I think its the opposite way around. Todd was an amazing manager who could coordinate a pool of incredibly talented developers to get a staggering volume of good content shipped.

And then, games journalists went ahead and did a lazy thing that they really should know better than to do, and attributed the entirety of Skyrim’s success to him, because attributing specific work in a game to specific team members is hard and takes time to research.

And when you repeat a lie enough times, you begin to believe it.

Todd forgot he was the least talented member of the team on Skyrim, he was the guy at the end of the production line that collaged the hard work of everyone else into a shippable game.

Fast forward to Starfield. Todd is fully drunk on his own mythos. All of the old team has left, and honestly? Good riddence. Their sensibilities were only holding him back. Don’t they know he’s the star? The genius that singlehandedly cracked the code on how to make a perfect videogame?

But the truth is, his his team was right when they said Starfield wasn’t fun, and Todd was dead wrong.

The only people in the world left that understand the lineage of Halo, and that Halo is all about the combat dance, and elaborate encounters, and that every enemy in the level is a chess piece that needs to be placed with utmost care, is Id Software.

Id, freshly equipped with everything they learned from resurrecting DOOM, is the only studio skilled enough to possibly save the Halo franchise.

Too bad Microsoft obliterated them last month, too.

Oops!

Pre-Ukriane war, I would have said not long at all.

But, after seeing how much absolute abuse and humiliation the Russian people have taken from their government, I don’t know man …

I don’t understand how Russia hasn’t balkanized and erupted into a civil war, or hasn’t had a sweeping political reformation movement yet, and that scares me.

If Russia is a baromater for how much a sufficiently cowed populace in a failed authoritarian democratic-in-name-only surveillance police state can take, then I guess 1.5 million U.S. soldiers dying fighting in Iran bad. All gasoline pumps closing nationally from lack of supply bad. The bottom half the U.S. population surviving off of the same humanitarian aid MREs that we used to send off to children in Sudan due to perpetually empty grocery store shelves bad. Statistically more U.S. citizens inside of a prison facility than outside of one due to Flock cameras and non-uniformed plain dressed cops with sci-fi face scanners in their pockets inventing reasons to arrest anyone with a statistically high left-leaning online footprint bad.