Well-Earned Todd Howard Humiliation Ritual
They didn't just put a gun to Todd Howard's head. They're full-on having him do a metaphorical hostage read with Jason Schreier. My god. What a day. Look at them being forced to reveal Fallout 5 AND the Fallout 3/NV remasters, because of the widespread joy at the rumours (now confirmed!) that Obsidian was finally tapped to make a real Fallout game. Absolutely shamed, Bethesda are, that they had to do this.
The internet doesn't always get it right, but fuck me, we've been getting it right for the last 15 years on this one. Make the fucking game you said you were making almost a decade ago. Make it like the older ones, not the newer ones. Make it weird and complicated. This might be your last chance.
Bethesda's needed to get its shit together for years. We've been calling the wheels on the cart getting wobbly the more they dumbed down the Elder Scrolls, from Morrowind to Skyrim, despite sales, but nobody believed us because Skyrim sold gangbusters.
Starfield was the first wheel actually coming off - sales were big up front, but there's less than zero cultural staying power, and that's what Bethesda needed, now, since the expectation was set from Skyrim. One need only compare steamdb numbers of Starfield to Skyrim (and don't fucking say consoles - PC always has and always will be the primary place for TES games because of mods you can't get on consoles.)
56.7% review score and an average of 4.5-5k players at the three year mark, vs Skyrim's 91% review score, and 41k average players at the fifteen year mark. And, mind you? Skyrim's average playercount has steadily increased over the last 10 years. Average of 15-20k players circa 2018. 41k now, and rising. Show me any other 15 year old singleplayer game that has done that. Sure as fuck isn't Starfield.
And then they just... Sat with their thumbs up their ass, praying Fallout 76 would be The Next Big Thing. And it fucking wasn't. Well beyond a full dev cycle timeframe for TES VI. Larian pushed out BG3 in 75% of the time that TES VI has already taken, and I guaran-fucking-tee you TES VI won't be a quarter multi-faceted, robust, and complex as BG3.
Todd Howard has, at this point, completely lost the ability to direct Bethesda to make a great game. The writing has not improved (see: Starfield, et al; I fully blame Emil Pagliarulo and believe that Mr-I-Dont-Use-Design-Documents should be part of the cut jobs). The complexity and mechanical depth of the games has not improved. The understanding of what priorities need to be focused on has not improved (see: the terrible signing off of Oblivion "Remastered", a somehow buggier release of a 20 year old game that just had a new graphics engine and model/texture/shader set stapled to it. Zero confidence for Fallout 3/NV remasters, even less stable.)
The only, only saving grace of TES VI coming out is that, being on Creation Engine 3, it'll be modded to hell and back. That's what will make it and save it.
But even then, Starfield's mod community atrophied on the vine so badly, because the game itself wasn't worth the time. I worry, then, for TES VI.
My hope here, my ONLY hope, is that much like Morrowind being made under desperation of a closing company, a hail mary made by doing it all, that TES VI is pushed to be the most wild and risk taking and out there game it can be because of the dire straits Bethesda find themselves in now.
