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Elder Scrolls Todd Howard Appreciation Thread

what do you think of Todd?

  • i like him and i like bethesda

  • he's a nice guy but i'm not getting scammed again

  • i'd play bethesda games, don't care about todd tho

  • i don't like him, i don't like bethesda games, and i only play turn-based games

  • who is todd? (kc)


Results are only viewable after voting.

Wunderbar

Arcane
Joined
Nov 15, 2015
Messages
8,809
I used to dislike Bethesda after Oblivion and Fo3, but now that triple-A RPG industry is in the gutter, Todd seems like the only savior.

You all know the history. Bioware sold out to EA and immediately went gay, each of their new games after DAO turned out to be worse than the previous one. Obsidian sold out to MS, and judging by The Outer Worlds, they took the same path as Bioware. Spiders are basically Bioware wannabies, the only reason they haven't gone gay is because they don't have the money to do so. Piranha Bytes are basically re-making iterating on the same game over and over. CDPR? It is evident that the Poles were never interested in making RPGs, all they wanted was to earn big buck by making cinematic action games. The Witcher 1 - soul; Witcher 2 - no soul, consolefied and overly streamlined dodge-roll fest; Witcher 3 - a full blown designed-by-committee decline, and now Cyberpunk 77 - whackamole trash where you can pick pronounces during a character creation. Sven? Ugh don't even get me started on Larian and their talking vegetables.

Meanwhile Todd. Todd went to a chess club, played DnD as a kid, was a fan of Ultima when he was younger. He's a 100% nerd, the kind of type who gets bulled by school jocks. Todd doesn't have any social media accounts, he never posts virtue-signalling political horseshit, Todd's games are for the most part free of current day poz. I bet he voted for Trump.

Since the 90s, Todd's been participating in development of games with an emphasis on systemic emergent gameplay in the spirit of Ultima. Morrowind had an amazing hand-crafted world, Oblivion had stunning visuals and mindblowing (for its time) physics engine, Skyrim introduced perks and better combat. Players complained about Morrowind's combat where the player misses the enemy despite standing right in front of it, then Oblivion fixed it. Players complained about Oblivion looking super generic and bright, and then Skyrim fixed it. Players complained about Fo3 combat and gunplay in particular being bad, and then Fo4 had great gunplay, good weapons animations, vastly improved enemy AI and multi-layered level design.

After having an enourmous financial success, any other studio would try to expand, hire hundreds of new employees and try to develop multiple projects simultaneously. After Skyrim sold gangbusters, Todd didn't expand and didn't turn The Elder Scrolls into some annual franchise like Ubisoft of Activision would've undoubtly done. Todd isn't looking for an easy way to make money.

Who came up with an idea of adding an inter-party drama and romancing NPCs? Who started giving your blank-slate protagonists fully voiced lines? Who started adding cutscenes and other cinematic BS? I'll tell you who DIDN'T start this, it was Todd. Todd was literally the last RPG dev who gave us romancing, cutscenes and fully voiced protagonist, and even then he was likely forced to do that because it was trendy and because Zenimax is run by a bunch of jews. Who still develops games on a proprietary engine instead of lazily licensing Unreal? Todd!

Here's the photo of Todd from the early 00s.
oxLNG0Q.png

and here's another photo of him made a couple of months ago
oxLNG0Q.png
The loveable rogue didn't age a bit!

Meanwhile look at Marcin Iwinski, CD Projekt Red developer
8824zaR.png
that's what i call Karma. It's like he was smitten by a God himself for being a hack.

Anyway, Todd. Todd's a good guy, i hope he doesn't retire and will stick with Bethesda for a few more games. I'm hyped for Starfield, and you should be hyped too.
 
Last edited:

Roguey

Codex Staff
Staff Member
Sawyerite
Joined
May 29, 2010
Messages
35,653
After having an enourmous financial success, any other studio would try to expand, hire hundreds of new employees and try to develop multiple projects simultaneously. After Skyrim sold gangbusters, Todd didn't expand and didn't turn The Elder Scrolls into some annual franchise like Ubisoft of Activision would've undoubtly done.

Outdated news. After Fallout 4 didn't replicate Skyrim's massive success, Todd decided he had to keep up with CD Projekt, so they expanded from 110 to 400 employees. They're still doing one at a time as far as I know though.
 

The Dutch Ghost

Arbiter
Joined
May 26, 2016
Messages
681
Also worth noting Todd wanted to make a Star Trek game since he was a kid. Starfield is his coming of age game project.

First of all, I hope his dream project falls flat. Having it fail and him being told by gamers that it is a terrible game with crap lore would amuse me a lot.

Second, if Todd would make a Star Trek game it would most likely be Kurtzman's levels of bad.
Star Trek already suffers from too many terrible games these last seventeen or eighteen years.
 

Generic-Giant-Spider

Guest
Todd Howard is the ideal developer.

Every day I dream of the sheer incline that would be Todd Howard and Cleve teaming up to give RPGs a well deserved swansong before retiring the genre forever.
 

Roguey

Codex Staff
Staff Member
Sawyerite
Joined
May 29, 2010
Messages
35,653
Also worth noting Todd wanted to make a Star Trek game since he was a kid. Starfield is his coming of age game project.

Bethesda had the Star Trek license and all they did with it was release shovelware and offer it to Obsidian who said no because Feargus only has love for Star Wars.
 
Joined
Jun 23, 2020
Messages
202
Goddamn, I pretty much hate all Bethesda's games but I just can't bring myself to hate this man, he lied to us many times before and probably will do so again, still I just find him so charming that I always want to hear what he has to say.
 

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