• KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      18 hours ago

      If they ditched Todd and Emil completely and brought over the writers from ESO they’d have a chance, provided they poached some competent quest designers from another studio. Todd’s apparently been sidelined post-Starfield but AFAIK Emil is still their lead writer and he’s been as responsible as Todd for the sorry state of Bethesda’s writing and worldbuilding.

        • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          16 hours ago

          And he’s gotten worse at it over the years. Like he ostensibly wrote the Tenpenny Tower storyline/quest for FO3, and then rehashed it in Starfield except worse because the literal only options there were siding with a CEO who wanted you to either commit genocide, convince an entire people to become his slaves, or give his mass murdering oligarch buddy a huge commission to let the generation ship leave without murdering or enslaving them. Whereas with Tenpenny Tower you could just kill Tenpenny on the spot, all the corporate freaks on that planet are invincible and the quest literally cannot even be failed, it can only resolve by you doing what they want.

          Like FO3 was bad and railroady in bad ways (with its forced loss in a cutscene and nonsensical original ending), but Starfield is even worse in all of those ways and I can’t help but see it as Emil getting increasing creative control and driving away everyone with actual talent.

            • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.net
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              14 hours ago

              And on absolutely every level too. The worldbuilding is this weird unseasoned-mashed-potato facsimile of two Heinlein novels (the really fascist one and the cowboy incest one), the narrative is just aimless meaningless slop that goes nowhere and says and does nothing, the quest design is half-assed brainwormed dogshit to the point that it’s absolute peak is when it just does the thing Titanfall 2 and Dishonored 2 did with a split time place and it does it meaningfully worse than either of those did it, and the character writing is just dreary and abysmal nonsense.

              Like mechanically the game was fine, but they just failed completely and utterly at every stage of writing its world and content.

    • Kefla [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
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      21 hours ago

      Brought to you by the guys responsible for Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield.

      Yeah, Bethesda’s dead. There are like 3 people left from when they actually made good games and those are the ones least responsible for those games being good