memes

Shit post.

After the first few times that’s on you bud, I’m sorry… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Me: no idea what Bethesda is

Oh yeah Bethesda's actual valuable talents just straight up don't exist anymore.

Basically it's a lot cheaper to bring in underpaid, non-unionized contract workers with short contracts. So as far as I'm aware, Bethesda got rid of all their skilled programmers who were highly familiar with the coding and engines of Bethesda games, and brought in people who didn't have any talent or familiarity, resulting in terrible outputs just because the actual people that make Bethesda's games good were all fired for being good at making games (and thus being on 'permanent hire' wages instead of 'shitty short contract' wages).

But it gets worse. A lot worse.

See, Bethesda is pretty notorious in the industry for the low quality of their code documentation. Even in their prime they were notoriously bad at this. Code documentation is essential to allowing people to read and understand code, which is notoriously one of the hardest things in the job to do- code is a lot harder to read than to write. Bethesda keeps little to no documentation, which is why most of their games have so many glitches. But not having documentation is a particularly dastardly combo with frequently cycling your workers to keep their wages low. Because their unfamiliar, underpaid workers now don't have any way to quickly learn how the code operates. And adding your own code to existing code in this way makes the problem a LOT worse, since now even if someone understands one part

Frequently cycling workers also makes it a lot harder for workers to communicate with each other. This is primarily useful to companies who want to prevent the formation of unions so they can underpay people, but it's also something that REALLY shows when making games because people need to talk to each other and work together in order to make assets that all go well together. If people aren't talking to each other... well, think of all the ways that tasks and goals can be interpreted. Two people assigned to different sections of the same task can produce fundamentally incompatible work.

I'm sure you can see how this could be all be an obstacle to making classic games with rich environments that are prized for their immersion, storytelling and fun gameplay decades later.

Seems like Bethesda and Ubisoft have kinda the same problem.

Once upon a time they innovated and released games that set a new level for the industry. Then they kinda boiled that down to a formula and just focused on making it bigger, missing the point of what made the games popular and what people liked them for.

They also managed to lose the fine details and parts that people liked in their quest to just make the games as big as possible.

People didn’t like Skyrim and the early AC games because they were perfect, they liked them because they were the best we had at the time and there was also a lot of care put into them.

FromSoft could’ve fallen down that rabbit hole as well, but they keep changing things up in their soulslike games.

Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring, each of those games are “soulslike” but also have fundamental changes that make them a unique experience.

stop trying to use their faces as memes. it's not going to happen

blocking to avoid innocuous trump spam

I was so psyched when it was announced that somebody had picked up the fallout series. Then I got FO3 and 4, and then I swore never to buy another Bethesda release. And I then bought a backup disc of the originals, because I'll be damned if my kids will grow up and think that their father wasted his late teens playing Bethesda's FPS versions.

Bethesdud