The Rise and Fall of Bethesda Game Studios | Elder Scrolls, to Fallout, to Starfield

#starfield #elderscrolls #fallout #bethesda With the failures surrounding the outdated best seller Starfield as it dominates news with user Reviews, AI Replies, and Modders who refuse to mod, I take a retrospective look at all the mistakes and the decline of Bethesda Game Studios over the years and how they've lead to where we are today. From Arena, to Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim to Fallout 76 and of course the dissappointing Starfield. I hope The Elder Scrolls 6 will be good, please.

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
1:15 The Start
2:40 Arena and Daggerfall
4:28 Battlespire, Redguard and Morrowind
10:05 Oblivion
12:57 Fallout 3
19:02 Skyrim
22:20 Fallout 4
28:09 Fallout 76
36:18 Starfield
43:01 The Future of Bethesda

Videos Featured include a large amount of B-Roll from trailers and promo material, as well as the Making Of and Behind the Scenes for Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and 4.
Youtube videos include:

[Mugthief]

I'm not sick. You're imagining that my voice is different. It's the same as always. Hope you enjoy the video, and if you like and subscribe I promise I'll love you forever!

[stuartrumbel]

That brief mention of foreshadowing got a laugh out of me. Well done. I used to be an adventurer like you, but if I go back to Starfield, it'll only be because I foolishly pre-paid for the first expansion. Starfield did make me realize I was in an abusive relationship with my favourite game dev. But my eyes are open now, and they are sleeping on the couch, and I remind them every morning that it's time they got their own place again.

[IlIBonesIlI]

I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I took a memory leak to the save file

[YYmmmYY]

You didn't mention a big part of Oblivion that foreshadowed Bethesda's laziness. In Morrowind, the Khajit had cat feet, where their ankles were near the middle of where human shins would be and they walked on their toes rather than the soles of their feet.

But in Oblivion, they gave the Khajit regular human feet and said it would be too much work to give them a different walking animation instead of just copy pasting the generic human walk 😢😢😢😢

[바보Queen]

its wild to me that junk cosmetics cost as much as games these days... how can anyone justify that

[chrishendry]

I remember the backlash on forums over the Horse Armor was nuts, and the community seemed adamantly against it. In World of Warcraft, when the cosmetic helmets came out, people were getting votekicked in dungeons immediately for wearing them and the forums were aflame of people who bought them arguing against people who were retaliating.

It was a few years ago I was working on a remote jobsite with a bunch of guys I would refer to as "non-gamers". Big into sports, drinking, all that. But they all followed the same pattern - they bought the newest Playstation or XBox model, and bought FIFA, and Call of Duty every single release. They barely touched them, but it was like a pattern, a tribalistic team-based belief system. And they also all played this one zombie game on their phones, and were funnelling cash into it daily for more items, stamina, and all that garbage. I'd seen all the graphs and news articles about casual gamers being so prominent, but this was the first time I really saw how much these guys funnel into the industry.

The conversation had come up because I had mentioned I bought a new, expensive laptop for my out of town jobs and they were like you spent HOW MUCH?!", and I was curious on how much we'd each spent on gaming. Turns out, myself, the guy with a World of Warcraft account since release, an active FF14 account for ~2 years, a gaming PC, gaming desktop, plus peripherals, had spent less over ~20 years than these guys who had ~10 years. One of the dudes had event spent about $2500 on this stupid zombie game in less than a year.

I wonder how many of them would have, or did buy fucking Horse Armor.

[LamborghiniDiabloSVPursuit]

You forgot the best part about the FO1st controversy: someone bought out the web domain for Fallout First to rightfully dump on it, before Bethesda could.

The website is still online as of 1/2024.

[gamerboy]

Morrowind was my first taste of the Elder Scrolls world.

After the intro sections, and you're let loose in the village of Seyda Neen, and the pop-up info window says, "you are on your own now. Good luck, " I was like, "oh dayum. I AM alone, aren't I?" I remember being completely lost as to what to do next.

Then I went and k*lled a minor NPC, and began using his shack as a temporary base for storing all my stuff. XD That shack really helped me out, until I eventually moved to a larger city (forgot its name).

[thedrake]

The biggest problem is undoubtedly the simplification in both mechanics and lore.
Ability Scores? Gone.
Casting Spells while wielding a weapon? Gone.
The world, both mundane and eccentric at the same time? Almost gone.
Morally grey Characters on all sides? Gone.

It just sucks. They killed both the body and soul of their games.

[BungieStudios]

In Fallout 3, I got totally lost in the creepy subway tunnels under a ruined city. It was super dark and kinda scary, with weird noises and stuff all around. I was trying to find a way out, but it was like a maze down there. My pipboy flashlight didn’t help much in the green tint. While wandering around, I thought about my old life before all this craziness. I was like you once, an adventurer. But then I got hit in the knee with an arrow in a fight, and everything changed except war because that never changes. Now, here I was, lost in this spooky underground, just trying to find my way back. Like Bethesda after Starfield.

[What_do_I_Think]

Thank you for the good analysis.

IMHO the problem is, that nearly all big studios are on the stock market or owned by big corporations. So, it is not about gaming any more but about exploitation of an IP. Elder Scrolls is an IP, Fallout is an IP, Bethesda is an IP -- and people buy the products with these IPs even when they are bad -- so that makes those IPs interesting for the big players -- not the games, not the players or even delivering a good product.

[bigcrazewolf]

I've been play Bethesda games for 20 years and it's time for the top management to be replaced. I have zero expectations for future releases. I only played Starfield on gamepass and can't bring myself to play FO76.

Edit: If Obsidian ever gets another FO shot they have to get the old team back together many are not at the studio. Josh Sawyer being one that HAS to be part of it.

[Jairjax]

oblivion and fallout 3 is really when the change started. The shift from complex character skill systems, to a design philosophy with simplification as the focus. That was the biggest change imo. They still have this simplification mindset today.

[OrangeNash]

As someone old enough to have played Morrowind when it first came out, that was probably Bethesda's creative peak. A few random comments. Every new release since Morrowind, has been "streamlined". And as a result, had lost some previous fans, while gaining more mass, mainstream, sales. That is the 20 year story of Bethesda in a nutshell. Why should they put huge efforts into leading edge, high quality stories and branching narratives, when the more casual each succesive game is, the more it sells?
You mentioned Radiant AI for Oblivion. As I recall, the main criticism of Morrowind at the time was that the world, particularly the NPCS were static. They stood around forever. So Radiant AI was hyped as every NPC leading their own life. That you could go on a quest in a cave, for example, and find some NPC had already dealt with the baddies. There were previews of NPCs behaving almost like humans in in MMO. But this basically made the game too random and a coherent story unplayable, so was gutted before release. Stripped back to basic schedules and no actual radiant AI as originally intended. Also, many people hated Oblivion gates. They liked the first one or two, but they got repetitive and you'd soon coudln't face them..see the pattern? Always keen to cut and paste and repeat assets in game. Oh, and many gamers absolutely hated the level scaling. It seemed put in as a cheap, quick alternative to setting sensible, manual scaling for the game. Was very controversial at the time. And others found the depth lacking after Morrowind. Being able to join all factions, even with contradictory aims, where in Morrowind you had to choose as joining one, would put you opposed to others.

I think perhaps the bugs are not the single biggest problem with bethesda. People focus on them as obvious and objective. For me, a bigger, core problem, is their desire to keep hyping up "HUGE" game worlds that end up being either empty, repetitive or both! Most games have significant bugs on release these days. They get fixed and then the game is fine. BSG problem is that even when the bugs are fixed, the repetition, shallow stories, the emptiness, the lack of genuine interaction etc is still there. Starfield really is not ruined by bugs - but it is boring because all the rest of those Beth negatives that have been festering for 20 years reached their peak in it.

When you put it all together, as you've done, and with the awful mobile phone games (I wasn't aware of those), it's obvious they are a company with minimal interest in games and lots of interesting in making money for the least work possible. And no, Starfield couldn't have been some huge team working for 10 years on it. It's clearly the minimum hack possible to put a cut and shunt of Fallout and Skyrim in space. And for a company that seems to love exploiting their market, it's jaw dropping how they appear to fail to understand what people loved about their games before. I do wonder if part of it is that we just grow out of the BSG formula as we age - and perhaps only return to it when we are old enough that senility hides the flaws :-)

[Childofbhaal]

To me Bethesda suffered because they gave in. Every new game they came out with after Morrowind became more dumbed down and more easy to digest for casuals. The moment you do that I think you’re diluting the pool already. The best games are products of unwavering artistic vision. Where people truly do not care to appeal to everyone and are okay having a dedicated fan base who enjoys their product for what it is

[rhodan]

The most amazing thing is that every bethesda release has the SAME bugs for decades that have been solved by modders the day of release and then they just pop up again in the next game. Suck it, consumer: CONSUME

[crispycaptures]

Starfield has cured my insomnia, its so boring that it puts me to sleep, when I go to bed all it takes is 5 mins of playing it and out I am, thats the best thing about it.

[jameson]

Bethesda made a space game where you walk around every planet. WALK. Yes, let's go explore that planet... ON FOOT.

[oldmanramblingatclouds]

I used to be an adventurer, and now as someone who actually likes Fallout 4 in the state it is now, I agree 100% with all your criticisms of the game. Indeed, the only reason I'm putting in so many hours even now is due to the Sim Settlements 2 mod, which not only vastly improves the settlement building minigame, but also incorporates the system into its own main story, which I feel fits in much better to Fallout 4's scavenging gameplay loop than the original's pithy 'save your kid' storyline. That said, I'm one of those people who actually _likes_ the settlement-building stuff, so I'm definitely biased.

Indeed, while I haven't played Starfield yet (I was going to wait for a GotY Edition, but not anymore though lol), I have got the sneaking suspicion that Bethesda actually expects modders to do the majority of the work. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but all those empty planets and limited radiant encounters definitely make me think Bethesda expected modders to save their arses.

[TheWolf]

you simply can NOT talk about mistakes of Todd Howard and his studio, without emphasizing the UI. and how it just keeps getting worse, no matter how many times anyone complains