You know what? Not being a danger on the track IS #1.
I’m onboard with that.

What a great video man! We should always have room in our minds for nuance and empathy.

I wonder if you’ll ever talk about WipEout and it’s sequel.. WipEout 3

To me Emil’s tweet thread did nothing to support the idea he reads reviews/criticism of his work.

The vibe I got is that his team and members of the company read all the critical reviews, felt like crap, and shared that with him. So he, oblivious to anything but 2nd hand criticisms, he tried to sweep things under the rug.

I just can’t give Emil or Todd good faith after anything I have heard from them or about them, even seeing their games (even Morrowind was seemingly made good in spite of Todd rather than because of him going by dev interviews and seeing his following works).

Well yes ?! I haven’t finished witcher 3 its a great game but it just way to long, and i dont have all that much time to play it if it whas 30-50h to 100% it would be still great

The same kind of people tried to destroy Hogwarts Legacy as tried to destroy Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and they failed because good games will sell 99% of the time, at the end of the day all their negativity makes no difference at all.

Kiwi Talkz had an awesome dialogue with Bruce Nesmith – where he said that “then they began to promote Todd H as the main author of Morrowind” – from Pete Hynas – who decided that the appearance of the “eternal schoolboy” was a great moment to sell more games. Than if the games are advertised by old men like Ken Rolston

Good intentions pave the way to hell – if intentions are not followed by understanding and a sense of proportion. It’s the same with Starfield – the game didn’t work out because of mistakes at all levels – from Todd to Emil.

Yeah…sorry but this video is a terrible take.

<3 back to you my friend (;

The problem with the Wiki of such documents is that no one visits some of the sections. Never, when you see a book or document, will you just casually browse through the sections you don’t even need right now.

The main “joke” of Emil – which few people noticed – is that in one interview he said that at Bethesda they “throw the CV into the trash” of all candidates who at least hint at the interview that they know better than Bethesda how to make games

12:40 Design docs have pretty much always been wiki levels of information.
I think you misunderstood and they dropped the wiki. Currently having to deal with this problem myself (another AAA studio) the desire to not write anything down is a plague on the industry at the moment…

People are missing the point about the centralized documents
Yes they got replaced by internall wikies
Starfield feels incredibly disjointed at parts (almost like there was no coordinating between teams)
Which strongly implies that Emils dislike of design documents carrried over to internall wikies probably meaning that starfields wiki was a mess
And yes they did manage to publish games but they used to be able to do so much faster
Which once again implies that instead of going after a ceartain vision they just throw stuff at the wall which wastes time
Sure their games got bigger but the studio also got bigger

Surprisingly level headed take.

Maybe I just don’t circulate in these “toxic” circles but over the last ten years of increasing divisiveness between players, devs, and publishers/executives, I don’t think I’ve heard anyone (seriously) say that they think devs should be crunched MORE or that they need to sacrifice their work/life balance. What I see most often is criticism of team leads implementing bad or inefficient systems of organization, and either micromanaging or completely ignoring problems, both of which lead to wasted time and effort. I see people pointing out a trend of dev teams bloating massively in size and therefor cost, without producing even a remotely similar increase in productivity. I also don’t think it’s right to ignore obvious evidence of dev teams taking hostile stances against their established playerbases, or adopting a mentality of toxic positivity which makes it impossible for devs to discard bad design choices or narrative choices, or for that matter bad team members (concord, dustborn, veilguard, etc) or toxic optimism (the fabled “Bioware Magic”). These are problems which we players cannot control much, and often barely even know about until after a terrible game is released and we suffer for it, the only option really is the nuclear option of just refusing to buy the game until the studio either reforms or collapses.

It probably has been true as well that up until relatively recently the whole dev team of a bad or controversial game has been catching critical flak that rightly belongs with only a small subset of the team who are more responsible for making decisions and guiding policies. It wasn’t until the last few years that it became more publicly known how publishers will overhire a huge number of very inexperienced devs for major projects for low pay and no career guarantees, then lay them all off at the ends of projects. It made more sense to blame “those damn devs” when one assumed that the people making the new bad game were the same exact team who made the older good game, one had to assume that they had suddenly taken up a terrible idea and refused to let it go, or at least that their publisher was directing them to develop games for a different audience. Now it’s better understood that most of these dev studios people feel betrayed by are, sadly, basically only that studio in name, with almost none of the original developers left working in them, and that the current dev team are likely very new and struggling just to make basic things work without the benefit of experienced leadership.

All that being said, one inflammatory headline that mangles what Emil said does not magically make what he explicitly says more defensible or change the fact that what he and his co-writers and sub writers created for Starfield or other Bethesda games less poor in quality. I wouldn’t stoop to attacking him as a person, that’s pointless and unproductive, but the way he approaches writing stories is in my opinion (and it seems the opinion of the vast plurality of all people who play games he worked on) extremely poor. Since he’s the lead writer, his poor strategy trickles down to every other writer, and to the final product. Maybe he has some talents I’m not aware of, but writing does not appear to be one from the objective results of his work, this makes him ill-suited to being a head writer and Bethesda would have been better off if he was assigned somewhere else, or assigned to a less influential role.

Hope something in here was of some value, and sorry for the wall of mucho texto.

In a way i agree,i love skyrim,i love fallout 3,and other longer games,but 80% of the games ive played are around 6 hours and i liked them, honestly id rather play something epic for 2 hours than bland braindead puzzle cutscene 80 hour crap like modern games

I was thinking that it should still be acceptable to call out a company or organisation for bad behaviour, i.e The propensity for publishers like Microsoft or EA to ruthlessly close good studios, and then you went ahead and made that exact same point with the Forza example. Great video 😊

Asking people to subscribe is actually algorithmic suicide the more people are subscribed but dont watch your videos frequently the worse they actually do

Weird that people still out here defending Emil’s old ass speech. Their games have continued to be poorly written and made, Bethesda games already feel dated on release day. Stop acting like you know what Emil actually meant, he says what he means clearly in that talk.

Bethesda has shown time after time they have no interest in improving literally anything. They peaked at morrowind, and have only slightly improved minor things, while removing something every time. They don’t even make rpgs anymore, they make shooters with brain dead horribly written stories.

Meanwhile you got other studios running laps around them doing everything they do but better, while Bethesda is stuck with their early 2000s game design.

Obviously games are done without malice but the starfield writing team failed completely and emil was the head of that. Whether some quote in a speech is accurate, he deserves all the criticism for the narrative shortcomings in starfield.

I’m playing Falliut 4 on PS5 and realized my PS4 trophies were still missing Railroad trophies. So I just ran through it again.

Not gonna lie, the fact that you can beat the game in 20 hours was a happy reminder how much I missed games that allow your to finish the mission repeatedly without having to worry about getting bogged down.

NG++ and above in Dragon’s Dogma is a great example from a game that saw a recent resurgence.

Almost skipped this one because I thought it was going to be dog-piling a certain developer or another “Bethesda/Starfield bad” video that I’ve been seeing all over the place recently. Glad I didn’t though because this was a very level headed piece, gj!

To think that at 18:27 you’d be talking to anyone that would do something like that seems highly unlikely. These developers without ‘media training’ should remember how gamers are not a monolithic entity and the loudest voices they opt to focus on are not representative of the whole. Engaging with social media at all means you expose yourself to the subsection that is engaging with social media which is inherently more volatile individuals than those that don’t exist in such spaces.

You expose yourself to an audience of thousands and you get unhinged messages from ~0.1% of those people that’s not a hate storm. You engage with that and play it up for sympathy while criticized for something in the wider sense that’s a lot like you picking up a turd on the sidewalk which you could’ve sidestepped and start drawing war paint on your face with it.

This is a great example of how almost every headline is a cherry picked detail meant to get clicks, but I couldn’t really stay focused on the valid points being made. I spent the whole 19:45 just thinking to myself “oh man this game was just so gadawful on every level. It’s like shit if it got shit out by other shit, but worse. It’s like if the concept of genocide got turned into a video

10:30 ive been playing Morrowind and Gravelord mostly the last week. Of course Morrowind is the eternal classic and i’ve been playing this same character for months now (playing 1-3 hours every other day or so)
And Gravelord is a new FPS but designed like an early 2000s FPS. Not a ‘boom shoot’ (has become an often misused umbrella term) but it’s clearly designed around fast paced action in big, non-linear maps

Damn this channel is good

Then KCD2 comes out and proves that a long game will be wildly popular if it’s good

6:30 this is such a good thing to point out. Reactionaries love taking a quote out of context, on a subject they’re basically totally ignorant about and manipulate it to suit their little “everything is a conspiracy against me” narrative.
We need media literacy so much. It really can’t be understated

asking gamers to have media literacy is wild, best of luck homie

I agree but it’s kind of shouting at the wall there will always be crazies out here. It’s more a product of our information age than of gamers specifically. All you can really do is report and ban em

Starfield was the best game ive ever played and the Fallout TV show is goated Bethesda should be a trillion dollar company

This is a really interesting topic that i’m not sure if i fully agree with your take. i’m at work right now, but i’ll try to come back to it tonight to collect my thoughts and write a thing.

I won’t lie, i was worried i was gonna hear some culture war, “modern games and pronouns” nonsense as ive only seen some of your stuff. Im glad i was wrong and the video was fantastic Lol.

I still don’t rate Emil particularly highly as a writer–he has a pretty clear preference for making a big impact up-front over introducing more subtle details that you’re meant to mull over (the latter being what made me fall in love with The Elder Scrolls AND Fallout)–but I do agree with his take about design docs. In my own writing, I’m a pantser. I’ll keep notes, I’ll have post-its with explanations for WHY I wrote something, but I don’t create huge lore wikis or meticulously plot out the whole story.

Have you tried the new Tokyo Xtreme Racer?

rice

video needs a different title. i spent most of my time watching it wondering what the topic was supposed to be.

…lol maybe i’m part of the problem.

I think articles like the PC Gamer one you mentioned is the main reason I find it hard to bother with written games media these days. It’s like the written equivalent of a reaction video- taking someone else’s work that has subtlety and nuance and is therefore less marketable, then leeching off it with punchy anger-inducing headlines to swoop in and yoink the attention. I have some sympathy with the challenges to compete with video content, but crap like that really isn’t helping their case.

Not to mention, it feeds into crap like this. The toxic awful vitriol you talk about here can often be traced back to work like this I feel. Yes, you’ll always have your reddit jackass types either way, but articles like this go a long way in reinforcing and legitimizing that sort of behavior. Stuff like twitter death threats feel like the kind of thing we should have moved far beyond by now, but it’s IV drip can be traced back to the very same pseudo-journalism you parodied here with your video title. (nice, btw, lol :P)

It is true that Emil did not singlehandedly write every single bad line of dialogue in Starfield and he definitely got a lot of unwarranted flak, however ultimately the buck stops with him when it comes to the writing. He is the lead quest/narrative design director and the responsibility for the games narrative falls on him. Taking that responsibility and making needed changes to improve is his literal job. The narrative is bad and that fact is his responsibility. Either he is incapable of delivering a good story and gripping quests or he is unwilling. Both lead to the necessity of replacement if we ever want a good story in TES6. There is no one else but him and maybe Todd Howard himself who could even take responsibility.
The circumstances for how or why the quests and narrative are bad do not matter. It is his job to make necessary changes in personnel or structure to ensure a good story and he failed. Repeatedly. His talks give us some insight on why that might be and we can speculate all day long but that changes nothing for the game’s lack of quality. It is not entirely his fault. He is more of a symptom of the underlying problems that have festered in Bethesda for a while now. And while we should not forget his humanity, the players are entirely in their right to demand better.
And it looks like as long as he remains the narrative director, TES6 will have a disappointing story and quests.

Core fans of Bethesda have long been dissatisfied with the direction their games are taking. From Morrowind to Oblivion to Skyrim, Bethesda has been slowly eroded RPG elements and meaningful choices in favor of “accessibility”, flashy cutscenes and set pieces and railroading the player into their desired path to never miss a single piece of content. Compound this with the 14 years we’ve had to dissect every single element of Skyrim with no real hope of ever getting a better RPG with meaningful choices and consequences for our decisions, Emil’s perceived nonchalant and dismissive attitude towards player issues that have marinated for years are just the final push many needed to finally vent their feelings.

Bethesda has been glazed ever since Skyrim came out. So much so that very valid criticism of their games has been dismissed and belittled for a long time now. It feels quite vindicating to see many people to finally wake up to the problems that have always existed. There is no viable alternative to Skyrim to play right now. There are many great RPGs but none do what Skyrim does. And with the overly long release cycle, most talent of the studio nearly gone, it being sold to Microsoft and Todd Howard possibly retiring soon, TES6 will likely be the last chance for a new classic Bethesda fantasy RPG. And either they listen to their long time RPG fans or there will be nothing like it for people like me for the next decade. I am hoping against all rationale that TES6 will be a master piece, I really do. But its frankly not likely. People complain because they care.

Anyway, looking forward to more videos, cheers.

Me, about to put 100+ hours into the new kingdom come: 😱

16:00 OK, but that is what that means. Absolutely, you should have some maximum number of guns you release per quarter, as it is bad design to flood the player with too many new things all at once. But the context in that quote made it clear he was talking about not working too hard now or they will get disappointed when you phone it in later. The number of guns was just an analogy on release quality! This statement is even more crazy as, it does not directly talk about work hours. You might in theory just happen to get a really good luck and everything just falls into place and you get the best quarterly patch ever, and this advice is we need to make this worse as we cannot expect to keep this quality up.

Forcing your employees to work slower now to not raise consumer expectations is stupid and harmful. Not only will one high quality game or patch buy you loyalty (aka, that is not how consumers think[1]). These are developers who 20 years ago would of been at the top of their industry (working for a top AAA studio). We want them to not try to better themselves with every release?

Stop trying to make AAA studios into McDonald’s. Bethesda devs dont make minimum wage and dont work 4 hours a week after school, and gamers don’t look first for consistency in the games they purchase. This is why AAA studios are now selling less units than single and small team indies who put 100+ hours a week into their game or 60 hours after a full time job. This is why all creativity and polish and passion have fled. We can tell. A game where the the single dev put 10k hours into crafting vs 1k devs each phoning in a thousand hours worth of work (over 3-5 years) is like night vs day.

[1] – I think the evidence for this is pretty self evident. All these studios only exist now a decade past when they last mattered because we were still remembering them back when they cared and produced polished creative games. If every game Bethesda released was as consistently well received as Starfield, they never would of even released Daggerfall. And yet they will survive Starfield and release another because we still remember Skyrim and Oblivian and Morrowind.

Honestly, I think it’s very telling that I’ve heard about that Emil “design docs” bit before in-passing, but now that I’ve heard the clip in-context – speaking as someone whose been creative-writing as a hobby for over a decade? He’s absolutely fuckin’ right.

Outlines aren’t always helpful. I don’t even make anything outside of putting pen-to-paper, but whenever I make an outline for a creative story or a oneshot or whatever, I can safely say that 99% of the time, the final draft of what I make will be much different from what I originally planned. Sometimes it might start off the way I imagined, but then spiral off into its own direction. Sometimes I might get stuck in a writer’s block until I come up with a different opening, and then I can cycle that back into whatever I wanted to lead into. Sometimes the two are completely and utterly different outright.

It’s why I’ve stopped making larger or detailed outlines for my work – instead, I tend to keep notepad files of little ideas or snippets of scenes I imagine in my head, so I don’t forget them and can easily access that excitement or energy for later. It’s also why I rarely ever work on multi-chapter stories anymore; big, detailed outlines are fun to dream up, but when I try putting them into practice, I easily get overwhelmed by everything I need to keep track of. And that’s still just pen and paper; for anything bigger, likes games or movies, it must be an exhausting amount of team effort.

I think you could also argue that NOT having PR training could produce more truthful less vague statements. I think it is probably easier to argue that then that PR people go through training to maximize the amount of truth and facts they release to the public.

Other than John Carmack, isn’t Emil the one who said the story isn’t important?