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> It seems pretty clear to me that in the video games industry (and pretty much any 'art' industry for that matter) great results are driven by singular, great people.

I can assure you from working inside said industry that this is not often the case, if ever.

Edit to add: great results are driven by great teams.

I agree. Producers and designers that frontline a successful project get the visibility but they have to be backed by highly effective teams of equally gifted folks that collaborate effectively. I don’t think this is different for any complex human endeavor. Often times the front liner isn’t the one who built the team - there’s often an anchor person more in the middle of the project that attracts talent and creates the atmosphere of collegial collaboration. Smart front liners bring those folks along to the next projects. From the article it sounds like that was Starfield, not 76, which is probably why it was so miserable.

As soon as a project is known internally as the one the B team was assigned to because all the “favorite” people went to the “better” project, it’s basically doomed. This has happened so many times, the game industry has enough people who should know better, and yet…

That's a totally fair point, and I completely agree. I should have clarified this in my original post. If you're passionate about games, but nobody wants to work with you, then that passion won't permeate throughout the development team. All these gaming visionaries tend to have the gift of extreme charisma and strong passion for games - you need both IMO to make a great result. You may have a great idea, but you need to get people fired up about it too and articulate it in a way that can be understood.

Even still this isn’t correct, even building a great team isn’t the work of one person and plenty of great games are built by teams lead by people who don’t get press as visionaries. You’re falling for marketing, both personal (where extreme charisma does help) and company lead where wheeling out a famous name sells units. Which isn’t to say famous people are all rubbish but that the hype and the reality are very different to one another.

This sounds just like the great man theory in history [1].

I think we should be wary when a lot is attributed to a single person whatever the context may be: there are always people "behind the stage" as it were, without whom the show doesn't start.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory

> It seems pretty clear to me that in the video games industry (and pretty much any 'art' industry for that matter) great results are driven by singular, great people. Todd Howard was the mind behind TES and Fallout 3/4

There are also many great results that are a team effort.

And according to this article Todd Howard was also part of the problem. For example:

"[A]lmost none of the Bethesda designers wanted the game to launch without NPCs. The design teams at both Rockville and Austin wanted NPCs to fill out the world of Fallout 76, but they say executive producer Todd Howard was not willing to budge all the way up ‘til launch."

Yeah, its my bad for not articulating this in the post. Obviously, any giant product like a modern movie or game is made by teams. I think one hallmark of a great director is the ability to build a great team around you, which is just as important as being passionate and understanding the medium.

I’ve never once experienced the “face” of a game doing all the hiring, or even being involved in too many interviews (except for marketing purposes, of course, but I mean hiring interviews). It’s quite a full time and important job to do the PR.

Maybe Todd was trying to just ship the dang thing to satisfy Zenimax. Build the games-as-service sandbox, let it fail, parent company head honchos leave you alone and your teams get to go back to working on the kind of games they actually want to build.

Having a vision is "part of the problem?"

Lots of visions are mediocre, incoherent, or superficial.

If the vision is bad then obviously.

the vision of fallout 76 was the issue. They took out all the interaction with characters and left in the junk collecting and base building, which for many players were the least interesting parts of fallout 4. The vision sabotaged the product.

I worked in the video game industry for a long time. This is a story you’re being sold - it’s the teams who build great games, not some singular great passionate mind. It’s a way for marketing teams to build a brand, not much more than that.

Firstly as other people have pointed out, teams build great products, not some individual with a messianic vision. That's just marketing.

Secondly, Todd Howard is the greedy executive who pushed out Fallout 76 and keeps rereleasing skyrim year after year after year. He has passion yes, but it's for raking in the benjamins. Making great games is strictly secondary.

Thirdly FO76 was such a total fiasco that people seem to have forgotten that Fallout 4 was insanely buggy at launch and even when they got through that was mediocre at best. In Fallout New Vegas there are interesting puzzles to solve and different ways to progress through the quest. In Fallout 4 you go places and then shoot people. Occasionally you get presented with 4 dialog options which are "yes", "yes", "no, but actually yes", and "close this dialog for now and be forced to come back later and be presented by the same choices".

> Todd Howard was the mind behind TES and Fallout 3/4.

If your example of a great game is Fallout 4, then you've already lost the argument.

It pales in comparison to Fallout NV, Fallout 2 and even 3 in many regards. It's an extremely dumbed-down RPG experience, plagued by a lot of the same issues that are present in 76, including lack of passion and generic, tropey NPCs and environments.

I think it would be more fair to say that most studios and game designers have their masterpieces, and then most of their other work is mediocre, simply because it trends towards the mean.

Some great studios and designers can replicate their initial success once or twice more, but those are extremely rare.

Haha, that's fair. I certainly didn't like it the first time I played it. However, I recently tried again on survival mode after a friend's recommendation, and it feels totally different. No fast travel and saving only at beds changes the game completely. Suddenly vertibirds are useful, settlements are mandatory, and the world feels absolutely gigantic rather than a sandbox separated by loading screens. Highly recommend checking it out (although it still won't scratch your RPG itch).

> It's an extremely dumbed-down RPG experience

The main story was weak, and the side content varies, but the game is sprawling and full of ‘hidden’ gems. In what other game could you eavesdrop on raiders discussing Henry David Thoreau in their lair at a former gift shop at Walden Pond? A gift shop at Walden Pond is itself ironically and darkly humorous.

I think FO76 is better than 4- nearly all of the RPG systems (dialogue, perks, crafting) have been improved, the world design is much more interesting, and the map has a ton of hidden corners to poke around in.

I loved Fallout 4, I'm sorry. Every second. I think a lot of people see the older games through nostalgia lenses when their lives were better/minds were younger/they were first experiencing an engrossing RPG. I played NV after 4 and NV was good too. Fallout 3 I keep giving up on and I'm not a quitter. It just doesn't draw me in like the other ones. It seems crude and simple comparatively, due to its age I guess.

I first played Morrowind two or three years ago, a few years after I first played Fallout 4. No nostalgia glasses for me, I had negative interest in games like Morrowind when Morrowind was new.

But playing Morrowind made me realize just how crap Fallout 4 is as an RPG. Fallout 4 has almost no choices to make and all the characters worship you as a messiah five minutes after meeting you. Morrowind is very rough around the edges, the roll-based combat system was a very hard swallow. But despite the rough/exploitable mechanics and the bad graphics, Morrowind still manages to be a much more immersive world because the people in it actually make sense. They have their own agendas and biases and they don't care about you until you give them a reason to care. In Morrowind you join a faction and are given orders by some regional flunky, or worse, that regional flunky tells you to buzz off and do shitty odd jobs for another apprentice in the faction. In Fallout 4 you approach a faction and immediately meet the faction leader who tells you that you're Howard's own gift to humanity.

> I think a lot of people see the older games through nostalgia lenses when their lives were better/minds were younger/they were first experiencing an engrossing RPG.

Yes, they do. But it is absolutely not the case here, sorry. F4 is just a worse game.

It's not the worst game in the series or the genre, but it is utterly mediocre and not at all an example of a resounding success in Bethesda's history as a game company. Metacritic's 5.6/10 User score agrees with me.

Doesn't mean you have to stop liking the game. There are plenty of bad games we all play as guilty pleasures.

Also, just FYI, I think Fallout 1, the first game in the series is a pretty awful game. It's extremely short, the side quests are all boring fetch/kill quests, the open world is mostly dead. F2 was a huge improvement upon it.

That’s funny. I played them both at release.

I thought Fallout 1 was incredible. I remember getting the trailer literally on VHS tape and being so hyped for it, and it totally lived up to it. It was unlike anything else at the time.

Fallout 2 felt kind of watered down by comparison. The whole idea to move the series back by 80 or so years was terrible. The enclave was a terrible idea. The first Fallout made sense 80 years after the war. Everything looks basically the same. People still live in bombed out buildings. Nothing makes sense. The second and later Fallouts were all set way too late.

It's not just nostalgia, go play Fallout 2, GoG has a copy that should work. It holds up extremely well, because it's just a much better game than the Bethesda versions. The writing, the humor, the world building, it feels a lot more alive and real than the much more technically advanced iterations. Fallout 1 is less polished, but also great. Fallout 3+ always felt like a reskinned Elder Scrolls to me.

I did exactly that. Multiple times, including before Fallout 3 came out, after, and also pretty recently. IMHO, Fallout 2 sucks in comparison with anything F3+. Worldbuilding might be there, but the gameplay simply isn't.

There's nothing wrong with being "a reskinned Elder Scrolls". Elder Scrolls is a great game (series). It is up there in the hall of masterpieces along with GTA and CS.

If you don't believe my word, look at Steam stats: https://store.steampowered.com/stats/

Like many here I also believed F3 and NV had better storytelling. But many hours of playing later, I see that I actually prefer F4.

I think most of F and ES games are pretty boring, and the chart is about as compelling as cable ratings the Big Bang theory is a great show. It has mass appeal. It’s a very successful game. But they seem dull to me. The newer ones at least.

The chart is more compelling than your (or mine) personal opinion. Especially, when it is not substantiated.

I was a fan of all of them but 4 just felt really dumbed down as far as the story and rpg elements.. I grew up on 1-3 and didn't play NV until last year when I was 36, and I really loved it. It seems to really focus on the crafting and base building and for me that part was not so fun, even though I like the idea

Try Fallout 2.

Hero worship is bad in games development because it can lead to just as tortuous experiences for those working under a supposed visionary who takes the praise and becomes a megalomaniac.

What you mean to say is that there are guys who get much more credit than they deserve when a game or for that matter any product becomes a success.

Fallout 76 seems to be a classic case of unrealistic development and testing deadlines.

Fallout 76 was deeply flawed as a concept. The concept of "remove the characters and story from the game and let them collect it with junk to basebuild" made the whole game deeply unenjoyable compared to a regular fallout game.

Fallout 76 had problems with development and testing as well, but the problems with it began at its core concept - which they've since said 'oops' and put back into the game.

The initial question of fallout 76 seems to be "how can we turn fallout 4 into a game with constant income" and every mistake started there.

I don't think it comes down to a singular person, but I'm pretty sure it is about passion. Modern large game studios have removed all the passion and turned game development into an assembly line of 100s or more people working on it. Creating a very large game and also having it be good seems more like an exception at this point.

Games with small teams probably have a much easier time creating a game they are passionate about even if the scope of the game has to be smaller.

It's not about passion at all. Plenty of passionate work themselves to the breaking point and end up with crappy games or failing to release at all.

It's that making ambitious games is hard, and if your organization doesn't have good engineering practices, good project management, a clear achievable vision, a realistic timeline, and capable team members, you will have difficulty succeeding.

And even with less ambitious games, studios fail all the time for the same reasons. It's not just the AAA games.

Clearly a smaller team with a smaller scope has an easier time because as you increase headcount, communication overhead increases exponentially, and bigger teams are usually trying more technically difficult things than a smaller team would try to tackle.

I find the presence of the "auteur" is valuable because it's a signal to people.

When there's a single leader who's highly motivated to do critically acclaimed work, it signals to talent that this is a project aimed at critically acclaimed work.

Now, said auteur also makes great margin calls and leadership decisions.

But keep in mind it's not just "great man syndrome."

More like it is a good signal because someone was willing to risk or build his reputation by putting his name on it.

The Civ games have been around for a while, then it became "Sid Meier's Civilization". Not because he went back in time and did more work on Civ, but because he built his rep and wanted to use it to sell a couple of more copies.

That’s why marketing teams work hard to create that perception in the audience.

The difference is that, having worked in the industry, I can say that film directors are given exactly the power they are advertised as having.

The film industry has learnt through many trials and errors it has to happen this way.

Software hasn't.

So less that in the video games industry great results are driven by singular, great people today, but games would be better if they were?

Games and films are both an exercise in project management.

Films are an exercise in getting everything you need in your 70 or so days of filming. The days you've rented the exorbitantly expensive cameras, trailers, lights, etc.

Games are similar, except over a few years.

Only the auteur leadership model is able to make those project management tradeoffs quickly, under a lot of stress, and well, to deliver high quality output.

> It seems pretty clear to me that in the video games industry (and pretty much any 'art' industry for that matter) great results are driven by singular, great people.

Nah. What actually happens is you have one [or more] driven people and a team of others helping guide them and restrain their excesses. After a few commercial successes, the rest of the team gets forgotten or left behind eventually and the single celebrity creator, now unrestrained (and ego inflated by fans), starts producing crap.

Hideo Kojima, I'm looking at you.

>It seems pretty clear to me that in the video games industry (and pretty much any 'art' industry for that matter) great results are driven by singular, great people. Todd Howard was the mind behind TES and Fallout 3/4.

Pretty sure this attitude is what led to Daikatana. Cults of personality are universally bad.

>Todd Howard was the mind behind TES and Fallout 3/4

He was one of the mindS behind TES, and probably the dumbest of the bunch. Since companies exist for profit, and the most profit exists in the lowest common denominator, he was eventually the only one left, which is how you get modern Bethesda.

Only proof I've seen Todd being good at is marketing. That's it.