…“it is obviously difficult to deal with when you’re going back to an area where a game had multiple endings.”
No, Howard. What you are finding difficult is to have any particular vision for a game beyond its literal systems and gameplay loops. You resent New Vegas because people care about it, and nobody cares about 76.
If you have a story you want to tell, you make choices that serve that vision; the problem is Todd doesn’t have one. He bought a franchise built on evocative storytelling and biting commentary and decided its best use is for players to bash virtual action figures together.
I think he was refering to the show being set after new vegas and having to continue on from a game which had different possible endings
I know, and I’ll allow that I’m not being very tidy in my rhetoric but the point stands that if you’re writing a FO:NV show, you could easily pick the game ending that suits whichever story you’re trying to tell with the show.
I was trying to connect that dot (my response to his quote) to my other grievances with how the Bethesda house style deemphasizes textual storytelling in favour of commercially safe gameplay loops and more environmental storytelling that, even when well done, isn’t very meaningful on its own.
I honestly don’t get the hate. To me, fallout 3 was on another level. It was oblivion with guns in a post apocalyptic wasteland and I loved every minute of it. I had never heard of fallout before bathesda bought it. I think the first 2 games plus tactics only sold like a million copies combined. Fallout 3 sold like 10 million.
I’m just saying, had it not been for bathesda, fallout would be dead and forgotten. I mean I sure as heck would have never heard about it. So I’m glad they made fallout 3, and it was a landmark game in my life.
Fallout was created by Tim Cain at Interplay. Herve Caen staged a hostile takeover of the company, forced out Cain and Brian Fargo, and proceeded to run the company into the ground and loot its corpse. Tim Cain was in the process of buying back IP from Interplay when Todd Howard swooped in and bought it for more than Cain could afford. Basically, Tim Cain had his baby - his magnum opus - stolen from him TWICE.
If not for Bethesda, we would have had multiple BG3 level sequels by now, instead of the looter-shooter garbage that Bethesda turned it into.
I don’t get this. Sounds like Tim Cain is a shit business and you’re blaming the person who had nothing to do with the company going under.
Another thing I don’t get, you think bathesda fallout is “garbage”? Really? Why is it every game is either a 10/10 or hot garbage? Why is there no in between? Why can’t you admit it’s just not for you? Fallout 1 and 2 weren’t for me, I didn’t like them. But I like bathesda fallout. It doesn’t mean I can 1 and 2 “garbage”. Fallout 3 and 4 gave across the board good reviews and millions of sales, clearly many people don’t think it’s garbage.
There seems to be an incredible amount of things you don’t get regarding this subject. And you’re refusing to learn any of them.
YOU MUST BE RE-EDUCATED. WRONG THINK IS ILLEGAL!
I can’t see a way to frankly assess the quality of a game on its commercial success, but let’s at least not pretend the franchise’s popularity is based on its later installments - that puts the cart before the horse imo.
Interplay going bankrupt is the reason Bethesda owns this IP. FO3 wasn’t a bad game, but it started development before their involvement. Everything Bethesda made on its own has been increasingly in their own simulationist, environmental style, which can be fun but isn’t a good fit for the highly novelistic style that made it popular to begin with.
I think my view still stands, without bathesda that series would have ended with that weird ass “fallout: bos” for PS2. If it hadn’t been bought by bathesda, we would have no fallout 3, 4 or even NV. Cause as much as people claim it isn’t, NV uses the bones and parameters of fo3, just builds on it. We also wouldn’t have gotten the show, which was great
You imagine Bethesda was the sole bidder on the IP, but this isn’t the case. But for their shrewdness, the series would have survived just fine.
Do you have some insider knowledge about other companies that bid on the rights or?
From what I can find online, there’s not much out there aside from Activision, which… Lmao
No, not them. I’m trying to figure out what interview I read about this. Pardon my source amnesia, I’ll write back if it comes to me.
You have to take a look on the size of the “gaming market” at release dates of those games. At mid 90s gaming was barely a thing, since PCs were still unbelievably expensive. Ten years later it was very different. Plus consoles on top of it…
It’s hard to compare sales numbers of 90s games to late 2000s games lol the whole industry had a massive growth spike post-Xbox introduction and PCs getting massively cheaper to build
I’d be curious to see the sale results of the games while takeling the amount of console/PC present as well as the market size during the release year.
We might have surprise about results of all the games with these parameters.
To try to answer, succinctly (which I’m bad at): looking backward is easier than looking forward. What I mean by that is since you didn’t get into the series until 3, it makes sense that you wouldn’t have a problem with 3 and 4, since it’s harder to see what the series could have been…as pretentious as that sounds.
Where much of the hate comes from (and I think a lot of it is overblown - I’m not trying to justify the behavior of the maniacs out there) is that the overarching progression of the series feels reset. Fallout 1 -> Fallout 2 showed a progression in a *post-*post-apocalyptic world, with society advancing again, to some degree. Shady Sands grew between 1 and 2, and was the foundation of the NCR.
So Fallout 3 at the time was IMHO a disappointment because the setting felt more generic, and like they were just playing the greatest hits from 1 and 2. I get the arguments that the setting in-universe was hit harder, but it still felt weird that it was post-apocalpytic instead of post-post-apocalyptic.
One reason (as always, IMHO) that New Vegas was so popular is that it continued to build on 1 and 2. We saw the NCR had continued to grow, other factions rise in importance, and generally felt less like the bombs had dropped the year prior. It’s what a lot of folks hoped Fallout 3 would be, in that sense. That’s my own biased view though, so take it with a grain of salt - there’s folks who want more humor, only isometric, more complex and branching storylines, etc.
For real though. Todd Howard needs to like, take some shrooms and meditate in the mountains. Touch grass. Given the headass shit he’s said lately it’s transparently clear he’s one of the biggest things standing in the way of another decent Bethesda game- I think the days of those might be done for good, I hate to say.
Todd Howard, Pete Hines, and the other guy I can’t think of his name right now, are the holy Trinity at Bethsoft. They figured out how to take the success of Morrowind and milk the shit out of it while “streamlining” every game.
The original ES creators said years ago the direction of the series is not what they would have done. And you can see how these three did the same thing to Fallout that they did with Elder Scrolls. Their “best” contributions have been creating DLCs and charging for mods. They’ve made bank for Zenamax. And that’s all they care about.
They’re creativitly bankrupt. I feel bad for the devs that grew up on the og elder scrolls games and became devs with the company.
Todd Howard was the project leader for Morrowind and its expansions
This is so sad fate. Morrowind was absolute gem of that era, nothing compared to it at the time. It has wonderful world it takes place in which is believable and filled with interesting characters, supported by truly brilliant soundtrack. And while story is quite decent there’s about gazillion other things to do, explore, see.
It’s sad that every upcoming bethesda game was more and more simplified and lost a bit of the morrowind magic.
I don’t think their games are necessarily becoming more simplified, it’s more that they seem to focus on areas of the games which would help make them more “mainstream” (for example, Fallout 4 made crafting and upgrading more complex compared to 3 and NV, but this is similar to other AAA games), while focusing less (and thus simplifying) other areas.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, I personally think Fallout 4 improved over 3, and Skyrim over Oblivion (though NV and Morrowind are still better). But this also leads to disasters like Fallout 76.
Ted Peterson, one of the actual creators of TES, was involved in writing for Morrowind. It’s the only reason it retained even a shadow of Arena & Daggerfall’s creepy, ambitious charm.
And if you were with TES from the start… with Arena, Daggerfall, and even Battlespire… then Morrowind was nothing but a massive disappointment. And the franchise went even further downhill from there. It’s clear that Todd has no respect whatsoever for the magic that Peterson, Lakshman, and LeFay created together.
I concur completely. I mean, I like Morrowind quite a bit, but coming from playing 1000 hours in Daggerfall and seeing this tiny simplified, constrained game world in the sequel was disheartening. The fact that everything since has been so much worse in that regard had made Morrowind age pretty well I suppose.
I’ve tried to get a sense of pre-Morrowind Elder Scrolls titles, but, as a later arriving fan they can be impenetrable. I’m old enough now to get annoyed when people say that about ES3 though, so I guess it’s come full circle.
I’m not really interested in arguing with anyone about which game is better or anything, I just feel a sense that I’m missing something. What was lacking with Morrowind that you saw in its predecessors?
The unity remake of daggerfall is free, slightly more accessible and absolutely worth checking out.
I forgot about that. Will have a look, cheers
I get that old games can be really hard to pick up, especially if they were before your time.
It basically comes down to two elements: the gameplay ambition and the world itself.
Arena and Daggerfall were wildly ambitious; and I don’t just mean the scope of the world. They tried to bring a tabletop level of freedom to a real-time first-person RPG. The games had complex interconnected simulation systems long before anyone else attempted something like that again. This was largely the doing of Julian Lefay and Ted Peterson. Morrowind scaled that ambition way back. If it’s the first TES game you played, it’s easy to not realize how pared back it was compared it’s predecessor. Each release after pared things back even further.
That is less important than the world, though. Lakshman and Peterson created a dark, sinister, thoroughly creepy world in the vein of Robert E Howard. It had deep lore, darkness, and unapologetic savage maturity that permeated everything. And it mattered. The world mattered. The lore affected everything… from sacred rights that could only be performed on certain days (which you discovered by reading lore-heavy texts), to huge dungeons both handmade and procedural and labyrinthine, to dark secrets that only revealed themselves in certain circumstances…
What Todd did is loot it and turn it into something else entirely. You can see this with Redfall, Todd Howard’s cheery, bright, swash-buckling adventure game spinoff that utterly disregarded Peterson and Lakshman’s lore and world-building. Vijay and Peterson had written a bible (which may still be floating around online) outlining the series through to Oblivion, which was supposed to be the literal end of the world and the darkest game in the series. We all know how that turned out.
Lefay and Peterson did return as contractors to work on Morrowind, which is why it still retains a bit of the character despite Todd’s directorship and being stripped of some of the darker themes… but we can all see where things went after.
There has never been another game like Daggerfall. It was the first and last of it’s kind.
Thanks for taking the time to spell it out for me. Were that Daggerfall found me as a kid, it sounds like it would have been exactly my thing. Even as a preteen I was already deep into dark, novelistic RPGs like Fallout 1+2 and (to a lesser extent) Strife and the early Baldur’s Gate games.
Since someone in this thread reminded me of Daggerfall Unity I’ve been looking at some gameplay footage, which was quickly apparent to be the wrong way to take in the game even before you described its depth as textual and tantalisingly obscurantist. At this point in my life, masquerading as a breadwinning parental archetype, I’m thinking the best way for me to vicariously digest a portion of Daggerfall might be through the imperial library site (link).
Looking forward, it’s impossible to come to any other conclusion about Todd Howard and his ilk being something like the Musk of great novelistic game franchises, buying and cheapening anything that captures the imagination and profiting immensely from it. Such voices are unwelcome in the conversation about games as art.
I still hold out hope that there are enough grown up bookworms like me to carry that torch as indie developers, though. Games like Disco Elysium still do get made, and as games get easier to produce over time it’s not hard to believe that the more writerly among us can make use of the medium to good effect in the traditions established by Lefay and Peterson.
Todd Howard needs to like, take some shrooms and meditate in the mountains.
Lots of the worst people in tech did this, and they just got worse…
Ehh but did they really though? Or did they microdose shrooms in chocolate bars and attend some bougie retreat at a ski resort? I’d say the latter is the real problem. Nobody has respect for anything anymore.
Fair dues. I mean Steve Jobs went full bore, and he was a fuckin scumbag.
The behind the bastards four part series on him was a huge eye opener into how incredibly terrible of a human being he was
That’s where I learned exactly how shitty he really was. I had always kind of figured he wasn’t a great person, people who rise to that level usually aren’t, but I hadn’t realised really how terrible he was.
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He was ALWAYS the one standing in the way of good Bethesda games. He’s responsible for Redguard as the followup to Daggerfall. Redguard!
He should have been chased out of the industry decades ago.
That’s fine, it’s hardly as if we’ll ever run out of good games to play. Hell, I haven’t even gotten to AC6 yet and I’ve been looking forward to that for ages
That quote actually makes sense in context, it’s talking about handling the story of the second season of the show.
Also, I doubt Todd Howard was in a position to independently decide to buy the Fallout franchise in 2004.
See for yourself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Buren_(video_game)?wprov=sfla1
You criticized Todd Howard for his game design skills in your original comment, I just pointed out that the sentence you quoted didn’t refer to designing the story of a game.
You also claimed “He bought a franchise” which seemed unnecessarily personal.
I don’t see how Van Buren is related to this at all (except for its relation to New Vegas, I guess, but I don’t see what this has to do the article or either of our comments).
I think I figured out why Todd Howard seems to have tried to make Fallout die; he never wanted to buy Fallout, but was pressured by Zenimax into purchasing a second IPin case The Elder Scrolls ever fails.
Fallout has always been a backup to The main Elder Scrolls games in case he makes a mistake. If Fallout succeeds in a massive way, there is a chance he will have to start giving it more resources than his own pride and joy.
It’s classic step-parent mentality. The suits made him into a step parent, so he managed a quick skin over oblivion and just copied bits and pieces of the first games stories like a high school student copying a book report from a book he never read. He didn’t really care about the substance from the previous games, but there was a lot of old concept art they could mash up and the 50’s aesthetic meant they could save a lot of money on licensing fees for music.
Then is sold big and ruined his chances for quietly making the story go away. But Skyrim was a huge success which should have made the idea of a second IP unnecessary. So, they decided to focus on their new game and let a company known for doing cheap sequels for other game companies IP.
Personally I wonder if Todd Howard was actually paying attention to who Obsidian had on staff, or if he just wanted a company who was willing to take the millstone from his neck so he could focus on the game he really wanted to make. The reason I think that Todd didn’t know who Obsidian were is because of how he treated the next company who he let play with the Fallout IP.
Fallout 76 was the only other title made by a mostly outside developer. I say mostly, because they were a newly acquired studio who had no real experience. Which led to a failure in Fallout 76 from launch. Compare that to how ESO was put together. It was built by Zenimax Online a core studio designed just for an online MMO Elder Scrolls game. They weren’t forced to use the single-player Gamebryo/Creation Engine. It was designed as it’s own online game.
Fallout has been consistently designed to fail, which is why Microsoft should just remove it from Bethesda and get someone who understands the story and is willing to follow the real story Canon make new games. We’re in this issue because Todd Howard has been forced to work on Fallout, which is amazing how even with him trying the screw it up, we still enjoy the Fallout world.
Trying to make fallout die? He helped make a show that has done insanely well and brought the fallout series player counts to record highs. You can not like Todd but to claim he’s trying to kill the series is hilarious
If they make games who take place outside of the US. They don’t have to hear about how they broke the lore. But Todd said no. Or Bethesda can make a new Fallout timeline. You have a OG timeline (FO1, FO2, Tactics, and FNV) and a Bethesda timeline (all the games/shows they made). They have two outs to stop people from hating them. But Bethesda is not doing them.
Personally I think multiple timelines/versions of the story would complicate things unnecessarily.
Lol this article goes out of its way to try and tamp down the New Vegas controversy.
A) no it’s not a stretch to look at the chalkboard in the show and see that the dates do not line up with new vegas’ timeline.
B) Josh Sawyer didn’t say he didn’t care what they did with fallout because he actually didn’t care but because he has had to make peace with the fact that he doesn’t control it anymore
C) Tim Cain said he loved the look and feel of the world in the show, not the plot elements or then retconning NV, and basically just said maybe the whiteboard is a lie / I don’t control it anymore so I’m not going to publicly criticize it but posted links to the timeline descrepencies.
new vegas fans can never understand plot points unless a character has 5 minute exposition explaining it
like fuck, do people really not know what an arrow means? did nobody play new vegas and realize the ncr was spread way too thin in new vegas? they couldnt even send troops to their defenses that are right next to legion territory, basically left them to die. hell new vegas talks a lot about how the ncr is barely holding on. how does that not tie in to the chalkboard timeline exactly? i seriously dont understand the confusion about it
like fuck, do people really not know what an arrow means?
Like fuck, do you not know that “fall of the NCR” happening before the events of New Vegas is a clear retcon at best, and nuking Shady Sands immediately after NV ends is completely shitting on all the themes of hope in the NV narrative?
I seriously don’t understand how you can read that whiteboard and think “oh yeah, they’re totally respecting the NV cannon”.
how is it a retcon at all? you clearly never played new vegas, considering that nuking the ncr is something the player can fucking do
get over it, you are just a bethesda hater, grasping at straws
No man, you’re a tod Howard dick rider for some reason who refuses to acknowledge that the show clearly put no effort into respecting NV cannon, or intentionally mislead fans into thinking that’s what they were doing. It doesnt take a fucking genius to look at that whiteboard and realize that it conflicts with the literal year that NV takes place.
no it doesnt. you dont even know the lore of new vegas or the ncr, because the ncr is massive yet in new vegas they were spread too thin, their president was not well liked, they are desperate to get hoover dam for some reason (maybe they’ve idk started to fall?)
and you fail to even see that there is an arrow pointing to a nuke. do you really not know that an arrow indicates time passing? do you really not know that the ncr did not capital in shady sands anymore?
you must think it would be a better idea to pretend new vegas never existed than to incorporate it into something new again. you must really hate new vegas to think that
“Like, where do you draw the line between what’s true and what’s not true?” he said. "What we tend to do is, the most truthful thing is what people saw on the screen, right? That’s the most truth. And then things that are written officially along with the games are kinda second truth. And then, other things that are written or done outside of that—spin-off things, or somebody answering on the internet—those things are kinda third place.
…Huh, what??? I can understand him wanting New Vegas to have lower priority in terms of canon in comparison to games made by Bethesda, but why the hell would he want a TV show’s canonicity to be above the actual source material, and the one that they themselves made on top of that???
I think the “most truthful” thing encompasses the games too. It comes across as “whatever the players do is what is canon to them” and “along with the games” means things alongside the games, not the games themselves.
Kinda like the game manual saying x character was killed in the previous game or something but you as a player never let that happen. Your canon is the true canon, not what is written.
That sounds much more like a todd thing to say.
It’s so weird that the vault dweller would punch Preston in the face 37 times, but it’s canon.
Ok, that’s fair. The article might be omitting context with that quote.
I don’t think screen specifically means TV, I think he’s talking about the original works like the games, tv shows, movies, being in first place, as opposed to material that comes with those original works, like instruction manuals, press releases, which is a second priority in terms of what canon is, and then Q&A sessions or, and this is when I’m also confused, spin off games.
Now, if spin off games means things like fallout shelter, sure. If spinoff means New vegas or Fallout 76 , that would be more surprising to me.
I need to watch the source video to know better, but life.
EDIT : nah, it seems he means gimmicky tie ins like fallout shelter.
If there is one thing I know about New Vegas fans, its that they are more rabbid than the mongrel dogs of the Empire. If ever there was a thing to blame “we can’t have nice things” on in the Fallout community, the answer is almost probably New Vegas fans.
Also, I never played much of New Vegas. I spent more time trying to get the game to not crash after leaving the starting town that I did actually playing the game. When my character got stuck inside of a stop sign, thats when I decided it was no longer worth the trouble.
The T.V. show was great, huh fellas?
