still the only company making big, open world SP CRPGs, aren't they? With no competition, Todd and his toddlers don't need to be good designers.

Ubisoft's later ACs are arguably as much of an RPG as recent TES offerings. Nevermind other things like Elden Ring or the various open world survival crafting things that often have level and skill ups. So... while this definitely used to be true, certainly from Arena to Morrowind, I think they're facing a backlash because it isn't any longer.

Ubishit and ER are both very different subgenres from TES and you know it; they have different target audiences.

The backlash against Starfield is both in that Beth shifted to procedural generation (and thus took off the mask and made the players realize just how generic shit boring their game design is) and because it's a new IP. Worse yet, when it comes to space, there ARE games players can compare Starfield to quite readily, and Starfield comes out short every single time.

I guess. They all put all sorts of markers on your map to guide you to points of interest, but a significant difference is that Elden Ring and Assassin's Creed have good gameplay and more interesting combat. ER also still has significant exploration elements despite the markers whereas dungeon designs in Oblivion and to a lesser extent Skyrim seem like they may have been contracted out to the Final Fantasy XIII map team.

So... TES since Oblivion is irredeemable shit but if you want an open world rpg, you're still covered by these other series. That's what you meant by different, right?

I meant they aim at completely different things in their designs. ER has little in the way of usual quests and NPCs to chat with, and virtually no systems beyond combat (no stealing, for example) - it's not a world sim (trying to make the player feel like he's part of the game world) which is ostensibly what Bethesda is gunning for. Asscreeds also aren't that way, albeit being closer to it than ER. Especially narratively - the retarded plot of jumping from modern day to history (ayyyliums and all) and everything connected to that, the narratively constrained side content and relative lack of side mechanics (though to be fair, I haven't kept up with latest asscreeds so who knows how many of those there might be now), etc. all make for a different kind of experience.

TES games have always chiefly drawn people who want to feel like they're living in a fantasy world, like they're actually an adventurer that fought his way through a dungeon, pawned off the loot, and drank the coin away in a tavern. It's something neither Asscreed nor ER are going for, and why Morrowind has such a cult following (being the most immersive of Beth games by far).

Lastly, it's not true that Bethesda has no competition - Piranha's games were the same way (albeit they've gone downhill since the times of Gothic 2), Kingdom Come: Deliverance guns for the same thimgs as TES, just without the fantasy setting, even Obsidian made an attempt. But the demand massively outstrips the supply, so Beth needn't really be afraid of being outcomepeted. Especially since their games also serve as a mod platform - that's another factor that plays massively in their favor.

 

[BruceVC]

In this post, I assert that what Bethesda has done in recent years is no different than what Bethesda ever did under Todd Howard, and provide a detailed explanation of what I believe is why Todd's Bethesda was ever (undeservedly) regarded as a quality studio. As I say in this post, each-next game Todd worked on is more dumbed-down than the previous. And except for Morrowind, whose creative quality bore more unmolested residual influence from pre-Todd's Bethesda than all subsequent Bethesda games, I don't think that Todd's Bethesda has ever made a good game. People also say that Morrowind was the start of the dumbing-down of TES, which helps make that point. I also rip on Bethesda's writer, Emil Pagliarulo, who I posit is one of the worst and most inept writers in the history of the games industry. "Every literary idea in Emil Pagliarulo's writing is the Ralph Wiggum version of what it should actually be"


Outside of the past several years, the huge amount of praise and hype that Todd has been given over the years implies that he was actually doing something hype-worthy, and that he was an important influence in products that, themselves, were hype-worthy. But I think Bethesda games were popular in spite of Howard, and not because of him. I think the blunt fact, as I've seen it since Oblivion, is that Todd is a really dumb guy, and Bethesda's writer, Emil Pagliarulo, is a really dumb guy, and, together, they're like Beavis and Butthead and they make really, really stupid game-and-story-design decisions. Pete Hines, who left Bethesda not too long ago, also seemed to me like he isn't a smart guy. And I think that troupe cultivated Bethesda into a low-skill and low-talent studio that always aimed low. But because that group of Dunning-Krugers were repeatedly praised and hyped, they believed they were doing great and felt affirmed in continuing the path Todd's negative design philosophy took them on.

TES is successful because it is a rich concept, filled to the brim with exciting and deep ideas... ideas which weren't created by Todd's Bethesda, but by the Bethesda that was destroyed when the psychopath lawyer, Altman, who reportedly never played a game in his life, stole the company from its creative-and-tech-enthusiast creator, Christian Weaver, and then Julian Le Fay was sidelined during Morrowind and left the company. Todd Howard has no really appreciable design talent: if you look at the changes made from one game to the next that he lead, his game design consists of one thing: taking things away, and simplifying the formula. Todd even said, himself, that that's his design philosophy - which is why the Bethesda slogan became "keep it simple, stupid", when that philosophy actually translated to "keep it stupid, simpleton", resulting in a bunch of simpletons making their games far too dumbed-down, and then making them even dumber each next time around.

That philosophy isn't why TES games succeeded, and it only harmed them. That philosophy isn't creativity, but is designing downward, and is reduction and destruction of more creative ideas. It's the trajectory of psychopathic thinking, and is why psychopathic CEOs are known for producing short-term gain, at the expense of long-term success and growth. I think the management decisions that are expressed in Bethesda products show that Todd Howard is a psychopath in his thinking. And that also seems apparent whenever he talks, saying trite and pretentious things as if he feels like he's saying something lofty and deep, with a vapid smile / grin that shows there's no depth of mind behind it.

People criticise Starfield and Fallout '76, and talk as if Bethesda has gone downhill, but what Bethesda did with Starfield is only what Bethesda has always done. And I'm sure that Todd doesn't have a grasp of why it didn't work again, when he's never, ever done anything different than what he did with Starfield, yet was always praised for it. But the shortcomings of Starfield were just as bad in previous Bethesda games, and so Todd Howard's Bethesda has never deserved the praise it received.

What happened is that, as technological advancements brought dozens of millions of more people into gaming through improved graphics and better accessibility, while Microsoft and Sony were marketing their Xbox-onward era of consoles with hundreds of millions of dollars, all these millions of people played Oblivion or Fallout 3, and were experiencing those games' concepts and systems for their first time (and so were the least judgmental of them they'll ever be), and then they incorrectly attributed those ideas and that creativity to Todd Howard and his team, and gave them undeserved praise. And Todd received immense false validation for his philosophy of just dumbing everything down, ensuring that he would continue on that abysmal path. And the writing in Bethesda's games were overlooked because there was so much else for people to be excited about, especially with mods.

But as the people who were excited and amazed by the earlier Todd Howard games they played, who had come into gaming with maybe Oblivion, Fallout 3, or Skyrim, played more and more Bethesda games, what used to be fresh to them became really stale, and the negativity of Todd Howard's game-design trajectory suddenly started being visible to them, too - but because their first Bethesda game experiences were all fresh to them at the time, and so created memories of enjoyment, they've mistakenly thought that Bethesda has gotten worse over the years. But Bethesda hasn't. What Todd and Bethesda have been doing in their most recent years and releases is only exactly, precisely what Todd has ever done since he started leading TES development, what Todd has never done anything other than, and is exactly what Todd was also doing the entire time when the people now-disillusioned with Bethesda were having their first Bethesda game experiences and being amazed by what they were playing.

In the non-pejorative sense, Todd doesn't appear, to me, to be a talented or smart guy, but a pretty dumb one - yet probably has a greatly-inflated sense of his talent and skill, due to receiving huge amounts of undue praise and hype over the years. The idea of Todd Howard being a skilled designer is an illusion akin to people in Dragon Ball Z believing that Mr Satan is the strongest fighter in the world. All that Todd did is inherit a magnificent formula from the creators of TES (who were sidelined or forced out of the company around the time Todd took over TES), and then progressively remove more aspects from that formula with each successive game. When that formula met with improving industry graphics (though Bethesda graphics have always been behind the curve - despite Bethesda being one of the most profitable developers in the industry), creating an accessibility inflection-point, and millions of people got into gaming for their first time with the Xbox-onward console generation, people assumed that what they were seeing and experiencing was something new and revolutionary, and assumed the responsibility for those things lay with Todd Howard and his version of Bethesda. But it doesn't. TES and the formula that was then applied to Fallout (another series Todd's Bethesda ruined) has been successful, completely in spite of Todd Howard and his Bethesda, and not because of it.

BTW, just as I think Todd Howard's speech, self-presentation, and design decisions bear the hallmarks of a psychopath (which I mean it in a clinical sense, not a hyperbolic, menacing-freak sense), Todd's Bethesda team bears the hallmarks of a low-talent, low-skill studio - which would be another expression of Todd's own management decisions, by which he influenced who was hired and what they should focus on, and what was deemed progress in the right direction. Just as a psychopathic CEO's short-sightedness and lack of awareness and appreciation for nuanced-but-important things ruins a company in the long-term, Todd's management of Bethesda has turned it into a low-quality, B-grade studio, but one that's in possession of a magnificent, top-tier IP.


If I could get a message to Phil Spencer, it would be this: the best thing Microsoft can do to improve Bethesda's quality and fortune is to let Emil Pagliarulo go. He has no writing skills: he is the quintessential definition of a hack, and is one of the worst writers in the history of the games industry, and probably beyond it. He has a reverse-Midas touch: everything he touches is turned to garbage. He hasn't written a passable story in his career. Bethesda would've been so much more without him as a writer on its games. And Bethesda will be so much more without him as a writer on its games. And possibly let Todd go, too. He's kind-of the same, riding on an image he hasn't earned and doesn't deserve. All he's ever done is strip away more things from the TES his Bethesda inherited from the TES creators, dumbing each-next game down more than the previous. People only mistakenly attributed TES' success to him, when it was in spite of Todd's influence and not because of it. And then start forming a Bethesda development team that's based around positive and confident creativity, talent, and skill - with someone who can recognise what those things are being in charge of the studio's reformation. Todd doesn't have an eye for those things in himself, or in others.



This 5-part article series on Fallout 3's abysmal writing highlights what is emblematic of all of Emil Pagliarulo writing, and is only scratching the surface - his writing is harebrained and simply doesn't make sense, or work: The Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3, Part 1

I couldn't even bear to finish Fallout 3 because of it - and I tried to push myself to. I couldn't even bear to finish Fallout 3 because of it - and I tried to push myself to. Every literary idea in Emil Pagliarulo's writing is the Ralph Wiggum version of what it should actually be. On a near moment-to-moment basis, in a way that article doesn't even delve into, the writing is so stupid that it makes me want to scream, and I genuinely feel like it will make me dumber if I keep playing it - and maybe it did that to Bethesda's general audience, setting people's expectations super low, which is a part of why Bethesda got a pass on its terrible development quality for so long.

Unfortunately, the "Bethesda's Game Design is Insulting" video has been made private. But here are some other testaments to the extremely low skill-level of Bethesda, which is a detrimental effect of Todd's management and his own absence of skill and talent, and sight for those things:

Dont to be concerned about any vanilla Bethesda game, its well known and accepted that they will have various design and structural flaws

Use this website 12 months after any Bethesda game is released but NEVER play any Bethesda game on release , this website will change your life and make you happy and you will end up loving Bethesda games

https://www.nexusmods.com/

 

[BruceVC]

Nobody actually thinks Todd is talented, it's just a meme. And he's charismatic.

I disagree, he played a massive role through the decades in the irrefutable success of Bethesda as one of the worlds most popular gaming companies

He made mistakes but everyone sometimes make mistakes

But he is very talented and understands what many gamers enjoy and appreciate. You dont have to like him but to suggest no one thinks he is talented doesn't reflect the reality of his success

 

[destinae vomitus]

Todd "an RPG is about going around on horseback and killing things with a sword" Howard literally schmoozed his way into working at Bethesda, solely because he was a fan of their hockey and sportsball games, and since then lucked his way to the top because of what happened to the studio during the 90's. Despite his public image, e.g. "I WAS IN THE CHESS CLUB!" (he was class president, actually), in actuality he's the kind of guy who can count the amount of tabletop RPGs he's ever played with one hand. While all the stoo-pid D&D nerds were working on Elder Scrolls games, the first game he opted to work on was an FPS (Terminator Future Shock), and his later directorial debut (Redguard) was an attempt at a cinematic action-adventure inspired by Tomb Raider, practically speaking the very opposite of a sandbox RPG. Pretty much everything good about the latter game (namely the writing and worldbuilding that helped pave the way to Morrowind) came from Kirkbride, who has since then said that he more or less had to work around Todd or outright bamboozle him to get stuff that he wanted in to make it into the game. Morrowind in particular was almost entirely his brainchild and not Todd's, while the rest of the credit ought to go to Ken Rolston and Douglas Goodall.

Though one could argue that Todd "Morrowind plays best on Xbox" Howard was the key figure behind their booming success that followed, in large part thanks to the deal that he made with Microsoft to port the game to their new shiny console at the time, those people were the ones largely responsible for how the game itself turned out. Despite switching roles from director to producer with Oblivion, it's evident that Todd was far more hands-on with the creative process and actual fundamentals of the game, Rolston for one was against liberal fast travel and yet it made its way into the game and was entirely designed around it despite him being labeled as lead designer, put two and two together.

I could go on, but really all you need to know about Todd "You might want to upgrade your PC" Howard is that he was allegedly good chums with Robert A. Altman, I think that says everything you need to know about the guy.

 

[Konjad]

Yes, we all knew Todd and Bethesda in general are hacks since Oblivion's release date (this is why I even joined 'dex). Fortunately it all comes to an end. Microsoft bought Bethesda, Starfield turned out too shit even for mainstream, and that was right after already criticized Fallout 76/4, Emil jumped the ship first like the rat he is, and the entire thing will crumble soon.

Bethesda will exist for a few more years in shadows. Maybe they will even release one more game, TES VI. One more game that mainstream won't like much anymore. Then they will perish. Along with Bioware.

 

[Bester]

I didn't read the thread, but asked GPT to summarize it for me.

Who's the Emil guy? You make him sound like he's the only writer there. Bethesda games never had good writing. It'd be more accurate to say Western gamedev writers and game designers are shit, not some poor Emil schmuck or clueless Todd.

You know any good Western writers? Or good game designers? Name some.

 

[Dadd]

You should make a video essay about this.

 

[thesecret1]

You know any good Western writers

Chris Avellone?