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Bethesda Game Studios workers have unionized
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
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As a decades-long Bethesda fan, I think this might improve product quality from what we saw in Starfield. It's clear that somebody needs to be able to talk back to King Todd.
Maybe if they're not so alienated from their work, we'll see more of other people's creative vision.
Starfield is Todd Howard making his Homer Simpson car. It’s a pile of shit no one wanted.
What are you talking about, he revolutionized the walking simulator. Now you can jump real high too. And instead of traveling places you just loading screen everywhere.
You can jump further too, but only if you rebind the jump button :D
I do think that's more Emil Pagliarulo's car than Todd
to be fair, a forest fire might improve product quality from what we saw in starfield
Fire is a natural and necessary part of many ecosystemsm. It keeps parasitic insect populations down, stuff like ticks and chiggers, and some plant species rely on fire to prepare the soil for seeds and even is required for some plants to release their seeds. In dry ecosystems like the western USA it also consumes old dead plant material, reducing the fuel available for future fires and reducing fire severity overall. Many foresters and fire fighters advocate for increasing prescribed burns, essentially forest fires that we light on purpose in cooler and wetter times of the year to consume the fuel without risking a catastrophic fire that is difficult to control. I just think that's neat.
Everyone should know this. The fire he said "This is fine" about was a metaphorical one, after all. But then, Unionization has been important to have in the economic ecosystem as well, so it might just be that greatly-needed wildfire in a forest with too much corporate rot.
This is the first thought I had. Capitalist apologists would probably say the exact opposite, that owners need to be able to abuse workers to get more and better work out of them, but that's basically never true. Owners owe so much to their workers' creativity - even in fields where you wouldn't expect - and they are deeply unaware of it.
This will be great for the workers, but I don't think it will necessarily fix the issues in Bethesda's organization when it comes to game development (and it won't make them worse either).
Given what we know from Starfield, Bethesda is really lacking when it comes to planning: they aren't doing a good job at establishing a compact vision for the final product which also results in having issues to establish an agile workflow to get from start to finish. In the best cases, this results in ludonarrative disonance where the story isn't really supported by the mechanics of the game (example: Fallout 4's story incentivizes the player to hurry up and look for their son, but they assign a lot of resources into making sandbox mechanics such as those related to base building); in the worst cases, this results in teams returning the ball to each other all the time because they aren't properly coordinated to build things in the way other teams of the studio needs them, which loses a lot of time and becomes even more glaringly obvious the larger the project is.
The silver lining is: this problem isn't so noticeable when the designers have the template of Oblivion in their minds and they're making Skyrim, but it was going to be completely exposed when making the jump to a new IP (and thus a new universe), with a new engine, with some large design jumps such as ceding ground to dynamically created areas; so ES6 doesn't have to be as much of a low point as it has been Starfield, as long as they're conservative in their design choices. I'd vastly prefer the leadership of Bethesda to be completely reorganized, which would allow them to innovate by taking well measured risks, but I don't have much hope for that scenario.
Either way it's a good thing, a major company unionizing could lead to the whole industry unionizing
On that, I agree.