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Artyom's TES Blogosphere ghoul apologist mudcrab liker alchemist when hungry

[orsinium]

[newbabynames]

bleak falls barrow

[uesp]

Pictured: Concept art by Ray Lederer, one of the two concept artists who worked on Skyrim. After the passing of Adam Adamowicz, he was the only Skyrim concept artist remaining at Bethesda, but was let go of this week.

[orsinium]

i want to play skyrim but unfortunately like all of us tes fans im in the position of having played it for literally thousands of hours and having done everything possible in it twice or more. so i just open the game, start a new save, and then put it down after 20 minutes of not finding anything to do that grabs me. i suffer for this more than jesus btw

[orsinium]

(trying to convince myself to play) maybe a vampirism run... I haven't done dawnguard in a few years... what could be a fun vampiric roleplay scenario.... hm

[orsinium]

i want to play skyrim but unfortunately like all of us tes fans im in the position of having played it for literally thousands of hours and having done everything possible in it twice or more. so i just open the game, start a new save, and then put it down after 20 minutes of not finding anything to do that grabs me. i suffer for this more than jesus btw

[uesp]

Bethesda employees have requested that you support this post on the Xbox feedback platform in response to the recent wave of annual layoffs. Please give it an upvote/supporting comment. https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/69b8ec0b-7479-f111-9b47-6045bdbd0989

[orsinium]

eso team(s) getting hit with layoffs of essential crew and after switching to a content release schedule/format that's been largely criticized 🥴 ruh roh !

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1,600 Xbox employees were hit directly by the recent Microsoft layoffs, with an additional 1,600 from Xbox still planned for a total of 3,200 employees. This has included/will include those under the ZeniMax umbrella, including Bethesda, ZOS, id, and Arkane.

Jeff Gardiner claims that 35 were let go from Bethesda, and 95 from id.

According to ZOS Senior Content Designer Katherine Souze, this included "half" of the team in the Elder Scrolls Online content team, although she has since deleted the original post. We know this has included some very public facing people, including Lead Dungeon Director Mike Finnigan and Community Manager Gina Bruno.

Over this entire era of layoffs in the games industry, there has been a regularity to it that has become predictable. Across the industry, teams have been devastated if their project failed with the studio often shutting down. But successes can see the same thing happen.

Perhaps the only positive thing that can be said is that no studios seemed to have been closed for once. Studios were released and returned to independence or sold instead of just being shut down.

As gamers, we haven't really felt like this practice and atmosphere in the games industry has been producing more and better games from the AAA space.

If the new CEO of Xbox is right and the involved restructuring of their management leads to more good games that come out quicker, that will be fantastic. But the past waves of layoffs haven't managed to do that at all, there's no reason to think they'll suddenly work this time. The safe bet is that these layoffs are just not going to stop.

A list of people we know who have been laid off at ZOS and Bethesda:

ZOS

Community Manager Gina Bruno

Lead Dungeon Director Mike Finnigan

Writer Designer Andrew Siañez-De La O

Writer Designer Julianna Comstock

Senior Writer Designer Jeff Grubb

Project Art Director Marc Hudgins

Senior Concept Artist Christina Cornett

Senior Animator Ami DeLullo

Animator Evan Van Biert

Senior Tools Engineer Robert Bailey

QA Tester Page Branson

Producer Ethan Koltz

Environmental Artist Brandon Rush

Associate Sound Designer Andrew Jordan

Senior Sound Designer Daniel Costello

Associate Sound Designer Sebastian Theodoro

QA Tester Trevor Bream

DevOps Engineer William Novak

Realtime FX Artist Jacob Wynn

Senior VFX Artist Anelise Mize

Lead Designer Ed Stark

Senior Encounter Designer Morgan Goin

Encounter Designer Erinn Fecteau

Senior Encounter Designer James Audet

Tools Product Owner Sydney Thibeault

Senior Software Engineer Dustin Thurston

Live Game Lead Gregory Roth

Content Manager Milo Webb

QA Manager Erik Marby

Narrative Director Bill Slavicsek

Lead Narrative Designer Richard Baker

Writer Designer Alexandria Baker

Writer Designer Ameya Vinayaraj

Bethesda

Community Manager Jessica Clark

Game Designer Simon Préfontaine

GRC Engineer Wayne Saunders

Associate Quest Designer Griffin DeClaire

Quest Designer Stephanie Zachariadis

Systems Designer Jean Paul Salman

Gameplay Engineer Anne Barrett

Monetization Designer Kevin Benavides

Lead Systems Designer Jacob Naasz

Senior Build and Release Programmer Anthony Ford

Lead Quest Designer Joshua Moretto

Senior QA Tester Steven Hoyle

[orsinium]

if for no other reason i dont think we need to worry abt bethesda using ai to code tes6 bc i genuinely dont think there's a single ai model out there that could make sense of what bethesda's already crammed under the hood of the creation engine and still write something even partially legible

[orsinium]

finally reading lord of souls after finishing and enjoying the infernal city several years ago. tf is with this book and its female characters it feels like a cheap sequel full of straight men's teenage fantasies

[orsinium]

this book has an awkward (or sometimes just straight up non-consensual) het meet cute every other page what is going on!!

[orsinium]

finally reading lord of souls after finishing and enjoying the infernal city several years ago. tf is with this book and its female characters it feels like a cheap sequel full of straight men's teenage fantasies

[orsinium]

something in either zenimax or bethesda's (or microsoft's i guess) internal terminology guidelines changed a year or two ago where now new groups in eso and fo76 keep being referred to in-game as "factions" "the factions" "new factions" etc and it's driving me nuts. it sounds like the characters are reading from a wiki or a design document and takes me out of whatever's happening immediately

[orsinium]

i know it's early here on the east coast of the US but i imagine not finding a single soul in the new content area on a weekend is maybe not the best sign of game health

[orsinium]

ugh i wish the group finder for the night market functioned like the dungeon one, where you're automatically slotted into fitting groups -_- every time ive tried to join one manually it's ended up being 10 dps and a healer and then the group disbands and everyone leaves

[orsinium]

if tamriel is the present and goblins were already there when the people of the metaphysical past and future (aldmeris, atmora) arrived perhaps their original societal stature collapsed bc the present is such a mutable, brief and unstable thing compared to the past and future which extend outward from either side in perpetuity

[orsinium]

(more rambling) i dont rly like the idea of the goblin gate being a literal parallel universe, esp when nirn-adjacent (non-oblivion) "universes" in tes history tend to be "timelines" more than they are totally different worlds with different inhabitants (not impossible, just not rly what we've seen in the series thus far outside of major shifts like kalpas) and the eso lore minute or w/e quip abt goblins being "of a different time" furthers my thought that the giant goblins from the gate were purposeful visitors from a variant timeline where men and elves didnt eradicate or metaphysically affect goblins-- or at least hadn't yet if the whole time thing holds up

[orsinium]

it's a small difference but essentially i think the giant goblins were strategically affecting a future series of wars via time magic, instead of being interdimensional refugees or invaders

[orsinium]

(more rambling) i dont rly like the idea of the goblin gate being a literal parallel universe, esp when nirn-adjacent (non-oblivion) "universes" in tes history tend to be "timelines" more than they are totally different worlds with different inhabitants (not impossible, just not rly what we've seen in the series thus far outside of major shifts like kalpas) and the eso lore minute or w/e quip abt goblins being "of a different time" furthers my thought that the giant goblins from the gate were purposeful visitors from a variant timeline where men and elves didnt eradicate or metaphysically affect goblins-- or at least hadn't yet if the whole time thing holds up