You’re half right, half wrong. Upvoted anyways but I’ll tell you why.
Half of bethesdas problems are the engine they use. The other half are bad writing. Neither is the fault of the devs that got laid off. I may be wrong on this point but I don’t think any of the writing team got laid off.
And the engine choice isn’t their fault either, they continue to duct tape new features to a 30 year old engine and rely on modders and like 3 senior devs that understand how it “works”. It’s like trying to run AI on a Gameboy. The younger devs are working with one arm tied behind their back, and that isn’t their fault either.
The best thing about bethesdas games are the things left to the types of devs that got laid off. The environmental storytelling, the Easter eggs, and the overall feel of the game. The people making the decisions are still there, still making bad decisions, and fistfuls of money.
So I do feel for the people that got laid off thanks to managements poor decisions like wasting time porting 11 and 15 year old games to every new system that comes out, or mobile games and MMOs.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Your first part is ‘more’ right by way of detail, but…
A dev that works for Bethesda should be able to figure out what you just said pretty quickly.
A dev that figures that out and then continues to work for Bethesda is a fool. Sure, that’s maybe a bit harsh for younger devs… but that’s how this industry works … unless you band together and make your own indie studio, you’re going to be the first on the firing line for everyone elses mistakes.
You are correct though that the entire writing team, including Emil, need to be fired. Start over, try again. They are still using the same facial animation tech as from roughly 2008-10, which was already outdated and surpassed by say HL2, when they switched over to it… I could go on.
The second half of what you said, I take issue with. In the last 10 to 15 years, the quality of enviornmental storytelling has gone down, the overall feel of the games has also gone down. Easter eggs? Who cares…?
But yes, all senior managment, including Todd, need to be shit canned as well, for making 10 years of terrible decisions.
Sharma taking an axe to Bethesda is really the only thing that makes sense from MSFT’s business POV… she’s gonna trim down the most financially wasteful things under her control first. ES 6 needs to come out and be very good, relatively quickly, or Bethesda as a studio is a dead man walking.
And even Asha isn’t fully in control of or responsible for how much fat she needs to trim, because MSFT has gone so wildly into AI, and Windows has so much technical debt and bloat, again mostly accrued over the last 10 to 15 years, … that bill is now coming due, and she needs to help figure out how to pay as much of that as well.