I have just done another video on Emil and a quote he made. It sort of explains why Starfield came out the way it did, and why the open world model has changed at Bethesda. How Fallout 3's Ending led to Starfield: th-cam.com/video/03CjhaldYgo/w-d-xo.html
here is the bizarr thing, i know ppl like to bring up No Mans Sky, but the issue with NMS is that there is no story, it's just a bunch of meaningless mechanics in a game, and maybe that's what Emil was talking about, but even in starfield there is a story, it's just Emil set himself up for disaster because he planned to make the writing for the game weak because he assumed that players would rather just play the game and don't care about the story. i personally can't get into NMS because there is no story, it's just a meaningless simulation game to me, don't get me wrong i like some simulation, but that should not be the entire game experience, it needs a compelling story to get me into it, now i don't think the writing in games such as skyrim or even FO4 is bad, could it be better? yes it could, but it's not bad for what it exists as. i understand both the stories for the dragonborn and the soul survivor are both singular stories, but they do allow some choices in the stories, and with mods that can make it even more possible for the player, mods such as alternate start, where you can start out as not the last dragonborn and it's the same for FO4, however the story still ends somewhat the same, so you end up finding other mods that offer alternate story directions, we like building our settlements sure, but if the game was only about building settlements without the story, the game would not be played by me, because to me, that would be boring, it would be almost exactly what i hate about NMS, now i will say NMS has a better space simulation than starfield does, because of the creation engine limitations it makes the mechanics of the game boring, so the only thing NMS has better than starfield is the mechanics of how they used their procedural generation and the ship travel, no need for dumbass load screens scattered everywhere you go. NMS is a good simulation space game, but it's not a good game because it has no story, it's meaningless pointless gameplay with mechanics that are meant to occupy the player, for me a game needs a good story and it needs to have multiple stories and it needs depth and multiple endings, as much as possible if at all, and they really need to get rid or the unkillable essential character's, that kind of thing only serves to limit choice in a game, but this also means they would have to write in a new story that reflects the players choice to allow a faction quest to die on and change the story in some meaningful way. so for me a game has to be a full package for me to like it, if it's half assed due to an incompetent writer who knows nothing he speaks of, i mean when he talked about ppl skipping dialogue, it's never something that ppl see in their first playthrough, but when they make the dialogue filled with endless nonsense, it tends to make the player board of the story and the story direction, or if say that player played the game many times before maybe they want to skip the dialogue simply because they already know the story and want to move along to the questing faster, that's more than likely than the reason he wrote off as in this mentality, Emil comes off as disingenuous in his comments because he doesn't ever factor in the full understanding, he's a very black and white person and only seems to be capable of one view point, which i suppose this mentality reflects in his writing sadly.
Guys delusional. The reply sounds more of a marketing technique. And to use a black and white movie from the 1950's as a basis to story making? Hes in the wrong field of work and has bad taste. I hate rom coms and avoid romantic dramas like the plague.
THANK YOU for identifying the lore problem. I've been waiting for someone to finally connect the dots that the current Bethesda brass had the established lore of both Elder Scrolls and Fallout dropped into their laps. All they've done is ride the coattails of more creative people. Anyone who knows the history of these franchises and/or Bethesda as a company would know that Starfield's main issue was always going to be garbage tier lore. And of course, that's exactly what we got.
@ thank you for the kind comment. It’s crazy that once that established lore, and they have to create their own ideas, it’s incredibly sad what they came up with. If you and I, two random strangers, sat down in a room for one hour, we could literally come up with better ideas than they did.
"We noticed that even the devs in the studio would skip dialogue." And that wasn't a collosal sized red flag that something might be wrong with the writing?
"We were making a restaurant, and noticed even the chefs would spit out the food." How could someone with any amount of rational thought not instantly realize "Oh, there's a BIG problem with the food quality."
@@mark.082 not to mention you usually read faster than you hear.. and if the delivery of a line is bland. Then that might be the reason for skipping and not that the line itself is bad.
Not only that, but I wouldn't lump reading the subtitles more quickly and the skipping the voice acting as "skipping dialogue". The voice acting has impart more information than just the text for me to be interested. BG3 has incredible voice acting with alot of subtle emotions that give you a clearer picture of who the characters actually are. Bethesda doesn't try to understand why people are interacting with their games the way they are, they just assume that's the new popular thing and double down on it. It's actually insane.
That’s actually very accurate. He seems like a beginner, that has never been coached or mentored, and all those rookie mistakes got engraved in his brain. Maybe there was too much ego stroking, or something, but the man definitely embodies the Bethesda “not willing to improve or change with the times” mentality.
your single insult had more character than all of emil's writings. i can feel the passion behind it. i can see the thoughts put into it. the amount of effort, of creative freedom you allowed yourself, i hereby witness it. and i'm amazed how something so simple can produce a much more powerful effect than bethesda's ever dwindling soul. this is original, this is new. this is everything bethesda has sought, and failed, to be. no balls, bethesda. no balls.
ye if he thincs that then whis whriting quality will sufer a loot or more likly his whriting is booring like the work he done in oblivion for the darkbrotherhood base npc poor and with no sence in ther changing disposision from dislike and distrust till you do one quest at the begining nah emil is just booring as a whriter cuz he dosent haw the telent needed for it his more like amature fanfiction whriter jsut with out the imagination
@@kephryccephryc863 allow me to use an AI to rephrase what you said. _The writer's storytelling is really weak, especially in their work on the Dark Brotherhood base NPCs in 'Oblivion.' The characters feel really flat, and it's weird how their attitudes change so suddenly. It's like they're more like amateur fanfiction than professional writing. Emil is just boring as a writer; he doesn't have the talent needed for it._ sorry but i literally needed an AI to finally understand you, and i hope this'll help others too.
@@fastestdino2 it’s just so crazy he said that. Despite no Bethesda game having this feature before! He’s like “oh you know our fans, they love their shack building” I’m like what shack building? lol so mental
In my case, I didn't even do either because the writing sucked and I didn't buy Fallout 4 to play discount 1st person Sim City, so what's the point if the writing isn't there? He literally admitted to making his game worse intentionally for a massive section of his audience who were there *for the writing and exploration*
imagine having one of the coolest jobs that a creator could have, with an excited, engaged, collaborative fanbase, and just resenting every minute of it
I think the funniest "Emil moment" for me was when on twitter he just randomly decided "Oh yeah, that one soldier in the opening cutscene of Fallout 1 was Nate from Fallout 4!" It's clear he just decided it'd be a "fun cool lore tidbit" and put ZERO thought into it. And twitter users instantly realized... "Wait, Nate was the guy who laughed at a war crime...? So... canonically Nate is a psychopath?" And Emil almost *immediately* realized his mistake, but because of his ego he couldn't just say "Oh yeah, I literally didn't think of that... my bad. Not canon anymore. Sorry." He kept trying to weasel around it like "Weeelll it's your head-canon as to how Nate changed since then..." and blah blah blah. No, Emil, what happened is you are a hack who didn't think for like 5 seconds before you just said "This is canon."
Nate can say some pretty messed up lines and crack some very out there jokes. Take nuka world, or the rude dialogue skips you get from skipping dialogue with B, or "A MAGIC BOAT RIDE! Will there be dinosaurs?"
His reasoning behind dumbing down the dialogue is just insane, it basically boils down to: "Some newcomers to the RPG genre skip every dialogue, so now you all have to suffer because of it." Completely ignoring their fanbase who play their games FOR that dialogue. Bethesda are too busy chasing mass appeal and their games are suffering for it.
I'd say it's for the world. Who plays a Bethesda game for the main story? Most of them are quite cringe. I wouldn't say actual writing has ever been their strongpoint but they used to be good at worldbuilding.
@@Iridescence93 World building is a part of good writing though. Sure their narratives are often convoluted and confused, but the world and characters would be consistent in reacting to your choices and what you've accomplished in the game. Sure their narrative skills were always kind of weak, but that seemed to be a compromise for the amount of choice they gave you. Now we just have bad writing all around.
Emil is just jealous of that over the years of his career people would rather praise & speak about other lead writer than him like Josh Sawyer, Chris Avellone, Brian Mitsoda, John Gonzales, Swen Vincke, & many other writer who are better than Emil.😤
@@White_Tiger93 telling that his reaction to people not reading his stories is "I'll just stop trying" while a decent writer would see that as a sign they need to improve their writing to engage players
@@ondiyaga3298 Bro’s injecting straight compium mainline into his veins. Don’t worry, pride cometh before the fall. Starfield was Bethesda’s worst selling game since before oblivion. They’re going to have to change or have their next game flop. It’s up to them.
The speech is so cringe, cause SOOOO many games disprove this statement. The Witcher series, Red Dead, Balders Gate, etc. They have amazingly written stories and made A LOT of money.
That's just insulting to players who actually play RPGs, honestly. Yes, Emil, people care about a good story in a role playing game. The gameplay can be meh, but you can't fuck up the writing. What about you take a look at what other studios have been doing since way before skyrim came out ?
It’s crazy how Bethesda seems to always learn the wrong lessons with every game. People wouldn’t ignore your main quests if they were well written. People do not ignore Far Harbor’s or Dawnguard’s main quests for a reason.
No what he said is true, but that doesn't mean you should handicap your game's story or not have one at all. If a game has a complex and engaging story, and people actually engage with it? Good. And if they don't want to engage, that's still okay. The issue arises when the story is in the way in one way or another. Like if you're being bombarded with annoying dialogue 24/7 or you're forced to watch unskippable cutscenes. Even worse if said cutscenes are of a low quality. This sentiment applies to essentially all games, bar stuff like VNs which are literally just stories and nothing else. A game has gameplay and that's what matters the most. A good story can and should be there, but it shouldn't be the main focus, ever, not to the degree which I've described. TW, RDR, BG and so on would all be nothing without their gameplay. Without their gameplay these "games" would be visual novels and nothing more. You create a fun and addicting gameplay loop and the story always comes second. You don't go out there with the sole intend of "it has to be like this!" and then you somehow cram your gameplay in there, whether it's fun or not and even fits to begin with.
as an engineer and an indie game dev I can say that this is one of the dumbest application of KISS I've ever heard of. KISS is used for making game mechanics so it's easier to expand on them, you make a simple base mechanic, and than add complexities onto it to make it more fun. one of the most amazing applications of KISS in game design is "BABA is YOU", the entire game is based on making the "YOU" collide with "WIN" to make a "YOU WIN", the mechanics are literally just "Item is Rule" making a Rule and "Item is Item" transforming all Items to that Item, with rules overriding or blocking other rules by some priority when they are contradictory(mostly old rules beat new rules). the idea is really simple and is easy enough to understand that anyone can grasp it - a perfect implementation of KISS. and then you actually play the game, reach some level and you get absolutely annihilated by how complicated a set of simple rules is to untangle. same goes with playing Piano, making a single sound is easy, playing a simple melody is still easy, playing a few chords and even chord progression with arpeggios and stuff is not really difficult, playing Rachmaninoff's arrangement of pretty much anything is an absolute travesty. simplicity that allows for greater complexity down the line - that is KISS.
Shame we're stuck with this hack ruining all the potentially good Bethesda games. We lost something really special when people like Kirkbride and Ted Peterson left. But I suppose Todd Howard is just easily manipulated, it was nice when Kirkbride was trying to get wacky creature designs or other fun stuff put into Morrowind that most project leads would shoot down as too risky. But when you got bums like Pagliarulo in there... all he's managed to do is somehow justify his continued existence in the company. Instead of using his position for the betterment of the game he just exists and soaks up money to justify more existence. As the game and company collapse with other people like him doing the same exact thing.
Now I understand why in Fallout 4 we got a Power Armor, a Minigun and met a Deathclaw in the beginning of the game. It's like the game wants us to run around guns blazing, speed running through dialogue and lore, and thus not noticing the bad writing. KISS
It's even better: The chaingun is crap (And ammo is basically nonexistent until it's even more crap), the power armor is made of poor glass and runs off crap batterys, and deathclaws can be very easily bamboozled by the environmental clutter. They wanted an unearned but awesome powertrip, but that's the stupidest way to go about it: Because the smart play is to exploit the buildings, so you can just bully the supposed boss fight. Not two minutes of playtesting could have told you to rework that section, and yet, here we are.
In fact, it was flat stated in an interview, by Todd or Hines (can't remember), that they wanted the player to have a "wow moment". They saw the deathclaw scene in Concord as that moment. And yes, Todd has wanted to turn Fallout into a shooter/looter since Fallout 3 because that was the direction of the market. Call of Duty had released 4 games prior to the release of Fallout 3. The reason Fallout 3 still had a lot of the same mechanics as the OG Fallout games was due to the fact that they were banking on the OG fans propping up the game in sales numbers. They even put in the VATS system so the OG fans had a combat mechanic they were used to from the OG games. When the shooter fans criticized the gunplay of Fallout 3, Todd specifically called in Id Software to help tune up the gunplay for Fallout 4. They also dumbed everything else down, to include the dialogue, story, quests from the OG games and Fallout 3 to turn Fallout 4 even more into a shooter where, yes, you run around guns blazing. As for KISS? Todd spoke in an interview how they had kept wanting to simplify mechanics when he talked about the elder scrolls games, from Morrowind to Oblivion to Skyrim. This just carried over into the Fallout games. This was Todd's vision, so it makes perfect sense he'd put Emil into the lead writing role, or have a hand in helping him get to that role at least, where that too was just dumbed down more and more.
I hate to be rude, but Emil is one of those rare characters who is nice to have as a verbal punching bag, not only because of the damage he's done to franchises like Fallout, but also because he's absolutely delusional and dumb lmao
in all honesty, he would probably do fine as a game designer if there was someone above him to keep him in check and do quality control, it's not like he's failed his entire life, its just when he became a head writer things turned to crap
0:26 If they make paper aeroplanes out of your book instead of reading it, it’s because the book is poorly written. I can’t believe a “writer” would even suggest that. EP is a hack writer.
@@eternaldarkness3139 reminded me of playing the Disney Magic Kingdom game a few years ago because I can't afford to visit the real place. I can imagine them saying "when people go to the real Disney park they're not bored!" like yeah.. that's.. sensible..
EXACTLY. It'd be like a chef saying "Well, people just spit out the main course, so why bother? Let's just throw something on a plate and focus on the drinks." It means you need to focus *more* on the main course, because it's clearly lacking, hence why people spit it out. What the chef in this scenario wants to make is a bar. What Emil wants to make by not giving a crap about writing, dialog, or player choice is a generic open-world action game, which is precisely what Fallout 76 ended up. ES6 is gonna be making headlines with how awful it is, mark my words.
Emil seems to not only have no respect for the fans of these games, but also seems to have no respect for videogames as an entertainment format, its like he thinks things like novels and films are the only formats that deserve good stories, this guys seems to not even like gaming, he just looks down upon it He genuinely doesn't deserve to have this job. There's thousands of aspiring people who would be eternally grateful to have his role, and yet he treats a privilege like this as if it's beneath him. It really is just despicable how ungrateful this guy is
Which is weird as he's not actually written any books, and certainly not 'the great American novel' so he can just stfu since all he's written are for computer games...
He is like a college kid who took a journalism course because he thought he would work at the New York Post or something but ended up talking about videogames on some z list website. That is exactly what Emil is, a failed writer who couldn't get a book or tv series off the ground and got stuck working on mid games.
Right? It's like he GENUINELY doesn't want to be there or make the games Bethesda is known for. And I'm like...quit, then? Switch over to a visual novel studio? *Write a **_book?_* Or go in the opposite direction and switch to a studio that _doesn't_ make story-focused games/RPGs at all?
Imagine your writing ability peaking in 2008 with Fallout 3 (which was already awful, the MC has to die for the "good" ending) and refusing to change, burying your head in the sand and condescending anyone who says your writing does indeed suck. He and Todd go hand in hand though, Emil refuses to improve his writing technique and Todd just expects fans to fix his broken titles for him which they always end up doing. Bethesda legitimately has zero chance to improve or grow until these 2 get canned, they've grown complacent and lazy.
Fallout 3 story was a dumbed down Fallout 1 story. Also, the design and worldbuilding as whole was terrible too. I mean, 200 years since the war and people still sleep in garbage? Even 1998's Fallout 2 had bits of regrowing civilization going on.
@@dranzerjetli5126 1) You get zero points for patching holes with paid DLC 2) the final mission is just the icing on the stupid cake the story is garbage from beginning to end.
>they've grown complacent and lazy More like old and tired (I should know, I'm there too - played TES from Arena thru to Starfield:), you reach an age of 'that'll do.' The people who actually created The Elder Scrolls and the worlds lore are no longer there and Fallout came from another developer so Starfield is their *first* original ip...
@@cyrosphere0154 painful is what it is! especially when you get like 5 optional questions that you really don’t want to ask cuz it’s redundant and it would take them forever to say it! They were obsessed with having so much dialogue but it didn’t serve any purpose. You didn’t learn anything, new dialogue options didn’t appear, it’s just like you can either do the quest or ask 33 questions about the quest before you do it anyway lol
@@TheParagonIsDead haha I think it’s easy to see which dialogue and quests were made outside of the usual writing crew. There was one side quest in the new dlc which was written very well and tackled a delicate subject. It was so unusual to what we normally experience so I assume it was a writer who doesn’t usually get as much power. I forget the name of the quest but it’s the quest with the old man with memory issues
Yeah, it's like a self fulfilling prophecy.... write awful dialogue because you expect people to skip it, and they'll skip it. Emil is a great example of the Dunning Kruger effect. Someone who thinks they're much more intelligent than they are, but their overconfidence stops them from recognising the difference between the talent and ability they THINK they have, and what they really have. His overconfidence is staggering, really. Arrogance is not a good trait when you're trying to design a product other people will like.
Players: "The game's story sucks and doesn't compell me to continue it, so I will build shacks as a preferable alternative." Emil: "See?? They're ignoring my amazing story and building shacks!! Why do I even bother!!"
I think that's a bit of an unfair characterisation. All the way back to Morrowind, I've primarily used Elder Scrolls games as a RP focused sandbox, rather than a main quest to be completed. Even in Morrowind which had a pretty great story, the majority of my hours were still spent playing characters that had no interaction with the MQ. "Shacks" is simply shorthand for all the screwing around players do in the broader world. Of course, that does still mean you need a compelling and cohesive world, which... not so much any more either. I'm pretty much resigned to ES6 being mediocre, and haven't purchased 76 or Starfield either because of their own mediocrity.
The thing about "writing what you know" is that it's based on the assumption that the writer has either lived a storied life from which their experiences can resonate with audiences and/or can draw upon a personal well of knowledge that can enhance elements of their story or at least give it something to relate to. The Lord of the Rings is a perfect example, being drawn upon the experiences of J.R.R. Tolkien, particularly his religious upbringing and service during WWI. In Isekai genre of Japanese manga, anime, and light novels, there's been this sort of subgenre I've taken to calling "occupational fantasy", in which the work uses the fantasy setting as a vehicle to explore their own occupational passions, such as medical science, culinary arts, industrial manufacturing, or even zoology and zoo keeping. The problem with Emil's usage of the rule is that he's using it as an excuse for his own complacency and utter LACK of life experience, with an overreliance on referential writing and shallow memberberries being his only way to try to cover that up. To him, he thinks he's streamlining the company's writing process, but he's not - he's *_crippling it._*
"Write what you know" is really just "research what you don't know". Kirkbride was great at writing lore not because he had actually practiced (and thus experienced) a crap ton of world religions, he studied them in college (he was a religious studies major, apperently). Emile could study up on interesting, well made sci fi worlds, or the pieces that make them up, but he didn't.
Emil made good levels in thief, he joined Beth around Bloodmoon and made some decent quests with ok dungeons, same in Oblivion but in more important questlines faction questlines (which retconned the implicit religious beliefs of the Dark Brotherhood tho), then all of a sudden he was narrative lead. How? All his best quest stories were playing off the stories of famous works of literature.
@@OdaManjiro The Dark Brotherhood quest arc in Oblivion is touted as his big accomplishment but I distinctly remember realizing like 2 jobs in that we were killing members of the Brotherhood but had absolutely no path or method to approach the speaker, Lucian or anyone really. It's just a railroaded quest line with a 'surprising twist' but gives the character absolutely no agency if they discover the 'twist' on their own. Yet he compares himself to Homer and Shakespeare
@@Martial-Mat kind of, but it wasn't anywhere close to the same. Just have the resources and choose between a couple choices, then spam the A button (on Xbox)
I DESPISE the dialog in Starfield. Everything feels so surface level and pointless. The “40,000 lines of dialogue” makes it so painful to get through the conversations
It really does and it’s such filler! An example is if I ask you “hey! Can you like the video?” Your answers are either a.) sure! B.) why do you want me to like the video c) do you get many likes? D.) why do people usually like the video? E.) tell me about yourself. It’s such a boring process because you never really care about the questions available and finding out the answers never leads to anything like additional secret dialogue. That’s why the Witcher 3 was so good. If you asked a good question, it opened up new dialogue, altered different endings of a quest, new clues, it actually held value. Bethesda just think we want to sit looking at a lifeless character listening to them talk at us for 20 minutes lol
just like all the other bethesda games then? Sure Starfield has terrible writing but funnily enough I think the writing is the one thing that didnt get "worse" when compared to skyrim or oblivion. It was always shit ^^. Also I dont know how bethesda does this but they really have a talent to make every single npc sound bored and tired when delivering their lines... the voice direction for their games must be fucking abysmal because I dont know many high budget games that have such a bad delivery on their voice lines
Regarding NPCs sounding bored, there is a simple answer there. All lines are recorded in alphabetical order, with no context given. And now you have a bored VA going through the motions
"unconscious incompetence" describes a person who is unaware of their lack of skill or knowledge in a particular area. This state implies that they are doing something wrong but do not recognize it.
After seeing so much of it from him alongside his social media tantrums, I think he's actually genuine. I think this man believes what he's saying. I don't know if that's worse or better.
To be fair, the point Emile was making was more along the lines of "If you give players a carefully constructed story in some games, they will ignore it favour of other activities". And there is an element of truth to this. Depending on the context and the amount of freedom in the game, players may ignore the story requiring the writer to "Keep it Simple" so even those players can follow along. We have a few examples of this in other games: When Gearbox was working on Borderlands, originally they wanted more elaborate cutscenes for story sequences. But they found that since the game could be played up to 4 players coop, players would tune out the story or focus on their own stuff. So they intentionally kept the story to brief audio logs and kept cutscenes sparse so they would be impactful when they were there and didn't disrupt the coop experience. Blizzard noticed that many World of Warcraft and Diablo players would skip through a lot of the dialogue when accepting quests since they were just in it for the loot and XP. This is in contrast to games like TLOU or God of War or RDR2. Games who are mostly story focussed and don't really have other stuff for you to get distracted by. Hell, RDR2 literally mission fails you if go off script. So Emile has a point. But the issue is his takeaway. He believes "Most players will ignore your story, therefore you shouldn't even try". Rather than a "Most players will ignore your story, try and find a way to accommodate both those that don't care and those that do". This is what CDPR actually did for Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk. They also pointed out that some players will just play for the loot and/or rush the main story. So they designed the main quest/throughline to be quicker to thumb through but let there be options for additional dialogue and story content through side quests. So players that wanted to rush through could rush through. And players that wanted to soak it all in could do so with more detailed quests made for them. That's why you can beat Cyberpunk's main story in like 15-20 hours. The main main story is super short (by RPG standards) but you miss out on all the other characters' stories since they are technically "optional".
@@FraserSouris Yeah to be clear, I’m saying that his using this to imply that the story doesn’t matter is the stupid thing. I suppose my comment doesn’t really say that and makes it sound like that I’m referencing just the raw statement.
I don't care if Emil think creating games is hard and that somehow validates he writes the worst dialogue in AAA gaming. Perhaps he should write a zombie games where the zombie is the protagonist and the start a new career in something he can master, perhaps janitor. Her is all the dialogue he needs: A gaaaah B gaaaah (sarcasting) C guuuuh (gaaah) D ? (gaaahh)
For me this really hit after playing the mods Enderal and Fallout London. When the writing from fan made projects is easily outclassing the devs it's not a good look.
I can write better and whenever or at the least, very often, when I play their videogames I re-write a lot of the dialogue in my my head as I hear it... or ateast I used to just rewrite the occassional line of dialogue here or there to phrase it better ,now with Starfield I am making up more sensible progression cor the story and making up natural motivations for characters as I am actively trying to get immersed in the game's story, it's sad... take the intro: Vasco and Barret in The Frontier land to pick up the artifact, mid conversations a ship enters the planet's atmosphere... The Fleet. So far it's the same set up, now I mix it up instead of helping Barret kill the pirates you are told to take cover in the ship (maybe it can be an option at least) shutting the doors tightly, and holding the glowing artifact in pitch black darkness creating a bond. As you overhear the muffeled sounds of gunfire outside. The in-ship intercom turns on and Barret says that they are being totally overwhelmed and intiates "Protocol Indigo", get off planet with delay or deviation and go to constellation with the artifact (You don't have to join forciably, or become The Frontier's Captain... you only have to either seek answers to the surge of energy you felt picking it up or just get rid of this rock and leave... because you should respect the player's choices and rewards should not be handed out) it turns out, to jump that much space you require more jump fuel. Vasco scans space and reads of an abandoned UC Ship yeard were you have the chance to refuel The Frontier, their you encounter The Fleet and engage in combat because you have to too survive. I have hopefully now set up tension, stakes, sensible progression and more importance for more or less the same story. it's not hard, if I can do it for free why can't Emil do it as a job?
@@Passageofsky yeah the whole “player can decide” thing really doesn’t stick well with Emil. The player might choose to do something that isn’t in Emil’s head canon for the game and that’s just not okay so you get next to no choice, and the choice you do get is shallow and affects nothing.
20:03 I wish studios would get this out of their heads where because people were “passionate and worked hard” like it’s relevant to anything. This is a purely transactional relationship. You make the games and if they’re good we buy them. That’s it. If I buy a car or I’m thinking of buying a car and it has a design flaw or some other faults, I don’t care if someone worked hard or were passionate. I’m taking the car back or just not buying it. We don’t owe you our custom and our money because people were passionate and worked hard. It’s not that complicated.
I can't remember who said it first, but "It sure took a lot of effort to squeeze out the turd I shat this morning. Doesn't mean I deserve praise or money for doing it."
I don't care how hard this building company worked or how passionate they were about building the house they're trying to sell me. If the walls are crooked and unpainted, the cabinetry wobbles when you bump it, the ceiling looks about to cave in, the roof isn't finished, there are holes in the floor, the foundation is askew and cracked all over, and it's missing the front door and many windows, I'm not obligated to buy it - much less LIKE the garbage they built, or even be positive about that company when others bring then up in conversation. Sure, outside contractors can fix it right up and make it shine, but I'm not going to say the builders made a good house after outside teams fixed all the issues and renovate it to my liking. Why should we treat game studios any differently? (besides the fact that a house is more important than a game, but if you were going to use that as an argument against this principle then you're a blithering, corpo toe-sucking moron who should be ignored because you're just gonna pre-order the next shiny AAA slop the moment it's available)
that's funny because the only thing they seem to show any passion for is their own collective ego and profit-driven goals. they have zero passion for fun or their audience. i wouldn't take a businessman's words at face value when they talk about passion. if they understood what they were talking about, we wouldn't even be here.
Emil took his success with the Brotherhood questline in Oblivion (which personally I didn't even find good because it railroads you harder than a train on tracks if you poke at it harder than blindly following the questline) and then has just repeated trying to do that for the past 2 decades. Also remember that this is the man that wanted to add magic to the Fallout canon with a side quest because he thought "it would have been cool" but "unfortunately" (fortunately) the magic system was already scrapped from the Engine from Skyrim so he couldn't do it; which is just more evidence that he can't think of anything original; he just recycles the same stuff over and over again, and after Starfield it's obvious why. I like to write as my passion and hopefully one day I'll officially become an author, but it's disheartening and even kind of insulting to see someone like this who just has such a shit and passionless attitude about his profession and the job as a whole, talking down on it like writing is stupid and unimportant or that nobody cares about it. Like, what the hell? I'm positive that almost any passionate young writer would be able to do a better job than this parasite. Even if they didn't, at least it would be something new and original even if it was bad.
_"heh, i know i could write better than all of emil's collective thoughts in a single comment. but i wouldn't want to try too hard, or mistake myself for being great even if that was verifiably true, because that is an incredibly low bar. dude's a hack. the wrong person in the right place, at the right time. but he isn't anymore, as it turns out it was the circumstances that made the man, and the man himself is not much to write about."_ *-my alternate ego* (he's pretty arrogant, but fair. not one of my favorite characters, but he's definitely interesting and can often be used as a wild card. i don't want to rely on him too much to progress the story, but he's very useful and fun to play with. scenarios often develop unexpectedly with his involvement)
Ghosts and Cthulhu Mythos light are a thing in Fallout tho, which is already a grab bag of 50's tropes and was never meant to be so goose-steppingly true to life anymore than Half-Life was.
@@VunderGuy If it "always existed" then it's no problem because that's long-established canon. Focusing one's magicka to control the very elements or summon/control the Undead is not something that has existed in Fallout before and Emil again wanted to add that to the canon out of *nowhere* because he thought it would be "cool", not because it would make sense or be narratively compatible. Besides, there's plenty of other bad writing Emil has done. I'm just listing a couple of examples. Let's poke at Fallout some more: Ghouls don't need food and water because of a quest where a Ghoul child is trapped in a fridge for 210 years, when they did need food and water beforehand - it is a major plot/decision in Fallout 1; but now it's be retconned that they don't food and water -- except the settlement system seems to suggest that they still do as ghoul settlers become unhappy if they have no food or water. This is sloppy writing and this plot hole now exists because Emil wanted to shove a ghoul child npc into a fridge for over 200 years because it would be "cool". In Fallout 3, the big bad evil guy survives lethal radiation because... well, we still don't actually know because it's never properly explained. Just vague excuses. And somehow despite having a tool to survive lethal radiation the first time it works the second time because...? Well we also don't know. The guy didn't die because Emil wanted him to, then died because Emil wanted him to. Doesn't matter if it makes sense or not. It's that way because Emil wanted it to be that way and didn't give a damn if it makes sense. I could keep going of course, but there's no greater or better example than just looking at Starfield and listening to how this guy has flat-out said that there's no point in putting great effort into writing because people will just build shacks, which really contradicts his excuses of "we worked really hard guys please like the game because we worked very hard on it" crap he keeps crying about.
Rather than building shacks, I would prefer the ability canonically to _re-build_ cities and towns that are destroyed at some point during the main story. You know, like rebuilding Kvatch, or Helgen. The mechanics to do so were introduced in _Skyrim_ with Hearthfire, and so it would be nice if a new mini DLC was introduced to rebuild and resettle Helgen with those mechanics. All that said, people typically resort to "settlement building" types of things to either take a break from questions or, and probably more common, because there's not much left in the game to do, because most of the quests are so short, and most of them are piss poor quality to boot.
I'm glad you pointed out how established The Elder Scrolls' franchise was. The same is held true of the Fallout franchise. They've been standing on shoulders of those games' original creators and barely having to do anything of depth. Starfield was their first time truly doing anything of their own and it shows just how much the original creators of those franchises contributed to their success of all subsequent releases.
To be fair, TES was an original Bethesda series. The thing is, it was first developed as a true TTRPG, hence why most mechanics are dice rolls up until Oblviion. The 4 core writers of the TES series left one after another, where the last one, Kirkbride, left after Oblivion. Julien Lefay invented TES, Rolsten and Goodall carried the world in Daggerfall and Morrowind and Kirkbride tryed to hold up the impressive lore in Oblivion, but literally got castrated by Todd. Now we have Emil, who simply dosent give crap.
@@Randleray Yea. I remember absolutely hating the earlier games during the early portions of the game due to the dice roll mechanics, but always grew accustomed to them after the first 5-6 levels or so. I remember getting Morrowind and being a bit thrown off by combat since it was fully 3D and I expected hits to always land due to that. However, it didn't take me long to understand why and grow accustomed to the combat in that game as well. I also understand why Oblivion moved away from the TTRPG style of dice roll based combat and all, but it lost so much soul and style overall as it moved forward. I really interested to see what the next game is like.
The problem is not only Emil but Todd also. There is no doubt in my mind that somewhere along the line Todd realized that all the work to make character AI feel real is not wanted by the players. Todd waxed on about his radiant AI for Oblivion and then slowly this just faded away from his speeches. Starfield was so disappointing for me for so many reasons. To have a lead dev (Todd) say in a video "When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored." and then Todd himself decided that each time you land....every single time that you land...a pirate ship lands a few hundred meters away. That is just bat shit crazy if you think bout it. Somewhere they were like When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored and then before release were like ok game this and so a pirate ship will land everytime you land so you can fight hordes. Then you have AI that never go to sleep and when you run at an NPC they dont react wherein past games they would almost get knocked down and yell at you. The water being empty and you cant even swim. The list just goes on and on.
12:00 Emil here is so lost WOW! He is saying here how players in FO4 were so bored in dialogue they were just skipping thru the options as a way to enforce his KISS principles when the opposite was happening in that his awful dialogue writing style with vague choices bored the players so much and quickly they just started pressing buttons to end it fast.
And that was at his studio! Playing a game they made! But then they increased dialogue in Starfield and used it as a selling point! Some people will always skip dialogue no matter what's written, but most of us will listen when its engaging! If it adds values, (like Witcher 3 dialogue opening up new dialogue options/new options in a quest etc) then we will engage with the npc and ask the questions. But when it's just to listen to them waffling them on at such a slow pace, it just gets so boring and you zone out. But he completely misunderstands it again!
@@AVVGaming1 it is pretty funny that BGS dumbed down all dialogue in FO4 to “yes, no, sarcastic yes and sad yes” then have the audacity to say “oh well players just skip dialogue anyways” yeah because they know their choices don’t matter and just want to get thru the boring ass line to start the quest. EVEN FO3 did it better than 4 because atleast 3 made you read the lines your character was gonna say so you knew whether you were being mean or nice or saying yes or no. They created the issue and now point at it as on out for all their problems wtf
Emil doesn't even understand KISS at all. He probably just heard what it stands for and decided that it would be a useful excuse to continue being bad at his job.
It's not just story that is badly written, its dialogue. The romance dialogue in Starfield for instance. It's like its written by an 11 year old boy from the 17's century. "Thank you my dearest" "You my love are something special" who the fuck talks like that.
@@ianweir3608 Yup. Todd and Emil have always been a couple of idiots with no game-design or writing sense, and no creative talent. TES, which Todd's Bethesda merely inherited, was successful despite them, not because of them.
@thischannel1071 Same with their purchase and legal wrangling of the Fallout franchise. Fallout 3, and *especially* New Vegas were successful despite them, not because of them.
"Gamers don't care about a good story" because we're all playing New Vegas for the timeless graphics and the polished experience. Ironically what's keeping FNV from being the best game ever, is everything that connects it to Bethesda
My understanding is that A reason (not THE reason) for Morrowind and Oblivion's success was Ken Rolston. He is a designer who has been designing games since the early 80s. Ken has also worked on some the biggest franchises in Table Top and Pen and Paper RPGs.
@@Tito_michi True. Without Vijay Lacksham, Ted Peterson, Julian Lefay, and Bruce Nesmith working on Arena, Daggerfall and to some degree Battlespire, there would be no Morrowind or Oblivion. No game, at this level, is made by one person.
I've read interviews where Kirkbride talks about all the ways he used to trick Todd into letting him implement all the stuff that made Morrowind cool and interesting. This game didn't succeed because of Todd, but in spite of him.
"some of the biggest franchises" Bro, Ken Rolston wrote modules for D&D. First edition, at that. Biggest franchises is an understatement, Ken Rolston was a staff member on _the_ formative franchise for Western fantasy gaming.
Definitely had an impact! I mean the dark brotherhood was okay, but it’s not like it I ask you to provide the top 10 best written stories in gaming thst it would be in there. It was just okay. And in 2006 standards were a bit lower in gaming writing. But I honestly think he believes it was the greatest story ever written. In fact, Bethesda seemed to agree as he was immediately promoted to lead writer.
The thing is, he didn’t write the DB quest line, he worked on the quests, under a competent lead writer, who checked his work & had final oversight. When they retired after oblivion, Emil took the credit & was elevated above his ability.
Lets not kid ourselves, Fallout 3 was not by any metric a great game either. People only remember it fondly because they haven't replayed it since it first dropped while they are on their 412th replay of New Vegas.
I'm convinced fans of Bethesda games have never really played RPGs, they just tried Bethesda and for whatever reason never played any good games. Because if you played good games, you'd see how bad and shallow and empty Bethesda games are.
No metric? Maybe in terms of it as a RPG but not as a game, kt's a good game: Enviromental storytelling level designs and detail is compelling, the art direction and atmosphere were both beautiful the music is solid and the game's size was staggering for the time
Kinda true. My first playthrough and introduction to Fallout was 3 in 2015, a year later I tried New Vegas and never went back to 3 until this year. It feels more boring and filled with wasted potential (the capital of the US after all) than what I remembered
I see a lot of people bashing on the fact that Starfield has only humans, but IMO that's not actually the problem. It's 100% possible to make an interesting space setting with humans only, and in fact I would like to see more of that. The real problem is that Starfield's lore is ass period. But look at the movie chronicles of Riddick for example, it's a space setting with humans only, but it's still super interesting. Or Warhammer 40K, they could remove the aliens completely and the lore would still be amazing, because the humans are so varied and interesting. All that needs to be done for starters is to take a setting where humans have been in space for millennia and had enough time develop widely different cultures, ways of life and even body types on other planets, just like what happened here on Earth. In short, the humans become the "aliens" but in a far more believable and realistic setting, because despite the fact that being able to f*ck blue skinned humanoid aliens is amazing, the possibility of that actually happening in real life is very close to 0.
The Starfield lore is cool actually, all out war between the two human space civilizations with total war on multiple planets, genetically engineered bioweapons, giant mechs and snake worshipping space cultists. The problem is the game is set AFTER all of that with a main story about digging for space metal to become the chosen one. WTF?
It's so broad and so shallow. Have just a handful of systems with more distinction between planets as well as between Freestar, UC, and ungoverned space and we could have interesting conflicts without the need for any other species.
@@maduross since everyone else already pointed it out I just say this short; AND the "evil" faction is only the pirates (Crimson Fleet) There's no conflict whatsoever, and I don't mean war but ideologies, lifestyle, politics etc
The Expanse is a great example. They could have left out the alien tech entirely and had a crazy fascinating story with just the politics between the human factions (Earth, Luna, Mars, Belters).
Another sci-fi space game, "Starsector" does this and does this pretty well with it's various, exclusively human factions with their differing societies, technology, military doctrine, and ambitions.
I love Sci-Fi, and I thought Starfield would be the perfect game for me. You name any big budget Sci-Fi video game series, I’ve played it. But I couldn’t play Starfield, and now I understand why. The narrative, the dialog, it felt as if Bethesda decided that their audience couldn’t handle a bit of grit and emotional weight, so they made the most insipid, anaemic narrative they could possibly conjure. The reason why I love games like Mass Effect or Cyberpunk is that they instil a duty upon you, the player to embark on heroics that strengthen your investment in the plot, as well as supporting characters. I felt none of that with Starfield, or at least didn’t care enough to become invested. I feel like in a ‘multiple choice’ game, your investment in the plot has to be one of the most important factors. How can you perceive any kind of value in choice if you don’t care about the stakes?
Totally agree and I love both mass effect and cyberpunk because of the mature content. But if I asked you who is your favourite companions in mass effect and why, you’d be able to write me an essay. If I asked which side characters were the best in cyberpunk you could do the same. If I asked for the best characters in starfield, you couldn’t answer and I think a lot of people would say the same. Their writing is so basic and no character stands out. And like you said, their writing seems so safe and boring. Honestly they really need to look at getting some help. But they did have that with Obsidan on fallout new vegas, it worked, then they refused to do it again!
Cyberpunk and BG3 are peak examples of how a good story and good gameplay compliment each other so neither overstays their welcome. When I get tired of slicing and shooting, I get back into story missions for a good cybercry. When I get tired of talking and exploring, there’s a fight just around the corner in BG3.
I personally enjoyed it, but it shouldn't have been the main focus of a Fallout game, but a mechanic you could choose to engage with or ignore completely. I think had Fallout 4 had more RPG mechanics similar to 3 and NV, and better writing it would have been better recieved, and the settlement mechanic would have been a nice little bonus for people to mess with if they wanted to.
I loved it, until it proved later, that it just dont works, half of workshop inventory is disapearing and it will broke once you will have more than 5 connected settlements, or you are on other end of map.
*shrug* I thought it was really good, just underbaked. I really wished for cool tower defence gameplay but it really never quite materialized. Building defensive bases with turrets and fortifications to defend against waves of raiders, supermutants etc. would have been really fucking fantastic if done well.
This was much better articulated than other "bethesda writing" videos in the sense that it doesn't just dump Skyrim in the garbage. It says "the main story was nothing special". Skyrim had some clever and funny writing at times, and I'm glad that someone sees that instead of lumping the entire experience into the main story.
The writing in Skyrim was abysmal. The world design was abysmal. This is where you’re going to get triggered… Until you realize that more than half the towns in Skyrim were a foot wide and an inch deep. Virtually zero residents or conversations of note. Dad-gamers and models buoyed Skyrim, nothing else. If it had come in Obvlivions stead, without modding, it would have flopped hard.
Skyrim's writing was a step down from Oblivion. Oblivion's main quest was a bit generic but the side quests were Bethesda's peak. The faction quests in Skyrim felt rushed. One minute you're a new recruit, next you're made managing director!
@Gloops01 I agree, which is why I only join one non civil war faction per playthrough. It was a mistake on bethesdas part to let you do all at once and ascend so quickly. This other guy is hating just to hate.
one important thing, Starfield SOLD really well... in their bottom line is a success, but sold because of PAST success and good will, that is now GONE, and they didn't notice yet... money speaks, but it takes time,
"Even if you write the greatest story with love and care, the players won't care and just built shacks." Apperently emil has never heard of morrowind, a game that practically saved bethesda on its early decline, and people still talk about the lore TODAY.
That only applies for the first years of its launch right up to Wastelanders. His lack of involvement ironically has led to the rest of the team objectively improving the experience, which won't make it the best game ever, but still a better one than at launch.
New Vegas killed Bethesda. Skyrim came out a year after vegas and was a massive hit. This should be considered a grace period where bethesda magic was still intact. Fallout 4 releases. The engine upgrades make the game marginally better than games that came out in 2013 and it's story was basically dead on arrival. The Bethesda Magic is waning. Fallout 76 releases. The Bethesda Magic is non-existent and the game is a fucking insect terrarium of bugs. Starfield releases. Bethesda Magic is executed by firing squad. The main quest is a massive McGuffin hunt and the planets are procedurally generated slop. As soon as fans bit into the forbidden fruit of a well written story, Bethesda began to collapse. It doesn't help that fucking over Obsidian over a single Metacritic point and bad industry practices make the games perform like a geriatric old man who escaped the home again has made trust in Bethesda dry up faster than P. Diddy's reputation after the feds found his baby oil stash.
Playing a bit of Devil's advocate here for the fun of it: To be fair, the point Emile was making was more along the lines of "If you give players a carefully constructed story in some games, they will ignore it favour of other activities". And there is an element of truth to this. Depending on the context and the amount of freedom in the game, players may ignore the story requiring the writer to "Keep it Simple" so even those players can follow along. We have a few examples of this in other games: When Gearbox was working on Borderlands, originally they wanted more elaborate cutscenes for story sequences. But they found that since the game could be played up to 4 players coop, players would tune out the story or focus on their own stuff. So they intentionally kept the story to brief audio logs and kept cutscenes sparse so they would be impactful when they were there and didn't disrupt the coop experience. Blizzard noticed that many World of Warcraft and Diablo players would skip through a lot of the dialogue when accepting quests since they were just in it for the loot and XP. This is in contrast to games like TLOU or God of War or RDR2. Games who are mostly story focussed and don't really have other stuff for you to get distracted by. Hell, RDR2 literally mission fails you if go off script. So Emile has a point. But the issue is his takeaway. He believes "Most players will ignore your story, therefore you shouldn't even try". Rather than a "Most players will ignore your story, try and find a way to accommodate both those that don't care and those that do". This is what CDPR actually did for Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk. They also pointed out that some players will just play for the loot and/or rush the main story. So they designed the main quest/throughline to be quicker to thumb through but let there be options for additional dialogue and story content through side quests. So players that wanted to rush through could rush through. And players that wanted to soak it all in could do so with more detailed quests made for them. That's why you can beat Cyberpunk's main story in like 15-20 hours. The main main story is super short (by RPG standards) but you miss out on all the other characters' stories since they are technically "optional".
No you’re absolutely spot on and before I did this video I spoke with a friend who had the same sort of input. I totally think what you’re saying is correct. I think what the issue is, is that you have to accommodate for so many different play styles. I honestly love CDPR and think they are the example! They have managed to strike that balance. I think they accommodated the creative type with the settlement buildings, but I think they really have made the stories boring for those who want a good story. It’s written in a way that’s so basic, it’s not even funny. But you are right in that he probably meant that, but no matter what his writing for quests and side quests has been poor for a long time. I’m going to do a video about how CDPR basically was the worst thing to happen to Bethesda. Thanks for the well thought out comment!
@@AVVGaming1 Yes. Emile's writing style seems to adapt the story only for the players who don't care rather than also accommodating it for those that care. I always suspected this is where Fallout 4's dialogue system came from. The idea being that rather than needing to actually read or interpret what the dialogue is saying, you can just give the type of response you want. If you, the player, didn't want to read the dialogue to choose the "positive response", you could just press X and your character will say a positive thing. If you wanted to say a negative thing, just press O. If you wanted to be sarcastic, just press square. If you wanted more info, just press triangle and your character will ask what the writer thinks is the best question for the situation. Like, I remember before Fallout 4 came out, one of the biggest "complaints" against both Bethesda and Bioware RPGs was that you select a dialogue option and it comes out different than how you read it. Maybe when you read the response, it sounded neutral but the character says it in an antagonistic way. So for Fallout 4, rather than making the responses more clear or adding a label like Deus Ex Human Revolution/Mankind Divided did, the game instead just simplified down to just 4 basic emotions. Which....sure... I guess meant you can never say the wrong thing. Like when you press X, your character will always be positive no matter what he says. But it makes it harder for the people that do care since it's harder to roleplay or ask additional questions or have additional responses since you are locked to those very specific 4 options no matter what. *>"is that you have to accommodate for so many different play styles. I honestly love CDPR and think they are the example! They have managed to strike that balance. I think they accommodated the creative type with the settlement buildings, but I think they really have made the stories boring for those who want a good story. "
As a writer, I completely disagree. The first rule of writing is to evoke an emotion, and that is where Bethesda have failed. It has nothing to do with complexity or simplicity. Cyberpunk, for example, just had better writers. They wrote a story that draws you in with each line. They wrote scenes with plot points that feel important and compelling to experience. Every detail down to character movement and animations all work together with the dialogue to emphasize meaning, reveal character emotions, and build a world worth learning about. Anyone who pursues the art of the craft knows it is not a simple afair. There are countless ways to analyze the subtle decisions that make a good story great. Complexity/Simplicity is only one of these ways, but it is largely irrelevant to the primary focus of writing, which is to make the reader/player feel the emotions of the scene. It is a drop in the bucket of the innumerable decisions that an expert writer makes. Bethesda's writers simply are not good at what they do. There's no other way to explain it without writing a 50k word book on the subject...
I think the problem has more to do with the internal structure of Bethesda than Emil in particular. Currently they have Emil as lead designer *and* lead writer. This is an absurd way to structure those positions, they should be handled by two separate individuals. The role of lead designer and lead writer have wildly different responsibilities. Assigning a single person to both positions, no matter who it is, will have extreme difficulty juggling the work. Bethesda is under the Microsoft umbrella now, they're a much larger studio, there's no reason they should be allocating multiple senior roles to a single individual.
That stuff about fans not wanting a deep story that gives them the power to influence the outcome, etc. sounds like an excuse. It's like he's saying, "Yeah, I could write something better, but I don't need to." The sad reality is that the more I hear Emil talk, the more I think the examples of his bad writing are genuinely the best he can do.
@BungieStudios they sold out to the highest bidder and are owned by shareholders nowadays. Priorities shift from making good games to making profitable ones.
HE WROTE FALLOUT 3??? Oh god, that explains a lot. No wonder the lore has been fucked inside out. EDIT: THE WRITING WASNT GOOD IN 3 THOUGH. The main antagonist in 3 is basically a mustache twirling cartoon villain with zero depth of nuance, and you aren't even the main character in that story. This has been argued and proven to death by numerous analysts online. I mean, if you WANT to invoke an 18 hour Creetosis response, be my guest, but you're talking out your ass because you've clearly never played Fallout 1 and 2. I mean, otherwise you'd know that the lore for the BOS, the Enclave and the Super Mutants have all been fucked with for the sake of mass appeal. Bethesda has zero standards for their writing, they are willing to change the lore if its convenient for them to do so. Hell, the reason that Cyrodill looks the way that it does in Oblivion was because they were capitalizing off of the LotR films. That setting is so fucking generic that it hurts.
Whenever he writes, he should ask himself, "Can I cut this in half and still get my point across?" That would have saved me a lot of dialogue skipping.
My dad said "if you let someone talk long enough they'll reveal exactly who they are, and sometimes you learn that they're just a moron" Edit: I'm talking about Emil
No he’s heard of NV, it completely outshined the story he worked on in 3 and it took 18 months to make. I feel like a large part of Emil’s work is pride and his pride was hurt bad when ACTUAL writers created NV and put the bar so far out of reach for hacks like him
Like I said so many times in the last 12 months or so: Emil Pagliarulo's motto "Keep it simple, stupid!" is a good sentiment to have if you make games for five-year-olds. Also: He has no professional background in story-writing and obviously has reached the limits of his creative writing decades ago. Even though he is a director and producer at BGS, he is either too proud or not smart enough to get outside help from professional novelists to make the world- and character building on the story front much more decent and entertaining. As long as he is the head of stroywriting in BGS games, all this will not get better and will dramaturgically remain on the cheesy, unimaginative level of the very early Stargate SG-1 TV show episodes (and their drama was actually more imaginative than what Starfield presents us with; only Stargate used those stories as throw away "adventure-of-the-week" vehicles... Starfield made an entire game out of this lackluster story-writing).
His KISS method should add, "Why does the player care" to their criteria. "You're the chosen one", no I'm not I'm going over there to collect cheese wheels because your story sucks
If you want disdain, have you tried all the options in Starfield that highlight "I don't have a choice" or question the premise? My memory was that all of the 4th wall touching/breaking questions have horrendous answers that sometimes felt more like disdain for the player than being a real response. I don't even know why they included them with the answers you get. As for ES6, I'm surprised people even have a sliver of hope for that. Shattered Space was, for me, Bethesda's chance to eat crow and show us that they can do good by the fans. The response and the DLC itself shows me they should not be trusted and that they've burnt any good will I might have had for them. Comparing it to Far Harbor is an insult. I won't be touching ES6 for at least 3 months after release and I'll only touch it then if it's gotten good reviews so I don't run into the Starfield issue where it was liked for a bit but then people realized how the game was made and opinion started to sour worse and worse. (My opinion of Starfield went from bad, to neutral with good moments, and back to bad. The middle was where I found quests I actually enjoyed and found interesting while also having modded out so many of the rough edges and I hadn't realized just how bad a lot of the systems in the game were. Also, one of the most popular mods at launch should not be a UI mod because of just how bad your UI is).
I did a video on that DLC for starfield and to be honest I’m still pissed I spent $30 on it lol and to be honest, I’ve bought some back games in the past. I just have never felt so cheated for the money lol. But it’s the fact Bethesda are not learning from their mistakes. He said that they knew in fo4 that dialogue was too much but they added even more on starfield. Good dialogue is not quantity, it’s quality. It’s saying things efficiently and that keep you intrigued. Sometimes it’s what the character doesn’t say or the hidden meaning behind it. With Bethesdas characters, especially in starfield, it’s such obvious writing that it’s annoying. Honestly it’s so poor but they knew that, they just aren’t learning from their mistakes or from consumer feedback. Imagine telling your younger self in 2011 when you see playing skruim that you’d end up not excited about the games sequel. So sad.
The most mindnumbingly stupid thing is his KISS-philosophy. This acronym and "philosophy" stems from advertising. It is meant to say, that in order to advertise something to a new customer-base, you need to keep the sales pitch and the act of buying itself as simple as possible, so that there is no reason to delay or doubt the buying of the product. Nobody in their right mind would say, this principle applies to the development of the product itself, especially when the demand is already there and the act of advertising is far less important.
Exactly right! Don’t over complicate the sale! If you have someone interested in buying the product, offer the one they want, don’t offer 10 variations because it complicates the sale! But KISS in actual writing, of stories, is plane different and that’s what I don’t get! Why he brags about it too! Honestly that whole presentation he did is so worrying it’s not funny
@@AVVGaming1 True. It's also quite funny how he/they distance themselves from this leading principle when responding to criticism: "no, this game is actually super complex and deep, there's endless options you can choose, blahblahblah" and stuff like "fans just want waaay too much". What is it then, do fans want too much depth and complexity or don't they?
I know and how he said "we put the biggest most ambitious open world space game on a console" and yet No Man's Sky already did this and a lot better, in my opinion at least. It's so strange because it's like he's in a room with no windows, human interaction or internet. He speaks like Starfield and its DLC got 10/10, no other games exist or compete, there's no feedback etc. its just so strange but it reflects in the way the company has been as of late. Even when they try to say they care about fans, they still snap at them. They generally can't take on constructive criticism.
@@AVVGaming1 Seem to be a general principle that these overconfident and underqualified hacks end up in the highest places where they slowly and steadily erode everything good that better people than them created.
Kiss is very important... that's why you get trash design from BMW where oil flows through the bracket of a alternator or how new cars don't have pull cable e brakes. Keeping things simple is very important.
I Honestly think that Bethesda doesn't want to do the work for writing anymore, at least Emil doesn't. And he is blaming the fans for it when really it's his fault, he is just tired of it. And the thing is if they wanted to they could just stop making story focused games and do what they clearly want which is focus more on gameplay and "fun" mechanics like building stuff, but if they did that they would have to stop calling their games RPGs and that is scary for Bethesda. But now it's all just half measures it's a story drive RPG except it's not really any good at that anymore, it is a gameplay focused game with building mechanics and such like minecraft except it's not nearly as good as minecraft. They have to decided what they want to make and stick to it and deal with the potential loss of fans and maybe new fans to come around and check it out but these half measures don't help anyone, no one is happy with how things are going now.
As always, I completely agree with you. It's clear that they want to be the next minecraft, or the next No Man's Sky. They want to make games that have a never ending life span. It could be an age thing? Maybe they see Gen Z playing these games a lot and they want to bring them over to the Bethesda games? But either way, it's a bad move for them. 1.) They will lose their core audience as they usually don't like those type of games. 2.) They won't get the crowd they want as they are not as successful as the other games they are competing with. Honestly, it's very scary when you think about it and where they could end up if they're not careful. Other companies are ahead of them in RPGs, others ahead of them in open worlds and others in crafting games. They either need to make TES6 the way we all want it (eg Skyrim next gen) or it will be a bad ending for them. At least, that's how I see it.
I didn't skip dialog in Cyberpunk 2077 because of how good the writing is in that game (not to mention style, voice acting and direction). Its amazing how if you write something of quality people don't skip through it.
Fallout 3 was absolutely not known for a really good main quest. The main quest was actual garbage that falls apart on basically ANY scrutiny. Fallout 4 was... about the same in that regard.
The virging Bethesda ''let's make it dumb and easy to understand '' vs the chad Fromsoft ''let's make the best story ever then put all the lore behind a square turd you can find in a castle's abandoned outhouse''
We could go on and on about Bethesda. But Bethesda created The Elder Scrolls and its lore, a universe far more complex than any universe FromSoftware created, a universe far longer than all of FromSoftware’s universes put together. What does comparing The Elder Scrolls to Dark Souls have to do with it? Is The Elder Scrolls compared to truly complex, truly colossal universes like Lord of the Rings or World of Warcraft? But why to FromSoftware games? Man, did you know FromSoftware didn’t create armor and knights? I hate it whenever two things that have nothing to do with each other get compared just because they share a specific element like fantasy and medieval aesthetics, in this case, FromSoftware games aren’t even RPGs since they don’t even let you be whatever you want or roleplay with your characters since it all comes down to killing, killing, killing. And what about the story? what are you telling me HAHAHAHAHAHA ALL THE UNIVERSES OF FROM SOFTARE ARE THE SAME STORY WHAT IS BEING LAZY I will summarize it for you. ohhh the great force that maintains order in the world was exhausted or was broken by someone now we are all at war everything is lost oooooh adventurer you are late the whole kingdom is lost and decayed the gods and demigods that we used to have are now crazy or hostile and are not even a shadow of what we used to be everything is lost ooooooh great force that used to reign in this world please come back. that is literally the story of all the fromsoftware games (the vast majority) Also, how easy is it if you finish the lore of Dark Souls or Elden Ring in a month LOLOLOLOL on the other hand, the lore of The Elder Scrolls takes years to learn, it is not only a video game, it also has collections of lore and canonical novels, and it is not just about reading, here you also have to learn to interpret what the books say, what is a lie and what is true, since there are canonical lies and canonical myths within the universe of The Elder Scrolls. You have to differentiate Emil Pagliarulo from the writers of The Elder Scrolls. Emil only writes the main story and some other things while the rest of the writers write the lore books, write the guilds or secondary stories ETC etc etc
@@Slippppppp Bethesda is shit and it's not what it used to be. We can throw shit at it with Fallout and Starfield but the Elder Scrolls don't fit in the same bag. We have to admit that the Elder Scrolls are a fantasy world that was made by geniuses who, even if they're no longer here, the lore is still there. I was wrong when I said they were the same. Sekiro is clearly not the same, and Bloodborne is not the same either, among others. That's where I was wrong.
>they want to build shacks for 30 hours >one of the bighest and most beloved mods on fallout 4 is Sim Settlements 2 a mod which has a better story and removes the need to build shacks for 30 hours
It's a lot easier for people to say "bAd wRiting" instead talking about branching questlines, player agency, and general roleplay and world interaction. That's where I think the problem lies, as you can write the most generic storyline but player choice and agency are what make the experience special.
This is why I think it’s just laziness on BGS part. I hate to use NV but it’s just so good. NV accounted for a INSANE amount of player choice, kill this guy or don’t, do this quest or don’t, leader of the NCR in the strip? Kill him who cares, the story will continue and you will face consequences. But accounting for all that player choice is a massive undertaking, very difficult because every player will play differently. Emil saw how good NV was and basically said “wahh I don’t wanna worry about player choice, I just wanna tell my story.” Which wouldn’t be so bad if he wasn’t a hack. But you can’t make a game and market it as an RPG when you have next to no control over the story until the final mission where you pick a faction you might be the leader of or still a pawn and then the story wraps up taking into account NOTHING you’ve done. That’s why the slides at the end of NV were so good, you saved goodsprings from the powder gangers? You get a brief mention of how they’re doing. You brought back the entire minuteman militia and built strongholds on every settlement you could? Yeah that’s nice, anywho
You also wouldn't see storylines that are in Cyberpunk in a Bethesda Game, Bethesda Games are too tame. Cyberpunk deals with Traffiking and Human Capture (the Badlands Mission with the guy kidnapping Children) there's a lot of adult themes in Cyberpunk that Bethesda are too scared to implement in their games.
The shack building comment really shows his contempt for his customers. There are a lot of people who love the addition of building to the Fallout games. There is a whole community built around it. The most popular kind of building in Fallout 4 and 76 is "lore friendly". That means the builders love the story of Fallout so much that they want to create things that fit into the overall story. I never want anyone to lose their jobs but this guy is the exception.
Declined? Its been bottom of the barrel trash for DECADES now. Oblivion was fun but still a noticeable step down from Morrowind. Bethesda Fallout was a flaming dumbster fire right off the bat. This has been a steady trend as more and more people have come to accept this hyper casual open world action game slop as the norm or even believe its exactly what Bethesda marketers tell them, this genre defining roleplaying masterpiece with infinite possibilities and everything anyone could ever want from a classic RPG. It makes me sick to my stomach thinking this more than likely going to be the future of both of these franchises because the MAJORITY do not giver a shit as long as they get to kill and loot in a new map thats either TES themed or Fallout themed.
1:50 "...and despise the shack building element." I have written multi-page litanies on FO4's seemingly endless failings, but the forced integration of Minecraft will almost certainly retain the top spot forever. Because it's a minigame that is completely incongruous with the rest of the game. Because the theme is "rebuilding the wasteland" when I specifically want to enjoy a post-apocalypse, not help transform it into a non-post-apocalypse. Because its existence corrupted the rest of the game: Every item now has some intrinsic secondary value, and when gauging what to leave and what to collect for selling, you no longer leave junk alone like it deserves; and bric-a-brac that's been patiently sitting on shelves for over 200 years now reliably respawns every 3.5 hours because the Minecraft machine must be endlessly fed. Because the rules of the minigame are just as immersion-destroying as the game itself: You can build a house or break one down in 16 milliseconds; you can create a bed from a cigarette; you can change a two-clawed deathclaw gauntlet into a three-clawed variant by somehow applying a random scrap of bone; and lead comes from pencils. But most of all, FO4's Minecraft system is the worst failure of the game because it's 33% of the game's total content, including the DLC. If you paid $60 for the game, $20 of that purchase went towards a minigame that deserves to be reviled and which you cannot ignore without installing mods. The rest of the game suffered from this imbalance of developer resources, as made clear by the conspicuous dearth of proper quests, a world that's poorly fleshed out (Easy City Downs? Cait's arena?), and the many companions who don't have their own quest, even though there are hints that they were going to, such as Strong's "milk of human kindness." And better still, now that Pandora's box is opened and Bethesda has successfully attracted a small audience who only play their games for whatever Minecraft homages they shoehorn into them, we're stuck with it. Elder Scrolls 6 is guaranteed to be oversaturated with the same thing, probably taking up a third of the game's total content once again.
This is so well said and hits the exact feelings I have in a summary! I don’t mind it as a side content, additional content for free is never bad. The part that upset me the most is how it took over most of the game. Like literally it’s almost half the content. Want to finish the main quest? You gotta build something! It’s just not my cup of tea, which is fine, but when it’s forced it changes the game. I’m going to do another fallout video this weekend on this.
Exactly my point! RDR2 in particular probably has hundreds of hours of content in it. Random events, hidden secrets and they’re all unique! They’re all hand crafted and special! So whilst Bethesda make generic radiant content, games like rdr2 hand crafted it all. That way the players curiosity always gets rewarded! It never gets repetitive!
That screenshot at 2:43 says it all. The response is obviously AI generated, or maybe it's oppositive of what I'm thinking. When the company cares that little it's probably time to stop buying.
I actually disagree with you about Oblivion's writing. I think it's just as bland and goofy as anything that came after. It's a bog standard apocalypse storyline with a generic main villain in Mankar and a lot of silly faction quests that seem at odds with the apparent seriousness of the main plot. If anything I think that a lot of the writing rot within Bethesda started with Oblivion. So even if Emil was ousted from the company, the rot has long since nestled into their design philosophy. They don't use design documents and Todd is still the head of the company. You'd need a complete overhaul from the ground up.
If writing is a waste of time in videogames, why then are people still talk about the themes, secrets, originality and nuance of games like Mass Effect, Fallout 1, Bloodborne etc.
Exactly! The writing is what makes a game a legend and last forever. Look at silent hill 2 it’s still considered a masterpiece but the reason is because of the writing! The deeper meanings! The symbolism. It’s deep! Same with the games you’ve mentioned. These surface level games just don’t hit the same. They’re here today and gone tomorrow.
TH-cam won't let me repeat here what I told Emil on Twitter as I listened to you. Big thumbs up! ES6, FO5? I'll probably just keep playing Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, and Fallout 4.
I was just playing Fallout 4 yesterday actually. The exploration in the game is really good but I think one of the saddest things was how good the Far Harbor DLC is. Emil compared Shattered Space DLC to Far Harbor from Fallout 4 saying they're alike. I can tell you now, they're not. Even if Bethesda never release a good game again, we can at least be happy they gave us a good run before their plans changed.
6:09 One must note that Emil is only one of Three Lead Designers credited in Skyrim, the others being Bruce Nesmith and Kurt Kuhlman. Kurt Kuhlman in particular had a heavy hand in Skyrim, and much of it's narrative and worldbuilding stems from concepts he and Kirkbride were establishing all the way back in morrowind, as well as their contributions to the Gregory Keyes novels that bridge the gap between Oblivion and Skyrim. Emil didn't have as much of an opportunity to screw up Skyrim because there were more senior devs to keep him in check
Avarti on TH-cam has a Skyrim series called "Why (Insert character here) is an idiot". That series exists because of how bad those quests were written.
@ so I did another video rihht after here: th-cam.com/video/03CjhaldYgo/w-d-xo.htmlsi=en7sDCBoMMx2QUNb where I essentially had to go over the fallout 3 main story again and I think my younger self and nostalgia made me feel that the story was better than it was lol after reviewing it again I realised there were a lot of issues with it. The side quests were great and so was the world / lore (in my opinion) but yeah the main story was a bit all over the place lol
Absolutely delusional. The way Emil puts it, it's like he is a writer who doesn't want to write, and makes less than the bare minimum because he thinks no one cares about it anyways, my take, stories can be as complex or simple as the writer wants and be a great story if it's well told. What Emil does feels like neither, it's barebones, more like laziness. How can someone like that be a lead writter is beyond me. Anyone with basic writting skills could put some thought into it and make a better universe than Starfield while talking a shower, there could be as many rookie mistakes all through it but it would still be more sincere and well thought than what Emil does.
The writing is Starfield is bad, sure; but was the writing in Skyrim any better? The only difference is that Skyrim got away with it. Skyrim had such anmazing exploration and world design, and such an addictive gameplay loop, that the dogsh*t writing didn’t matter too much.
Meh… They stripped the gameplay loop down to barebones and relied on the surge in casual gamers to buoy their sales. The world design in Skyrim is pretty brutal. Just look at half of the towns - there’s barely 10 residents in each of them and none of them have anything enjoyable to say. Skyrim was a fluke. Overly simplified to attract dad-gamers during a period of time where the demographic was seeing a massive surge. Which is why they just kept re-releasing the game over and over again periodically. Play 2-3 hours of oblivion, see how well that game was written and how rich the environment/towns are, then go play Skyrim. It’s astounding how painfully bad Skyrim is.
@@lucaschudleigh7193 The towns aren't great, no. But let's be fair: the world in Skyrim is stunning. Great to explore, plenty to do. The music - which I forgot to mention - is fantastic. And the basic gameplay loop is simple, but fun. That was enough to make it work and work well. However, I suspect they drew the wrong conclusions from Skyrim's success. Skyrim was able to carry the weight of its bad writing and quest design ONLY because those other elements were so well done. The right lesson to draw was NOT "hmm, it seems high quality writing and quest design don't matter". But I think that probably was the lesson they drew.
@@lucaschudleigh7193 i agree completely. oblivion was my fav game when it came out, i played skyrim a few years ago and quit after 10 hours. i couldn't stand it, it's a total waste of time. Then i played kingdom come: deliverence and the difference is stunning. It made me feel the same things i felt when i first played oblivion
It didn't have amazing exploration or world design seeing the same dwarven ruin or seeing the same falmer infested cave over and over again or seeing the same fkin Nordic burial crypt with draugrs over and over again isn't good design or good for exploration. Its bad and terrible but ppl back then bought into the hype with all the gaming media giving 10 to a mediocre game.
For so many people to criticize Emil’s stories is to have so many people play them. We didn’t tear out the pages of his novel, we read them in disbelief that the LEAD WRITER would stop caring about WRITING
I have just done another video on Emil and a quote he made. It sort of explains why Starfield came out the way it did, and why the open world model has changed at Bethesda. How Fallout 3's Ending led to Starfield: th-cam.com/video/03CjhaldYgo/w-d-xo.html
here is the bizarr thing, i know ppl like to bring up No Mans Sky, but the issue with NMS is that there is no story, it's just a bunch of meaningless mechanics in a game, and maybe that's what Emil was talking about, but even in starfield there is a story, it's just Emil set himself up for disaster because he planned to make the writing for the game weak because he assumed that players would rather just play the game and don't care about the story.
i personally can't get into NMS because there is no story, it's just a meaningless simulation game to me, don't get me wrong i like some simulation, but that should not be the entire game experience, it needs a compelling story to get me into it, now i don't think the writing in games such as skyrim or even FO4 is bad, could it be better? yes it could, but it's not bad for what it exists as.
i understand both the stories for the dragonborn and the soul survivor are both singular stories, but they do allow some choices in the stories, and with mods that can make it even more possible for the player, mods such as alternate start, where you can start out as not the last dragonborn and it's the same for FO4, however the story still ends somewhat the same, so you end up finding other mods that offer alternate story directions, we like building our settlements sure, but if the game was only about building settlements without the story, the game would not be played by me, because to me, that would be boring, it would be almost exactly what i hate about NMS, now i will say NMS has a better space simulation than starfield does, because of the creation engine limitations it makes the mechanics of the game boring, so the only thing NMS has better than starfield is the mechanics of how they used their procedural generation and the ship travel, no need for dumbass load screens scattered everywhere you go.
NMS is a good simulation space game, but it's not a good game because it has no story, it's meaningless pointless gameplay with mechanics that are meant to occupy the player, for me a game needs a good story and it needs to have multiple stories and it needs depth and multiple endings, as much as possible if at all, and they really need to get rid or the unkillable essential character's, that kind of thing only serves to limit choice in a game, but this also means they would have to write in a new story that reflects the players choice to allow a faction quest to die on and change the story in some meaningful way.
so for me a game has to be a full package for me to like it, if it's half assed due to an incompetent writer who knows nothing he speaks of, i mean when he talked about ppl skipping dialogue, it's never something that ppl see in their first playthrough, but when they make the dialogue filled with endless nonsense, it tends to make the player board of the story and the story direction, or if say that player played the game many times before maybe they want to skip the dialogue simply because they already know the story and want to move along to the questing faster, that's more than likely than the reason he wrote off as in this mentality, Emil comes off as disingenuous in his comments because he doesn't ever factor in the full understanding, he's a very black and white person and only seems to be capable of one view point, which i suppose this mentality reflects in his writing sadly.
Guys delusional. The reply sounds more of a marketing technique. And to use a black and white movie from the 1950's as a basis to story making? Hes in the wrong field of work and has bad taste. I hate rom coms and avoid romantic dramas like the plague.
THANK YOU for identifying the lore problem. I've been waiting for someone to finally connect the dots that the current Bethesda brass had the established lore of both Elder Scrolls and Fallout dropped into their laps. All they've done is ride the coattails of more creative people. Anyone who knows the history of these franchises and/or Bethesda as a company would know that Starfield's main issue was always going to be garbage tier lore. And of course, that's exactly what we got.
@ thank you for the kind comment. It’s crazy that once that established lore, and they have to create their own ideas, it’s incredibly sad what they came up with. If you and I, two random strangers, sat down in a room for one hour, we could literally come up with better ideas than they did.
@@AVVGaming1 Idk man... I mean... space cowboys?? Not sure I could ever come up with something so revolutionary 😅
"We noticed that even the devs in the studio would skip dialogue." And that wasn't a collosal sized red flag that something might be wrong with the writing?
"We were making a restaurant, and noticed even the chefs would spit out the food."
How could someone with any amount of rational thought not instantly realize "Oh, there's a BIG problem with the food quality."
Well you could make the argument that they were skipping it to see if the quests worked properly regarding interactions/spawns/markers... Etc.
@mark.082 There's that, and then there is not skipping to actually see if the writing is any good.
@@mark.082 not to mention you usually read faster than you hear.. and if the delivery of a line is bland. Then that might be the reason for skipping and not that the line itself is bad.
Not only that, but I wouldn't lump reading the subtitles more quickly and the skipping the voice acting as "skipping dialogue". The voice acting has impart more information than just the text for me to be interested. BG3 has incredible voice acting with alot of subtle emotions that give you a clearer picture of who the characters actually are.
Bethesda doesn't try to understand why people are interacting with their games the way they are, they just assume that's the new popular thing and double down on it. It's actually insane.
Classic Emil projecting him self onto players to justify his inane writing.
His writing is exactly like the shacks, full of holes and shit.
😂
That’s actually very accurate. He seems like a beginner, that has never been coached or mentored, and all those rookie mistakes got engraved in his brain. Maybe there was too much ego stroking, or something, but the man definitely embodies the Bethesda “not willing to improve or change with the times” mentality.
Yes, the shacks the are supposedly meant to survive a Boston winter, but you can see directly through
I somehow survived entire vanilla Fallout 4 but this year it made me drop Fallout 3. No regrets.
your single insult had more character than all of emil's writings. i can feel the passion behind it. i can see the thoughts put into it. the amount of effort, of creative freedom you allowed yourself, i hereby witness it. and i'm amazed how something so simple can produce a much more powerful effect than bethesda's ever dwindling soul. this is original, this is new. this is everything bethesda has sought, and failed, to be.
no balls, bethesda. no balls.
If the writer doesn't care about their writing, why should I care about it
Elder Scrolls is the Temu Forgotten Realms
ye if he thincs that then whis whriting quality will sufer a loot or more likly his whriting is booring like the work he done in oblivion for the darkbrotherhood base npc poor and with no sence in ther changing disposision from dislike and distrust till you do one quest at the begining nah emil is just booring as a whriter cuz he dosent haw the telent needed for it his more like amature fanfiction whriter jsut with out the imagination
@@kephryccephryc863 allow me to use an AI to rephrase what you said.
_The writer's storytelling is really weak, especially in their work on the Dark Brotherhood base NPCs in 'Oblivion.' The characters feel really flat, and it's weird how their attitudes change so suddenly. It's like they're more like amateur fanfiction than professional writing. Emil is just boring as a writer; he doesn't have the talent needed for it._
sorry but i literally needed an AI to finally understand you, and i hope this'll help others too.
EXACTLY. Write with passion and you'll get a passionate response
@@OneKauz 100% spot on!
Bro they spent 30 hours building shacks because the gameplay wasn't there 🤣
@@fastestdino2 it’s just so crazy he said that. Despite no Bethesda game having this feature before! He’s like “oh you know our fans, they love their shack building” I’m like what shack building? lol so mental
never touched a shack until sim settlement mod made it more appealing.
Was busy and didn't watch the video, what's it about? I'm almost done building this shack and will probably read yer comment afterwards, promise 👍
In my case, I didn't even do either because the writing sucked and I didn't buy Fallout 4 to play discount 1st person Sim City, so what's the point if the writing isn't there? He literally admitted to making his game worse intentionally for a massive section of his audience who were there *for the writing and exploration*
Yeah like wtf else am I supposed to do? I literally can't think of an alternative because the game is so boring there is none.
imagine having one of the coolest jobs that a creator could have, with an excited, engaged, collaborative fanbase, and just resenting every minute of it
how......how do these people get in these spots, it's like selectively chosen every time
@@MGrey-qb5xz he’s buddy buddy with Todd ig
@@MGrey-qb5xz Nepotism
The frauds keep getting hired due to the people they know not because of any real talent.
@@MGrey-qb5xz I also want to know the answer to this.
I think the funniest "Emil moment" for me was when on twitter he just randomly decided "Oh yeah, that one soldier in the opening cutscene of Fallout 1 was Nate from Fallout 4!"
It's clear he just decided it'd be a "fun cool lore tidbit" and put ZERO thought into it. And twitter users instantly realized... "Wait, Nate was the guy who laughed at a war crime...? So... canonically Nate is a psychopath?"
And Emil almost *immediately* realized his mistake, but because of his ego he couldn't just say "Oh yeah, I literally didn't think of that... my bad. Not canon anymore. Sorry." He kept trying to weasel around it like "Weeelll it's your head-canon as to how Nate changed since then..." and blah blah blah. No, Emil, what happened is you are a hack who didn't think for like 5 seconds before you just said "This is canon."
Nate the Rake babyyyyy
And even then it still was the best part of Fallout 4 😂
Nate can say some pretty messed up lines and crack some very out there jokes.
Take nuka world, or the rude dialogue skips you get from skipping dialogue with B, or "A MAGIC BOAT RIDE! Will there be dinosaurs?"
It was genuinely hilarious how the only thing that potentially makes Nate interesting was a complete accident
C0DA moment
His reasoning behind dumbing down the dialogue is just insane, it basically boils down to: "Some newcomers to the RPG genre skip every dialogue, so now you all have to suffer because of it." Completely ignoring their fanbase who play their games FOR that dialogue. Bethesda are too busy chasing mass appeal and their games are suffering for it.
I'd say it's for the world. Who plays a Bethesda game for the main story? Most of them are quite cringe. I wouldn't say actual writing has ever been their strongpoint but they used to be good at worldbuilding.
When you don't appeal to anyone specific you get left for dead. Who is there to save you when the masses move on?
@@Iridescence93 World building is a part of good writing though. Sure their narratives are often convoluted and confused, but the world and characters would be consistent in reacting to your choices and what you've accomplished in the game.
Sure their narrative skills were always kind of weak, but that seemed to be a compromise for the amount of choice they gave you. Now we just have bad writing all around.
Emil is just jealous of that over the years of his career people would rather praise & speak about other lead writer than him like Josh Sawyer, Chris Avellone, Brian Mitsoda, John Gonzales, Swen Vincke, & many other writer who are better than Emil.😤
@@White_Tiger93 telling that his reaction to people not reading his stories is "I'll just stop trying" while a decent writer would see that as a sign they need to improve their writing to engage players
Yeah, I'm sure Emil can write "a great american novel", he just chooses not to do it.
Sure Emil, suuuuuuuure.
Bro`s living on copium 24/7
@@ondiyaga3298 Bro’s injecting straight compium mainline into his veins.
Don’t worry, pride cometh before the fall. Starfield was Bethesda’s worst selling game since before oblivion.
They’re going to have to change or have their next game flop. It’s up to them.
Hubris isn't just a comic store in Fallout 4. ¬¸¬
Emil is a lolcow. Thinks he's a Shakespeare when in reality he's just a sad, eternally-online Twitterer.
For Emil and Todd its all about the brother hood of steel. They cannot get their heads out of that. Fanboy writing
The speech is so cringe, cause SOOOO many games disprove this statement.
The Witcher series, Red Dead, Balders Gate, etc.
They have amazingly written stories and made A LOT of money.
* Emil didn't like that *
That's just insulting to players who actually play RPGs, honestly. Yes, Emil, people care about a good story in a role playing game. The gameplay can be meh, but you can't fuck up the writing. What about you take a look at what other studios have been doing since way before skyrim came out ?
You've lost Betheda karma.
It’s crazy how Bethesda seems to always learn the wrong lessons with every game. People wouldn’t ignore your main quests if they were well written.
People do not ignore Far Harbor’s or Dawnguard’s main quests for a reason.
No what he said is true, but that doesn't mean you should handicap your game's story or not have one at all. If a game has a complex and engaging story, and people actually engage with it? Good. And if they don't want to engage, that's still okay. The issue arises when the story is in the way in one way or another. Like if you're being bombarded with annoying dialogue 24/7 or you're forced to watch unskippable cutscenes. Even worse if said cutscenes are of a low quality.
This sentiment applies to essentially all games, bar stuff like VNs which are literally just stories and nothing else. A game has gameplay and that's what matters the most. A good story can and should be there, but it shouldn't be the main focus, ever, not to the degree which I've described. TW, RDR, BG and so on would all be nothing without their gameplay. Without their gameplay these "games" would be visual novels and nothing more. You create a fun and addicting gameplay loop and the story always comes second. You don't go out there with the sole intend of "it has to be like this!" and then you somehow cram your gameplay in there, whether it's fun or not and even fits to begin with.
"You're starting to see a massive disconnect from Emil and fans"
No, we're seeing a massive disconnected between Emil and reality.
HaHaH lol
as an engineer and an indie game dev I can say that this is one of the dumbest application of KISS I've ever heard of.
KISS is used for making game mechanics so it's easier to expand on them, you make a simple base mechanic, and than add complexities onto it to make it more fun.
one of the most amazing applications of KISS in game design is "BABA is YOU", the entire game is based on making the "YOU" collide with "WIN" to make a "YOU WIN", the mechanics are literally just "Item is Rule" making a Rule and "Item is Item" transforming all Items to that Item, with rules overriding or blocking other rules by some priority when they are contradictory(mostly old rules beat new rules).
the idea is really simple and is easy enough to understand that anyone can grasp it - a perfect implementation of KISS.
and then you actually play the game, reach some level and you get absolutely annihilated by how complicated a set of simple rules is to untangle.
same goes with playing Piano, making a single sound is easy, playing a simple melody is still easy, playing a few chords and even chord progression with arpeggios and stuff is not really difficult, playing Rachmaninoff's arrangement of pretty much anything is an absolute travesty.
simplicity that allows for greater complexity down the line - that is KISS.
thank you this was very informative, i hope the channel guy pins it
Pinned it!
Emil Pagliarulo hears about KISS and turns it into KYS
Shame we're stuck with this hack ruining all the potentially good Bethesda games. We lost something really special when people like Kirkbride and Ted Peterson left. But I suppose Todd Howard is just easily manipulated, it was nice when Kirkbride was trying to get wacky creature designs or other fun stuff put into Morrowind that most project leads would shoot down as too risky. But when you got bums like Pagliarulo in there... all he's managed to do is somehow justify his continued existence in the company. Instead of using his position for the betterment of the game he just exists and soaks up money to justify more existence. As the game and company collapse with other people like him doing the same exact thing.
Now I understand why in Fallout 4 we got a Power Armor, a Minigun and met a Deathclaw in the beginning of the game. It's like the game wants us to run around guns blazing, speed running through dialogue and lore, and thus not noticing the bad writing. KISS
And then you find out that the minigun sucks dogwater for the rest of the game as it suffers from level scaling. IGNORE THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!!
@@sompretThat would explain why there were like, four perks specifically to increase heavy weapon damage
It's even better: The chaingun is crap (And ammo is basically nonexistent until it's even more crap), the power armor is made of poor glass and runs off crap batterys, and deathclaws can be very easily bamboozled by the environmental clutter. They wanted an unearned but awesome powertrip, but that's the stupidest way to go about it: Because the smart play is to exploit the buildings, so you can just bully the supposed boss fight. Not two minutes of playtesting could have told you to rework that section, and yet, here we are.
In fact, it was flat stated in an interview, by Todd or Hines (can't remember), that they wanted the player to have a "wow moment". They saw the deathclaw scene in Concord as that moment. And yes, Todd has wanted to turn Fallout into a shooter/looter since Fallout 3 because that was the direction of the market. Call of Duty had released 4 games prior to the release of Fallout 3. The reason Fallout 3 still had a lot of the same mechanics as the OG Fallout games was due to the fact that they were banking on the OG fans propping up the game in sales numbers. They even put in the VATS system so the OG fans had a combat mechanic they were used to from the OG games. When the shooter fans criticized the gunplay of Fallout 3, Todd specifically called in Id Software to help tune up the gunplay for Fallout 4. They also dumbed everything else down, to include the dialogue, story, quests from the OG games and Fallout 3 to turn Fallout 4 even more into a shooter where, yes, you run around guns blazing.
As for KISS? Todd spoke in an interview how they had kept wanting to simplify mechanics when he talked about the elder scrolls games, from Morrowind to Oblivion to Skyrim. This just carried over into the Fallout games. This was Todd's vision, so it makes perfect sense he'd put Emil into the lead writing role, or have a hand in helping him get to that role at least, where that too was just dumbed down more and more.
Aftwe tht part i turnwd game off never played ir
I hate to be rude, but Emil is one of those rare characters who is nice to have as a verbal punching bag, not only because of the damage he's done to franchises like Fallout, but also because he's absolutely delusional and dumb lmao
Is it delusion or lying like a scumbag when you know your product is a steaming pile
Dude has the ego of a balloon, and is one of those people who you just let keep talking uninterrupted because he'll expose himself *constantly*.
in all honesty, he would probably do fine as a game designer if there was someone above him to keep him in check and do quality control, it's not like he's failed his entire life, its just when he became a head writer things turned to crap
@@katsu1715 He actually has actively made worse every single project he was involved with due to his contributions bringing the quality down.
@@katsu1715 He's definitely failed. He just failed upwards.
Emil is a simpleton who thinks he's an intellectual.
_" Why my _*_boycotting_*_ has increased "_
Emil is the embodiment of the Dunning-Kreuger effect
He’s Todd’s pal. That’s why he has a job. It’s Nepotism but for friends, cronyism I think it’s called.
@EvgeneXI I am convinced they more than just pals, but secret lovers.
@@LordAquillaI could have go to sleep without this image in my head.
0:26
If they make paper aeroplanes out of your book instead of reading it, it’s because the book is poorly written.
I can’t believe a “writer” would even suggest that. EP is a hack writer.
When astronauts went to the Moon, they weren't bored.
Neil Armstrong; "One step for man..." (SKIP)
"Hack writer" is almost too kind. He's a fraud and an idiot😂
@@eternaldarkness3139 reminded me of playing the Disney Magic Kingdom game a few years ago because I can't afford to visit the real place. I can imagine them saying "when people go to the real Disney park they're not bored!" like yeah.. that's.. sensible..
Emil is one person in a long list of people in the entertainment industry that choose to blame their customers rather than look in the mirror.
EXACTLY. It'd be like a chef saying "Well, people just spit out the main course, so why bother? Let's just throw something on a plate and focus on the drinks." It means you need to focus *more* on the main course, because it's clearly lacking, hence why people spit it out.
What the chef in this scenario wants to make is a bar. What Emil wants to make by not giving a crap about writing, dialog, or player choice is a generic open-world action game, which is precisely what Fallout 76 ended up. ES6 is gonna be making headlines with how awful it is, mark my words.
Emil seems to not only have no respect for the fans of these games, but also seems to have no respect for videogames as an entertainment format, its like he thinks things like novels and films are the only formats that deserve good stories, this guys seems to not even like gaming, he just looks down upon it
He genuinely doesn't deserve to have this job. There's thousands of aspiring people who would be eternally grateful to have his role, and yet he treats a privilege like this as if it's beneath him. It really is just despicable how ungrateful this guy is
Which is weird as he's not actually written any books, and certainly not 'the great American novel' so he can just stfu since all he's written are for computer games...
He is like a college kid who took a journalism course because he thought he would work at the New York Post or something but ended up talking about videogames on some z list website.
That is exactly what Emil is, a failed writer who couldn't get a book or tv series off the ground and got stuck working on mid games.
Right? It's like he GENUINELY doesn't want to be there or make the games Bethesda is known for. And I'm like...quit, then? Switch over to a visual novel studio? *Write a **_book?_* Or go in the opposite direction and switch to a studio that _doesn't_ make story-focused games/RPGs at all?
Imagine your writing ability peaking in 2008 with Fallout 3 (which was already awful, the MC has to die for the "good" ending) and refusing to change, burying your head in the sand and condescending anyone who says your writing does indeed suck. He and Todd go hand in hand though, Emil refuses to improve his writing technique and Todd just expects fans to fix his broken titles for him which they always end up doing. Bethesda legitimately has zero chance to improve or grow until these 2 get canned, they've grown complacent and lazy.
Fallout 3 story was a dumbed down Fallout 1 story. Also, the design and worldbuilding as whole was terrible too. I mean, 200 years since the war and people still sleep in garbage? Even 1998's Fallout 2 had bits of regrowing civilization going on.
Didn't they change it with anchorage dlc with Charon and Fawkes being able to do it.
@@dranzerjetli5126 1) You get zero points for patching holes with paid DLC 2) the final mission is just the icing on the stupid cake the story is garbage from beginning to end.
@@dranzerjetli5126
You can, but the game calls you a "coward" for doing so, and not throwing your life away for no reason
>they've grown complacent and lazy
More like old and tired (I should know, I'm there too - played TES from Arena thru to Starfield:), you reach an age of 'that'll do.' The people who actually created The Elder Scrolls and the worlds lore are no longer there and Fallout came from another developer so Starfield is their *first* original ip...
He's right, I would ignore it. The dialog in starfield was painful
@@cyrosphere0154 painful is what it is! especially when you get like 5 optional questions that you really don’t want to ask cuz it’s redundant and it would take them forever to say it! They were obsessed with having so much dialogue but it didn’t serve any purpose. You didn’t learn anything, new dialogue options didn’t appear, it’s just like you can either do the quest or ask 33 questions about the quest before you do it anyway lol
I loved some of starfield dialogue, maybe that was the part that he didn’t work on.
@@TheParagonIsDead haha I think it’s easy to see which dialogue and quests were made outside of the usual writing crew. There was one side quest in the new dlc which was written very well and tackled a delicate subject. It was so unusual to what we normally experience so I assume it was a writer who doesn’t usually get as much power. I forget the name of the quest but it’s the quest with the old man with memory issues
Sadly the dailog in bl3 is way worse atleast it has beter gameplay then dorksfeild of lies
Yeah, it's like a self fulfilling prophecy.... write awful dialogue because you expect people to skip it, and they'll skip it. Emil is a great example of the Dunning Kruger effect. Someone who thinks they're much more intelligent than they are, but their overconfidence stops them from recognising the difference between the talent and ability they THINK they have, and what they really have. His overconfidence is staggering, really. Arrogance is not a good trait when you're trying to design a product other people will like.
If I wrote essays the way Emil writes, I would have failed all of University.
Players: "The game's story sucks and doesn't compell me to continue it, so I will build shacks as a preferable alternative."
Emil: "See?? They're ignoring my amazing story and building shacks!! Why do I even bother!!"
I think that's a bit of an unfair characterisation. All the way back to Morrowind, I've primarily used Elder Scrolls games as a RP focused sandbox, rather than a main quest to be completed. Even in Morrowind which had a pretty great story, the majority of my hours were still spent playing characters that had no interaction with the MQ.
"Shacks" is simply shorthand for all the screwing around players do in the broader world. Of course, that does still mean you need a compelling and cohesive world, which... not so much any more either.
I'm pretty much resigned to ES6 being mediocre, and haven't purchased 76 or Starfield either because of their own mediocrity.
He's the kind of guy that would overcook a rotten steak, watch you spit it out, and assume that you just don't like steak
"What diners actually want is ketchup. So this time instead of serving steak, we just served a plate of ketchup."
The thing about "writing what you know" is that it's based on the assumption that the writer has either lived a storied life from which their experiences can resonate with audiences and/or can draw upon a personal well of knowledge that can enhance elements of their story or at least give it something to relate to. The Lord of the Rings is a perfect example, being drawn upon the experiences of J.R.R. Tolkien, particularly his religious upbringing and service during WWI. In Isekai genre of Japanese manga, anime, and light novels, there's been this sort of subgenre I've taken to calling "occupational fantasy", in which the work uses the fantasy setting as a vehicle to explore their own occupational passions, such as medical science, culinary arts, industrial manufacturing, or even zoology and zoo keeping.
The problem with Emil's usage of the rule is that he's using it as an excuse for his own complacency and utter LACK of life experience, with an overreliance on referential writing and shallow memberberries being his only way to try to cover that up. To him, he thinks he's streamlining the company's writing process, but he's not - he's *_crippling it._*
"Write what you know" is really just "research what you don't know". Kirkbride was great at writing lore not because he had actually practiced (and thus experienced) a crap ton of world religions, he studied them in college (he was a religious studies major, apperently). Emile could study up on interesting, well made sci fi worlds, or the pieces that make them up, but he didn't.
@@StarlitSeafoam *THANK YOU!!!* So many people don't know what "write what you know" actually means!
Tolkien was also a philologist and that arguably had primacy in LotR.
The more Emil talks, the dumber he gets. That said, Skyrim also had house building.
Emil made good levels in thief, he joined Beth around Bloodmoon and made some decent quests with ok dungeons, same in Oblivion but in more important questlines faction questlines (which retconned the implicit religious beliefs of the Dark Brotherhood tho), then all of a sudden he was narrative lead. How? All his best quest stories were playing off the stories of famous works of literature.
@@OdaManjiro The Dark Brotherhood quest arc in Oblivion is touted as his big accomplishment but I distinctly remember realizing like 2 jobs in that we were killing members of the Brotherhood but had absolutely no path or method to approach the speaker, Lucian or anyone really. It's just a railroaded quest line with a 'surprising twist' but gives the character absolutely no agency if they discover the 'twist' on their own. Yet he compares himself to Homer and Shakespeare
@@Martial-Mat kind of, but it wasn't anywhere close to the same. Just have the resources and choose between a couple choices, then spam the A button (on Xbox)
@@Azerkeux DOH!
Oh, you meant the Other Homer... Doh!
@@Azerkeux You're right. There are hints littered throughout and it becomes obvious if you pay attention. There's really no excuse for it.
I DESPISE the dialog in Starfield. Everything feels so surface level and pointless. The “40,000 lines of dialogue” makes it so painful to get through the conversations
It really does and it’s such filler! An example is if I ask you “hey! Can you like the video?” Your answers are either a.) sure! B.) why do you want me to like the video c) do you get many likes? D.) why do people usually like the video? E.) tell me about yourself. It’s such a boring process because you never really care about the questions available and finding out the answers never leads to anything like additional secret dialogue. That’s why the Witcher 3 was so good. If you asked a good question, it opened up new dialogue, altered different endings of a quest, new clues, it actually held value. Bethesda just think we want to sit looking at a lifeless character listening to them talk at us for 20 minutes lol
just like all the other bethesda games then? Sure Starfield has terrible writing but funnily enough I think the writing is the one thing that didnt get "worse" when compared to skyrim or oblivion. It was always shit ^^. Also I dont know how bethesda does this but they really have a talent to make every single npc sound bored and tired when delivering their lines... the voice direction for their games must be fucking abysmal because I dont know many high budget games that have such a bad delivery on their voice lines
Rare cases where AI writing would be an improvement.
Regarding NPCs sounding bored, there is a simple answer there. All lines are recorded in alphabetical order, with no context given. And now you have a bored VA going through the motions
"unconscious incompetence" describes a person who is unaware of their lack of skill or knowledge in a particular area.
This state implies that they are doing something wrong but do not recognize it.
dunning kruger effect, as the nerds like to call it (i'm one of 'em)
“Our Starfield fans go to another school guys, you wouldn’t know them.”
That opening clip with Emil truly blows my mind. I’m not sure if he’s gaslighting or if he truly believes the shit that he said there.
After seeing so much of it from him alongside his social media tantrums, I think he's actually genuine. I think this man believes what he's saying. I don't know if that's worse or better.
He wrote that speech himself, and it shows. Truly inspired.
To be fair, the point Emile was making was more along the lines of "If you give players a carefully constructed story in some games, they will ignore it favour of other activities". And there is an element of truth to this. Depending on the context and the amount of freedom in the game, players may ignore the story requiring the writer to "Keep it Simple" so even those players can follow along. We have a few examples of this in other games:
When Gearbox was working on Borderlands, originally they wanted more elaborate cutscenes for story sequences. But they found that since the game could be played up to 4 players coop, players would tune out the story or focus on their own stuff. So they intentionally kept the story to brief audio logs and kept cutscenes sparse so they would be impactful when they were there and didn't disrupt the coop experience.
Blizzard noticed that many World of Warcraft and Diablo players would skip through a lot of the dialogue when accepting quests since they were just in it for the loot and XP.
This is in contrast to games like TLOU or God of War or RDR2. Games who are mostly story focussed and don't really have other stuff for you to get distracted by. Hell, RDR2 literally mission fails you if go off script.
So Emile has a point. But the issue is his takeaway. He believes "Most players will ignore your story, therefore you shouldn't even try". Rather than a "Most players will ignore your story, try and find a way to accommodate both those that don't care and those that do". This is what CDPR actually did for Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk. They also pointed out that some players will just play for the loot and/or rush the main story. So they designed the main quest/throughline to be quicker to thumb through but let there be options for additional dialogue and story content through side quests. So players that wanted to rush through could rush through. And players that wanted to soak it all in could do so with more detailed quests made for them. That's why you can beat Cyberpunk's main story in like 15-20 hours. The main main story is super short (by RPG standards) but you miss out on all the other characters' stories since they are technically "optional".
@@eternaldarkness3139
I'm worried that he may be genuinely stupid if that's the case.
@@FraserSouris
Yeah to be clear, I’m saying that his using this to imply that the story doesn’t matter is the stupid thing. I suppose my comment doesn’t really say that and makes it sound like that I’m referencing just the raw statement.
Emil need to be fired asap!
We've been saying this since 2008
Todd too.
@@amadeusagripino6862 Some have been saying it since 2006. He's a total hack, and has never been good at his job.
And Todd. He's the enabler.
Todd as well.
I don't care if Emil think creating games is hard and that somehow validates he writes the worst dialogue in AAA gaming. Perhaps he should write a zombie games where the zombie is the protagonist and the start a new career in something he can master, perhaps janitor. Her is all the dialogue he needs:
A gaaaah
B gaaaah (sarcasting)
C guuuuh (gaaah)
D ? (gaaahh)
That could make a funny indie game
For me this really hit after playing the mods Enderal and Fallout London. When the writing from fan made projects is easily outclassing the devs it's not a good look.
Its kind of ironic that London let's you climb ladders but fallout 4 with its hundreds of Devs couldn't implement that
case in point: Skyrim's VIGILANT mod. Better written then the MQ and it was both tragic and engaging to playthrough as a Vampire.
I can write better and whenever or at the least, very often, when I play their videogames I re-write a lot of the dialogue in my my head as I hear it... or ateast I used to just rewrite the occassional line of dialogue here or there to phrase it better ,now with Starfield I am making up more sensible progression cor the story and making up natural motivations for characters as I am actively trying to get immersed in the game's story, it's sad... take the intro:
Vasco and Barret in The Frontier land to pick up the artifact, mid conversations a ship enters the planet's atmosphere... The Fleet. So far it's the same set up, now I mix it up instead of helping Barret kill the pirates you are told to take cover in the ship (maybe it can be an option at least) shutting the doors tightly, and holding the glowing artifact in pitch black darkness creating a bond. As you overhear the muffeled sounds of gunfire outside. The in-ship intercom turns on and Barret says that they are being totally overwhelmed and intiates "Protocol Indigo", get off planet with delay or deviation and go to constellation with the artifact (You don't have to join forciably, or become The Frontier's Captain... you only have to either seek answers to the surge of energy you felt picking it up or just get rid of this rock and leave... because you should respect the player's choices and rewards should not be handed out) it turns out, to jump that much space you require more jump fuel. Vasco scans space and reads of an abandoned UC Ship yeard were you have the chance to refuel The Frontier, their you encounter The Fleet and engage in combat because you have to too survive. I have hopefully now set up tension, stakes, sensible progression and more importance for more or less the same story. it's not hard, if I can do it for free why can't Emil do it as a job?
@@Passageofsky yeah the whole “player can decide” thing really doesn’t stick well with Emil. The player might choose to do something that isn’t in Emil’s head canon for the game and that’s just not okay so you get next to no choice, and the choice you do get is shallow and affects nothing.
20:03
I wish studios would get this out of their heads where because people were “passionate and worked hard” like it’s relevant to anything.
This is a purely transactional relationship. You make the games and if they’re good we buy them. That’s it.
If I buy a car or I’m thinking of buying a car and it has a design flaw or some other faults, I don’t care if someone worked hard or were passionate. I’m taking the car back or just not buying it.
We don’t owe you our custom and our money because people were passionate and worked hard. It’s not that complicated.
Exactly.
Precisely.
I can't remember who said it first, but "It sure took a lot of effort to squeeze out the turd I shat this morning. Doesn't mean I deserve praise or money for doing it."
I don't care how hard this building company worked or how passionate they were about building the house they're trying to sell me. If the walls are crooked and unpainted, the cabinetry wobbles when you bump it, the ceiling looks about to cave in, the roof isn't finished, there are holes in the floor, the foundation is askew and cracked all over, and it's missing the front door and many windows, I'm not obligated to buy it - much less LIKE the garbage they built, or even be positive about that company when others bring then up in conversation. Sure, outside contractors can fix it right up and make it shine, but I'm not going to say the builders made a good house after outside teams fixed all the issues and renovate it to my liking.
Why should we treat game studios any differently? (besides the fact that a house is more important than a game, but if you were going to use that as an argument against this principle then you're a blithering, corpo toe-sucking moron who should be ignored because you're just gonna pre-order the next shiny AAA slop the moment it's available)
that's funny because the only thing they seem to show any passion for is their own collective ego and profit-driven goals. they have zero passion for fun or their audience. i wouldn't take a businessman's words at face value when they talk about passion. if they understood what they were talking about, we wouldn't even be here.
Emil took his success with the Brotherhood questline in Oblivion (which personally I didn't even find good because it railroads you harder than a train on tracks if you poke at it harder than blindly following the questline) and then has just repeated trying to do that for the past 2 decades.
Also remember that this is the man that wanted to add magic to the Fallout canon with a side quest because he thought "it would have been cool" but "unfortunately" (fortunately) the magic system was already scrapped from the Engine from Skyrim so he couldn't do it; which is just more evidence that he can't think of anything original; he just recycles the same stuff over and over again, and after Starfield it's obvious why.
I like to write as my passion and hopefully one day I'll officially become an author, but it's disheartening and even kind of insulting to see someone like this who just has such a shit and passionless attitude about his profession and the job as a whole, talking down on it like writing is stupid and unimportant or that nobody cares about it. Like, what the hell?
I'm positive that almost any passionate young writer would be able to do a better job than this parasite. Even if they didn't, at least it would be something new and original even if it was bad.
Wow dodged a bullet there.
_"heh, i know i could write better than all of emil's collective thoughts in a single comment. but i wouldn't want to try too hard, or mistake myself for being great even if that was verifiably true, because that is an incredibly low bar. dude's a hack. the wrong person in the right place, at the right time. but he isn't anymore, as it turns out it was the circumstances that made the man, and the man himself is not much to write about."_
*-my alternate ego* (he's pretty arrogant, but fair. not one of my favorite characters, but he's definitely interesting and can often be used as a wild card. i don't want to rely on him too much to progress the story, but he's very useful and fun to play with. scenarios often develop unexpectedly with his involvement)
Railroads you harder than a train on tracks? Wow, what a wordsmith.
Ghosts and Cthulhu Mythos light are a thing in Fallout tho, which is already a grab bag of 50's tropes and was never meant to be so goose-steppingly true to life anymore than Half-Life was.
@@VunderGuy If it "always existed" then it's no problem because that's long-established canon. Focusing one's magicka to control the very elements or summon/control the Undead is not something that has existed in Fallout before and Emil again wanted to add that to the canon out of *nowhere* because he thought it would be "cool", not because it would make sense or be narratively compatible.
Besides, there's plenty of other bad writing Emil has done. I'm just listing a couple of examples.
Let's poke at Fallout some more: Ghouls don't need food and water because of a quest where a Ghoul child is trapped in a fridge for 210 years, when they did need food and water beforehand - it is a major plot/decision in Fallout 1; but now it's be retconned that they don't food and water -- except the settlement system seems to suggest that they still do as ghoul settlers become unhappy if they have no food or water. This is sloppy writing and this plot hole now exists because Emil wanted to shove a ghoul child npc into a fridge for over 200 years because it would be "cool".
In Fallout 3, the big bad evil guy survives lethal radiation because... well, we still don't actually know because it's never properly explained. Just vague excuses. And somehow despite having a tool to survive lethal radiation the first time it works the second time because...? Well we also don't know. The guy didn't die because Emil wanted him to, then died because Emil wanted him to. Doesn't matter if it makes sense or not. It's that way because Emil wanted it to be that way and didn't give a damn if it makes sense.
I could keep going of course, but there's no greater or better example than just looking at Starfield and listening to how this guy has flat-out said that there's no point in putting great effort into writing because people will just build shacks, which really contradicts his excuses of "we worked really hard guys please like the game because we worked very hard on it" crap he keeps crying about.
Rather than building shacks, I would prefer the ability canonically to _re-build_ cities and towns that are destroyed at some point during the main story. You know, like rebuilding Kvatch, or Helgen. The mechanics to do so were introduced in _Skyrim_ with Hearthfire, and so it would be nice if a new mini DLC was introduced to rebuild and resettle Helgen with those mechanics.
All that said, people typically resort to "settlement building" types of things to either take a break from questions or, and probably more common, because there's not much left in the game to do, because most of the quests are so short, and most of them are piss poor quality to boot.
Or maybe even Concord and Quincy in fallout 4.
Not just...shacks,but actually rebuilding bits of them
I'm glad you pointed out how established The Elder Scrolls' franchise was. The same is held true of the Fallout franchise. They've been standing on shoulders of those games' original creators and barely having to do anything of depth. Starfield was their first time truly doing anything of their own and it shows just how much the original creators of those franchises contributed to their success of all subsequent releases.
To be fair, TES was an original Bethesda series. The thing is, it was first developed as a true TTRPG, hence why most mechanics are dice rolls up until Oblviion. The 4 core writers of the TES series left one after another, where the last one, Kirkbride, left after Oblivion. Julien Lefay invented TES, Rolsten and Goodall carried the world in Daggerfall and Morrowind and Kirkbride tryed to hold up the impressive lore in Oblivion, but literally got castrated by Todd. Now we have Emil, who simply dosent give crap.
@@Randleray Yea. I remember absolutely hating the earlier games during the early portions of the game due to the dice roll mechanics, but always grew accustomed to them after the first 5-6 levels or so. I remember getting Morrowind and being a bit thrown off by combat since it was fully 3D and I expected hits to always land due to that. However, it didn't take me long to understand why and grow accustomed to the combat in that game as well. I also understand why Oblivion moved away from the TTRPG style of dice roll based combat and all, but it lost so much soul and style overall as it moved forward. I really interested to see what the next game is like.
The problem is not only Emil but Todd also. There is no doubt in my mind that somewhere along the line Todd realized that all the work to make character AI feel real is not wanted by the players. Todd waxed on about his radiant AI for Oblivion and then slowly this just faded away from his speeches. Starfield was so disappointing for me for so many reasons. To have a lead dev (Todd) say in a video "When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored." and then Todd himself decided that each time you land....every single time that you land...a pirate ship lands a few hundred meters away. That is just bat shit crazy if you think bout it. Somewhere they were like When the astronauts went to the moon, there was nothing there. They certainly weren't bored and then before release were like ok game this and so a pirate ship will land everytime you land so you can fight hordes.
Then you have AI that never go to sleep and when you run at an NPC they dont react wherein past games they would almost get knocked down and yell at you. The water being empty and you cant even swim. The list just goes on and on.
Man i wish theyd kept developing more and more realistic AIs… its what sells those open world sandbox games imo
AI is one thing that has never really grown from the 2000s.
12:00 Emil here is so lost WOW! He is saying here how players in FO4 were so bored in dialogue they were just skipping thru the options as a way to enforce his KISS principles when the opposite was happening in that his awful dialogue writing style with vague choices bored the players so much and quickly they just started pressing buttons to end it fast.
And that was at his studio! Playing a game they made! But then they increased dialogue in Starfield and used it as a selling point! Some people will always skip dialogue no matter what's written, but most of us will listen when its engaging! If it adds values, (like Witcher 3 dialogue opening up new dialogue options/new options in a quest etc) then we will engage with the npc and ask the questions. But when it's just to listen to them waffling them on at such a slow pace, it just gets so boring and you zone out. But he completely misunderstands it again!
@@AVVGaming1 it is pretty funny that BGS dumbed down all dialogue in FO4 to “yes, no, sarcastic yes and sad yes” then have the audacity to say “oh well players just skip dialogue anyways” yeah because they know their choices don’t matter and just want to get thru the boring ass line to start the quest. EVEN FO3 did it better than 4 because atleast 3 made you read the lines your character was gonna say so you knew whether you were being mean or nice or saying yes or no. They created the issue and now point at it as on out for all their problems wtf
Emil doesn't even understand KISS at all. He probably just heard what it stands for and decided that it would be a useful excuse to continue being bad at his job.
It's not just story that is badly written, its dialogue. The romance dialogue in Starfield for instance. It's like its written by an 11 year old boy from the 17's century. "Thank you my dearest" "You my love are something special" who the fuck talks like that.
0:10 witcher/cyberpunk players will not agree here
Or 40k or metro etc etc
Shows how out of touch the devs we're/are at Bethesda.
He's still employed. Why?
How can anyone be this stubbornly awful at their job and still collect a paycheck?
Because his boss is the exact same way and they're Pals
@@ianweir3608 Yup. Todd and Emil have always been a couple of idiots with no game-design or writing sense, and no creative talent. TES, which Todd's Bethesda merely inherited, was successful despite them, not because of them.
@thischannel1071
Same with their purchase and legal wrangling of the Fallout franchise. Fallout 3, and *especially* New Vegas were successful despite them, not because of them.
Nepotism
Emil dry cleans tiny brown leather jackets...
"Gamers don't care about a good story" because we're all playing New Vegas for the timeless graphics and the polished experience. Ironically what's keeping FNV from being the best game ever, is everything that connects it to Bethesda
Given the original ending of Fallout 3, I'd suggest that story writing at Bethesda was already on the decline before 2010.
Given pretty much anything in fallout 3
My understanding is that A reason (not THE reason) for Morrowind and Oblivion's success was Ken Rolston. He is a designer who has been designing games since the early 80s. Ken has also worked on some the biggest franchises in Table Top and Pen and Paper RPGs.
And Michael Kirkbride, Ted Peterson, Julian Lefevre, Mark Jones and many other talents were behind TES.
@@Tito_michi True. Without Vijay Lacksham, Ted Peterson, Julian Lefay, and Bruce Nesmith working on Arena, Daggerfall and to some degree Battlespire, there would be no Morrowind or Oblivion. No game, at this level, is made by one person.
I've read interviews where Kirkbride talks about all the ways he used to trick Todd into letting him implement all the stuff that made Morrowind cool and interesting. This game didn't succeed because of Todd, but in spite of him.
"some of the biggest franchises"
Bro, Ken Rolston wrote modules for D&D. First edition, at that. Biggest franchises is an understatement, Ken Rolston was a staff member on _the_ formative franchise for Western fantasy gaming.
The accolades Emil got from his writing in Oblivion went to his head and now he has gotten brain damage from huffing his own farts.
Definitely had an impact! I mean the dark brotherhood was okay, but it’s not like it I ask you to provide the top 10 best written stories in gaming thst it would be in there. It was just okay. And in 2006 standards were a bit lower in gaming writing. But I honestly think he believes it was the greatest story ever written. In fact, Bethesda seemed to agree as he was immediately promoted to lead writer.
@AVVGaming1 dark brotherhood was garbage, the bonus objective rewards were okish, but the story was just bad.
The thing is, he didn’t write the DB quest line, he worked on the quests, under a competent lead writer, who checked his work & had final oversight.
When they retired after oblivion, Emil took the credit & was elevated above his ability.
Lets not kid ourselves, Fallout 3 was not by any metric a great game either. People only remember it fondly because they haven't replayed it since it first dropped while they are on their 412th replay of New Vegas.
I'm convinced fans of Bethesda games have never really played RPGs, they just tried Bethesda and for whatever reason never played any good games. Because if you played good games, you'd see how bad and shallow and empty Bethesda games are.
No metric? Maybe in terms of it as a RPG but not as a game, kt's a good game: Enviromental storytelling level designs and detail is compelling, the art direction and atmosphere were both beautiful the music is solid and the game's size was staggering for the time
Kinda true. My first playthrough and introduction to Fallout was 3 in 2015, a year later I tried New Vegas and never went back to 3 until this year. It feels more boring and filled with wasted potential (the capital of the US after all) than what I remembered
It's quite good actually.
Wait, I have hundreds of mods installed.
I played it quite recently on vanilla, FNV's a good game but it's fans are annoying as fuck when it comes to any bethesda game.
I see a lot of people bashing on the fact that Starfield has only humans, but IMO that's not actually the problem. It's 100% possible to make an interesting space setting with humans only, and in fact I would like to see more of that. The real problem is that Starfield's lore is ass period. But look at the movie chronicles of Riddick for example, it's a space setting with humans only, but it's still super interesting. Or Warhammer 40K, they could remove the aliens completely and the lore would still be amazing, because the humans are so varied and interesting. All that needs to be done for starters is to take a setting where humans have been in space for millennia and had enough time develop widely different cultures, ways of life and even body types on other planets, just like what happened here on Earth. In short, the humans become the "aliens" but in a far more believable and realistic setting, because despite the fact that being able to f*ck blue skinned humanoid aliens is amazing, the possibility of that actually happening in real life is very close to 0.
The Starfield lore is cool actually, all out war between the two human space civilizations with total war on multiple planets, genetically engineered bioweapons, giant mechs and snake worshipping space cultists. The problem is the game is set AFTER all of that with a main story about digging for space metal to become the chosen one. WTF?
It's so broad and so shallow. Have just a handful of systems with more distinction between planets as well as between Freestar, UC, and ungoverned space and we could have interesting conflicts without the need for any other species.
@@maduross since everyone else already pointed it out I just say this short; AND the "evil" faction is only the pirates (Crimson Fleet) There's no conflict whatsoever, and I don't mean war but ideologies, lifestyle, politics etc
The Expanse is a great example. They could have left out the alien tech entirely and had a crazy fascinating story with just the politics between the human factions (Earth, Luna, Mars, Belters).
Another sci-fi space game, "Starsector" does this and does this pretty well with it's various, exclusively human factions with their differing societies, technology, military doctrine, and ambitions.
I love Sci-Fi, and I thought Starfield would be the perfect game for me. You name any big budget Sci-Fi video game series, I’ve played it. But I couldn’t play Starfield, and now I understand why.
The narrative, the dialog, it felt as if Bethesda decided that their audience couldn’t handle a bit of grit and emotional weight, so they made the most insipid, anaemic narrative they could possibly conjure.
The reason why I love games like Mass Effect or Cyberpunk is that they instil a duty upon you, the player to embark on heroics that strengthen your investment in the plot, as well as supporting characters. I felt none of that with Starfield, or at least didn’t care enough to become invested. I feel like in a ‘multiple choice’ game, your investment in the plot has to be one of the most important factors. How can you perceive any kind of value in choice if you don’t care about the stakes?
Totally agree and I love both mass effect and cyberpunk because of the mature content. But if I asked you who is your favourite companions in mass effect and why, you’d be able to write me an essay. If I asked which side characters were the best in cyberpunk you could do the same. If I asked for the best characters in starfield, you couldn’t answer and I think a lot of people would say the same. Their writing is so basic and no character stands out. And like you said, their writing seems so safe and boring. Honestly they really need to look at getting some help. But they did have that with Obsidan on fallout new vegas, it worked, then they refused to do it again!
I don’t think Emil has played any videogames ever
Cyberpunk and BG3 are peak examples of how a good story and good gameplay compliment each other so neither overstays their welcome. When I get tired of slicing and shooting, I get back into story missions for a good cybercry. When I get tired of talking and exploring, there’s a fight just around the corner in BG3.
Cyberpunk isn't a peak example. Exactly the opposite of you're going to put BG3 in the same sentence.
@@BGRUBBINnice bait bot, try harder next time. cyberpunk is a master piece. Grow up.
@@alexs06347 hahahaah nice sarcasm "masterpiece" ahhahahahahahah
@@alexs06347this is cope to a level that shouldn’t be possible.
@@BGRUBBIN Tell me you haven’t played cyberpunk since release without telling me you haven’t played cyberpunk since release.
I hated the building feature in Fallout 4.
Me too
I personally enjoyed it, but it shouldn't have been the main focus of a Fallout game, but a mechanic you could choose to engage with or ignore completely. I think had Fallout 4 had more RPG mechanics similar to 3 and NV, and better writing it would have been better recieved, and the settlement mechanic would have been a nice little bonus for people to mess with if they wanted to.
I loved it, until it proved later, that it just dont works, half of workshop inventory is disapearing and it will broke once you will have more than 5 connected settlements, or you are on other end of map.
*shrug* I thought it was really good, just underbaked. I really wished for cool tower defence gameplay but it really never quite materialized. Building defensive bases with turrets and fortifications to defend against waves of raiders, supermutants etc. would have been really fucking fantastic if done well.
the only reason I even touched it was because there was a trophy associated with it, and it was awful 😒
This was much better articulated than other "bethesda writing" videos in the sense that it doesn't just dump Skyrim in the garbage. It says "the main story was nothing special". Skyrim had some clever and funny writing at times, and I'm glad that someone sees that instead of lumping the entire experience into the main story.
The writing in Skyrim was abysmal.
The world design was abysmal.
This is where you’re going to get triggered… Until you realize that more than half the towns in Skyrim were a foot wide and an inch deep.
Virtually zero residents or conversations of note.
Dad-gamers and models buoyed Skyrim, nothing else.
If it had come in Obvlivions stead, without modding, it would have flopped hard.
@@lucaschudleigh7193 No offence bud, but brother in Christ that was a cringe-worthy comment.
Skyrim's writing was a step down from Oblivion. Oblivion's main quest was a bit generic but the side quests were Bethesda's peak. The faction quests in Skyrim felt rushed. One minute you're a new recruit, next you're made managing director!
@Gloops01 I agree, which is why I only join one non civil war faction per playthrough. It was a mistake on bethesdas part to let you do all at once and ascend so quickly. This other guy is hating just to hate.
@lucaschudleigh7193 "The world design was abysmal" 😭
one important thing, Starfield SOLD really well... in their bottom line is a success, but sold because of PAST success and good will, that is now GONE, and they didn't notice yet...
money speaks, but it takes time,
Ppl still buy call of duty ppl are still buying skyrim ppl bought fallout 4 after the show.
Their bottom line won't be hurt in a longtime
@@dranzerjetli5126 But it will be hurt.....one day...
Just make sure you live long enough to see it
"Even if you write the greatest story with love and care, the players won't care and just built shacks." Apperently emil has never heard of morrowind, a game that practically saved bethesda on its early decline, and people still talk about the lore TODAY.
Exactly! It’s honestly a bad thing to say as a writer. If the player wants to ignore the story fine, but you still give your best!
In Emil’s defense, I wouldn’t have wanted my name on anything to do with Fallout 76 either. 😂
That only applies for the first years of its launch right up to Wastelanders. His lack of involvement ironically has led to the rest of the team objectively improving the experience, which won't make it the best game ever, but still a better one than at launch.
And now it's better than anything he have ever made
New Vegas killed Bethesda.
Skyrim came out a year after vegas and was a massive hit. This should be considered a grace period where bethesda magic was still intact.
Fallout 4 releases. The engine upgrades make the game marginally better than games that came out in 2013 and it's story was basically dead on arrival. The Bethesda Magic is waning.
Fallout 76 releases. The Bethesda Magic is non-existent and the game is a fucking insect terrarium of bugs.
Starfield releases. Bethesda Magic is executed by firing squad. The main quest is a massive McGuffin hunt and the planets are procedurally generated slop.
As soon as fans bit into the forbidden fruit of a well written story, Bethesda began to collapse. It doesn't help that fucking over Obsidian over a single Metacritic point and bad industry practices make the games perform like a geriatric old man who escaped the home again has made trust in Bethesda dry up faster than P. Diddy's reputation after the feds found his baby oil stash.
Playing a bit of Devil's advocate here for the fun of it:
To be fair, the point Emile was making was more along the lines of "If you give players a carefully constructed story in some games, they will ignore it favour of other activities". And there is an element of truth to this. Depending on the context and the amount of freedom in the game, players may ignore the story requiring the writer to "Keep it Simple" so even those players can follow along. We have a few examples of this in other games:
When Gearbox was working on Borderlands, originally they wanted more elaborate cutscenes for story sequences. But they found that since the game could be played up to 4 players coop, players would tune out the story or focus on their own stuff. So they intentionally kept the story to brief audio logs and kept cutscenes sparse so they would be impactful when they were there and didn't disrupt the coop experience.
Blizzard noticed that many World of Warcraft and Diablo players would skip through a lot of the dialogue when accepting quests since they were just in it for the loot and XP.
This is in contrast to games like TLOU or God of War or RDR2. Games who are mostly story focussed and don't really have other stuff for you to get distracted by. Hell, RDR2 literally mission fails you if go off script.
So Emile has a point. But the issue is his takeaway. He believes "Most players will ignore your story, therefore you shouldn't even try". Rather than a "Most players will ignore your story, try and find a way to accommodate both those that don't care and those that do". This is what CDPR actually did for Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk. They also pointed out that some players will just play for the loot and/or rush the main story. So they designed the main quest/throughline to be quicker to thumb through but let there be options for additional dialogue and story content through side quests. So players that wanted to rush through could rush through. And players that wanted to soak it all in could do so with more detailed quests made for them. That's why you can beat Cyberpunk's main story in like 15-20 hours. The main main story is super short (by RPG standards) but you miss out on all the other characters' stories since they are technically "optional".
No you’re absolutely spot on and before I did this video I spoke with a friend who had the same sort of input. I totally think what you’re saying is correct. I think what the issue is, is that you have to accommodate for so many different play styles. I honestly love CDPR and think they are the example! They have managed to strike that balance. I think they accommodated the creative type with the settlement buildings, but I think they really have made the stories boring for those who want a good story. It’s written in a way that’s so basic, it’s not even funny. But you are right in that he probably meant that, but no matter what his writing for quests and side quests has been poor for a long time. I’m going to do a video about how CDPR basically was the worst thing to happen to Bethesda. Thanks for the well thought out comment!
The weak story was the primary criticism of Borderlands...
@@AVVGaming1 Yes. Emile's writing style seems to adapt the story only for the players who don't care rather than also accommodating it for those that care.
I always suspected this is where Fallout 4's dialogue system came from. The idea being that rather than needing to actually read or interpret what the dialogue is saying, you can just give the type of response you want. If you, the player, didn't want to read the dialogue to choose the "positive response", you could just press X and your character will say a positive thing. If you wanted to say a negative thing, just press O. If you wanted to be sarcastic, just press square. If you wanted more info, just press triangle and your character will ask what the writer thinks is the best question for the situation.
Like, I remember before Fallout 4 came out, one of the biggest "complaints" against both Bethesda and Bioware RPGs was that you select a dialogue option and it comes out different than how you read it. Maybe when you read the response, it sounded neutral but the character says it in an antagonistic way. So for Fallout 4, rather than making the responses more clear or adding a label like Deus Ex Human Revolution/Mankind Divided did, the game instead just simplified down to just 4 basic emotions. Which....sure... I guess meant you can never say the wrong thing. Like when you press X, your character will always be positive no matter what he says. But it makes it harder for the people that do care since it's harder to roleplay or ask additional questions or have additional responses since you are locked to those very specific 4 options no matter what.
*>"is that you have to accommodate for so many different play styles. I honestly love CDPR and think they are the example! They have managed to strike that balance. I think they accommodated the creative type with the settlement buildings, but I think they really have made the stories boring for those who want a good story. "
As a writer, I completely disagree.
The first rule of writing is to evoke an emotion, and that is where Bethesda have failed. It has nothing to do with complexity or simplicity.
Cyberpunk, for example, just had better writers. They wrote a story that draws you in with each line. They wrote scenes with plot points that feel important and compelling to experience. Every detail down to character movement and animations all work together with the dialogue to emphasize meaning, reveal character emotions, and build a world worth learning about.
Anyone who pursues the art of the craft knows it is not a simple afair. There are countless ways to analyze the subtle decisions that make a good story great. Complexity/Simplicity is only one of these ways, but it is largely irrelevant to the primary focus of writing, which is to make the reader/player feel the emotions of the scene. It is a drop in the bucket of the innumerable decisions that an expert writer makes.
Bethesda's writers simply are not good at what they do. There's no other way to explain it without writing a 50k word book on the subject...
@@AVVGaming1funnily the Sim settlement mod for fallout 4 bring some sort of story for the settlement building system.
I think the problem has more to do with the internal structure of Bethesda than Emil in particular. Currently they have Emil as lead designer *and* lead writer. This is an absurd way to structure those positions, they should be handled by two separate individuals. The role of lead designer and lead writer have wildly different responsibilities. Assigning a single person to both positions, no matter who it is, will have extreme difficulty juggling the work. Bethesda is under the Microsoft umbrella now, they're a much larger studio, there's no reason they should be allocating multiple senior roles to a single individual.
That stuff about fans not wanting a deep story that gives them the power to influence the outcome, etc. sounds like an excuse. It's like he's saying, "Yeah, I could write something better, but I don't need to."
The sad reality is that the more I hear Emil talk, the more I think the examples of his bad writing are genuinely the best he can do.
The 3's of the ealry 2000's, Bioware, Bethesda and Blizzard. All three are failing right now.
No king rules forever...
uBislop
Why?
@BungieStudios they sold out to the highest bidder and are owned by shareholders nowadays.
Priorities shift from making good games to making profitable ones.
Blizzard are exists though u should see how bobby kotixpad treats women
HE WROTE FALLOUT 3???
Oh god, that explains a lot. No wonder the lore has been fucked inside out.
EDIT: THE WRITING WASNT GOOD IN 3 THOUGH. The main antagonist in 3 is basically a mustache twirling cartoon villain with zero depth of nuance, and you aren't even the main character in that story. This has been argued and proven to death by numerous analysts online. I mean, if you WANT to invoke an 18 hour Creetosis response, be my guest, but you're talking out your ass because you've clearly never played Fallout 1 and 2. I mean, otherwise you'd know that the lore for the BOS, the Enclave and the Super Mutants have all been fucked with for the sake of mass appeal.
Bethesda has zero standards for their writing, they are willing to change the lore if its convenient for them to do so.
Hell, the reason that Cyrodill looks the way that it does in Oblivion was because they were capitalizing off of the LotR films. That setting is so fucking generic that it hurts.
Whenever he writes, he should ask himself, "Can I cut this in half and still get my point across?"
That would have saved me a lot of dialogue skipping.
Emil should ask himself; "Can I cut this?"
Fixed
My dad said "if you let someone talk long enough they'll reveal exactly who they are, and sometimes you learn that they're just a moron"
Edit: I'm talking about Emil
Imagine if Larian Studios had that mindset for Baldurs Gate 3.
He’s clearly never heard of Fallout: New Vegas or The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
No he’s heard of NV, it completely outshined the story he worked on in 3 and it took 18 months to make. I feel like a large part of Emil’s work is pride and his pride was hurt bad when ACTUAL writers created NV and put the bar so far out of reach for hacks like him
Like I said so many times in the last 12 months or so: Emil Pagliarulo's motto "Keep it simple, stupid!" is a good sentiment to have if you make games for five-year-olds. Also: He has no professional background in story-writing and obviously has reached the limits of his creative writing decades ago. Even though he is a director and producer at BGS, he is either too proud or not smart enough to get outside help from professional novelists to make the world- and character building on the story front much more decent and entertaining.
As long as he is the head of stroywriting in BGS games, all this will not get better and will dramaturgically remain on the cheesy, unimaginative level of the very early Stargate SG-1 TV show episodes (and their drama was actually more imaginative than what Starfield presents us with; only Stargate used those stories as throw away "adventure-of-the-week" vehicles... Starfield made an entire game out of this lackluster story-writing).
He's using the motto completely wrong in the first place. He's using it as an excuse for doing a bad job rather than applying it at all.
The fact that he mentions' Casablanca as one of his favourite movies is wildly ironic compared to the writing in his works lmao
His KISS method should add, "Why does the player care" to their criteria. "You're the chosen one", no I'm not I'm going over there to collect cheese wheels because your story sucks
If you want disdain, have you tried all the options in Starfield that highlight "I don't have a choice" or question the premise? My memory was that all of the 4th wall touching/breaking questions have horrendous answers that sometimes felt more like disdain for the player than being a real response. I don't even know why they included them with the answers you get.
As for ES6, I'm surprised people even have a sliver of hope for that. Shattered Space was, for me, Bethesda's chance to eat crow and show us that they can do good by the fans. The response and the DLC itself shows me they should not be trusted and that they've burnt any good will I might have had for them. Comparing it to Far Harbor is an insult. I won't be touching ES6 for at least 3 months after release and I'll only touch it then if it's gotten good reviews so I don't run into the Starfield issue where it was liked for a bit but then people realized how the game was made and opinion started to sour worse and worse. (My opinion of Starfield went from bad, to neutral with good moments, and back to bad. The middle was where I found quests I actually enjoyed and found interesting while also having modded out so many of the rough edges and I hadn't realized just how bad a lot of the systems in the game were. Also, one of the most popular mods at launch should not be a UI mod because of just how bad your UI is).
I did a video on that DLC for starfield and to be honest I’m still pissed I spent $30 on it lol and to be honest, I’ve bought some back games in the past. I just have never felt so cheated for the money lol. But it’s the fact Bethesda are not learning from their mistakes. He said that they knew in fo4 that dialogue was too much but they added even more on starfield. Good dialogue is not quantity, it’s quality. It’s saying things efficiently and that keep you intrigued. Sometimes it’s what the character doesn’t say or the hidden meaning behind it. With Bethesdas characters, especially in starfield, it’s such obvious writing that it’s annoying. Honestly it’s so poor but they knew that, they just aren’t learning from their mistakes or from consumer feedback. Imagine telling your younger self in 2011 when you see playing skruim that you’d end up not excited about the games sequel. So sad.
I swear if Todd fired his guy, he'll actually earn some respect from the community
The most mindnumbingly stupid thing is his KISS-philosophy. This acronym and "philosophy" stems from advertising. It is meant to say, that in order to advertise something to a new customer-base, you need to keep the sales pitch and the act of buying itself as simple as possible, so that there is no reason to delay or doubt the buying of the product. Nobody in their right mind would say, this principle applies to the development of the product itself, especially when the demand is already there and the act of advertising is far less important.
Exactly right! Don’t over complicate the sale! If you have someone interested in buying the product, offer the one they want, don’t offer 10 variations because it complicates the sale! But KISS in actual writing, of stories, is plane different and that’s what I don’t get! Why he brags about it too! Honestly that whole presentation he did is so worrying it’s not funny
@@AVVGaming1 True. It's also quite funny how he/they distance themselves from this leading principle when responding to criticism: "no, this game is actually super complex and deep, there's endless options you can choose, blahblahblah" and stuff like "fans just want waaay too much". What is it then, do fans want too much depth and complexity or don't they?
I know and how he said "we put the biggest most ambitious open world space game on a console" and yet No Man's Sky already did this and a lot better, in my opinion at least. It's so strange because it's like he's in a room with no windows, human interaction or internet. He speaks like Starfield and its DLC got 10/10, no other games exist or compete, there's no feedback etc. its just so strange but it reflects in the way the company has been as of late. Even when they try to say they care about fans, they still snap at them. They generally can't take on constructive criticism.
@@AVVGaming1 Seem to be a general principle that these overconfident and underqualified hacks end up in the highest places where they slowly and steadily erode everything good that better people than them created.
Kiss is very important... that's why you get trash design from BMW where oil flows through the bracket of a alternator or how new cars don't have pull cable e brakes. Keeping things simple is very important.
Bethesda’s motto, KISS: “Keep it stupid, simple.”
okay buy "go get me a coffee, office-boy" is a great quest lmao
I Honestly think that Bethesda doesn't want to do the work for writing anymore, at least Emil doesn't. And he is blaming the fans for it when really it's his fault, he is just tired of it. And the thing is if they wanted to they could just stop making story focused games and do what they clearly want which is focus more on gameplay and "fun" mechanics like building stuff, but if they did that they would have to stop calling their games RPGs and that is scary for Bethesda. But now it's all just half measures it's a story drive RPG except it's not really any good at that anymore, it is a gameplay focused game with building mechanics and such like minecraft except it's not nearly as good as minecraft. They have to decided what they want to make and stick to it and deal with the potential loss of fans and maybe new fans to come around and check it out but these half measures don't help anyone, no one is happy with how things are going now.
Chat GPT could most likely come up with more interesting quests and writing.
@@misanthropicattackhelicopt4148 Honestly it wouldn't surprise me if they used Chat GPT for some of their writing.
As always, I completely agree with you. It's clear that they want to be the next minecraft, or the next No Man's Sky. They want to make games that have a never ending life span. It could be an age thing? Maybe they see Gen Z playing these games a lot and they want to bring them over to the Bethesda games? But either way, it's a bad move for them. 1.) They will lose their core audience as they usually don't like those type of games. 2.) They won't get the crowd they want as they are not as successful as the other games they are competing with. Honestly, it's very scary when you think about it and where they could end up if they're not careful. Other companies are ahead of them in RPGs, others ahead of them in open worlds and others in crafting games. They either need to make TES6 the way we all want it (eg Skyrim next gen) or it will be a bad ending for them. At least, that's how I see it.
@@AVVGaming1 Yep that pretty much is everything I was thinking. Let's hope they can correct them self but I have my doubts.
I didn't skip dialog in Cyberpunk 2077 because of how good the writing is in that game (not to mention style, voice acting and direction).
Its amazing how if you write something of quality people don't skip through it.
Write the story around shack building then
Fallout 3 was absolutely not known for a really good main quest. The main quest was actual garbage that falls apart on basically ANY scrutiny. Fallout 4 was... about the same in that regard.
Like fallout 1 or 2 were some stuff was just "magic"?
The virging Bethesda ''let's make it dumb and easy to understand ''
vs the chad Fromsoft ''let's make the best story ever then put all the lore behind a square turd you can find in a castle's abandoned outhouse''
We could go on and on about Bethesda. But Bethesda created The Elder Scrolls and its lore, a universe far more complex than any universe FromSoftware created, a universe far longer than all of FromSoftware’s universes put together. What does comparing The Elder Scrolls to Dark Souls have to do with it? Is The Elder Scrolls compared to truly complex, truly colossal universes like Lord of the Rings or World of Warcraft? But why to FromSoftware games? Man, did you know FromSoftware didn’t create armor and knights? I hate it whenever two things that have nothing to do with each other get compared just because they share a specific element like fantasy and medieval aesthetics, in this case, FromSoftware games aren’t even RPGs since they don’t even let you be whatever you want or roleplay with your characters since it all comes down to killing, killing, killing. And what about the story? what are you telling me HAHAHAHAHAHA ALL THE UNIVERSES OF FROM SOFTARE ARE THE SAME STORY WHAT IS BEING LAZY I will summarize it for you. ohhh the great force that maintains order in the world was exhausted or was broken by someone now we are all at war everything is lost oooooh adventurer you are late the whole kingdom is lost and decayed the gods and demigods that we used to have are now crazy or hostile and are not even a shadow of what we used to be everything is lost ooooooh great force that used to reign in this world please come back. that is literally the story of all the fromsoftware games (the vast majority) Also, how easy is it if you finish the lore of Dark Souls or Elden Ring in a month LOLOLOLOL on the other hand, the lore of The Elder Scrolls takes years to learn, it is not only a video game, it also has collections of lore and canonical novels, and it is not just about reading, here you also have to learn to interpret what the books say, what is a lie and what is true, since there are canonical lies and canonical myths within the universe of The Elder Scrolls. You have to differentiate Emil Pagliarulo from the writers of The Elder Scrolls. Emil only writes the main story and some other things while the rest of the writers write the lore books, write the guilds or secondary stories ETC etc etc
@@Slippppppp Bethesda is shit and it's not what it used to be. We can throw shit at it with Fallout and Starfield but the Elder Scrolls don't fit in the same bag. We have to admit that the Elder Scrolls are a fantasy world that was made by geniuses who, even if they're no longer here, the lore is still there. I was wrong when I said they were the same. Sekiro is clearly not the same, and Bloodborne is not the same either, among others. That's where I was wrong.
Fromsoft: leta bastardize our design ideas and turns bosses and equipment into a spammy mod
@@l0y3lg45 Hi Emil. Nice to see you here.
>they want to build shacks for 30 hours
>one of the bighest and most beloved mods on fallout 4 is Sim Settlements 2 a mod which has a better story and removes the need to build shacks for 30 hours
It's a lot easier for people to say "bAd wRiting" instead talking about branching questlines, player agency, and general roleplay and world interaction. That's where I think the problem lies, as you can write the most generic storyline but player choice and agency are what make the experience special.
I think those are two sides of the same coin. To have branching quest lines and character agency requires good writing.
This is why I think it’s just laziness on BGS part. I hate to use NV but it’s just so good. NV accounted for a INSANE amount of player choice, kill this guy or don’t, do this quest or don’t, leader of the NCR in the strip? Kill him who cares, the story will continue and you will face consequences. But accounting for all that player choice is a massive undertaking, very difficult because every player will play differently. Emil saw how good NV was and basically said “wahh I don’t wanna worry about player choice, I just wanna tell my story.” Which wouldn’t be so bad if he wasn’t a hack. But you can’t make a game and market it as an RPG when you have next to no control over the story until the final mission where you pick a faction you might be the leader of or still a pawn and then the story wraps up taking into account NOTHING you’ve done. That’s why the slides at the end of NV were so good, you saved goodsprings from the powder gangers? You get a brief mention of how they’re doing. You brought back the entire minuteman militia and built strongholds on every settlement you could? Yeah that’s nice, anywho
You also wouldn't see storylines that are in Cyberpunk in a Bethesda Game, Bethesda Games are too tame.
Cyberpunk deals with Traffiking and Human Capture (the Badlands Mission with the guy kidnapping Children) there's a lot of adult themes in Cyberpunk that Bethesda are too scared to implement in their games.
The shack building comment really shows his contempt for his customers. There are a lot of people who love the addition of building to the Fallout games. There is a whole community built around it. The most popular kind of building in Fallout 4 and 76 is "lore friendly". That means the builders love the story of Fallout so much that they want to create things that fit into the overall story. I never want anyone to lose their jobs but this guy is the exception.
Declined? Its been bottom of the barrel trash for DECADES now. Oblivion was fun but still a noticeable step down from Morrowind. Bethesda Fallout was a flaming dumbster fire right off the bat. This has been a steady trend as more and more people have come to accept this hyper casual open world action game slop as the norm or even believe its exactly what Bethesda marketers tell them, this genre defining roleplaying masterpiece with infinite possibilities and everything anyone could ever want from a classic RPG. It makes me sick to my stomach thinking this more than likely going to be the future of both of these franchises because the MAJORITY do not giver a shit as long as they get to kill and loot in a new map thats either TES themed or Fallout themed.
Emil is anything but intelligent. Allowing him to write was a massive mistake.
he's clearly....haha a very simple minded fellow and doesn't know it
1:50 "...and despise the shack building element." I have written multi-page litanies on FO4's seemingly endless failings, but the forced integration of Minecraft will almost certainly retain the top spot forever. Because it's a minigame that is completely incongruous with the rest of the game. Because the theme is "rebuilding the wasteland" when I specifically want to enjoy a post-apocalypse, not help transform it into a non-post-apocalypse. Because its existence corrupted the rest of the game: Every item now has some intrinsic secondary value, and when gauging what to leave and what to collect for selling, you no longer leave junk alone like it deserves; and bric-a-brac that's been patiently sitting on shelves for over 200 years now reliably respawns every 3.5 hours because the Minecraft machine must be endlessly fed. Because the rules of the minigame are just as immersion-destroying as the game itself: You can build a house or break one down in 16 milliseconds; you can create a bed from a cigarette; you can change a two-clawed deathclaw gauntlet into a three-clawed variant by somehow applying a random scrap of bone; and lead comes from pencils.
But most of all, FO4's Minecraft system is the worst failure of the game because it's 33% of the game's total content, including the DLC. If you paid $60 for the game, $20 of that purchase went towards a minigame that deserves to be reviled and which you cannot ignore without installing mods. The rest of the game suffered from this imbalance of developer resources, as made clear by the conspicuous dearth of proper quests, a world that's poorly fleshed out (Easy City Downs? Cait's arena?), and the many companions who don't have their own quest, even though there are hints that they were going to, such as Strong's "milk of human kindness."
And better still, now that Pandora's box is opened and Bethesda has successfully attracted a small audience who only play their games for whatever Minecraft homages they shoehorn into them, we're stuck with it. Elder Scrolls 6 is guaranteed to be oversaturated with the same thing, probably taking up a third of the game's total content once again.
This is so well said and hits the exact feelings I have in a summary! I don’t mind it as a side content, additional content for free is never bad. The part that upset me the most is how it took over most of the game. Like literally it’s almost half the content. Want to finish the main quest? You gotta build something! It’s just not my cup of tea, which is fine, but when it’s forced it changes the game. I’m going to do another fallout video this weekend on this.
Emil is Todd's boyfriend.
"they will spend 30 hours on making shacks" tell that to red dead redemption 1 or 2
Exactly my point! RDR2 in particular probably has hundreds of hours of content in it. Random events, hidden secrets and they’re all unique! They’re all hand crafted and special! So whilst Bethesda make generic radiant content, games like rdr2 hand crafted it all. That way the players curiosity always gets rewarded! It never gets repetitive!
Emil. Emil never changes.
Hahaha it’s so true! Since the first day he’s consistently the same so at least he’s got that going for him ool
That screenshot at 2:43 says it all. The response is obviously AI generated, or maybe it's oppositive of what I'm thinking. When the company cares that little it's probably time to stop buying.
The fact that you... AVV Gaming, still have hope for skyrim 2: wrath of the peenus
is sad
I actually disagree with you about Oblivion's writing. I think it's just as bland and goofy as anything that came after. It's a bog standard apocalypse storyline with a generic main villain in Mankar and a lot of silly faction quests that seem at odds with the apparent seriousness of the main plot.
If anything I think that a lot of the writing rot within Bethesda started with Oblivion. So even if Emil was ousted from the company, the rot has long since nestled into their design philosophy. They don't use design documents and Todd is still the head of the company. You'd need a complete overhaul from the ground up.
If writing is a waste of time in videogames, why then are people still talk about the themes, secrets, originality and nuance of games like Mass Effect, Fallout 1, Bloodborne etc.
Exactly! The writing is what makes a game a legend and last forever. Look at silent hill 2 it’s still considered a masterpiece but the reason is because of the writing! The deeper meanings! The symbolism. It’s deep! Same with the games you’ve mentioned. These surface level games just don’t hit the same. They’re here today and gone tomorrow.
TH-cam won't let me repeat here what I told Emil on Twitter as I listened to you. Big thumbs up!
ES6, FO5? I'll probably just keep playing Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, and Fallout 4.
Well next year Skywind is coming out and Skyblion is in the works.
I was just playing Fallout 4 yesterday actually. The exploration in the game is really good but I think one of the saddest things was how good the Far Harbor DLC is. Emil compared Shattered Space DLC to Far Harbor from Fallout 4 saying they're alike. I can tell you now, they're not. Even if Bethesda never release a good game again, we can at least be happy they gave us a good run before their plans changed.
Yes yes yes! That is where the quality is now! In the mods made by volunteers! I will be doing videos on all those soon!
Team Beyond is the new Bethesda now.
Emil and Todd are the reason modern Bethesda is garbage
16:19 "biggest richest space simulation" the delusion on EP guess he never heard of the sentence wide but shallow
Mate I don’t think he’s aware there are other space games at all lol
6:09 One must note that Emil is only one of Three Lead Designers credited in Skyrim, the others being Bruce Nesmith and Kurt Kuhlman. Kurt Kuhlman in particular had a heavy hand in Skyrim, and much of it's narrative and worldbuilding stems from concepts he and Kirkbride were establishing all the way back in morrowind, as well as their contributions to the Gregory Keyes novels that bridge the gap between Oblivion and Skyrim. Emil didn't have as much of an opportunity to screw up Skyrim because there were more senior devs to keep him in check
Avarti on TH-cam has a Skyrim series called "Why (Insert character here) is an idiot". That series exists because of how bad those quests were written.
7:59 Uhhh no it wasn't.
"I'm really smart guys, I think this thing is bad but can't give a reason as to why"
@@scovrge__ Oxhorn, is that you?
You talking about fallout 3s story?
@@AVVGaming1 Yeah.
@ so I did another video rihht after here: th-cam.com/video/03CjhaldYgo/w-d-xo.htmlsi=en7sDCBoMMx2QUNb where I essentially had to go over the fallout 3 main story again and I think my younger self and nostalgia made me feel that the story was better than it was lol after reviewing it again I realised there were a lot of issues with it. The side quests were great and so was the world / lore (in my opinion) but yeah the main story was a bit all over the place lol
Absolutely delusional.
The way Emil puts it, it's like he is a writer who doesn't want to write, and makes less than the bare minimum because he thinks no one cares about it anyways, my take, stories can be as complex or simple as the writer wants and be a great story if it's well told.
What Emil does feels like neither, it's barebones, more like laziness.
How can someone like that be a lead writter is beyond me.
Anyone with basic writting skills could put some thought into it and make a better universe than Starfield while talking a shower, there could be as many rookie mistakes all through it but it would still be more sincere and well thought than what Emil does.
The writing is Starfield is bad, sure; but was the writing in Skyrim any better? The only difference is that Skyrim got away with it. Skyrim had such anmazing exploration and world design, and such an addictive gameplay loop, that the dogsh*t writing didn’t matter too much.
Meh… They stripped the gameplay loop down to barebones and relied on the surge in casual gamers to buoy their sales.
The world design in Skyrim is pretty brutal.
Just look at half of the towns - there’s barely 10 residents in each of them and none of them have anything enjoyable to say.
Skyrim was a fluke. Overly simplified to attract dad-gamers during a period of time where the demographic was seeing a massive surge.
Which is why they just kept re-releasing the game over and over again periodically.
Play 2-3 hours of oblivion, see how well that game was written and how rich the environment/towns are, then go play Skyrim.
It’s astounding how painfully bad Skyrim is.
@@lucaschudleigh7193 The towns aren't great, no. But let's be fair: the world in Skyrim is stunning. Great to explore, plenty to do. The music - which I forgot to mention - is fantastic. And the basic gameplay loop is simple, but fun. That was enough to make it work and work well. However, I suspect they drew the wrong conclusions from Skyrim's success. Skyrim was able to carry the weight of its bad writing and quest design ONLY because those other elements were so well done. The right lesson to draw was NOT "hmm, it seems high quality writing and quest design don't matter". But I think that probably was the lesson they drew.
@@lucaschudleigh7193 i agree completely. oblivion was my fav game when it came out, i played skyrim a few years ago and quit after 10 hours. i couldn't stand it, it's a total waste of time. Then i played kingdom come: deliverence and the difference is stunning. It made me feel the same things i felt when i first played oblivion
It didn't have amazing exploration or world design seeing the same dwarven ruin or seeing the same falmer infested cave over and over again or seeing the same fkin Nordic burial crypt with draugrs over and over again isn't good design or good for exploration.
Its bad and terrible but ppl back then bought into the hype with all the gaming media giving 10 to a mediocre game.
@@johndeighan2495its definitely not stunning fkin UbiSoft games had more stunning environments than elder scrolls skyrim
For so many people to criticize Emil’s stories is to have so many people play them. We didn’t tear out the pages of his novel, we read them in disbelief that the LEAD WRITER would stop caring about WRITING