Todd Howard Breaks Down His Career - Luke Reacts 

an icon that has long been dead

@@should_296true, sadly.

legendary conman for sure

Nope

He ruined bethesda... Every game since morrowind has been worse.. Skyrim sucks compared to oblivion and morrowind. Can't for the life of me understand why people like skyrim so much... Writing is shit... Quests sucks ( daedric quests are actually good) voice acting is.horrible.. And now we have starfield .. Which is just horrible.. Thanks Todd.. You took one of the most magical game companies and turned it into ubisoft.. Though I have to.give him credit for morrowind and oblivion.. Even though oblivion was a step down in many ways it was a truly magical game with amazing quests.. And morrowind is a 10/10 for the time it was released

In some ways I believe the technology isn't necessarily holding them back, let me use for example a creation engine when it comes to mods, it's still the most powerful engine when it comes to modding in comparison to all other engines in existence now, now the engine is held back in many other ways that other engines definitely do a better job, but no other engine even still to this day can do as much as this engine can when it comes to modifications and the ability to constantly improve on it and do more with it, yes it is true that it is very Jank and a very old engine, but if you look at it from the perspective of the unreal engine, they are both roughly the same age, now the Unreal Engine on the other hand has been updated far more often then the creation engine which is why it's so much better, the creation engine only got a update recently and they've been using the same version for roughly the past 30 years with little updates here and there to fix it from time to time. So unreal is roughly five versions ahead of the creation engine in advancements, but again they're roughly the same age, I think a lot of people focus too much on age of the engine and don't focus on it's strength that can be worked on and updated like they should, I mean can you imagine if it was the other way around, that they only updated the Unreal Engine after 30 years once and say the creation engine was updated at least a version 5 by now, the creation engine would look far better, but unfortunately that's not the fact of this conversation, the creation engine just gotten update and it needs many many more. Now a lot of people want them to get rid of it, but every time I talk to someone who's like an experienced Mater I asked them what this engine can't do, and they often tell me they think this engine can do almost anything, it's just that it needs some workarounds to what's possible or it needs some upgrades in order to get past some of those hurdles one thing's for sure you never going to fully get rid of load screens, some games in the past generation came up with some interesting ways of dealing with load screens, but they were still load screens they just didn't feel like load screens to the player because of how they implemented them, now Bethesda did this same type of load screen in Fallout 4 when it came to the elevators, nobody knew at the time that some of the elevators in Fallout 4 or quite literally load screens and nobody could know until it finally snapped to load when the doors suddenly opened you could tell there was a jump in scenery, well something very similar to that can happen even still with the current version of The Creation engine, why they chose not to do that in Starfield well there could be many reasons, maybe it was just too much for them to put into it, although they did mention that they didn't want space to feel boring so they just wanted it to load to the next section of the game, unfortunately that creates a gameplay Loop of load screen simulator and they should have known this was going to be the biggest issue based off of that system they created, a lot of people wanted a game that felt like you were actually traveling through space instead of through another load screen, and I actually agree with them on that, it would have been better than used one of these delayed load screens that doesn't exactly feel or even look like a load screen in order to make it feel as if you were traveling through space and not just through another load door. But there are a lot of other areas in the game that could have allowed something similar to that when it came to flying into a planet and flying away from a planet, but the other reason why they made Planet so lackluster is to reduce load time, and it worked, but it makes the game boring, if they had a much more giant landscape it would have made that load screen twice as long, so they chose the option of making the load screens last long by building a small space that seems big because there's nothing in it with very sparsely populated worlds in order to make the load screens quicker. Wasn't worth it? Well you tell me, the load screens aren't quite as long as they used to be, so that's a good thing, but it's at the cost of fun and detailed worlds, I would rather wait 15 more seconds or 20 more seconds or 30 more seconds for more detailed world every time over the 5 to 10 second load screen to load nothing but three or four things with trees and animals of empty land mostly, to me that seems like a bad trade-off.

That's funny. Other studios don't seem to have those technology restraints.

Fallout 4 is trash

Sad!

No its EMIL. he is best friends with the worst triple a rpg writer in history.

Lack of Interesting places to look at and explore, Lack of interesting factions, lack of interesting world design, weapon design, armor and clothes design. Lack of good narrative, lack of good writing, lack of fun and interesting enemy design, lack of challenge, lack of anything other than the bare minimum.

Yep. If I was loading into something awesome, I'd wait a full fuckin minute. But even waiting 10 seconds to get dropped into a boring landscape with essentially nothing worth exploring gets old really fast. Especially when it's 10 seconds every 2 minutes.

tell me how much floor is contained within a sample of floor, basic af youtube commenter.

Funny how those games are all over 10 years old lol. When are you gonna ask for something new that's equally as good?

Truly sad.

to me it’s difficult to see much of howard in MW, it seems mostly like he got lucky managing production for the old-heads and fresh creative-types during it, but I’d be very interested to see that stew cooking 🧩🔨

the fame and big budgets basically made them creatively bankrupt over time, kids (not people) will eat up anything in recent years.

@circlesnare3671 there is virtually zero signature of todds design philosophy in Morrowind which is why it was so good.

They didnt improve their tech. Thats part of the problem

Starfield was successful tho. Anthem was not. I hope the success doesn't make them over confident

@@MDHDH-iy7nm Tech is not an issue. Bethesda's games stand or fall on how good world and lore they create.

This is the case for every game Director and for most games honestly. Todd is just the guy who sets the overall vision, manages goals and task schedules and approves or disapproves of design decisions and ideas. He's not a creative guy himself and that's fine. The real creative guys in Morrowind, like Kurt Kuhlmann, Michael Kirkbride and Ken Rolston were the one who really made it into what it is. It should be noted that they only had good things to say about Todd when interviewed about their time in BGS, so I don't feel like knocking on Todd too much as a result. A company is only as good as the people in it. If the talent in Bethesda is gone, Todd won't be doing any miracles.

@@willl676 Ok. That sounds fair. I don't like the overall discussion, where people attribute to Todd the good things from the past, while totally omitting the talent (like you said - Kirkbridge, Kuhlmann) that made those games special.

Side quests are good (Ryujin Industries, and Aurora Drug Lord), main quest is shite.

@@MDHDH-iy7nm the lore is fine it’s the actual story u play in that’s kinda shit. The game does have fluid systems that are disjointed due to the amount of menus and loading screens. Todd knows what to do but they use older tech or in this case “refurbished” tech, the creation engine, to create large experiences which aren’t possible. If they are to create large experiences they need to create a new engine from scratch or use some other game engine. It’s a 7/10 not a 4/10 game. It’s a fine game it’s just not an amazing one

​@@shawnthomas6492 This attitude is what allows them to put out low quality games like this. I will concede poor wording on my part, but what I mean to say when I say systems, is that its trying to be 3 different games at the same time, and thats what im really talking about. It causes the game to fall apart when you realize: - Its trying to be a Bethesda open world game - Its trying to be a realistic scifi space exploration - Its trying to be a fantastical space game (fuck intelligent aliens right? thats not realistic, but being Dragonborn in space is!) None of these connect at all and the game has 0 identity. The fact that its stretched in 3 wildly different directions like this brings the game down a LOT. Its like they tried to build multiple games in a single game, and pretty much blew up all over the launch pad. It feels like they had that excuse of "no intelligent alien life" but then, they stopped developing the realistic space game they planned because they had an "Uh oh... this game fucking sucks moment" and basically literally injected it with some Skyrim hoping nobody would care or notice lmao. You have to be blinded by nostalgia to give this game anything above a 4-5. If we're being as objective as possible, vanilla Skyrim is a 7-8/10 game; but not this trash. (Do apologize for the long rant, but I loved what BGS used to be. They quite literally introduced me to RPGs, but I really hate what theyve become)

Side quests were really good. Main quest was not so exciting, but the person who made the main questline for Starfield already left the company.

@@shawnthomas6492 How Ryujin is good? It's a fetch quest galore with broken stealth sprinkled between.

He didn´t do Skyrim alone

Really Kirkbridge, Kuhlmann and Goodall made Morrowind what it was. If Todd had anything to do with Morrowind we probably had the dark elves living in a basement or under a moonlight, or whatever generic shit you could think of.

And then starfield came in

@@VaeSapiens 100%. People give Todd too much credit, when in fact the dev team was better, not Todd.

Their engine is just completely outdated. They see something that isn't broken so it will keep getting used.

@@VaeSapiens He was literally the person who led the entire game. You can't just handwave that away

Rockstar would do something more like Kingdom come they keep there games more grounded. I would love an Acient Rome or Pirate game by them.

@@John-996 yea I know lol but people are still gonna compare them regardless, and honestly Rockstar could go with whatever theme they wanted and fans would welcome it with open arms. They're really one of the last companies you can be sure you'll get a good game from

​@@ryansarafin12They could but they are smart enough to Make amazing games with settings that are not done to much. Sam Houser wanted a Horror game with no Zombies or Ghosts so They came up With Manhunt and it stood out at the time.

Okay, let's not get ahead of ourselves. Starfield is MUCH better than Redfall. It's not an achievement, but to compare them is...... Yeah

@@chainsaw8507 Im not comparing the two. SF is the new redfall. The tech is behind, the game feels small, design is awful and so much more. SF stuck in last gen just like Redfall compared to market.

​​@orbit1894 Redfall is made by a completely different game studio. Not even the same game.

To be fair, Todd doesn't make the decisions for the company. He doesn't own it he's only the producer and director

@@yous2244 Wrong.

That was Obsidian, not Bethesda.

The exploration is dogshit in new Vegas

>Starfield is a rpg Hahahaha! Good one, chatgpt.

Fallout 4 and skyrim are just as boring to me as FO76 and starfield. Morrowind was like the last time BGS made a good RPG Imo.

@@bigiron1990 I kind of agree that Skyrim was the last time they could pull out their tricks. What Skyrim had was a lot of interesting stuff in the background lore (which was mainly inherited from Morrowind) and the design philosophy of "fuck around and find out". Fallout 4 wanted (for some reason??) compete with Bioware and they tried to do the whole "narrative" experience, voiced MC, companions, romance etc. Obviously it's Bethesda that we are talking about, so that was half-baked at best. But you could still "fuck around and find out". Now with Starfield they trimmed both "the fucking around" and heavily trimmed "find out". And frankly, I have no idea what they were thinking with that.

@@VaeSapiens Fallout 4 was brutally disappointing for me. I had never been as hyped for a game before or since FO4, I went to the Midnight release and everything. I remember really enjoying the few hours I played that night obviously, I was really excited. After that though I remember playing it some more the next day and not being nearly as satisfied by the end of my session with the game that day. By the end of the launch week of FO4 I was asking myself while playing "when does it get good?" I felt like I must not be looking hard enough. Where are all the interesting NPCs? Why does everything I do feel the same? Where are all the Side Quests? (Not Radiant Fetch quests) then it hit me in the face all at once lol... This IS everything. I hope you enjoy picking up bent cans and desk fans! lol. I was so sad.

@@bigiron1990 I'm sure this is some kind of blasphemy but I loved Fallout 4. I wonder if it's because I didn't much enjoy Fallout 3 and NV and came into 4 with pretty low expectations. Humans have a cognitive bias that makes them remember negative experiences much more keenly than positive ones. It's probably why I don't much like Morrowind; I played Daggerfall and Oblivion first, and Morrowind felt like the worst of both worlds. Anyway, sorry to hear about your experience. I can imagine how if you're a staunch dyed-in-the-wool fan of hardcore RPGs, Bethesda and AAA gaming's slide into dumbed down action game must be tremendously disappointing. BG3 dropped though, which I hope you enjoyed!

@@acudaican Very True! BG3 has been like the 2nd coming of christ for me lol. I already have put 300 hours into since it dropped lol. The only thing I wish was different about BG3 was the way they handle the end of a playthrough.

AND HONESTLY THEY Go on to say that there are even other games they have made like this game called Quake where if you look at the q In quake you can clearly see this game was made with that skyrim concept completely in mind.. so this has been going on for years with the same studio and this is very good content... keep up the good work bro!

jesus christ

I think the best way to put is that Starfield is like a huge, flat pancake with burnt spots and flour lumps that leaves you bloated and full, but not satisfied. BG3 on the other hand is a well cooked meal with a starter and dessert that combines all their ingredients into a well rounded dish that leaves you full and satisfied.

Sure you did

Stay salty mad my dude lmao 🤣.

Also starfield - first game that made loading animation it's logo.

They've pretty much always released on Xbox first and been loyal to that brand.

Bethesda are in bed with Xbox, PlayStation never give them a squeeze.

It'd be entirely different if it took them 6-8 years to drop masterpieces. Like actual game changing titles. Skyrim was their last "ground breaking" effort, and at the time it was, but like 5 better (subjectively) open world games dropped right after. Since then, they've been behind. Dropping starfield in 2023 is like dropping Pong the same year as Mario Brothers. It just doesn't cut it.

When?

About Future Shock being the first mouse-look or first to use wsad... all B.S. It wasn't and it's own default settings were arrow keys just like everyone else's FPS of the era... like quake, for example... which had a nearly identical loadout a full year earlier, and that was also no where near the first time this was used in a game... I think the first was a Apple Mac game... though, I can't recall it's name.

He is a tiny man in all aspects. He kicked out of Bethesda some of the best talent just because he had envy and an inferiority complex. He didn't wanted anyone else making Elder Scrolls or Fallout games after New Vegas tearing him apart.