Emil is the jackass who specifically chooses not to develop with design documents, and thinks writing a good story is a waste of time. Starfield isn't bad because 'making games are hard'. Starfield is bad because Emil consistently has really bad ideas about game design, and his writing is garbage.
This coming on the back of learning that Chris Avellone Obsidian Entertainment (fuck Chris, put him up there with Brian Fargo as actual real-life pieces of shit above and beyond the sole scope of this chost - game design.) pitched multiple Fallout: New Vegas style games to Bethesda as side-games, and Bethesda turning them all down.
Really. You've gotta be fucking kidding me.
Like, sorry, you mean you turned down an attempt at repeating one of the most highly regarded games to come out in the game engine and IP of your company? The highest ranking game in terms of percentage of positive reviews on Steam of your entire company catalogue? Higher than every single game you've released or had your hand in since then? Literally offered, repeatedly, on a silver platter, multiple games in both IPs of your company to fill the void between unnecessarily long development cycles of your mediocre games? Literally free money for you and your company? Your company turned that down? Why? Is it because Emil can't stand being upstaged in every facet of his work? Upstaged by a smaller team with less resources and far less time making a game that is still better than anything you've made since it was released? Mm. Sounds like Emil's a real dogshit game designer/writer/team lead.
Every game he's touched, genuinely, has been made worse for it. Can't say that for certain about Thief 2, since he was only a junior designer there, but... It didn't exactly go well for the company, despite good initial reception. Bloodmoon was far from the most enjoyable area of TES3, the least well written of the three main stories, and not even the better of the two expacs. The Dark Brotherhood questline in Oblivion was, despite being 'fan favourite' because it supported murderhoboing, unfinished, uninspired, but they were at least fun little snippets of gameplay (almost like he was better with the extreme constraints of being a team member, not a team lead, much like Todd). Fallout 3's entire fucking story was dogshit, and Emil+Todd are directly responsible for the god-awful shit that is the main narrative thread in Fallout 3, among all of its other problems. ("YOU AGAIN!" - no really just watch Hbomberguy's Fallout 3 and New Vegas videos if you really want to know exactly how shit of a game designer/writer Emil is - almost all of the problems are Emil's fault.)
Skyrim's story was shit. Its main story and major faction writing was uninspired shit. The most interesting parts of Skyrim were the connections it had to The Elder Scrolls as a set of lore, which weren't his doing at all - in fact, I'd wager he was responsible for crushing most of that connection. Skyrim sold well because it was about as Generic a fantasy game as you could get, with untold modding capability on top. Nothing about Skyrim's success was Emil's doing - especially when the two major factions in the game are racist nationalist purists OR racist world-ending colonizers. Great writing, Emil! In fact, Emil's influence on Skyrim is part of the huge downward spiral Bethesda is in now - remove mechanics and ideas that don't work right the first time, never revisit them, insert his own stupid ideas about what makes a Bethesda game good (despite extensive evidence to the contrary), wonder why those design decisions aren't award winning.
Fallout 4 sucked worse than Fallout 3, despite improvements. It sold many copies because of Skyrim. That's all there is to it. The writing is, by far, the worst in Bethesda history at its time of release - how the fuck do you go from the awful premise, story, and conclusion of Fallout 3, and decide to make even worse decisions about the narrative and motivation of your character in Fallout 4? The extremely-easily-guessed plot hole in the intro to the game persists for a majority of the game's playtime, and never once was it thought to be resolved into less ludonarratively dissonant motivation with maybe one of the dozen mandatory dialogues in the game?? WHY WOULD YOU ASSUME THAT EVERYONE IS GOING TO BE MOTIVATED TO FIND A BABY IN A WASTELAND? There are SO MANY PROBLEMS with this premise! And the design of the gameplay? Well, let's just say, Fallout 4 is not renown for its innovative and polished gameplay design, what with its critically panned decision to have a fully voiced protagonist, attempts to integrate a mobile device as a second screen, dogshit arrow/spellcast-style 'gun'play, and now-traditional optional-half-baked-subsystems that took up too much devtime.
Fallout 76 speaks for itself. Bethesda knew, all over, that it was a bad game, even before release. Todd literally admits it (in the language of Interview Speak), and its updates haven't, and won't, save it from being a fundamentally badly designed game. Yet another situation where Emil's staunch, gut-instinct decision to not have NPCs in an IP known for its well-written and compelling characters, from a company known in part for its interesting NPC-filled worlds, stands out as a clear indicator that Emil Pagliarulo is fucking abysmal at game design and writing.
And then there's Starfield. His latest wet shit. Star "They're Totally Not Dragonshouts" 'Dragonshouts In The Game Code' Field. Starfield is badly designed and written game. It is a bad example of a game. No, enjoying playing the game does not make it a well designed/well written game. Enjoying Starfield does not make you a bad person, just that you might like trash things, and that's fine, but also not a widely shared belief. It does not stop Starfield from being a bad game. It runs poorly, it's terribly designed (in pretty much... Every aspect), it's terribly written - shallow, pedantic, misguided, unresolved, with a piecemeal story written in isolation and entirely out of sync with all its gameplay components, unlinked and put through the blender of development changes, with a number of interesting stories and premises that are entirely left to the wayside for an uninspired, boring, toe-deep take on what amounts to an unnecessarily long and barren roguelike.
He's not left the company yet, which means he's working on TES6, which means there's literally no hope for this game being good, unless Todd has already identified Emil as the core of the problem and excised him somehow, internally or otherwise.
I have no hope for TES6; I'm always welcoming a miracle, but I'm not holding my breath.
It is objectively morally correct to pirate Bethesda games. I hope Starfield is the thing that ruins the company long-term. I hope it is ash in their mouths by the time TES6 comes around, and they've so little good will left to burn that maybe they'll consider doing things differently.
