In the darkest of moments, when it seemed the writing was on the wall for Bethesda...

>In the darkest of moments, when it seemed the writing was on the wall for Bethesda, project leader Todd Howard took the team to a nearby hotel for a private meeting. There, Howard rallied the developers’ spirits, handed out personalized business cards, and assured them it would all work out, as long as they were willing to keep going.

>That speech, one source says, probably saved the company.

Based fucking Todd. Fuck all doubters and haters. He will rise again in these darkest moments just like before.

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Other urls found in this thread:

web.archive.org/web/20190327161417/https://www.polygon.com/2019/3/27/18281082/elder-scrolls-morrowind-oral-history-bethesda
youtube.com/watch?v=7xqfC80SRGU
youtube.com/watch?v=XEWC5TLVocg
youtube.com/watch?v=GRz4FY0ZcwI
twitter.com/AnonBabble

No more dead cops

>handed out personalized business cards
what a faggot

>People were worried about their jobs, too. “We were worried it was all gonna go down before, but now the game’s not coming out on time. Are we gonna lose our jobs?” So I did an exercise where I asked everybody, “If you could have any title in life, what would it be?” It was just like an email question. “What would you like to be known as?” And you get all sorts of great and random answers. But my plan all along was: I printed business cards with that as their title, and I called an off-site meeting. I did the meeting in another building, so I think a lot of people thought they were fired, or being laid off.

>And I brought everybody in, and said, “Here’s where we’re at: We’ve been given a lot of pressure. People outside the team have told us what to do to get this done. But the only way this game actually gets done the way we want is if we all come together and do what we think is right. The team has been through a lot. If you’re on board, and we are gonna reset and do this thing, then come up here and take your cards and join me tomorrow.” And that was the meeting.

This man is a Godd.

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kek

About Redguard:
>We’re all talking about tech we didn’t have, and we pitched this idea to Todd at the time, and he’s like, “You know what? I like pirates. And everybody knows this game Daggerfall. So let’s just make a pirate game in Daggerfall.” And we’re like, “Fuck yeah.” Because the [project that would become Morrowind] was just getting on its feet.

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Or is he the king of liars and the great deceiver?

About The First Pocket Guide to the Empire:
>The way Todd and I bonded was doing this kind of fake in-world stuff in the manual, and we wanted to do something like that for Redguard. Eventually, when the game came out, it would come out in the manual. And that’s when we realized we knew fuck-all about the world; there was nothing except Daggerfall, which is very small. There maybe was a timeline stuck somewhere, with just a bunch of names and stuff like that. And so much of it was kind of just coming out of a D&D game that the original [Bethesda] guys had done, and most of those guys were gone. So we started obsessing about the world or whatnot. For some reason, you can’t make a pirate game without deciding how the universe got created.

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About making Morrowind weird:
>The game was originally set in the Summerset Isles. And then we got bored and decided, “Man, this is really boring. How about we put it in a volcano with like giant bugs everywhere?” And people were like, “What?” So Todd Howard — the easiest way to get anything past Todd, at that time, was you basically just had to say “Star Wars.” Which was true for me and anybody then. So I was like, “The game should be like Dark Crystal meets Star Wars.” And he was immediately hooked.

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Todd going balls to the wall:
>But it was a bad time; Bethesda was about to go under. And that’s when ZeniMax Media got formed. I met with the key people — and they didn’t really know me then — to say: “What do you want to do?” For me, it was kind of a no-fear moment. “Well, it can’t get any worse, right? We’re about to go out of business, and now we have a lifeline, so you better take advantage of it.”

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Todd fucking wrote Morrowind:
>That time was not just about getting Morrowind done; it was the recreation of Bethesda. It was, “What kind of development team do we want to be? How are we going to do certain things?” I did the initial programming, because there weren’t a lot of people. So I wrote the first demo for Morrowind; I wrote the beginnings of the editor. "

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Toddposting was never funny. Move on, you worthless attention whores.

Mark Nelson:
>Todd and I once got into a 45-minute-long screaming match about how high werewolves should jump.
Todd Howard:
>It was a very heated discussion. It’s just funny when you leave work thinking, “Why didn’t this person understand why I think werewolves should jump this high versus this high?” And you take that outside the office, and people look at you like, “What are you even talking about?” Then, you know, you walk in the next day and say, “All right, well, let’s do it the way you want. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
Mark Nelson:
>That may have been the one argument I ever won with Todd.

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Todd is alright
Pete hines needs to go.

kek

About the Xbox port:
>Originally, we were going to be a PC-only title, but Todd wanted really, really badly to get Morrowind on the Xbox. He talked with Microsoft all the time, and flew out there a couple of times. He worked very hard on that. It
>You could do a trick on the original Xbox, which was that you could reboot it during a load screen. So you could put up an image that stayed there, reboot your game, and people who play it on the Xbox won’t be able to tell. But those of us who worked on the game can tell you: “That load screen? Your Xbox is actually rebooting the game.” It just couldn’t handle the memory situation, so we had to clear it out. And it actually worked really, really well. That was one of our final tricks. Our Hail Mary.

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>Todd really pulled everybody together and just said, “Ignore publishing; ignore ZeniMax and all that stuff. We are our own company within this, and we have our own processes, and we’re gonna figure this game out together.”

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On Oblivion:
>It went 180 with Oblivion. Because Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings was coming out, and it was fucking great. And since technology had come so far, Todd was like, “We’re gonna make that. We’re gonna go back to traditional fantasy.” And that’s cool. Oblivion was rad.

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THE ABSOLUTE STATE OF MORROWIND PRODUCTION:
>We were about to start on Tribunal, and everybody was pretty fried. We had really been working crazy hours, and no one knew if the game was going to be a success. We just had no idea. This whole RPG-on-a-console thing was a stupid idea, right? Everybody thought that was gonna be dumb — except Todd, who was right. And it was like five o’clock on a Tuesday night or something when we were starting this design meeting to figure out Tribunal. At that point, it was Ken, it was me, and it was Doug Goodall.

>Ken wanted to do some stuff, and Ken is perverse. He will throw out just ridiculous ideas for stuff, and he knows they’re bad ideas, but it gets you talking. He wanted to have like weird Amazons who are stealing your shit, and it was all horrible. At the same time, Doug was this lore purist, and he knew the lore backwards and forwards, and he’s like: “That doesn’t make sense.” They’re getting into this argument, and by the end of it Ken had left. Doug had stormed out of the room; he took his ID card and a note and left it on Todd’s desk, saying, “I quit.” And I went home and was like, “What all just went on in this meeting?”

>The next day, and so I was gonna be an hour late, and I get into the office and everyone’s running around going: “Todd’s looking for you! Todd’s looking for you!” Todd had come into his office, and Doug had quit, apparently. Ken wasn’t there — although it turned out that was planned. And I wasn’t there. So there’s no design department anymore.

>Todd’s going, “What the fuck happened in this design meeting? I have no design department.” And, as it turned out, Doug quit and stayed quit.

>[Ed. note: Goodall did not respond to multiple requests for an interview; Howard declined to comment on this topic.]

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>except Todd, who was right

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Mark Nelson excerpts, just 4u Yea Forums:
>I mostly wrote books for my quests; “The Lusty Argonian Maid” was my personal favorite, and it was all of a page.
>. I loved writing the quests with Umbra, and little guys like M’aiq the Liar. Personally, I always latch onto that kind of stuff.
>My favorite quest — and I laugh about it because it’s probably the most successful thing I’ve ever put in a game, and it was my first game — is “A Falling Wizard.” Tarhiel, the man who fell from the sky.

Is Nelson, dare I say it... /ourguy/

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does he still work at bethesda?

>handed out personalized business cards
What? Why? They already know his name, phone number and email address, he's their fucking boss.

>Nelson created Jyggalag as a place holder Daedric Prince, and he did some work on Shivering Isles before leaving Bethesda.
Nope. Morrowind and Oblivion.

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actually sounds like a really great boss here

Good thread

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>tfw I remember having a charm on touch spell named "The Lusty Argonian Maid's Touch"
>always used it before talking to merchants and other NPCs

I miss having custom spells

Cards for the employees dumbass, not HIS business cards.

Your fucking Charisma build breaks the game of life, Todd.

Todd, I'm not going to buy Skyrim VR, fuck off.
Still, thanks for letting DOOM Eternal be on Steam. That's cool on you

Eric Parker:
>I like to tell people that if you ever fell through the world in Morrowind, or got stuck on a piece of geometry, that was my fault.
What a CHAD

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>Michael Kirkbride:
>I do remember going, “Hey, does that mean Sermon Fourteen went through?” And Ken’s like, “Yeah, why?” I’m like, “OK, never mind.” He says, “No. Why?” I’m like, “You’ve read it.” And he goes, “Yeah, but should I read it closer?” Because it was like a holy treatise on blowjobs, heavily veiled in this made-up holy language. So it makes me laugh that, you know, 11-year-old Timmy’s like, “Hey, Mom. Check out this Xbox game!”

Thanks for making me google this, OP. The article is a goldmine. Archive link for those who don't want to give Polygon hits:
web.archive.org/web/20190327161417/https://www.polygon.com/2019/3/27/18281082/elder-scrolls-morrowind-oral-history-bethesda

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I really want to know what kind of lies he told to his employees during the Fallout 76 production

>"You need to believe"
>the game is trash
>"Is not your fault"

what a champ

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Noah Berry (environment artist):
>The first thing I remember is walking in the door to the basement, and seeing some guy to my right who was ultimately not part of the Bethesda team but under some other arm of the company. And he was doing pornographic website work. My first impression is this guy looking at nude photos, and I’m like, “Whoa, OK. What kind of place is this?” Literally the moment I walked into the space to interview, there’s porn on the monitor.

OH NO NO NO

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>I think it was kind of just Kirkbride, Todd, and then Ken Rolston coming up with design ideas. And so he had a good stack of images, and we had them plastered up in this room. So the whole room was covered, wall-to-wall, with all of Kirkbride’s sketches. We called it the war room. And it was very inspirational, because they were all pen-and-ink sketches — really rough, really loose. But it gave a vibe of everything, from: “What were dark elves like? What did they look like? What do their clothes look like?” All the way to the landscape, which had these giant mushroom trees. There was a little bit of everything. And it became sort of the style guide for the game and the culture of the dark elves.

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>There’s two games that really influenced my aesthetic: the original Oddworld game, Abe’s Oddysee; and Out of This World, which was a French adventure game that I still adore.

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Actually pretty cool.

>One of Todd’s rules is that humor has no place in games. So then the goal was always to see what funny shit we could get into a game and not get caught. That made it fun.
Todd rules with an iron but fair fist.

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looking to peddle more of your shit ideas dreamboy?

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I doubt 11-year-old Timmy would bother with books. I wouldn't be surprised if bethesda just removed them in the future. I don't think normalfags care much.

>The tradition at that time was that if you had bugs, then you shouldn’t release your game.We were doing things in ways that, now, no sane company would do — without all the QA, without any asset-management software, without level designers, without UI people. People just did stuff.

>But we got through Microsoft certification the first time [we submitted the game]. That makes no sense. If you’re gonna talk about the miracles — the things that have to have been divinely influenced — there is no chance that a game of that scale, that had that many moving parts, should have passed cert the first time it went through. And my assumption is that Microsoft said, “This is a product people are going to love even if it’s broken.”

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>If Bethesda has a secret sauce, it’s knowing that “broken” is not a preventer of success.
OH NO NO NO NO NO

That explains a lot.

HAHAHA

FUCKING KEK. BASED MICROSOFT

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And to conclude with one last from me:
>I was adamant to put out this editor we had built, The Elder Scrolls Construction Set, because I wanted people to create their own modules. I thought that would give it this life, and it did somewhat, but that laid the groundwork for us doing it in Oblivion and Fallout 3 and Skyrim and Fallout 4. So I also think the Construction Set is a legacy that we’ve continued, and that for our audience — who understands our tools and keeps getting better and better at it — it’s a huge, huge part of our games now. I named it after Stuart Smith’s Adventure Construction Set on the Apple II, which I still have in my office.
PRAISE TODD

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Chad chin, chad phone

>I used to have this thing with Todd, because he was one of the ones that’s like, “Let’s not make it too weird.” So I’d bamboozle him. There was a period where I would actually draw two different versions of a monster — the one that was weird and that I wanted to be in the game, and then one that was fucking crazy. And so I’d go to Todd, and I’m like, “OK, I think I’ve got the mid-level creature set.” And I’d show him a picture. He’d be like, “Nah, dude, that’s crazy.” Then I’d go back to my office and I would act like I was drawing something new, and I’d just come back with the original drawing of what I really wanted to be in there. Like, “Hey, is this what you were thinking?” And he’d be all, “Oh, yeah, that’s much better. That’s great.”

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>We were all in one great big room, and it was just end-to-end tables. If I pushed back in my chair too much, I was bumping chairs with one of the programmers. Todd was four tables away; it seems like he was up on a little platform.

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Fucking lost my shit at this retarded picture

Why is it so hard to hate him?

lmao
bless MK

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>[The look of the game] came from Michael Kirkbride, and I would say that it’s not just the visual aesthetic; all of the narrative aesthetic of Morrowind also comes from Michael. I might’ve been the narrative lead, but Michael was the luminary — the man with spectacularly exotic and bad judgment that excited us so much.

So if I'm getting this right, Todd, Kirkbride and Rolston were the executive team behind Morrowind. With a heavy caveat that Kirkbride and Todd couldn't function without Kuhlmann who bounced back their ideas and fixed them and Goodall and Nelson who created new lore and ideas when the rest of the team dropped the ball.

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He has charisma and is not a bad guy. He's a nerdy dude that just wants to make video games and believes in his vision, no matter how it turns out.

It was a dream team. A different time.

only rolston is gone. kuhlmann and todd are still there. and kirkbride always gets contracted to do work for elder scrolls.
maybe they can get ken back. i don't know what he is doing now.

>I was with the interviewer, and we were talking about different games that we liked. And literally, in the middle of the interview, he got up and took me to meet Todd, told Todd I was a big RPG fan, and that he’d want to talk to me. So that’s how I ended up working on Morrowind.

Ken Rolston, Lead Designer of Morrowind and Oblivion:
>Working on Oblivion was more pleasant, but at the same time, because I had less control over the authorship, I was less invested. And I think, really, it’s very kind of them to credit me for lead design. I certainly did the job that I needed to do, but it was not as important to me as Morrowind was. I think I’m probably only really great the first time I do anything. And then, after that, I’m great because I have the experience. For Oblivion, I made the outlines and then — we had experienced people — I said, “This is an outline. I want it to look like it has the same content, but I want you to change all the elements in it. I want you to make it whatever you want to make it.”

>I worked on things in the background; I worked on the non-quest dialogue so that it made the world more colorful. It’s the kind of thing that Todd knew that I could do and that I would enjoy. But I did not enjoy making the main quest for Oblivion. It wasn’t the kind of main quest I would want to do. Having done Moby Dick the first time, and then not being able to do Moby Dick again — in many ways, I think Morrowind is to Moby Dick as Oblivion is to the movie Titanic. It was a great spectacle, but very generic and very accessible to users. And so there was sort of a loss of investment on my part.

And then this guy "retired" for a short time before going on to help design Kingdoms of Amalur.

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How many people do you think Todd has buried in his backyard?

>Amalur
Shit :(

Amalur had good lore but fell for the fucking MMO meme

MK said Rolston was their papa. Can't function without him. And MK only got contracted for KotN.
Also there's Emil now. Yes I know he made DB quest line in Oblivion but that was before the promotion.

Kirkbride, Goodall and Nelson also quit a long time ago.

It's only Todd and Kuhlmann now. The only reason Kirkbride's stuff gets into the games is because Kuhlmann smuggles it in since they're friends.
People like to ride Kirkbride's dick hard, but I'm adamant that one of the biggest losses to TES is Goodall's departure. He had basically constructed the whole Ta'agra khajiit language and having quit it was lost and formated when servers were being purged. He was also a lore nut and as autistic about it as we are here. We could've had khajiit race as developed as dunmer or even more. But alas, Goodall left.

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>spectacularly exotic and bad judgment
That's an amazing way to describe Kirkbride. He's fucking wild with great ideas, but if he isn't on a leash then he spews incomprehensible nonsense. Reading though c0da is like having a stroke. Some of the best creative minds are like this, they just needs someone else to temper their ideas into something tangible.

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Emil doesn't know shit about lore. His ticket to fame was "Hey Todd I wanna design Dark Brotherhood and basically reboot its lore can I?" "ok"

He's terrible with writing, always adhering to "keep it simple stupid" and he's the man behind Skyrim's main quest.

kojima
lucas

Yes user. I said "Also there's Emil now" as a bad thing on top of old guard leaving.

skyrim's main quest was fine. not every main quest has to be like morrowind's. it was the good mix of generic fight the dragon fantasy and real arcane lore when you talked with paarthurnax
emil shouldn't write anything big though. he is better at the smaller side stuff like dark brotherhood. he can't write a large story.

I'd say david lynch as well. Sometimes you just need a level headed second opinion to separate the wheat from the chaff and really showcase the good stuff. The problem with a lot of these great creative artists
(like you mentioned) is that they get too big for their own boots and are given more and more creative control because they're the "mind behind it all". This usually ends in ruin.

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incidentally, Spielburg always makes sure to make his daily reels a cooperative experience and credits many of his greatest successes to iron fisted editors. Ex. Jaws, which he said was basically made/saved by the film editor who refused to let them have the shark on screen because the animatron puppet they had looked retarded as fuck

>old guard leaving
I'm kind of snickering at this because Todd and co. were the new guard.
TES basically has three different periods - Arena to Battlespire, Redguard - Morrowind and Oblivion - present.

Peterson is probably the common denominator. He was there since Arena all the way to Oblivion. That's amazing.
He's one of the original trinity. It was Lefay, Peterson and that Indian dude who's name I forgot.
Then you had Todd, Kirkbride and Rolston.
Now it's Todd, Hines and Emil.

Also a shootout to Gary Noonan, he's been there since Battlespire to Oblivion. Altho he was light on lore work.

>redwood

nah it was good he left. it sounds like he was an autistic prick if he quit over something so stupid. and it was during tribunal's development not like later with oblivion or something. and there is a reason game studios don't hire lore people. because sometimes you want to try something new and different and you don't want to deal with someone's autism just because of a minor contradiction or retcon. these are games first and lore second.
and the khajiit race will be developed when we visit their location. the only reason why the dunmer are developed is because we visited their location.

hines is pr. i don't know why people bring him up in discussions about lore decisions or game development.

>the only reason why the dunmer are developed is because we visited their location
No. They're developed because the team was at their prime back then.

Oblivion added nothing about Imperials and Skyrim only partially developed nords (and needed a Kirkbride intervention to save it).

that is just wrong but ok

Fuck yeah

>Bethesda was about to go under. And that’s when ZeniMax Media got formed. I met with the key people — and they didn’t really know me then — to say: “What do you want to do?” For me, it was kind of a no-fear moment. “Well, it can’t get any worse, right? We’re about to go out of business, and now we have a lifeline, so you better take advantage of it.” It’s one of those things where you go through some tough times, development-wise, and when you’re given another shot, my view was not to be conservative.

Apparently people at Bethesda have been there for years, having a low turnover rate and a high rate of people staying there is really weird for a game company.

>And MK only got contracted for KotN.
He's responsible for some of the stuff in Skyrim's (heavily edited out) lore -- all the wall panels in the draugr tombs are his. What you can read of his take on their religion makes me wish it played a bigger part.

fuck you and fuck todd posters

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To be more pedantic, MK was contracted for base Oblivion as well. He wrote books such as Remanada and the main quest lore. In Skyirm, his stuff is in there because Kuhlmann and he are great friends and Kuhlmann is considered the internal loremaster at Bethesda.

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Based todd encouraging his team to get creative with humour instead of just throwing bland jokes in

Reminder that in about 12 more years, Skyrim will officially be soul

that's a modified version of an old dev trick. Because managers always meddle in shit, you put something obvious in your design that they'll have an issue with.
The first time I saw it it was called a "white dove" because this artist knew their boss was going to be a fuckwit so they put this obnoxious white bird on their character that would fly around in animations, and the boss told them to remove that instead of changing the content the artist actually wanted to keep

>all the wall panels in the draugr tombs are his
That's neat. I didn't know about that.
I know his Many Headed Talos made its way into Heimskr's speech.

Didn't he do Mankar Cameron's speech in paradise as well? I can remember reading somewhere that he trotted it out whilst high and was surprised they put it in unedited.

Yes, although I'm not willing to sift thru all the interviews to find which one is it.

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For me it was from day 1

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>over sandwiches
Oh my God, I can finally picture what's happening in this picture. What a time to be alive!

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He really is like Michael Scott isn't he

>Todd has this annoying habit of almost always being right. It’s infuriating, but he’s got the best game instincts of any human being I’ve ever met.

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Xbox is/was ahead of its time.

THINGS ARE WORSE THAN EVAR

youtube.com/watch?v=7xqfC80SRGU

wtf I love Polygon now

>Todd has this annoying habit of almost always being right. It’s infuriating, but he’s got the best game instincts of any human being I’ve ever met. He just knows when something’s gonna work, and you start to learn to trust that. It takes a while — you’ve gotta fight with him a few times. But he’s pretty amazing.

We memed so hard we altered his instinct. Now nothing works.

I'd vote for todd desu

In 2 more years it will officially be a 10 year old game that still holds 2 spots in the top 50 games being played on Steam Charts.

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>And what he cares about, at the end of the day, is making a good game: Are the mechanics fun? Is the game fun? And he did a lot of that by feel. He was a master of having a spreadsheet that ran every system of the game in Excel. And that’s not Ken. Ken cares about the worldbuilding — and he doesn’t even care about the story so much. He just wants to create all of these little threads and see how they’re going to unravel, and hint things to the player. It was funny when they argued, because they weren’t really speaking the same language a lot of the time.
Didn't someone here show a screenshot of a spreadsheet showing Morrowind's systems?
Todd? Is that really you?

DAILY REMINDER THAT TODD IS OUR GUY!
>Board of directors full of shitheaded hollywood jews, baseball players, a war-criminal and trumps brother(Cousin?) who don't give a flying FUCK about videogames
>Todd wants to make the videogames he wants to play
>Todd is the only reason 76 wasn't a total lootcrate fest, and actually has a way to earn things ingame. Zenimax wanted everything to come from lootboxes, similar to battlefront. Todd is the one man who stood in their way, and won.
>Todd is the only reason the dunmer haven't come back as a big bad
>Todd genuinly cares about his games
>Todd hires his down on their luck high school friends to work at Bethsoft
>Todd has never been in a scandal
>Todd told the truth about skyrim, You really could climb every single mountain in the game
Todd is just a kid from the 80'x who loved videogames and made it his career. Todd deserves only our love and admiration.

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kind of funny since in 10 years nobody will remember steam

winnie the pooh tiennamin square you slant eyed chink commie motherfucker

And Skyrim will be rereleased again.

Love him or hate him, you can’t deny the man has charisma.

That's a pretty good design approach.

>Todd hires his down on their luck high school friends to work at Bethsoft
And that's why the animations are so shit and that there's no ladders and lances.

>Michael Kirkbride: Todd was a great leader, even then. He’s probably one of the coolest people in gaming, man. He can keep everything in his head and still crack a joke. I love Todd. I still remember being really sad that I left, and he was like, “You’re the most creative person I’ve ever met.” And whenever I’m between gigs, or whenever I get really down, I’m like, “Yep. Todd Howard said that about me.” Fucking 20 years ago or whatever.

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absolutely fucking based

if the bethesda leaker is to be believed, they figured out ladders in december.

But yeah, that's why the animations are so jank. Todd just wants to help his old classmates.

That's actually a really good motivator.

for you

Todd is one of the good ones

Has he ever said anything about F76 post launch?

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reminder that Todd Howard came up with the Construction Set and programmed it himself.
>"at the time I was playing with a lot of mod stuff for various games, Myth was a game I loved that had plug-in architecture where you could download stuff that would change the game, but Morrowind was at the start of that project and it became, if we had a big tool that allows us to build it, that's where it's going to make the difference.
>"So I actually started coding and I started coding the construction set, I was inspired by the apple II Stuart Smith's adventure construction set"

Kek

Todd 2020

youtube.com/watch?v=XEWC5TLVocg

>4:00

>There was a time when Todd was just a huge nerd that loved making videogames with his huge nerd buddies
>Then Zenimax made him the poster boy of the studio and relegated him to a more managerial position so that he could also work with the PR team and appear at events and such
>One by one, his nerd buddies leave
>The games he loved so much are now hollow shells of their former glory
>Worse yet, the public blames him for it all
>Todd takes it though, as he still holds a faint hope that a day will come when he no longer has to parade and posture for his corporate overlords, a day when long lost friendships are mended and he gets to do what he truly loves again, with the people he loves
>Until that day, Todd will bear the brunt of the criticism directed at Bethesda

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>Todd’s going, “What the fuck happened in this design meeting? I have no design department.” And, as it turned out, Doug quit and stayed quit.
>He was just like, “You know what? This isn’t good for my health. I’m getting too stressed.”
>It got weird sometimes.

youtube.com/watch?v=GRz4FY0ZcwI

It's because he genuinely loves what he does. He's excited for his own games as much as people outside of BGS are. Add onto that a boatload of charisma, and a bunch of experience in the industry, and you get a Dev like him.

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76 was the best of a bad situation. It was entirely engineered by Zenimax. The board of directors studied what was making money with videogames at the time of FO4's release, and gave BethSoft a laundry list of bullshit. Lootcrates, unlockable perks through drops, forced PVP similar to DayZ and Rust, craftingshit, and basically said to the team "Make it happen or you're fired".

Todd stepped in and went to bat for them, and us. He used evidence like EA getting in trouble, even banned in belgium to make everything unlockable through in-game actions. Todd diddn't want to make F76, he wanted to make FO5. If Peter monyneux was in charge of FO76, you'd have to buy every perk, spend tokens for skillpoints you can only get from paying real world money, you'd have tons more bullshit.

If you can't see that, i don't know what to say. Funny todd howard memes aside, he really is a genuinely good guy.

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>>Todd hires his down on their luck high school friends to work at Bethsoft
That's fine and all but unless the company puts in the time to really teach, then he's sacrificing quality for being a nice guy.

Did you suck his dick yet?
Did he whisper into your ears, while you were doing it?

>The subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my God, it even has a watermark.

That's the point though. He'll go up against his bosses just to do right by someone.

>See calendar
>All day in meetings about how to sell the next game, how to minimize the backlash from F76, what to do and say at E3, etc
>Just want to sit with my buddies and code away a fun game
I've given Todd a lot of shit on here but he does seem like not only a good boss but someone you'd like to sit down and relax with.

Ok, where did you read that?

I 100% respect that side of him, and the low turn-over at Bethesda is a good indication that the team enjoys being there, but nowadays few companies put in any effort to teach its employees. Hopefully Todd does so with these friends, but the quality has very clearly gone down, in all areas.

What kind of autist makes this thread

Remember this guy?

Todd wrote him and every quest involving him

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I honestly found him really damn annoying and I didn't like him at all.

The quality of the models is going up. Look at wolves in skyrim vs wolves in 76. Look at dragons vs scorchbeasts.

Based chad Todd

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I don't think so Todd

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real and based
fake and cringe(formerly gay)

todd howard

Samefag weaving a narrative

what's that he's drinking?

For the most part, I disagree. But also that has more to do with console restrictions. It's easy to make a 50 million polygon model, incredibly detailed with all sorts of cool touches. The hard part is downsizing it. So more powerful console, more detailed models. Plus, they still fall short when you compare it to other games out there.

Also I forgot the image.

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Looks like a bottle of San Pellegrino.

Nuka-Cola

You have to remember that most games out there are not nearly as massive in scope as most Bethesda releases are.

it was in a bunch of interviews that they wanted to make perkcards lootbox drops. There's even lootboxes ingame called "Lunchboxes". But you can only obtain them in QASmoke.

That's design, not model.

I know, it was mostly for the joke.
Other AAA are, and their level of quality on the models in miles ahead of Bethesda.

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>handed out personalized business cards
What is this? American Psycho?

source?

I meant literal scope, not the amount of money and manpower put into the game. Bethesda games boast some of the biggest worlds in the industry, and they are handcrafted down to every single asset.

True, there are games that trump Bethesda even in this regard, but they are very rare and are considered literal masterpieces, partly due to that fact.

>Oh my god! It even has a link on where to buy Skyrim

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Oral History of Morrowind on Polygon.

>I meant literal scope, not the amount of money and manpower put into the game
So was I. Of all the good things people can say about Bethesda, their in-game models aren't anything to write home about. They're serviceable, although they can also be incredibly retarded. Just ask /k/ about Bethesda guns.

Underrated

Most AAA games these days are either multiplayer games confined to isolated matches in small to fairly large maps, or much more compact and on-the-rails experiences than the average Bethesda game. Even 76, as abysmal as it is, is a larger game, in terms of actual landmass and content (I use the term content loosely here, to mean different locales and such) than most of its contemporaries.

Out of recent games, only RDR2 could boast to have more to it in terms of sheer volume.

I'll use the obvious comparison of Witcher 3, a 4 year old game. Seriously, whether it's Skyrim, Fallout 4 or 76, their models aren't anything special, they serve their purpose but can be disappointing, specially when you see how cool the concept art for them can be.

> I give Todd a lot of credit for the unanalyzable skill of hitting the sweet spot for delivering, just at the last moment in your schedule, what you said you were going to develop.

todd's main skill

Witcher 3 is considered an exceptional game and an achievement unto itself. Same with RDR2.

It's almost like it is supremely difficult to create large worlds AND have it all look nice and be well animated, and when someone succeeds at it, it is seen as a major accomplishment. I am not making the claim that Bethesda models are great, I am saying that considering the sizes of their undertakings, it is pretty reasonable for them to be lacking in some areas. Witcher 3 and RDR2 do not sacrifice anything and still manage to have massive worlds, and they are rightfully lauded for it.

>It's almost like it is supremely difficult to create large worlds AND have it all look nice and be well animated
So yeah, not what Bethesda does. I've seen some of Bethesda's renders for models, those can be impressive, but in-game, not really. Maybe because their engine can't stand more, which wouldn't surprise me, but I still stand by what I said. Their models, in-game, are decent, nothing you wouldn't expect from a studio that works with 3D games. And this without going into some of the models' retarded logic. Again, just ask /k/.

The guns in Bethesda fallouts are not bad models, they are bad designs.

A leak? What's this?

Their design should be taken into account when saying whether it's a good model. But even ignoring that, the models are just alright.

Witcher 3 is pretty but how hard is it to make sure the cutscenes play at the right time?
There is a reason Bethesda games are always discussed and Witcher 3 is largely forgotten.. even here.

awhile back, around the time F76 was released, there was this one bethesda leaker. Might of been a larper, but everything he said was belivable enough.

He went on about how starfield just wasn't possible on the creation engine, and how the suits diddn't want to switch engines because they diddnt want to pay for more dev tools. He said that blades was delayed because it was utterly boring as it was completely devoid of content in november when it was supposed to be released.

I'd unironically vote for Todd Howard as US president. The memes here would be great.

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H-has Toddposting returned? I thought it had finally died by following FO76 into its early grave. Is this truly the return of Yea Forums's baneposting?

>There is a reason Bethesda games are always discussed
Threads actually talking about good stuff in Bethesda games are rare. They're either toddposting or talking about how shit their games can be. Or their latest bug, or how they're suing a company for reusing their code, downright to knowing its the same code because it has the same bugs, etc.

It's a shame all of his games after Morrowind suck dick through a straw

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it was a fucking obvious larper because he spoke like a retard who clearly doesn't know how game development works. he kept talking about the engine like it was a was a fucking internet browser that they could just download a different one and use. or he said they got space ship combat working on another engine, like that that is a problem solved in a weekend.
the reason they keep using their engine is because of the editor. it is the only one that lets them create massive amounts of content very quickly.

I have never bought a bethesda game, and I never will.

????
Lurk moar

Always bet on Todd.

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