Hooray for organized labor.
Does this mean they’ll make good games again? 👀
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted; the last somewhat good game Bethesda made was more than a decade ago at this point.
Maybe people think you’re insinuating that the games are bad because of the workers and not because of bonehead management?
Yeah, I think Skyrim was good, and I liked Fallout 3/New Vegas, but nothing has majorly changed since those two games other than the graphics. I watched my friend play Starfield and realized that in my opinion, it was just more of the same with a space skin.
I think games can be bad because of the employees not making good games, but for reasonable circumstances. If the employees are making bad products, and management is actually decent, it would be because they’re demotivated and demoralized from poor pay, benefits, and working conditions.
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no, but the foot soldiers who are forced to implement the shitty ideas will at least get paid well for it.
Absolutely love to see that industry finally unionize. Unions in general really seem to be having a renaissance, and I am so here for it.
Freaking finally, Bethesda Games Studio has been an odious thing for a long time! Can’t wait to see what kind of strong-arm action can be leveled against Bethesda. 😏💪🏼
Heres hoping it involves pushing the old guard into advisory roles or atleast breaking up into smaller teams. Theres no reason to have such a large dev team for what their games are, if anything it may be hurting them since it keeps things unfocused.
There have been stories of Todd Howard ‘seagulling’ basically coming into meetings, shitting out ideas that he wanted teams to work on and flew the fuck out of there. It is highly disruptive of a boss to do this; as the dev teams would know how to handle things. It would be nice that if they could optimize their team structures and produce better games as a result. Being in a union would give them better control over their working conditions.
That and his mid 90s dev tendency of bigger equals better probably doesnnt help. Starfield for example shouldve been four systems total, with maybe an independ special one or two. Seriously he focuses on size way too much, especially when Bethesda games dont even do a good job at using strategic emptyness.
Yeah, sometimes big games aren’t all that great; if the focus of a game is diluted too much, the end product becomes mediocre in nature. It shows with Starfield as it’s a bloated mess with little care and attention focused on the core, essential features! Strategic emptiness is such a powerful tool, yet very few devs effectively utilize it.
The worst part is nearly all of the Bethesda games up to about Fallout 4 use strategic emptiness pretty well in a lot of areas. So its not like they dont know how to do it, but its almost like that bigger is better issue bled in too much and resulted in cluttered maps.
Morrowind definitely did from my memory! Yeah, the gaming trend they’ve decided on would be to fill maps with more shit and call it good. I miss those well made maps, that were smaller in scale but were handcrafted with care. Bigger is better tends to lead to worse outcomes, unless the team puts in the hard work…
Yeah a lot of games embraced that style and it doesnt really work. Less is often times more, that isnt to say you cant have big maps look at rockstar games. But you have to be careful on it, if you are going to make a big map include empty space where the player can feel tense about threats or just kinda vibe. Stalker actually does that type of thing pretty well, also I have not been more panicked than playing Stalker Gamma and getting jumped by five cats at night in a thunderstorm cause I thought I killed everything on the way in.
Microsoft Gaming/Blizzard/Activision next, yes?
Activision’s QA Department already unionized.
I wonder if Microsoft buying up so many gaming companies will actually end up helping the unionization movement, they bought all these companies and now the union has one big target instead of a bunch of medium sized ones.
Sometimes, it feels like all that’s left is Bethesda, Microsoft, EA and Nintendo.
Oops, time to shut it down! /s
This is Bethesda, though. Walls are vague suggestions to clip through.
So you’re saying the union may break containment and spread to the rest of Microsoft? I sure hope it does.
