Recent content by Tom Bishop

I have no doubt that the people at Bethesda have played F1 and F2, simply because of how many plot elements they've needlessly rehashed in their games. If only they took more spiritual and thematic influences from them instead of specific story beats and characters/factions. As for what...

What does that have to do with it?

I for one am not enthusiastic about this. No, Hillary wasn't great, but Trump is simply unfit for office. He's an unpleasant, divisive asshole who routinely makes outrageous statements, openly panders to racists, and appears to be motivated by his ego far more than any real interest in public...

Incredibly minor nitpick, but "sentient" in the review should be "sapient" when describing the Mr. Handy. Very common mistake. To be sentient just means that you have senses. Sapience is the human-like ability to think, judge, etc.

It's not even lazy/incompetent writing so much as it is lack of interest from Bethesda. They don't want to create a world of burgeoning civilizations rife with political intrigue and social commentary; they want to create a wacky post-apocalyptic world driven mostly by action. Which could...

What Bethesda probably does with its voice actors is call them into the studio, hand them a thick binder with the thousands of lines they have to record, and point them to the recording booth where they'll be spending the next few hours. No context for their lines, no direction, no time to even...

I actually like ESO's lore a lot. There are a few contradictions, sure, but every new TES game has those, and a lot of what they added was surprisingly creative and worthwhile. My favorite new lore book was this one: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Aurbic_Enigma_4:_The_Elden_Tree Truly dank lore.

I'd call Bethesda's previous games RPGs - not particularly deep or complex ones, certainly, but there are basic roleplaying elements there. You work on your skills/attributes to get good at certain tasks, you make choices throughout the game, you decide your character's personality, etc. With...

I'm sorry to be so blunt, but almost all of this is wrong. Kirkbride wrote quite a bit more than just the 36 Lessons, as listed here: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/General:Michael_Kirkbride I highly doubt that "most of" Kirkbride's writings were cut - I'm sure some stuff was, but he was definitely...

Pete Hines is quite a bit higher than Todd on the corporate ladder, far from working for him. It's easy to make fun of his goofy defenses of F4 on Twitter, but ultimately, he's not really responsible for the game's content. But even just talking about Todd, he was in charge of TES games like...

Bethesda isn't interested in applying logic and context to enemies. The way they see it, the player is just going to kill them all in a few minutes, so who cares about the niggling little details of who these people are and how they fit in the world? They evidently don't realize that solid...

I could add a few thoughts too.

I'd be interested in reading an article or essay arguing that F4 is better than NV, or watching a properly-scripted video where someone makes their case; but I'm not going to watch a 26-minute video of some guy awkwardly talking off the cuff about it. It's boring presentation.

I'm pretty sure there are no real "requirements" for calling it GOTY.

Not necessarily. If you're fast enough, you can kill Burke before he kills the sheriff. And he thanks you for it afterward, so it's not simply an unscripted glitch.