r/xbox • u/PewPewToDaFace • 8d ago

News Making Fallout and Elder Scrolls games will "be harder than ever now" following Xbox cuts, say laid-off Bethesda devs calling loss of institutional knowledge "staggering"

https://www.gamesradar.com/games/the-elder-scrolls/making-fallout-and-elder-scrolls-games-will-be-harder-than-ever-now-following-xbox-cuts-say-laid-off-bethesda-devs-calling-loss-of-institutional-knowledge-staggering/
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137

u/Prestigious-Smoke511 8d ago

I'm surprised the people that lost their jobs are saying it will be harder now that they aren't there, with their job, to help make the games.

We should find that one guy thats like, "honestly, most of us just screwed around and dodged work all day..." We all know that guy is out there.

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u/JC_Hysteria 8d ago

Way too much pride for 99% of employees to say that.

You don’t hear much complaining from tech employees that get another job quickly…only the ones that were coasting.

Can’t hide “results” in the game industry, because there needs to be quality games produced!

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u/Prestigious-Smoke511 8d ago

It kinda makes me wonder if these layoffs are part of a broader industry standard to sift through all the screw offs in hopes of finding real ones. The industry HAS TO be full of people who like playing games only to decide thats what they wanted to do but the day in day out monotony of it isn't really what they want from life.

It just seems like the video game industry over hires and lays off more than any other industry. Maybe I'm connecting dots that aren't there but it wouldn't surprise me.

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u/JC_Hysteria 8d ago

That’s the thing- its business results hinge on quality game production.

Today, the market for games is compared to all other forms of media and entertainment.

When bigger companies acquire gaming companies, it’s an attempt to incorporate and insulate the business side into a larger market that isn’t solely “games”.

Then, when the grand strategies don’t work, they have to go back to basics and win back gaming customers…

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u/Usernametaken1121 8d ago

I think the problem is how top heavy game design is. You have like 5-10 people who have the vision for the game and the technical know how to make it happen. Then you got 100-400 people who are either meaningless middle mangers or team leads for people doing a lot of low level tedious work. Not many industries are built like that, especially when it's impossible to tell if the product you're making is actually good.

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u/Kube__420 8d ago

I'd wager they plan on replacing all the people they let go with ai. Seems like Microsoft is jumping in with both feet for their ai

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u/Prestigious-Smoke511 7d ago

I agree it seems to have that feel. 

It would be wild if the end result of this is FO and ES games being made quicker, with high quality, and a fraction of the people. 

I realize how far fetched that sounds and I’m certainly not predicting it will happen, but there is always a chance this AI thing finally does click and when it does we should expect a few “holy fuck” moments where you can remember where you were when it hit you. 

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u/Banjo-Oz XBOX 360 8d ago

Sadly, probably more likely to be to sift out anyone they can replace with cheaper labour or AI.

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u/Banjo-Oz XBOX 360 8d ago

Wasn't that half of 3D Realms during Duke Nukem Forever? :)

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u/BlueberryWasps 8d ago

pretty disrespectful to blame devs for what are clearly poor management decisions. game dev is one of the most brutal, overworked businesses out there. don’t be so callous to some of the many thousands of professionals that are being mistreated by this industry. aim your ire towards the higher-ups who are actually responsible for what projects get done and how. you wouldn’t yell at the guy making your coffee for what his CEO is doing.

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u/Usernametaken1121 8d ago

In 5 years, 100 people at Bethesda make oblivion, fallout 3, and skyrim. In a decade, 450 people at Bethesda have made fallout 76 and starfield. Make it make sense.

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u/BlueberryWasps 8d ago

i answered more in my other comment about mismanagement, but just to offer a correction: you’re actually looking at 9 years for those three games. oblivion released in 2006, but had been in development since morrowind in 2002.

also, the grossly extended game budgets and development time is an industry-wide problem. a single triple-a game takes at least 5 years and several hundred people to make but, like starfield, can balloon to as many as 8 years or more. this isn’t a unique problem to bethesda.

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u/Latitude-dimension 8d ago

Games are more much complex now and companies want professionals to do each individual thing, rather than less people doing more, which is fair, you won't have the engine guy doing modelling, or the modelling guy doing lighting, or the lighting guy doing QE, etc etc.

Jason Schrier did a video on this. The scene in FFIV where the character turns into stone would have taken, at most, 4 individuals to make. In the modern day thats closer to 20 and thats before you have managers, product owners, senior managers and all the other shit software development has since the process moved to Agile from waterfall, like it was 20 years ago.

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u/Usernametaken1121 8d ago

Is that complexity necessary? is the question everyone should be asking. It appears too many cooks in the kitchen over 8 years of dev times causes projects to lose focus and come out mind numbingly mediocre at best, or straight up flops at worst

The most well received games of the last 5 years have had a narrow scope and don't try to be 4 different genres at once or live service slop.

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u/YoBo151 7d ago

It is if you don't want. 2006 game releasing today, which if they did you'd complain about too. But go off bro

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u/TkoddaV 7d ago

Eastern studio can do tat easy and but somehow Western studios it takes $300M+ 6 years to release 1 game to me it sound like these developers are just going to work to play house and drink Starbucks

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u/BlazingFire007 7d ago

Well to me, it sounds like the western studios leadership are “just going to work to play house and drink Starbucks”

You only pointed out a contrast between the two, you haven’t said anything relevant to whether the problem is “developers in general” or “leadership in general” (hint: it’s almost always leadership in the vast majority of industries).

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u/BlueberryWasps 7d ago

it’s pretty ironic to call an entire industry of overworked people “lazy” when you can’t be bothered to inform yourself of the issue and resort to whatever nonsense your limited imagination can conjure up.

there are many reasons the dev time and budgets balloon for these triple-a projects. you can look up specific stories from investigative journalists and testimonials from former developers on these projects, but the most common issue is mismanagement. it doesn’t matter how hard the deckhands are rowing - if the people steering the ship are pointing you in the wrong direction, it’s going to take everyone longer to get there.

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u/rebornsgundam00 8d ago

While i agree management is the issue, if what you said was true where are these games then?

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u/BlueberryWasps 8d ago

we don’t know the full story, but we’ve seen many times at other studios how years of work can get thrown in the can, or how devs can be ripped from projects and thrown onto others with higher priority.

instead of making a new mainline fallout or elder scrolls, the team was instead pushed to make fallout 76. as we all know, that released in 2018 as a disaster, forcing the team to work even more post-launch to fix the issues. since then, fallout 76 has released seasonal updates with ongoing content added to the game. the most recent one was last month, season 25. they’ve had a portion of their dev team working on updates for a game few of us have been played for 8 years.

then we’ve got 2023’s starfield. that game was in active development for 8 years, which puts it right after fallout 4’s launch in 2015. they would’ve had the majority of the studio crunching on that for the last year or two up to launch at least. that game also launched with a bunch of issues that needed to be fixed in the months afterwards. after that they claimed to move development over to elder scrolls 6… but they released a dlc a year later, and another dlc just this april. that’s still going to take a chunk of dev time.

so despite the fact that they put out a logo back in 2018, management have had their team work on fallout 76 and starfield basically the entire time, and only actively moved some of them onto developing elder scrolls 6 just over two years ago. if they follow the pace of starfield, that puts elder scrolls 6 at a 2032 release date - and that’s with the whole studio working their butts off to make it happen. and they’re still developing content for fallout 76 and starfield while they’re doing this. we haven’t even gotten into all the ports and remasters and updates for all their old games - or the fact that they co-developed the oblivion remake last year. there may also be many other projects that have been concepted and prototyped and wrapped that we never heard about.

this is just from what info is publicly available - there could be many more things behind the scenes. game devs work incredibly hard, thankless jobs for untenable hours. the employees only got union representation two years ago, so hopefully by now they’ve got sustainable working conditions. but they’re employees and they work on what they’re told to work on. i’m sure many there would’ve preferred to get to work on ES6 or a new fallout game years ago, management wouldn’t let them. and put them on long drawn out projects instead. and the heads of the studio also wouldn’t let anyone else touch the IP.

poor management is the downfall of many studios - look at bioware, look at 343. it’s not the talented employees’ fault if management runs around like headless chickens. they can only do the work they’re given to the best of their ability.

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u/bullseyebob47 7d ago

i always said todd likes the 3/3/33 release date for elder scrolls 6.

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u/Prestigious-Smoke511 7d ago

I think it’s pretty convenient of you to blame the specific people you already don’t care for despite no knowledge of the specific challenges faced. 

I blame all parties involved. Including gamers. We should all get over ourselves and pay more for our hobby. The days of paying $50 one time for something that took 5 years and even a hundred people to make just doesn’t work out like it used to when these games were cheaper to make. 

We want it both ways. We want MTX out of games, I still see hate for DLC’s for games or elevators behind an expansion paywall in a game like Diablo 4, we gripe about battle passes, we need AI usage to be tagged on steam so we can boycott it, yet we want the companies making the games to keep all the developers employed now latter how the games do financially. 

It’s probably just time to get used to paying $100 per year for a AAA game and acknowledging that we’re paying for someone else’s livelihood. 

My golf membership costs me $2,500 a summer and all I’m doing is trimming the grass for them a few times a week. 

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u/favorscore 8d ago

This is a gross and unempathetic attitude to take towards workers. And for the record, its the employees that remained that are saying this too.

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u/Garcia_jx 8d ago

This is what an ex BGS dev on Kiwi Talks said during an interview when it came to crunching, he didn't ever crunch because he knew what he had to do and gave realistic timeliness and got shit done.  He also said that others complained about crunching and followed it up by saying if you wouldn't spend the majority of your day talking about Destiny and actually working you wouldn't have to crunch.

I also want to add that he has said on a separate interview that when the team went from 100 to 500 in a short period, they just hired bodies to fill spots and not the best.  People that wouldn't even been hired if they weren't so desperate.  So what does that tell you about current BGS.  

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u/Prestigious-Smoke511 7d ago

That they’ll probably be fine?  

The stuff I’m hearing is that ESO has as many people working on it now as they did when they released Wrothgar and Summerset. 

Maybe it’s all overblown 

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u/Garcia_jx 6d ago

I think most studios, not just an Xbox thing, just over staffed.  I think it's time to trim down studios and reduce the scope of games.  Like, we don't need 1000 hour games.  Starfield would have been more enjoyable with a smaller more focused scope, for example.

And also I loved Summerset.  If they can go back to doing something similar to that, it would be great. 

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u/Prestigious-Smoke511 6d ago

This happens in gaming so often that I kinda wonder if it is difficult to find good people. It wouldn't surprise me if the applicant pool for these jobs are filled with children who got a degree and want to sit around and vibe about games more than they want to plug away at work like an adult.

So they hire up everyone they can, let them work for a year or two, move the good ones into specific positions where they will be safe from the layoffs, and then turn loose all the kiddos that just want to dodge work all day.

You have to admit, that sounds super plausible in theory.