Fallout London hype🗣️

@@biosupdate7449 Don't get hyped for big mods, most of the time they never happen and the few that have come out have been pretty mediocre, only ones that have been good are the tamriel rebuilt mods for morrowind.

@@honeybadger6275 in my heart I know you’re right but the truth hurts man😭🤣

@@biosupdate7449 At least you're willing to listen and don't call me a hater like a lot of bethesda cult members. Its not like I take joy in this, I'm just a former fan of their games.

I love how even that statement feels 20 years too late 😂 Like where have you been? That challenge was completed at least a decade ago

It wouldn't be the first time someone misapplied the idea of KISS to justify / "mask" their idiotic incompetence and laziness, and it won't be the last. It's really sad that people overlook the actual context for the reasoning of KISS and instead just mindlessly use it as a mantra.

KISS does still apply to writers. Do not overcomplicate your wording for no reason nor should you overconplicate motives. People are simple and have simple desires, the mechanisms of achieving desire are what makes a person complicated. A rich mans happiness is involved with gorging his ever expanding hunger for the lixurious while a peasant enjoys a family. Both achieve happiness but both have viscerally different mechanisms of achievement.

There is a difference between ""don't make it more complex than it needs to be" and "don't make it complex, period" that Emil does not seem to appreciate. Ultimately Kelly still made jets, not hot air balloons.

@@loserinasuit7880 Overcomplication is fine, it's how well you execute it and what's your target audience is. Was the rich man born greedy, did his previous life make him obsess with hoarding wealth, is it a survival mechanism, is it peer pressure, is it to compensate for something, is it because wealth is the measure of worth in his environment... all of them? And that's before we get into motive change over the course of the story or characters less conventional for their environment. Or if the creators want the audience to understand complex causes. If you look at the motive we have as human being, it seems like simple urges/pathos, but behind the scene, the causes are myriads and interconnected. There's also the other side of overcomplication. Deliberately release information scarcely, indirectly, unconventionally (sounds cues, structure, visual, pattern, meta...) and force the audience to piece it together. As always, how well an idea can be executed matter most.

@mdd4296 Overcomplication is not fine. Complex and complication are not the same words.

Maybe you would know if you were a car manufacturer but you aren’t, so shut up.

@@bupbuppington4501 You don't need to be an engineer to know the Pinto was a poorly designed automobile.

Elon Musk lmao

Tesla moment

Agreed, that whole "making games is hard, you guys" excuse they use all the time is peak comedy, in no other section of society would such a pathetic excuse work outside of gaming making. "I am sorry that the shopping mall collapsed on itself but making buildings is hard, you guys. Why did we use cheap material as foundation? You are just a hater".

I'd like to think the programmers removed the magic functions AFTER finding out Emil wanted to turn Fallout 4 into Skyrim with guns. Maybe they realized how stupid it would make them all look, scrapped the functions, then told Emil it can't be done.

I can just imagine the poor programmer, having to bullshit his way out of going along with Emil's whim, just so he can retain whatever little sanity this game still had.

Perfectly put, well written :D I didn't know about this, and it's hilarious :D

When I saw the Salem Museum I thought there was going to be a quest about finding a synth(instead of a witch) but no, fight a deathclaw by circling around a pillar til it dies

In China stories have no substance, they are meaningless and childlike. There is a reason for this, and I suspect BGS's writing is safe, and boring for similar reasons.... It doesn't offend anyone or take any stance on anything.

There's a pattern for elder senior devs and artists that are pushed out the industry in some way or another: contractually obligated(enslaved) by NDA to stay silent or play along, blacklisted, demotivated to the point it ruins one's dream to make a sequel to his old IP, slander a reputation acquired earnestly, getting blacklisted just as or in consequence to a few of these example. Marty, Avelonne, American McGee, Mick Gordon, some old members of Troika and much more. Some of them even get slandered by a new generation of young Devs with a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome, because one of these Elders had standards and dared to tell them how to do their job correctly. It is sickening and something is afoot in the current ways this industry works.

@@camraid9 Have you ever read xianxia/wuxia? They are anything but "mild and safe". The "good guy" is like someone running an evil RPG playthrough most of the time.

​@camraid9 if china werent involved, Emil would still be a shit writer. Actual children's story are safe as can be and tend to have better quality writing.

We all know why: Emil is much cheaper.

Well... Find my dad Find my son Find my thing

Dont get me started on "starborn" Someone called this out on the OG starfield teaser years ago

Don’t forget the members of the Dark Brotherhood in both Oblivion and Skyrim, there’s the brute who doesn’t care for stealth, the Argonian shadow scale, the poison Master, the wizard, the fanatic who we’re led to believe is the traitor, and the high ranking member who’s the real traitor. They both even have a vampire who’s exactly 300 years old, except in Skyrim he made the vampire a little girl which... yeah I’m not touching that with a 20ft pole.

It's like poetry, it rhymes.

Not only that but they made the son an old man and called him "father". Imaginatively unimaginative

Real astronauts got to seamlessly fly to the moon, without 5 loading screens.

@@honeybadger6275 Well they did kinda sit through a 3 day long elevator loading screen to get there.

Not to mention the fear and constant mortal peril they were in heading to the moon in the technological equivalence of a wristwatch garbage can.

And were rewarded to do so.

They had a moon buggy to ride as well iirc

I really don't get what he got out of his little rant...is his ego so massive he couldn't help but stroke it ? Because now he puts a huge bullseye on his back by putting himself in public. I always called out Emil as the main reason why Bethesda is incompetent but now even casual players are starting to know Emil's failures.

Like smooth little babies.

@@KikyouNeko assuming Emil is legitimately the real problem. I pray he gets removed before TES 6 gets too far ahead 😭 I practically have an associates degree in elder scrolls lore and I couldn’t stand to see it massacred

@@woodlefoof2 My good dude, their last lorehead expert, Kurt Kuhlmann has left Bethesda right at the day of Starfield release, he was "let go", basically fired... Now Emil has full reigns over TES lore to himself, Todd is too busy playing CEO so Emil is basically the game director now.

@@KikyouNeko 😭 it’s joever

I think they had writers who cared in Morrowind and Oblivion, and sometimes even in Skyrim, but you're right that Fallout was mostly meh, and their new original world was a blob of nothing. Writing aside, something that really kills Starfield is that there are far better space games, like No Man's Sky, or the less accessible Elite: Dangerous, which barely lean on story at all like Starfield pretends to

@@robjsmiles Oh yeah I guess my comment could be seen that way since it was so negative. I believe there were and maybe even still are people that care, but they’re not in charge and if that doesn’t change well…the video explained that thought quite thoroughly already.

@@robjsmiles I know it has gotten miles better since launch but it's kinda sad that NMS is held up as a better game. I remember the mess it was at launch.

Exactly.

@@oz_jones It still is a mid game at best. I remember I bought it after it was "fixed", for like 6$ and its a shalllow nothing.

a decent man wouldn't say it just works either

Glad Pete is gone

@@AnarchicArachnid gone?

​@@syndicalistcat3138obliterated

@@syndicalistcat3138 Retired in October.

Put it in a bowl and Emil would say it is soup.

@@asbergan No, he'd make an entire main storyline where factions argue if it's soup or not and if it deserves to be treated equally to other dishes

@@Adrian2140 Don’t forget the twist near the end, concluding that it is actually a beverage!

@@asbergan "But I thought we're talking about soup." "Eh, you wouldn't understand, shut up and build."

​@@Adrian2140don't forget the critique to capitalism

It's not really a contradiction. The characters in the game assume that the vault is an underground paradise because all they know of the vaults are the propaganda leaflets left over in the ruins, and the accounts of the control vaults that actually opened up again after the war. As three dog keeps saying on the radio, no-one knows what happened down there for James and then for your character to leave. They just assume you left by choice because it didn't even occur to them that the inside of the vault could be just as dangerous as the outside.

@@duskmare0000 he's speaking of how you can't tell your dad about why you really left the vault, not telling your lifestory to some random hobos in the wasteland

@@duskmare0000it’s not that the characters don’t understand, it’s that you can’t explain to them that you were running for your life.

I wouldn't be super surprised if the entirety of the vault escape was added after those dialogues, and nobody bothered to go back and patch things up.

​@@duskmare0000 dude literally writting the game for bethesda, what a proud shill

There must be a conspiracy about higher ups all banding together and firing off talented staff to "keep the status quo" of stale garbage.

It's because Microsoft owns Bethesda now, and they're far too hands off, so incompetence is a guarantee at this point no matter how bad it effects things. Do you think Mojang would survive either under another company or independently when they couldn't even get a full Minecraft update out in 4 years, pandemic or not? Fuck no, they'd be gone. Think 343 would've been allowed to ruin what was Xbox's flagship franchise for over a decade to the point people only play it cause it's "free" on gamepass? No, they'd be fired. Microsoft, at this point, no matter what's happening internally at Bethesda, is the problem now.

It's not a conspiracy, it's the rule for the industry at large. Outside some studio like nintendo, game industry job is a revolving door so the employer can keep cost down (hire more junior staff, fire more experienced/expensive one) or senior leave by themselves to get a better position elsewhere. Emil climbed Bethesda quite early during the 2000s, Todd even earlier, they are in a positions that set for life.

@@Fuzzycatfur They did mention a couple years back they wanted to be more hands-on with the developers since the previous approach was failing, but no changes seem to have been made.

I've always thought that their games didn't have the best writing, but they did well enough to the point where the player could want to speculate on the story details, and I love the speculation videos I love the theories and investigations, so the writing may not be that great when it comes to the narrative in the actual game, but going off of other stories and other books and secrets within the game it always added up to a very well crafted story that's going on and then has been going on for thousands of years in the established lore of the series. Now I haven't played starfield, so I have no idea what that even looks like except for from other people's playthroughs and their experiences of the dialogue, now it's true that I know that Bethesda have kind of downgraded some of their choices, and those aspects I don't necessarily like, because they go after the narrative more than they go after choices for the game play aspects, so in that sense I would agree that's where some bad habits come into play in their games. I think one thing to take into consideration is the fact that this is a video game, it's not meant to be a movie, it's not meant to be a TV show, it's meant to be a role-playing video game, where we have silly choices and silly game design, and people liked it in the past so the only difference is people not liking it now based off of other games as the result, and also getting rid of other mechanics of the game used to have that people loved, although I will say for Oblivion I didn't like to persuasion check it was absurd to use that system, and yet some older Gamers really loved that mechanic, for me that mechanic was paying NPC some money in order to get in their good graces and compliment them, and it made no sense at all during the dialogue of whatever you were talking about in order to change their point of view of you, I thought it was kind of silly but it is a video game video games have funky mechanics every once in awhile.

Todd: "Emil, the game's got a 29% post-launch approval rate." Emil: "And I guess that just isn't good enough for some assholes!!!"

Haha that’s like straight from the channel Terrible Writing Advice. Always blame the reader because you, the author, can’t be wrong.

@@kotzpenner It really is. I'm pretty sure he says something very close to that during his how to respond to criticism video.

I gave up after FO4. That game is already a dumpster fire but barely salvageable with hundreds of mods. Anything after that, I didn't even bother touching

Something something the cream rises until it spoils.

I just read a comment what say both in Oblivion and Skyrim the traitor was the leader, all member was the same in both games and they even have a 300 years old vampire member in both games.

It was such a shame to hear Will Shen left Bethesda after Starfield. He was the one hope I had for their future (especially if he were to replace Emil). Now it all just feels like such a waste.

@@Zodroo_Tint I’m like 90% sure that might’ve been my comment you saw. The traitor in Oblivion’s Brotherhood isn’t *the* de-facto leader of the Brotherhood like Astrid is in Skyrim, but they are a member of the black hand who are the highest ranked members aside from the listener.

Spoiler alert: All twinkies taste like shit.

not sure what you are talking about. i have never eaten a twinky and i am pretty sure it tastes like shit, so...

@@udozocklein6023 I love seeing schizophrenic non-sequitur replies like this

isn't it a sweet? like, full of sugar? clearly tastes like shit - no need to try. doesn't make me crazy or schizo^^@@macalvand

@@udozocklein6023 this follow up reply has proven @macalvand's judgement of your mental state, though I'm sure (to some extent) it was a joke

It's a real shame Bethesda only made that "mistake" once, giving us New Vegas. Obsidian even offered to make an Elder Scrolls games to fill the wait gap, but they never got a response

Thing about that is the leads at Obsidian that made New Vegas as good as it was are no longer at the company and their last game was fairly mediocre and forgettable

​@@kakyointhemilfhunter4273that's a shame, honestly the only reason I was hyped for outer worlds to begin with was with their previous work.

@@lamlelamatsiliza8550They sold the game as being "from the people that made Fallout" when the vast majority of those people weren't working there. Deceptive marketing at its best.

@@kakyointhemilfhunter4273 right. some of my favorite games of all time, kotor 2 and fo:nv were made by obsidian. those guys who made those games possible aren't there anymore. the old heads that made gaming great have long since left.

Because people believe it can't be done better

there arent that many defenders when you look at how the hype cycle for starfield played out

​@vietimports I dunno, the overwhelming consensus I hear is "Starfield is a great game" Admittedly, the correlation between those who think that and also think Skyrim is an excellent rpg is very, very high.

@@bchin4005 i mean, starfield has a 66% rating on steam, was nominated for 1 award at the game awards and didnt win it, and its player count has dropped to 10k on steam. for reference baldurs gate 3 still hits 200k. i think the 'overwhelming consensus' is that it is an aggressively average game with outdated game design, evidenced by the myriad of youtube videos roasting the game for months

​​@@vietimportsit's nice to see how the talk around their games has shifted. I'm hoping it pushes them to actually try with ES6 but I'm not expecting it. I'm glad Baldurs Gate 3 happened this year, really shows how good an RPG can be.

I don't need a Ph.D. in Meteorology to know when it's raining.

kinda feel like Emil is disconnected from the realities of playing video games, tbh

@@froggystyle9068you don’t think my idea of having a vault full of twitch streamers has any potential😭

⁠@@froggystyle9068There's an old adage from some creatives - audiences are GREAT and identifying exactly what they don't like, but pretty bad at proposing good alternatives. I dunno, the shitty amateurs might not be making much better stuff, but they're not asking me to pay $70 for their work either

@@froggystyle9068 I mean, I'd think it's more fitting that they're trash writers, too. There's the old saying, "it takes one to know one," so not surprising that they couldn't write themselves out of a pre-solved word puzzle, and detecting that quality in one of their own.

That a game design decision not a writing one

@@j0nnyism That's not true at all. They are interlaced. If they aren't you get Deus Ex Human Revolution.

​@@j0nnyismif you're a writing lead on a project you ARE a game designer.

Also Emil's insipid reduction to bad guy/good guy everything is extremely uncompelling. New Vegas was superb because, no matter who you agreed or disagreed with, you could see the solid reasoning behind the NCR, the Legion, and House. Even when Caesar is crucifying and enslaving people, your first conversation with him reveals "huh, he makes some good points, and I can see why he could gather a following." Even when Ulysses or Elijah try to kill you I find it impossible to truly hate them because they're so fleshed out and you can sympathize with their motivations. Meanwhile, Fallout 3 and 4 reduce the BoS and Enclave to lawful good and chaotic evil and are completely tainted going forward... one of Emil's worst crimes.

​@@TaRAAASHBAGS Even one of your possible companions like Rose say how safe legion territory is for trading caravans and she's a trader by profession. She also has a lot of negative things to say about the legion too. It is not so black and white. There is an entire questline dedicated towards fixing N.C.R. corruption regarding the trading caravans. You can't compare Bethesda's storytelling to New Vegas.

@@whitegoose2017 I was just a preteen when I played Fallout 3 so I wasn't too conscious of what a good story/writing was. When I played NV a few years later I was woken up to how shit the previous title's narrative was. New Vegas's writing and worldbuilding are superb.

Hunter's diaries are actually pretty interesting 4th wall breaking because they tell the player what is the point of playing the game, because the player will be repeating the hunt for the artifacts over and over again till he/she is so bored he will do something else with their lives.... Sometimes with the followers, sometimes all alone... finding out there is no point to do it over and over again...

@@MirecU Maybe if he had any concept of game design beyond shit radiant fetch quests he'd understand why it's not pointless to a lot of people. Always good to be an "artist" with contempt for your audience.

AS IF he *never* got called a Ni*ger or F**got in a CoD lobby. WE ALL COLLECTIVELY SAW PEOPLE GET BEHEADED IN EXECUTION VIDEOS. We got Broad-spectrum censorship and absolute "political correctness" stamping out creativity and NOW its a wild west? 🤣

Hes just a sensitive lil guy who can't take any sort of criticism

he just spits bullshit internet is way too safe these days

@@komikop literally. If there was *ANY* time period of the Internet that was a "wild west", it will have been that decade-and-a-bit from the very late 90's to around 2012

An afternoon in gamefaqs was like ww1 for him I bet.

I dunno, I feel like I could use a pat on the back when I drop a huge deuce lol Seriously though, like you said, hard work doesn't equal good work. I'm tired of people saying "I/they worked really hard on that!" So? I could work really hard building a car, doesn't mean people would/should trust that it's any good.

Emil Pagliarulo: the living, breathing proof that the labor theory of value is absurd nonsense.

​@@OuroborosChokedWell he would be told to fuck off to mop floors even under perfect commmunism, beeing good for absolutely nothing else

"My bum has been a bum for a long time, but that doesn't mean I have to listen to anything it says." All the deflection of criticism oozing from him is sickening. I'm not a helicopter pilot, but if I see one in a tree...

@@OuroborosChoked Only said by scammers who try to delude you from thinking about the point of LTV: getting rid of overvalue of parasitic classes (bankers, rentiers and politicians) and undervalue of critical jobs (farmers, production and maintenance workers).

It comes off especially douchey when you, as someone criticizing his writing, are yourself *actually making a game* (hi im doing that (mainly as a personal project at the moment))

lol the unoffical elder scrolls pages should change their name to the official elder scrolls pages

@@honeybadger6275 straight up.

@@contramachina354 Then microsoft should fire everyone that works for bethesda and just license out the fallout and elder scrolls ip to a few dozen different studios and we might get 1-2 decent games over the next 10 years.

​@@honeybadger6275Fallout by Larian Studios... Can you imagine? 🤤

@@NostraDavid2 You'd probably be able to have sex with deathclaws or something messed up like that knowing those pervs.

I was getting sick of the memeing on Bethesda's buggy releases as well, it's not supposed to be funny. Todd Howard jokingly saying "yeah our games got some bugs" during the FO76 conference was embarrassing as hell, got really tired of the "hahah that's our Bethesda!" attitude from fans. It's about time people are finally gettting fed up with it.

@@AuXiiLia nobody is getting tired of bethesda games being buggy. You’re wrong for thinking they are. Bethesda games being buggy is completely and utterly okay with everyone. Skyrim was an early 2010s game that you could play on the 360 or ps3. That is insane, it was the best of the whole genre for a long time and frankly this wasn’t even the first time bethesda had made games that can be described that way. Morrowind, to this days does a lot of things that aren’t rivaled even today. Daggerfall even has levels of freedom in creating a character that you wont find anywhere except pen and paper rpgs and even THEN SOME. Bethesda games being buggy is absolutely fine because they’re supposed to make games that people still like in 10 years because even in 10 years games just struggle to match some of the aspects they got so right. They are ambitious in a way that is unique. Its okay for the games to be buggy. The reason people are mad is because the games Bethesda are making now feel like slop and for some reason the unambitious slop STILL has the same amount of bugs

@@AuXiiLia The games, especially 76, had far worse problems than bugs. If anything, the bug thing is often a distraction and misdirection. "it's a bethesda game" excuse was often used for basic features being terrible or badly done, as well.

​@tillburr6799 This argument doesn't work when bugs are being ported over from past games. People are definitely sick of the rampant bugs that would be found in an hour of playtesting.

@@franzosisch5965 nope. Argument still works.

There are two types of writers - the one who makes an intricate magic system full of rules/cause and effect, akin to real life physics, and the ones who use magic as an excuse to handwave plotholes and stuff they can't be bothered to explain

Harry Potter probably is the second of those two. After reading five of the books, I couldn't be bothered to continue.@@Homiloko2

@@adelram9299 I read the first one as a teen and was utterly bored by it, but granted I was a bit past the target audience age. Maybe I should give it a new chance?

​@@oz_jones you're better off watching the films first. The first 2 are abit childish but it's far less daunting than a book.

Thank you! I'm in a publishing company's discord, Nat 1 Publishing, and the founder has an original setting he made called Faewalk. Well, one of the other guys in this discord will fight tooth and fucking nail to keep interesting explanations from happening. "It faewalk, it's kooky crazy, a wizard did it." I seriously disliked the setting until bossman (the name I gave the founder) explained that serious stories do happen. I read some of the stories that take place, and all I can think is that I am home in Skyrim/Cyrodiil once more and we call it Faewalk. Do not ignore consistency. Consistency rewards diligent audiences. Diligent audiences are life support for any work.

Holy cow, this is so much better. Like a bunch of organised thugs think they can clean up by pretending to be the brotherhood and then they start getting picked off and you have to uncover the truth and then decide where your loyalties lie. That's so much better.

I mean, he did say that he didn't know the lore, and even if he did, someone at the studio said that they don't have to abide by literally everything. They can or they don't. For those who don't they can do whatever they want. Emil maybe did that because he doesn't know it and just went with his experiences as a Catholic boy. Too bad he couldn't do the game version of Spotlight because you know....

Man, that would have been an incredible, stupendous twist for teenage me playing Oblivion

@@damienrichards9743 i think hiring a guy who doesn't know the lore or care about it to expand on the lore and having him write the storylines for every quest is a super good idea

@@youngruger77 Tell that to either Rolston or Gooddall (I think that's how you spell his last name. PatricianTV said something about one of them saying they can either diverge from the lore or not have to do anything with it and do something new entirely. That and someone wrote a book named Coda where you can essentially choose which story and mods to be your preferred 'canon' so Emil took that literally and here we are....) Or any of the more experienced writers/designers before they left the studio for other endeavors. Just another excuse to justify "hey i can do whatever i want and there's literally nothing you can do about it". Much love and respect.

His backtracking on it is so fucking funny too

@@CatManThree’oh nooo my character I wrote to be a morally good family loving war hero now looks like a war criminal’

@@vickkyytoria Funny thing is all of that could be avoided if he stfu and stayed silent. Really he's jealous he didn't write the script for Fallout TV show.

Todd and Emil want Fallout to have been their series that they created from the start, not just a series that they bought from a defunct studio.

@@eleven99 You mean demolish legacy that was before their time?

Can't even write themselves out of being a bad writer lol

"Writing is hard and I'm also not criticizing others who have a hard job."

The only thing I disagreed with was his take on the DB questline; the entire questline is intentionally geared towards making you feel like an evil villain, and honestly it was a lot of fun. The dinner party quest is probably my favorite in the entire game. The instance of the Kahjit acting friendly all of a sudden was NOT implemented to make you "feel bad," it was classic dark humor to make the player go "it's a bit late for that buddy." Imagine playing through the DB oblivion questline as a moralist lol. Oblivion itself is filled with moments like this that fans love. I feel like he intentionally misrepresented the obvious tone just because he didn't like the writer. This does not however invalidate his other points.

@@joeking6972 I agree that, to me at least, the first half of the dark brotherhood quests were actually decently written. However, that was also creetosis' point. The "dinner party" was also part of that first half, so your point there is moot. These were "decent" because they weren't really doing any heavy lifting in terms of overall plot or story, as these were all quests disconnected from one another aside from making progress within the DB hierarchy. Here, it really is just the quest design team that was doing all the work. It's when the questline tries to push forward an actual narrative that things quickly fall apart. COULD there be an instance where the cheydinhall DB has to be purged and you get the ugly task to do it? Sure. Would that make the player feel bad and have them question things? Sure. But it's not the premise that is the problem, it's the execution. The writing takes a dive into bullshit plottwists and plot contrivances after the dead drops start to change. The fact the player can't really interract with anybody about the obviously changed letters is annoying. The fact the characters within this questline do horribly ridiculous and unprofessional things despite the critical position they are in, is silly. The fact that the player is always JUST too late to influence the outcome of everything is contrived. The fact Lucien Lachance never noticed treachery is amateurish at best. The fact the other brotherhood hand members IMMEDIATELY killed an otherwise trustworthy and loyal subject, without questioning him and without investigating it themselves, is blatantly absurd. (To add to this: the manner in which you get recruited by lachance is also patronizing and silly. Not to mention the fact you can't report the brotherhood in any way to the authorities is stupid. Your point about playing as a moralist only serves to highlight this issue. It is blatantly impossible to play the dark brotherhood questline and pretend you're doing anything morally upright, unless you PRETEND that you are infiltrating the organization to bring about it's downfall. But PRETENDING and ROLEPLAYING are two very different things. The game fails at the last part if it's the player that has to pretend things are happening in their head.) And lastly, the fact that the night mother claims, at the end of all things, that everything was planned, it was all destiny, and anyway she knew about the traitor all along, TRUST ME BRO is the dumbest and most unneccesary shit ever. It doesn't add anything of substance to the plot, it just adds plotholes and another patronizing message of "you don't have any control, player." THIS is the issue. If your writing ONLY serves as a means to an eventual end, you might get away with people not noticing just how badly written the middle part is. And it absolutely is. This is why people have ignored the DB questline's shittier aspects, because the first half is decent and the shocking nature of plottwists and apparant tragedy is distracting enough in the second half that people simply didn't notice. And then there's the people that just attempt to rationalize and justify the bad writing afterwards. If bad writing is not adressed properly by the fanbase, how can we expect things to improve?

@@RedFloyd469 Lucien never noticing until it was too late is definitely a legitimate criticism but does kind of make sense as he wasn't expecting such a high ranking devotee of Sithis to be a traitor. People become so comfortable in their positions and "default to truth" when suspecting someone, especially someone they know, of treachery leading to chronic denial until it's too late. This is a prominent feature of abvse cases and there's a book called "Talking to Strangers" that goes more in depth into this topic. The part with the Kahjit was still never meant to "guilt trip" you, and even if you were playing as a moralist this guy is as evil as they come anyway so the criticism still doesn't hold as you'd be doing the world a favor. Infiltrating the brotherhood in order to bring about it's downfall feels kind of silly if you're actively taking contracts on what are quite possibly completely innocent people. The option to report them instead as you've suggested is far better. I don't think that it's a flaw in and of itself that you can't play through the questline as a double agent, it's more that the game doesn't give you an option between join them or don't. This is relatively acceptable however though because in order to discover them you need to commit a certain crime, which isn't something a moralist character would do to begin with. It's perfectly fine to address bad writing, and as I've previously stated I agree with his other points, but I find that when someone doesn't like somebody else they tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater and miss what's right in front of them. It's important to criticize someone when need be, while also remaining judicious in their appraisal. Otherwise they just come off as a hater and risk polarizing those on the fence in the interest of preaching to the choir, even if most of their points are solid. I think it's quite clear that he was not interested in changing anyone's mind with this video, rather he merely wanted to reinforce what most people already thought, people love having their suspicions confirmed. If he had published this video a few years ago I think we all know that the outcome would have been much different, it's just socially acceptable to condemn anything and everything related to this person now. He still would have been right on most points, but would have also been motivated to think through each of his points more. I should have been more clear that I did not mean the entire questline, only several points that he mentioned. I clearly wrote "DB questline" when I should have clarified specific parts rather than the whole. I agree with you on everything else, though.

Wait a minute, yeah! That's even established that earlier with Moira, why didn't they do that?

@@tentacledood5784Bethesda: Errrrrr…. Too much work and it’ll make us actually write something half decent.

That wouldn't have worked. Enclave is a huge stickler about "the purity of man" and as such, having a ghoul as one of their visible heads would go against that. Now, what would work is if he had been augmented with enclave tech to replace his irradiated parts. Sort of a Frank Horrigan deal but done for preservation's sake, rather than to make a secret service super soldier.

​@@TheAdmantArchvileCrap, good point.

@@TheAdmantArchvile Offshoot of Enclave, the Exclave. Like the Outcasts in F3.

It's a narcissistic response. I've had relatives that I hated because they'd say that, instead of accepting that they'd done something wrong. "I'd like to see you do better" is best answered with "It's not my job to do your work for you". If I was as bad as my job as Emil is at his, then I'd be referring to my current employment in the past tense.

I go through my scripts for youtube videos repeatedly and sometimes have to rewrite or even outright cut big segments.

that's not really the same as having it peer critiqued.... you're just going over your writing without external criticism (which imo it needs)@@Creetosis

I get the impression that Emil does exactly two passes when he writes. He does a first draft, and then he goes back over to spackle some glib efforts to chide anyone who points out the obvious solution to his setup.

"Shakespeare? Who's that guy?"

Emil is the kind of person to say Homer was a hack because the Iliad being written in rhyme was a gimmick to overcompensate lmfao

same thing happened with the halo and witcher tv shows lol, these writers think they can do better than the source material their show was greenlit off of

Considering how bad Morrowind is, that says a lot.

I’ve cared more about continuity when writing some silly story using someone else’s world in some silly corner of the internet, than this guy does writing for a beloved world from a meaningful work of fiction.

i think this can be attributed to separate people doing the guild quests, Emil, if i remember only did the Dark Brotherhood in Oblivion

@@alshabib5849 Yeah, I could see how the guilds existed in the void, their questlines completely apart from each other, main or sidequests. This was literally the only point where one guild questline touched another, and they still botched it.

​@@sharpfang In Morrowind one of the Fighters Guild leaders sends you out to eliminate a Thieves Guild leader. This actually breaks the Thieves Guild storyline making you unable to progress in the Guild. There are many other such interactions in Morrowind, thus providing replayability. In Oblivion/Skyrim all playthroughs are the same. You do the quests almost the same way.

​@@alshabib5849this is why internal documentation is important

​@@whitegoose2017"Almost" is an understatement. What really is there in terms of decisions? Stormcloaks or imperial, dark brotherhood member or getting rid of them (and i don't remember if destroying the dark brotherhood has more than 1 quest even) and sparing or killing parthanux.. Is there actually more? If so it not memorable in the least. To this day i don't understand how people have like 500hours in this game, you do and see the same stuff over and over again

Emil and Todd glare at you in long, uncomfortable silence, turn to each other, scowl, then look back at you: "You're fired,' Todd says. 'So anyway', Emil says, turn to Todd, 'I'll just have Fawkes say something about it being the player's destiny or something' Todd stands up and claps his hands: 'Brilliant', he says, pointing at Emil, 'that's why I love you man, you think of this shit. Alright lunchtime guys I'm thinking Mexican'

@@DougWIngate Yeah... It just works, doesn't it?

Still need to change stuff for Charon and RL-3 then because it's stupid for them too.

I just watched the video. They could have easily explained why you couldn't use same drug as Autumn did by just having it break in the siege / fight with you or him just consuming it beforehand to account for possibility that he would have no time to find magic drug in his jacket and inject it if he would need to get into Project Purity so that you either find him with a broken or empty syringe. Like, it is completely believable that either would happen and easy to implement without changing much of dialogue or inventory for that to be in game. 0 fucks being given on culmination of your story is truly a peak of writing.

These people. Do not. Care. They're activists here to break the toys you remember from childhood when you don't play with them how they want you to.

Reminds me of drama class in jr highschool. I was lazy and thought "I won't write anything down. I'll just wing it on stage". Yeah, I'm terrible at improvising lol but I still did it whenever I could because Im lazy and didn't really care.

@@rclaws3230 How are they activists?

@@flowerthencrranger3854 It's called Critical Theory and it's a religion that hates White Straight Men and anything they may have produced. Replace with particular lever of grievance most likely to effectively attack Straight White Men.

​@@rclaws3230What do you even mean by Bethesda being activists? And what does that have to do with providing internal documentation for game production back in 2006?

Todd is like those big mouth midgets from high school spent entire junior high got stuffed in locker room

People: Emil, your writing sucks you incompetent hack! Emil: Hey now! That is a bit unfair, don't you think? This was a team effort. I'd almost be pissed if I was part of that team, with him deflecting his failures onto the whole group. Kind of the opposite of what a good leader would do.

Out of interest, since I haven't played it and I'm in no rush, I just googled "Starfield story inconsistencies" and it seems there's a whole bunch of stuff, and this is in a completely brand new game for a completely brand new IP - so them using the other IP being 20+ years old as an excuse is pretty feeble. if anything, having a wealth of existing documentation about the world should make it easier to be consistent, not harder. I guess Emil would rather tear that existing documentation up and make paper aeroplanes out of it than read it. Hmm, where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, that's what he accused players of doing with his stories - I guess it's all projection with this guy. He doesn't seem to have an iota of love for the franchises under his care, he's just in it for the money.

The peeps behind the HALO show should take note of this.

Lack of respect for what was written prior sums up the vast majority of Bethesda's involvement with Fallout. It's the main reason supermutants, the BoS, and the Enclave showed up in Fallout 3 and 76 (and why the first two showed up in 4). Bethesda thinks that those factions and facets of the lore are what make Fallout, when that's not really the case. The primary driving force behind the classic fallout games are the communities and peoples you come across, how they developed in the wasteland, and their troubles. Respecting the franchise would be leaving the classic Fallout elements to the classics, while making their own compelling stories, factions, and communities to populate their own games.

As an addendum, this is why many people say that the NuWasteland games fit better with the Fallout setting than Bethesda Fallout.

​@@Klepto2322And if they don't like the lore at all they could have atleast rebooted the whole thing or make a new similar IP.

Here’s another one: Spider-Man 3. CGI technology was barely capable of handling what they wanted to do with Sandman’s… everything. So what’d they do? Instead of showing him ripping open an armored car, they show the driver seeing his shadow. Instead of him directly attacking the occupants, they flooded the set piece with real sand. When they wanted Spider-Man to punch a hole in him? They brought in a one armed boxer. Besides making things actually possible to render, it treats him less like a character and more like a force of nature. One that our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is about to try fighting.

That statment has so little value, it's almsot similar to saying "I drank water today."... Of course nobody sets out to make a bad game duh but setting out to make a great game and delivering that will make your words more valuable unlike this hack Emil. I swear Bethesda is still living off Skyrim glory to this very day, they think they're untouchable.

@@KikyouNeko technically it's actually worse than that... Asset flippers continue to make money by... setting out to make the cheapest, most no effort, derivative, misleading, bad games they can get away with... There are indeed, people who set out to make bad games...

@@Dreadought I agree with that but usually good or bad games will always advertise themselves, indie titles are filled with lazy asset flips like you mentioned but they'll get exposed pretty quick and end up not worth it so it's a rare occurence when that actually happens.

Didn't Shaun also set up the fight with the guy who kidnapped him as a baby? The experienced cyborg merc with over a century of survival experience(and a squad of synths) vs Shaun's recently defrosted parent that has no idea what's going on yet, and was just wandering around.

@@stepmi yeah he basically sent Kellogg to go meet you and take it from there because he wanted the parent to get a little more closure and revenge. Basically Fallout 4 is literally just a social experiment but at the same time, instead of just bringing the player to the Institute, Shaun is like "oh I hope my parent finds me! They're so close! Oh shit a deathclaw! Oh no, oh no. Oh. Oh my God. Oh well." Which for clarification, the birds are synths too, they're like the bird camera robots from the Incredibles

To be fair, the vault as a concept was built on this premise that safety is the key to community and identity. A lot of Fo4 makes sense if you ignore the plot or story. Or logic. And replace it with something better. The story is kind of smashed together from stories that were half finished or pieces of better stories edited by other people. You can tell that happens frequently. One of the major reasons why, is that the core characters don’t have a timeline or a series of links to their own history. When fans made the wiki pages for characters, there’s often a large number of overlap and missing pieces, travel time is inconsistent. Et al. Nothing grows or changes within the vault itself, because it is a contrived process to begin with. The immortal people, who have lived 60+ years without aging… Is only reasonable if you ignore the problems of immortal people in the story. Ie main characters surviving events that should be traumatic. Father … wants the player to change his mind and break free from the system as a way to gain power and independence. This process is not that organic in the Fallout universe because independence is exceptionally difficult. You need to trade. Travel is ridiculously hard, etc. It is possible that the player is also immortal… or was genetically engineered to be different. That he’s probably one of the hundreds of children / clones. Think about how difficult it would be to build a city sized vault without the help of thousands of people over decades. Now build hundreds of these. You need a crazy amount of resources. It’s the size of a cruise ship, or multiple cruise ships under the ground. It’s hard to know that the vault’s exist to change the world… without assuming a larger purpose in spending trillions of dollars to build hundreds of underground infrastructures that don’t connect or trade. They have to understand that it’s a very backwards concept to start over and restart a culture, from nothing. The idea works if you have the ability to start over, but … They were tinkering with the mechanics of creating and modifying the social environment, using a series of scientific methods rather than assuming the end result.

@@ratatosk02 yeah, but no bird even tried to help the player character if its life was in danger. So, Shaun was ok with his parent dying. Also, why didn't Shaun at least programmed synths to not be hostile if he wanted to meet that much?

@@stepmi they could have actually done something _interesting_ with the story if it turned out you had some guardian angel synths looking out for you, who show up when you're in real danger (Mysterious Stranger style). Imagine noticing this and following the threads and discovering the links back to the Institute that way, instead of just following a dog with a magical nose along a pre-determined trail of undisturbed clues just lying around waiting for you to come along.

As a dev, if one who's stricken by my ADHD and toddler-level object permanency and has the 50GB of WIPs to prove it: He sucks at the story and he's the fecker who put zombies in so much of Oblivion's dungeons, those are both absolute sins. My friend who's never played a TES game in their life wrote better story quests than him just from reading the in game books and the Morrowind dialogue on the UESP and we've fixed Skyrim by violently ramming all the stuff Kirkbride and Wormgod dropped all over the old Bethesda forums pre-Oblivion into it like we were making a kooshball of Weird.

My favorite response to "let's see YOU do better!" snark is "You don't need to be a seasoned helicopter pilot with 10 years of experience, to be able to see a helicopter in a tree and rightfully say 'Dude f*cked up!'"

This is something we all know, yet shit "artists" pretend isn't true so they can circlejerk each other's garbage. "How can you call art 'bad' if it's subjective?" Very easily, actually.

I couldn't agree more with this sentiment. This also shows in his distaste of players not playing his questline and doing something else, or worse, not doing them exactly how he wrote them to work.

Also, making sure that the design document is up to date would be his work as a lead. So this walking fraud managed to justify skipping on his job, not sure how the hell he is still not fired.

This would also explain why there were so few writers compared to other studios.

An exhaustive document like this for F3 or F4 (including of course all major points from F1, F2) would be in itself an indictment and it would supply proof of his faults. Without a document, or with a vague one, as long as Todd is happy its all fine, its all just "creative decisions".

@@OnlyDeathIsEternal instead of actually doing the writing lead's job, he instead took it to mean he can now write whatever he wants, and no one can gainsay him

She'd use Cogsworth to kill all the raiders in Concord instead and use Preston Garvey to get to Diamond City?

It would have made more sense if she had been a police officer or a fellow soldier Nate met in the army. How does a lawyer know how to shoot a laser rifle?

Bethesda Dumbed it down to the extreme in 4 anyway. Building a base is the only worthwhile thing to do in that game. Emil isn't wrong, but it's a state that they themselves made. I say this as someone who hate the base building in that game

gamers were basically FORCED to participate in fallout 4s base building, by having the game constantly harass us and destroying our settlements while we werent around and able to babysit them 24/7. Many fans argue that to enjoy the game you literally have to ignore the settlement system. And many mods exist to shut off the fucking radiant quest systems involving them.

also, we dont fucking read the main story of a game...

Emil seems to be confusing "Players don't want to read the stories in games" with the more factual "Players don't want to read _my_ stories in games" - one of these statements has more truth than the other, and perhaps he should examine why that is. Then again, he's making bag while being openly incompetent at his job. Bethesda aren't giving him an incentive to get better or making him leave, so it's not like he's going to do either.

Reading a story is tedious and boring.@@TheDelinear

"No, your dad James killed himself and you should glorify suicide too."

“You have to do it because it’s a part of the story, I’m an npc. That’d be too easy.”

@@gimpscam9976 And then they released Broken Steel later... Welp, so much for that "moral story"

@@TheBreakingBenny Which is even weirder because Ron Perlman still says you died. Somehow Bethesda couldn't get him to rerecord the ending saying you lived.

@@MrGhosta5 I would not be surprised if Emil Pagliarulo believed so firmly in his nonsense plot and story that he failed to think even further. Knowing him, though, he believes himself and Bethesda to be infallible

He's the reason the writing is stunted and unsatisfactory, and Todd's the reason more and more gameplay systems keep getting stripped out and oversimplified to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. They're the perfect team!

he is also nonbinary and gay

​@crookedgamer7183 What does that have to do with anything

@@creamerthug7028 The bankers that control the reserve systems in every country and effectively all world governments have been using people like that as a cudgel among other things to systematically destroy our nation states so they can consolidate power in the form of a world government?

​@@creamerthug7028Well you see, 'LGBT = bad' is a very popular stance nowadays. Does it have any basis or substance? No, but it's cool to be contrarian

everything is hard when you are incompetent

"It's hard work to make a video game!" Is an excuse that works when you are a solo-dev working on your own time and resources... Not when you have held a high position in a triple A company for the last two decades.

Laughed out loud Nice

And even if true, that doesn't excuse anything, that is just a statement without any real meaning to the conversation. "Building is hard" Isn't a good excuse when a bridge collapses.

That's the mentality they go on about. No nuance just shades of black and white elementary tier level of writing.

Same shit happened with Darth Maul in TCW and people praise the shit out of this arc and this character still. Sometimes you just need to gather enough idiots who would praise anything you do

As long as Todd and Emil are development leads at Bethesda we can not expect any innovation or evolution.

But Todd made the OG games?

@@EggEnjoyer No, Todd made Oblivion. He was project lead for Redguard and Morrowind, but the actual creative legwork for Morrowind mostly rests on Ken Rolston and Michael Kirkbride, while Mark Nelson, Douglas Goodall, and Gary Noonan contributed the graphical and writing elements. Todd did some Imperial quests, and was the main manager, but that just consists of telling people what to focus on and not literally how to do their jobs.

@@SecuR0M Right. But surely he has some talent if he was project lead for those 3 games. They’re all acclaimed. But then again maybe not if starfield was his dream game and he let it turn out like this. Maybe dude is checked out idk

@@EggEnjoyerTalent without effort is useless. Also, it could very well be that Todd is old hat, and is unable to create games at the baseline standard of current day.

Which is complete bullshit since he probably has the easiest job there based on wtf he pulled off. It took playtesting to figure out an idea was complete crap. Thousands of man hours probably used to get to that point when he could have just thought about it for a few seconds to realize how shit his idea was.

I don't think your issue is with "developers" the underpaid people working 80h a week at 70% of industry pay to make something. It's the leadership, emil was leadership at Bethesda.

​​@@kingmanichim, Neil Druckmann, that guy from Devil May Cry emo reboot, they all have something in common: they think they're rockstars and God's gift to games industry, but they're just a bunch of arrogant pricks.

Exactly. Everyone works hard, Emil. The rest of us actually have to be competent too

It's a stupid excuse because he chose to work in the medium of games, and my suspicion is that Emil has never actually practiced the craft outside of that medium. If I write a shitty short story, and the editor tells me as much, I can't then turn around and go "well brah you just don't get how hard this is. It's hard work so like I dunno accept it if its bad" No. I have to take the criticism to heart and do better, because I will never sell another piece of writing if I concoct bullshit excuses for myself. He also has a lot of lazy, amateurish habits -- all the handwavy contrived nonsense and failed Rule of Cool bullshit -- that should have been pounded out of him by editors before his work ever saw the light of day.

Yet Obsidian still got screwed out of their bonus by 1 point, tells you all you need to know about Bethesda's arrogance when the reason the score was low was probably because they were forced to use the craptastic engine and were given so little time to make the game in the first place thus leading to bugs. When a bethesda game has bugs it's "quirky" and just a given mods will fix it yet the same leeway is not given to any other dev in the industry.

@@pinnacleevolution1634 Fun fact: they were not given documentation for the CK. They had to learn FROM DISSECTING FANS' MODS FOR FALLOUT 3 how to do half the magic they did (there's even still traces of some modder's annotated code buried inside comments).

@@neoqwertylmao I wander aware of that that is actually absurd. It feels like Bethesda were just paying them to push something new out because 3 was popular and Skyrim was being made, almost like they didn't care whether it was successful or not and just a money grab

"You can't replace passion and skill with manpower." Wait, what? Passion and skill is a part of manpower. Not speaking up for Emil at all as he's not a good writer.

​@@pinnacleevolution1634yeah Todd and Bethesda by extension are some despicably nasty people. It was worse than the 1 point, it was less than half a point the score was 84.5. Bethesda even went out of their way to make it harder for them to reach that deadline by refusing to let anyone who knew the creation kid work with Obsidian.

Roofing is absolutely awful and I commend the men that do it. I never could.

He reminds me of Tony Tollerico, except instead of music it's writing and Emil shits some out instead of just pretending like Tollerococo.

I can work hard making a meal but at the end of the day if its nasty its my own hands that made it.

Most people work hard to earn their income. Income they don't want to spend on rubbish.

@@neoqwerty I had never heard of him so I had to look that up. There is a Tony from way back but I think you mean Tommy? I can see how it's similar. Both seem very ego driven.

Holy shit! Hey, Gundam!

omg daddy gundam hi

If the reviews are bad/low: "Ignore them" If the reviews are good/high: "Please give ME a bonus for it"

I never liked the guy sometimes I wondered "hey maybe he's got good ideas here and there but hodd toward just don't use them" -- but it's been too long.. that theory isn't plausible

@@villings Pretty sure Todd is just a spokesman and hasn't actually been involved in the game development since Morrowind.

@@villings The problem is emil has good concepts but he doesn't know how to use them beyond the concept phase. Starfield's actual premise of meta-narrative multiverse mirroring is absolutely genius but emil executed it in the worst way possible. They seriously need to get a few more writers that work alongside emil so that he's not doing everything on his own and failing at executions where they matter.

I have hated him since fallout 4 and now that i played oblivion and fsllout 3 i hate him even more. Starfield just verified bethsada hasnt made a good game since morrowind

The problem is that Emil is a lazy writer who routinely excuses himself by citing writing principles and practices that only work for short-story fanfic writers.@@piccoloatburgerking

Exactly, the response they were looking for was “I played a game called Fallout where I launched a nuke AND I CLAPPED!” And that’s exactly what Bethesda got.

It's a popular strategy these days, just look at what happened to Star Wars.

It works because the geeky stuff has become cool and popular on some level. This happened with bands all the time back in the day. They got big and the music changed for the worse to appeal to a broader pallet. I have a buddy who got into games about 5 years ago (we're 41). His opinion on gaming gives almost no priority to anything we care about. Lore, immersion, cohesive in-world details/physics. So many people prioritize tech specs and graphics. His major issue with Starfield when it came out was around the DLSS or whatever other feature was missing. Lol. I'm like "bro, this game looks so bad, what are you even liking about it?"

He still has a job because he's Todd Howard's highschool friend. He can't be fired unless Todd is gone.

"Oh, I guess Klingon promotion is wrong here." Man, they must be dumb as fuck for not understanding that the BOS _isn't_ a barbarian faction unlike the raiders

“Oh yeah, you kill the leader and become the leader!” How the fuck did they come to that conclusion? How was the thing that bothered them was “Oh, they still don’t like Danse,” and not “You killed our fucking leader, prepare to die????”

@@Stryfe52 I wouldn't be surprised if Emil Pagliarulo is speaking for the team, effectively boiling down the talks they had behind-the-scenes (which may be a given because God forbid they use design documents, right Emil?!), and they were too depressed to maybe express why it's nonsensical with their hearts.

​@@TheBreakingBennyI truly want to believe it's mostly the leads making these horrible games over at Bethesda. I can't comprehend an entire dev team being that stupid

Your profile picture gives off Bjorn from Peggle vibes.

Brother, you didn't even finish the video. Why should anyone take your criticism seriously?

@@lillasagna5487He didn’t have to finish the video to leave the comment that he left

Imagine your whole lifes work falling appart, brutal lmao

@@lillasagna5487 Mate I'm not talking about Cree, don't project instead do a little digging and find out before you make yourself the butt of a joke or are mocked for it.

@@lillasagna5487 How embarrassing for you

A few ways to just fix the aging could be making him a synth like you said. Or he was the only successful one who survived the experiment. Sure it could be a copout excuse but if they just add enough evidence( such as when exploring the institute you come across a scientist who is injecting something into a test subject, they then explode or their head flys off or what ever). Furthermore he could be treated like the winter solder, they freeze him, and thaw him as needed. Another excuse could be he is a clone, where the reason for the brain impants is so each clone is up to date on what Kellogg knows, and when the active clone dies or suffers life threatening injuries, a new one wakes up.

Also, fixing Kid in a Fridge is super easy. You find the fridge outside of Quincy. Just make it so that the kid hid in the fridge during the siege of Quincy and got stuck there.

With Kellogg, Emil's story is so bad that I could write a better one using the basic framework of F4. And I'll prove it right now. My version deviates when you reach the door to the vault. You see a pip-boy on the door control console with a drawing showing you to put it on your wrist. You put it on and you see "BOOTING" and then "AUTOPLAY". You hear a voice, "Greetings. If you are listening to this, then the revival process was successful. With the old automated systems inoperative, I had to manually setup the sequences, a long and tedious process. I would have preferred to greet you in person, but my absence would have been noticed. There are many things you need to learn about this new world you've been dropped into. Too many to tell you in this message. Probably the most important thing for you right now is where's your son and who killed your husband/wife. I can give you some help with those. The man's name is Kellogg. Where he is now, I do not know. You can start your search for him in a place called Diamond City. I've entered the location into this pip-boy. Search out a detective named Nick Valentine. With luck he can help you. I will be in touch later." You see "MESSAGE ENDS." You then leave the vault. You head to Diamond City and go through the quest to free Nick. Nick's never heard of Kellogg, but agrees to help you look around. Rummaging around the bowels of the stadium, you find a room that looks like no one's been there for years and recover a holotape. It's Kellogg's voice and he's angry that the Institute has severed all contact with him after all the jobs he's done for them. He also fills in some details of his life and how he got involved with The Institute. He says that he's leaving DC to look for work with the Gunner mercenaries who are now a playable faction. You head down to Gunner HQ and sign up to work for them. A number of Gunner quests follow, some morally questionable, while you work your way up to build trust in that faction. You finally pop the question to the Gunner leader about Kellogg. He tells you he doesn't know him, but vaguely heard the name before. You rummage around Gunner HQ and find another holotape. Kellogg talks about how the Gunners are kicking him out because he has too much "baggage" and that he's going freelance. He fills out some more details of his life and talks about his wife and son/daughter were murdered by a rival gang back in the NCR. You follow the breadcrumbs through various NPC's, each time finding a holotape, each one where he sounds more bitter and depressed, leading to the next location. Your last location, you find a holotape. Kellogg's last job went tits-up. He complains he's slowing down and that he got shot up. He's heading off for a place he can get treatment and rest up. You head to that location. You walk in and ask the man at the desk if Kellogg is there. The man says "Are you here to kill him?" You have a number of answers. The man says, "A man with Kellogg's past, it's no surprise that someone would show up one day." and "Look, you can do whatever you want. I won't stop you. But just talk to him first." and tells you where Kellogg's room is. You walk into the room and there's an old man in a wheelchair. He's obviously senile. He thinks you're his son/daughter finally coming to visit him. He's happy and crying, saying how well you've grown up and how sorry he couldn't be there for you. He lamenting that he can't remember the things he's done but knows they were bad, that he did it all for the family, and makes you promise not to follow his path. It could be done to make him so pathetic that you actually feel some sympathy for him. You then have the choice to kill him, play along with his delusions, or just leave. Whatever you do, you leave the building and look up to see the Prydwen arrive in Commonwealth. End of Act I. The voice on the holotape is, of course, Sean who you will finally meet at the start of Act II. Hopefully you can piece together at this point that it's your son who's now an old man. I haven't worked out the entire path for Act II, but then again, I haven't devoted much time or thought to it. Anyway, let me know what you think.

Tbh they should have had him be a freshly made synth. If I remember correctly they were monitoring the vault for when you leave, so it wouldn't be hard for them to deploy Kelogg 2.0 as bait to bring you in. But nope, instead they wrote themselves into a hole.

@@AbelMusa the synths, railroad and institute are referenced in one quest in fallout 3, so I say the incompetent who wrote fo4 looked at that and then proceeded to royally screw the pooch and screw up the aesthetics they were clearly implied to have

It’s also just ripped from the Telvani in Morrowind where it actually made sense. Since Telvani are a culture entirely based around magical strength. Might makes right. With the factions of fallout being made of human societies. It’s completely nonsensical. Idk any human civilization that’s ever operated that way.

It makes sense for non human societies in fantasy or sci fi that are based around inherent magical strength determining your place in the hierarchies. Humans prefer stuff like money, connections, or ideologies to determine your place in the hierarchy.

Emil in that timeline be like "Floor being a mess? Trashes everywhere? Funny how disconnected some of the employees are from the realities of floor mopping, and yet they speak with complete authority. I mean, I can guess what it takes to make a video game but I don't work on game development, so what the hell do I really know? Not a lot."

@@missilecarrierI love you

The internet has made you unnecessarily cruel for no reason. Is he a bad writer? Yeah sure, pretty solidly poor. But this seems like you’re saying the whole “probably couldn’t even mop right” bit for some personal satisfaction. You’re behaving like a scumbag, even if you’re in the right.

@@missilecarrier Perfection.

@@pterodummy Nah, I wouldn't trust Emil to mop my floors because I care about my floors. He'd fuck up my floors with his shit mopping then go on a schizophrenic essay about how I don't understand the intricacies of floor mopping. Emil can genuinely eat broken glass, if he didn't want to be ripped on by Internet people then he should stop shitting into a fucking fountain pen for a living. Unbearable hack.

Random necromancers are just perverts, so it's ok. Vunfert the unliver probably has not been in the College in a long time and their policies might have changed. The fact that you can't pressure him about it is a sign that it is not the case and you are actually right. I hate it.

@@karpai5427 That's right! Wuunferth says explicitly that Necromancy is illegal, and his "rumors of Necromancy" are just a red herring for the murder mystery quest.

I love how beautifully this contasts with how they handled the same matter in Morrowind. Different factions all have really distinct takes on the subject. It's illegal, but handled more as a taboo by the Mages Guild. The average Dunmer dislikes it, but for interesting reasons (they worship their ancestors and take strong offense to their remains being misused). It's all very consistent, and only inconsistent when it's meant to be.

I suspect this was a remnant of someone with D&D ideas buried in the back of their head. In D&D, healing magic is part of the school of necromancy, having to do with the revivification of dead flesh. In ES, of course, there is a separate school for healing, but I get the feeling the "necromancy isn't always bad even though necroMANCERS are" is an unconscious leftover of the D&D mode of thought.

@@Saibellus Or, now get this; Bethesda is bad at writing nuanced and well-thought out, thought-provoking moral dillemas, and just uses "necromancers bad" because that's the usual fantasy trope. You don't need D&D related conspiracy theories when the simple answer is that bethesda's writers think of morality as something black and white, and believe the fanbase are 5 year old children anyway.

Literally there is a mod where a quite good freelance voice actor replaces the original narrator... Mainly to have it not be so judgemental in that scene, actually complimenting it to say.

It should be 24 years in the industry since he was hired for Thief 2. A human being could be born, grow up and finish a master's degree in the amount of time he's taken to figure out how to use 2-3 level editors (poorly).

Who spent money on Starfield? You get it for free on gamepass, dummy.

Ok, having too much time while listening to these vids. I bet no one would read it but I wrote it, so have spiel. Most people don't know what they want. Why do you think many of these same corporations are making billions for decades? Clearly it has been "working out" amazingly for them, for a long time. Most people are easily manipulated. These corporations keep using highly scummy anti-consumer practices, pushing it more and more(for a very long time, it's not just recently and people haven't caught on yet or something), because they are making money, from people giving it to them. These tactics and psychological manipulations work. Bethesda, blizzard - countless others, have been producing mediocre to bad products for years, decades. Were still beloved for most of that time. And still are doing great despite countless beyond garbage displays and unethical practices. Even people who criticize, most of them still give them their money. Having relatively small portion of people being critical, doesn't stop the much larger demographic throw money at them. So many games now in top spots of highest revenue, have very negative review scores, but they are still raking it in. Games that re-release every year or every other year, being the same or worse, selling like hot cakes. Skins for 30$+, turning games into not being games anymore but virtual store fronts. Game after game of utter dogshit, most people still praise it. Still are hyped for the next game. Many of them even well regarded and liked, even beloved in some cases. A great game can be hated, a really bad game can be beloved. Been happening forever. Starfield case is more of a lucky one where the popular narrative (eventually) aligned with the truth. In the end, it's all about marketing and branding, and the narrative that wins out. Then it rolls like an avalanche from there with YT-bers making videos and people eating it up, whether it's true or not. (in the case of starfield, it deserves its criticism and more) After what bethesda did before starfield(it was bad, it was a lot), everyone was still hyped like crazy for starfield, delusional. Now I already see the cope and hype for TES 6. In even worse cases, it's the same. A studio can release the worst game ever, bomb a small country - people will still find a way to be hyped for their next #product. Forget about the other stuff in a month. As long as the brand is strong/big enough. That's what most people are, branded. Mindlessly consume #product. It's simply the realty of things, at large. Games aren't even about having fun anymore. Many people don't have actual fun playing(starfield is a decent example, with the "it gets fun after 100-200 hrs just keep playing", this is also ironically opposite of the truth, but anyway). It's about design formulas to keep people hooked. Preying on psychological tendencies of humans. (there is detailed documentation on this, for gaming, and its proven to work over and over) There is criticism and intelligence, but that's more the niche side of things. Been around game dev(and other creative work) for a long time to know that most people, indeed, do not know what they want(it's also just logical most people won't understand why they like a story, for example, not nearly as deep as a good writer who wrote it. Same way as most non-car mechanics won't understand how a car works anywhere close to a professional car mechanic who is competent). In most cases, people want what they are conditioned to want. You make something different, innovative and great? Many will cry that it's different than 99% of other games and demand it is made to be a copy/paste of other games(then maybe go complain somewhere else about all games being the same and no innovation). God forbid it's a game that demands some actual thought(this is a larger problem than gaming here, would take forever to get into it, of course i'm generalizing somewhat as i'm talking about what makes the most money by far and is the vast bulk of the industry). Or perhaps in some cases they are just more vocal about it. If devs listened to people, in many cases, the amazing game they made/are making, would be utterly ruined. Went on a bit of a "rant" because that phrase "people don’t know what they want" doesn't really follow logically there. Corps can be bad and make crappy products at the same time as people "don't know what they want". Both can be true at the same time, and someone acknowledging a fact, isn't necessarily a "corporate shill". The gaming industry has exploded and become another huge industry, consequently following into the steps of other industries of this scope. It went from innovative, passion driven industry, to soulless corporate product pushing, based around marketing and manipulation for the sake of making as much money as possible. It's how it goes. Of course there are still passionate developers attempting innovation and doing interesting things. Few and far between compared to the juggernaut the mainstream gaming industry has become though. Sadly it's the fate of any industry that becomes so large, in current way of society. It needs to become that, in order to become so large.

So many corporations nowadays have switched from "Is our product good enough to buy?" To "Are you good enough to buy our product?" The results have been nothing short of catastrophic.

@@APsychicMonkey No they haven't lmao

@@hihihi1q23 Never been told by the maker of a thing that you're neither wanted or needed? "Don't play our game", "don't watch our movie" etc.?

Heard 😢

Ah. I feel I’m pretty good at keeping track of all that for myself, but I definitely had a bad case of that for one story I was writing. Conceived it with a late stage anime fight in mind, but the story before it evolved as I wrote it to the point where whatever context I’d planned was changed completely. The protagonist role between the fighters had swapped, it was a mess. That was hardly the only problem with that one. No idea why I just left it up unfinished, it was horrible and I freaking hate it now.

The work is smarter than its author, because it contains all its brilliance at once.

I have some issues with this myself, but generally I'm pretty good at remembering the names and traits of my one off characters so I can bring them back in the future. I do have a document, but I just don't maintain it nearly as well as I maybe should.

“Don’t ask questions, just consoom product and get excited for next product.”

@@Slender_Man_186 They're even worse than that, They want you to buy the same product multiple times, on multiple platforms. Not to mention microtransactions are a thing because of them.

​@@Slender_Man_186 f76 fans be like:

Yeah, noticing things is what led to world war 2.

@@Zeropointillnot really because of them but you aren't entirely wrong

Who the hell praises Skyrim for player choice? Its one of the most rail roaded "RPGs" ever. 99% of the time your only choice is either do the quest or don't.

@@GeraltofRivia22You'd be surprised how many mouthbreathers praise Skyrim for its seemingly huge amount of player choice and freedom when in reality it has none.

I'm pretty sure most people's idea of "player choice" is when the player gets a choice. In that regard, Skyrim is a masterpiece. All those dialogue options, different skill trees and paths, weapons, spells, shouts, so much player choice! I'm convinced this is the case, I refuse to accept that so many people are just hallucinating choices where there aren't any for the sake of an empty compliment for their favorite brain-turn-off games.

Skyrim is a crappy game. Go ahead, play it unmodded, even better, play the FIRST release of it unmodded. There is no reason for it to be praised even when it was first released, far better games were around. The only reason Skyrim gets praised is because it is a great skeleton for mods to create a decent enough game. Without mods? It is a skeleton without any meat on the bones. To make the game be passable for what a triple A title should be expected to be, you need to install so many mods that you double the disc space it uses.

​@@Nempo13 The FIRST release had the majority of its sales on Xbox 360, which is unmoddable.

I'm afraid it won't change the situation much:( new projects just will be cancelled, like the new Star Wars trilogy or Dishonored series. I think we will either appreciate indie games or story mods, or there is a very tiny chance that an era of really good remakes/extended editions of old games will come.

@@Tito_michi Of course it wont, but it's a nice big egg on Todd Howards / Emil Pagliarulos face. And Larian will continute to produce outstanding RPGs like they have for the last 20 years. It's nice they finally got the recognition their work deserves.

I know that creatives are often more sensitive to criticism, and I say this as a writer myself, but for some reason they've become so soft to any disagreement. When someone posts a bad review about my story, or they make a comment about it, I don't throw it away or have a tantrum. I look at what they are saying, and I think about if what they've said has weight to it. Sometimes they are pointing out a genuine flaw, sometimes they misunderstood something or are otherwise wrong in a way that I can ignore it. But game devs so often just come to the conclusion that anything against their game is against them personally. MW3 is a corporate product, maybe some of the devs actually care, but it is completely soulless to me and I feel like they devs have to understand that, not even agree, but they must understand why people think this way.

Well, he's the same person who voiced for the new and terrible Kratos. He's not a good example to go off of.

I'm not entirely sure it's the MW3 development team that's at fault for not having enough time to make a game though. I don't think MW3 had any chance of being good given the absurd crunch they were under.

"We invented teleportation, cold-fusion energy, mass-produced synthetic humanoids capable of independent, witty, and creative thoughts, brought the gorilla back from extinction, and we still haven't taken over the world yet. What's up with thaaaaat?" ~ Your son

Dumb people can't write smart things. He, and many other writers, see something that's cool, and want to write about it. Sadly, they're literally too stupid to understand it, so they resort to bullshit.

​@@MK_ULTRA420Don't forget the hyper advanced Cybertics capable of making someone Biologically immortal and yet Father dies of cancer

What Pagliarulo did to Fallout is borderline criminal

@@MK_ULTRA420 I'm more offended they somehow built cutting-edge future tech that exceeds anything that existed in Pre-War civilization with a box of scraps. That's not even a post-apocalypse story anymore.