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 They are still using the same facial animation tech as from roughly 2008-10, which was already outdated and surpassed by say HL2, when they switched over to it… I could go on.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.