The *one* thing I can never get my head around is this.
Zenimax *loves* money, but it is Todd and Todd alone who prevents the hiring of a third-party dev to bang out rapid on-current engine 'sequels' to Fallout and Skyrim- titles that would cost pennies and yet make a good chunk of a billion dollars each.
Todd Howard has only *one* concern- to kill any and all 'competition' to titles he personally has direct and intimate control over, and damn profit and mindshare. Despite the idiocy of some comments here. Todd is the *big boss* and the only source of toxic decision making at Beth, a division of Zenimax that controls the lion's share of all of Zenimax game output.
It is easier to state the games that Todd does not control, and Elder Scrolls online is pretty much the only major one.
Todd is probably the vilest 'top boss' in the games industry today- he is driven entirely by his hatred of the success Fallout:NV received, and his only coherent 'policy' is to ensure under his watch, no indy team ever gets 'his' glory again.
The gamer suffers. The lover of the Fallout and Elder Scrolls IP suffers. And it doesn't even make any commercial sense. But Zenimax is owned and run by non-gamers, and they *trust* Todd cos of the amazing commercial success of Skyrim and the Fallout games (til 76).
I know of no other person (in his pos in the game biz) who could have smirkingly given this interview- where he admits to being a crook, a crook who works on the absolute assumption that his target gaming 'consumers' are utter morons. I for sure, the top guys at EA think this- so do many of the others. But to proudly say it in public, and then know that dumb dumbs will continue to buy Beth games (and defend them when they are sh-t) is really something.
Are gamers that thick? Well I was shocked and depressed at how few gamers noticed Wolf 2 and Dishonored 2 were sh-t compared to their very good predecessors. It seems that gamers just are not very discerning on average- unless the fall in quality is blindingly obvious in the crudest fashion, most are just bamboozled by graphics and cut-scenes, or *gimmicks* (as in D2).
Yeah, for sure there are many mediocre games one can make it to the end, and get that X number of hours of gameplay. I'm sure everyone finished Rage 2. But experiencing the whole of a game does not mean the game was good.
That Todd is a moral blackhole impacts everything Beth does. No matter how hard the owned teams at Beth work, Todd's dirty fingers taint every pie. Technically there is some fine work at Beth- Dishonored 2's morphing mansion was ingeneous. But the *art*- which in games is the gameplay- is pure sh-t. One's gameplay around the every changing building was some of the worst I've enountered, and so lame compared to the gameplay in Dishonored(1) it was just sickening.
With Todd in charge *nothing* good can now come out of Beth. I by this I do not mean a new game can't have some interesting aspect. Rage 2 showed the problem. The techies certainly banged some aspects of quality into the reworked Mad Max 2- but taken as a whole the game was an atrocity, when it was oh so clear that much time money an effort on that engine should have given us something killer. Mad Max (1) is a vastly better game than rage 2.
Beth = Woke + MTX.
Todd = Big Boss with zero respect for gamers.
