Anybody else stumped by Bethesda suddenly losing the plot?

[Turnikman228]

I'm stumped that Bethesda doesn't make a new Terminator game as they did in 1993 with Future Shock and SKYnet. That and Rage 2 not hitting Steam is a disappointment. Other than that, never cared for ES or Fallout, ever.

[Erebus]

Alot of that is false. It has alot of the old bugs. Bethesda's elder scrolls/fallout games were never fixed by Bethesda. Not a single one. Even Fallout 76 has Fallout 4 bugs in it. Maybe on pc that's different (excluding fallout 76) for the other games due to modders fixing those games because Bethesda wasn't.

Btw, Fanboy is not a synonym for fan. It's a fan that idolizes whatever they are a fan of or like too much. It's like a battered housewife with an abusive husband in this situation. Make excuses for actions, do mental gymnastics to escape the truth, keep coming back for more.

[Baron Baldric]

[Astraea]

My own gut feeling about these matters is, that the ever ongoing expansion of a successful games company is it's own demise. Let me explain.

Being the noob that I am in terms of running a business (or worse than that; I never tried) my common sense came up with three points I'd think would be important to running a games company:
Control (implementation, schedules etc.), Creativity (ideas for the game, art), Cost (moneeee), Personnel (hiring, steering) or short: CCCP (I had to, sry).

Let's predict how easy or hard it is to manage each of these points in various stages of company size:

*Dev team size of 10 people, our first indie game
Control: 8 (smaller teams are easier to manage, but schedules easier to oversee and implementation of various game elements are fewer thus easier)
Creativity: 10 (if you do not have the maximum amount of ideas and energy when you just started your games company, you are doing it wrong, right|)
Cost: 6 (double edged sword, licenses and initial software might be steep priced for indies but most of the staff will be underpayed or not at all because dreams are big)
Personnel: 9 (I would assume excellent, because you came together and started to live your dreams, although early grievances might arise due to lack of proper hierarchy)

*Dev team size of 50 people, established mid tier company
Control: 6 (a team of this size needs a special trained manager to run all the departments and keep track of where the smaller teams are busying themselves with and ask for deadlines, the ones who manages is unlikely to be part of the original group of company founders since gaming wasn't his professional field)
Creativity: 6 (expectations are higher, you have gathered fans who want to see certain elements from the games that made your company grow, you are now responsible for a large sized team and their monthly wage and the strain on budget/time that goes along with that. All in all heavy criteria that your ideas must fit on)
Cost: 6 (you may have some profit in the bank, but you might or might not want to hire a publisher if you are risking your entire company on the next release. Next to none media exposure would be a guaranteed bankruptcy. Also; many many staff members to feed...)
Personnel: 8 (What's lost in creativity is made up by the comfort of having set up a proper team with it's captains and veterans withing the company although it does have a setback in terms of control)


*Dev team size of 100+ people, multinational AAA big budget stock market giant
Control: 3 (you better have a ton of managers or things end here, schedules and deadlines are a drama)
Creativity: 3 (expectations of long time fans, expectations of shareholders, expectations of the designer, your team has most likely put their ideas in previous games and are struggling to come up with new ideas that would fit afore mentioned expectations)
Cost: 5 (again, a double edged sword; you can gain a ton or lose a ton. But in the end with high stakes like this you are unlikely to take much risk and the quality of your product will show your precarious situation)
Personnel: 4 (you will have to convey your original idea for the game, the feel, the atmosphere you had in mind to the entire team and everyone has to 'get' it, no easy task.)

There, that's my take on this topic. I'm of the opinion that the best, most stable games company would be a mid-tier one. They have the resources to make a game with good graphics, complex gameplay and are independent enough to try out new things and implement a risky idea here and there. The team size is manageable and can be steered properly if the hired manager is being made acquainted enough with the product although you have to remember they will always see things in a different perspective, after all that's why you hired them. If a company like this releases a flop, it's tragic but things do not immediately end. Shareholders can't pull their support because the company isn't on the stock market, if there's a publisher they likely take part of the hit, company might manage to get back on it's feet with a next release.

I really don't think massive sized gaming companies can be continuously successful at what they do, there's too many people working on too many parts and too many stakes. All too many. At some point you gotta decide to stop expanding and keep doing what you do best.

[isturbo1984]

To be fair, by the time Skyrim was ported to next gen consoles, the bugs were non-existent. I think I encountered one minor graphics glitch in Skyrim on the Xbox One after the first patch and that was it. The games are notoriously buggy at launch, but they always get fixed. Blaming consumers who bought the fixed version of a fun game on next gen hardware is an improper use of the word "fanboy," imo. You are essentially just describing a fan. With the amount of remasters and second round ports these days, Bethesda is hardly an offender here.

[isturbo1984]

To analyze the issue, one has to directed the question at Zenimax, not Bethesda. As long as we are talking about "losing the plot." People forget that Bethesda is a subsidiary and are not i direct control. From there, I think the main underlying issue nobody really touches up on is the fact Bethesda announced not too long ago that they will not be outsourcing to independent studios wit their games any more. I don't think a lot of people realize just how much help they get from other developers. For whatever reason, it was decided to not put Zenimax Online Studio (ESO) on the project and this was Bethesda's first stumbling out of the gate. I don't really think there is much of a conspiracy beyond that. It makes sense, as this is Bethesda Softworks first online game. And since Avalanche is still co-developing Rage 2, which is yet to be released... one could say that this decision was made in the middle of development for Fallout 76 and instead of recruiting someone to help finish the project, it was decided they would do the best they can themselves. I don't think Bethesda really wanted to handle it all themselves. They were probably forced.

It's a similar situation when Bioware or Dice speaks publicly. They have a better press face than EA does, so they are the mouthpiece. Same thing with Bethesda. they aren't really running the show, they are just Zenimax's mouthpiece because they have a better relationship with gamers. But they do and say what they are told. Make no mistake.

[Erebus]

It wasn't suddenly or overnight. It was years of fanboys excusing every bad thing Bethesda did and buying multiple copies of skyrim just for two extremely buggy game series. It made Bethesda arrogant and think gamers will buy just about anything.

[Sabre]

I'd say that's a pretty good question. I don't know a lot about what happens behind the scenes but it seems like when any company/group gets big enough they start losing the plot.

Maybe it's because they start putting more and more middlemen between themselves and their customers? Entire PR departments, spokespeople, outsourcing advertisement and the like.

Maybe it's because they start making games for book-keeping money-obsessed investors who just want to see maxed out profits on a predictive flowchart and have no idea that their fanbase aren't as simple as numbers on a profit prediction model.

Maybe they get so arrogant off of all the praise and success of their previous games that they think they know better than you what you want and dismiss any criticism as ignorance of the masses who will shut up and like what they put out because they're geniuses.

Maybe they made bad hiring choices and their original staff slowly got replaced by idiots.

Maybe their original staff got burned out and lost their passion for what they did.

Maybe they drank the ideological Kool aide and think that their primary job is to educate you rather than entertain you.

It could be all kinds of things honestly. Whatever it is I can't think of a time a major gaming company ever came back from this kind of failure. Hopefully Bethesda will be the first, but I doubt it. They've had plenty of time to listen to the fans and take feedback but it doesn't seem like they've taken it seriously at all. It's too bad, I'd really like another Fallout New Vegas style game with modern graphics.

[gbullock32]

I felt it was more Bethesda got too complacent with us letting the buggy releases slide by, so they pushed this out too fast. The micro-transactions were a plan from the beginning and really just made the end product being so unfinished far less excusable (and it was already bad, even by Bethesda standards); a combination of bad ideas on their own all rolled into one product that made them all stand out so much more.

[Last_Dragoon]

This has been long in the making its just the gaming community as a whole decided that this was just too far. We can start with buggy releases, which has gone so long without getting absolutely destroyed with criticism because "the game is so big", but they began to lose that excuse when games like Witcher 3 came out and showed Western RPG developers how to create a huge and expansive RPG. This only got worse with Fallout 4, which was also not as well liked as other bethesda games because the side quests were dreadful. Then comes the paid mod workshop shit that was just a half ass cash in. Then Fallout 76 comes in. This fake ass attempt at an MMO (Bethesda bragged last year how they were "saving single player games"), but not going full ESO, which is actually pretty good now. And even fallout 76 gets worse because of all the side bullshit (microtransactions, the stupid bag, banning people making your game better, etc).

[Methpoodle]

Maybe Bethesda got a concussion and is suffering the effects of cte. I mean if bethesda were a person they'd be showing all the symptoms.
difficulty thinking, impulsive behaviour, apathy, memory loss, difficulty planning and carrying out tasks, suicidal thoughts and behaviour (it definitely seems like Bethesda is trying to kill itself)

Can a company get brain damage? It certainly seems so.

[Nic]

lol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPl-YMq2WTM