Second for Overlord, the whole show is just ridiculous power fantasy. It's great, I love it dearly.

There's some occasional egregious fanservice but it's typically brief enough that I could deal. Rest of the show is killer.

Yep. I've heard Florida be called "God's waiting room" for my entire life.

I was voted "most likely to have a dead man switch" in high school and I'm not sure what all that implies about me but it's fun to tell people

This is pro advice, agreed

VtM absolutely requires a good group in order to have a good game, IMO. You can get by with a mediocre roleplaying group and still have fun playing something like D&D, or Pathfinder or LANCER, I think, but not so with WOD games. Roleplay IS the game.

That kind of group is hard to find, in my experience, unless you manage to hunt down an existing VTM game and convince them to let you join.

I love Doom so much. He plays like he's the bad guy but if you peel back the thinnest veneer of villainy, he's literally just a good guy that wants the best for his people. He has ongoing beef with Fantastic but has showed up to help them fight off bigger threats on several occasions, mostly under the auspices of "this is MY mf planet and I WON'T have you wrecking the place".

Doom is the platonic ideal of the Benevolent Dictator and while that would never fly in the real world for a multitude of reasons, it's very fun to see in a comic book. Doom is what I imagine myself to be if given unchecked power (and is the reason I insist I'm not to be put in charge of anything ever).

But it won't, because if that's what anyone involved with this was actually worried about then they would be doing that already during a regular physical exam during which they already take a cheek swab. That doesn't need a referendum.

This is about trans exclusion and making schoolgirls flip up their skirts for coach. There is no explanation for it that can suggest otherwise.

For a first playthrough, no.

For a game I know and love and have come back to, yeah totally, sometimes. I have fully embraced CHIM and just get born with 500k septims in my pocket now whenever I play Morrowind. I save edit my inventory all the time in Terraria, especially looking for that one specific crafting recipe accessory that just hasn't spawned. I mostly do it to eliminate grind on games where I've already served my time properly.

Todd moved into a leadership role around the time of the development of Oblivion and his fingerprints have been visible on it since then.

One thing that comes to mind specifically, and this isn't game breaking, really, but I think it neatly illustrates the larger problem -

You ever notice coming from Morrowind to Oblivion that Oblivion has about a quarter or less of the actual story and dialogue that Morrowind had? This was, if I recall correctly (and I might not, it's been a while) a Todd decision. This happened because voice acted dialogue was considered a hard requirement for Oblivion to have, except... they didn't have enough space on the disk to actually hold all of these audio files and still have a decent amount of game. So a lot of the dialogue and nuance was cut completely, dumbing down the entire game by a significant degree. NPC's now only have a half dozen lines or so apiece, with the exception of (some) main quest NPC's, because of this design decision.

If you want to know more about this, I'll recommend you this heckin' chonker of a video from PatricianTV (it's literally 12 hours long, that's not a joke, be warned) which goes over the game itself in pretty obsessive detail but more importantly pulls back the curtain on a lot of the development cycle.

To be clear, I don't think that Todd is the entirety of the problem at Bethesda. But I do get the impression that he's a significant blocker to forward progress. He has to go first, before the rest of the studio can start to regroup and recover.

Same guy also has an 18 hour long Skyrim retrospective in the same style that goes into a lot of Todd's further antics post-Oblivion.

Diablo and Overwatch are Blizzard, not Bethesda.

Fallout 4 was okay, 76 was an abject disappointment that was somewhat clawed back into the light, for all 12 people who still play it.

Starfield was a disappointment full stop, which never recovered itself.

I don't think Bethesda is in trouble, but it isn't because of their game quality. It's because they're going to market ES6 with an amount of money comparable to the GDP of Germany, and the average person who played Skyrim will buy it, because everyone and their mother and their mother's dog played Skyrim for some reason. They've re-released Skyrim 8 times and made money every time. It's a household name.

Get rid of Todd Howard and we might have a chance of seeing them make a half decent game again, but it's not going to be this one, because they have no need to make a half decent game when they can ride on their own coattails into the sunset. Every person who has ever held a controller has heard of Elder Scrolls now, half of them will buy the new one sight unseen, and Bethesda is banking on that heavily.

Whenever I have a problem, I throw a molotov. Boom, different problem