It feels like when Fallout 3, 4 and Skyrim came out you couldn't escape people posting about them for weeks, especially with Skyrim. Now the most I've seen are complaints about how disappointing Starfield was.

Is the game that much blander or does Internet culture just move on that much faster these days? On the other hand, I do feel like there was a lot more enthusiasm for other games like Elden Ring, and sometimes you get an Among Us that just completely take over the Internet.

    • LeylaLove [she/her, love/loves]
      ·
      9 months ago

      Yeah, it all went down hill when that one guy high on shrooms all the time left the company. I forget his name, but I'm sure some other morrowind fan knows who I'm talking about

      • Smeagolicious [they/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        9 months ago

        Michael Kirkbride? Writer/designer/lore guy for Morrowind (and pretty much everything interesting in the elder scrolls that we never actually see in the other games). Though afaik he wasn’t always on some shit as the rumor goes, I think he just got really into incredibly esoteric religious writing

        • LeylaLove [she/her, love/loves]
          ·
          9 months ago

          Pretty sure it's Kirkbride. The guy I'm thinking about has done extensive writing about his interpretation of the lore after leaving Bethesda.

          • Venus [she/her]
            ·
            9 months ago

            That's kirkbride, and yeah, he famously said that the only substances he needed for the Sermons were whiskey and cigarettes. He was just high on his comparative religion degree (aka irl deep lore)

            • LeylaLove [she/her, love/loves]
              ·
              9 months ago

              Respect. Honestly makes sense why I'd mistake a comparative religion degree with tyriptamine psychedelics. Fun fact: In the tale of Moses, he went up to the mountains and burnt a bush and saw shit before making the commandments. The mountain widely agreed upon to be the mountains have acacia bushes, which contain DMT. A lot of our earliest accounts of religion often have pharmacological explainations because of DMT. So if you go hard enough on religion, it'll sound like you're on shrooms 🤷‍♀️

      • Chapo_Trap_Horse [none/use name]
        ·
        9 months ago

        BGS used to have a few weirdos at the office ((Kirkbride included) who made things messy and interesting. Another one was lead concept artist Adam Adamowicz. He did all the art for Fallout 3 and like 75% of it for Skyrim (this is coming from an AMA with another BGS artist who was there at the time).

        Adam died of lung cancer in 2012.

        Bethesda's games' look and feel and writing have been nosediving. Everything feels more focus-grouped and hermetically-sealed and clean and horrifically uninteresting.

        All that being said, I think I have like 60 hours in Starfield and while it is indeed boring as shit, it's boring in a very BGS-type of way only BGS can do, and in a weird way I actually like it and plan on finishing the game. I can't describe it, I think I'm just an uncurable Bethesda stan.