No I don't feel sorry for Bethesda because they brought this upon themselves with Fallout 76 and they could have fixed it and they didn't and made it wore and worse. Also the genre that Fallout 76 fall into is not my cup of tea. TES6 may help them but that remains to be seen at the end of the day since we know very little about TES6.

Oh forgot to post this earlier...here is a funny video to cheer everyone up:

IMHO the problems with Bethesda began many, many years ago... just after Oblivion. That's (Oblivion) when Pete Hines started attacking fans for acting "entitled" when they just wanted games that weren't broken. This behavior escalated with Skyrim... becoming insane with the completely game-breaking state of the PS3 release. It's this time that Hines actually picked twitter fights with angry fans (yes, I call them fans because they simply wanted working games!) . But Hines' anger toward fans -- instead of being a terrible head of PR -- seems to have been endemic to the Bethesda culture.

(and BTW a major Oblivion bug was never fixed on PS3 and Hines and co. -- prior to a possible lawsuit -- claimed it might not be possible to fix Skyrim on PS3)

Today, Bethesda continues to release broken games (in fact more broken than in the past) while flogging the dead horse of Skyrim. Can I play it on my phone? Hopefully soon... even Blizzard understands we have phones! Duh

As much as I respect things about Skyrim and Oblivion, I can't load them up without having this terrible taste in my mouth... disgust...

Blizzard... Bioware... Bethesda...

There was a time when these names meant AAA quality and ambition to make great games... now they're just mills trying to get the same customers they actively resent to buy the same game multiple times on multiple platforms with always-online DRM and dumbed-down buggy ports (if they haven't simply contracted out to a cut-rate Chinese phone dev from the beginning).

Fallout 76 is just the latest in a long line of s@#$.

Bethesda have published many of my favorite games the last handful of years. Dishonored and Dishonored 2, Wolfenstein the New Order, Prey, Doom 2016... Yes Fallout 76 sucks, and so does Wolfenstein Youngblood. And yes I worry they're going to force online into everything like they did those two. And yes Oblivion was dumbed down and disappointing. However overall Bethesda this decade have made me a lot happier than EA, Activision or Ubisoft.

I remember oblivion. Beautiful game. Nice weapons, armor, land....

Oh right the NPC's were ugly as shit...

... ); once long ago...

I'll just say this: corporations are nobody's friend, their one and only goal is making money. They deserve neither loyalty nor trust. It doesn't matter what a franchise was or what the previous actions of a publisher/developer were - things should be judged only in the present state, having any kind of "affection" for an abstract commercial entity makes no sense.

Bethesda is acting very badly, disrespectful of its customers, with no regard to quality and stating the false repetedly to boost their sales on "bone fide" buyers.
Given the facts, it seems only fair they are getting what it's due, their reputation is burned and the customers are rightly aware and distrustful for the future. You reap what you sow.

EDIT: btw, never forget the tricks they pulled with Obsidian and Arkane, especially since the latter was fundamentally fraudulently pulled near bankruptcy by the same group that acquired it immediately after.
Bethesda is no saint, it has never been.

In my opinion they are a great publisher, but a mediocre developer. They did make some great games, but they were so full of bugs and glitches, that they eventually became unplayable, and all of this culminated in Fallout 76.
Honestly, people were way more forgiving to Bethesda games, when it came to bugs and glitches and used a number of excuses, and fans of those games made patches that fixed things, that Bethesda should have fixed themselves.
Just look at Fallout 76, half of the code was from Fallout 4, no NPCs, the final boss fight was recycled from Skyrim (the one with the dragon), and not to mention the store, microtransactions and subscription.

They got lazy, because people cut them some slack, and were way less critical when it came to their games. I will just say that they have an amazing art team, and anyone who saw their artbooks, can't deny this.
Their only hope is that the new Elder Scrolls game and Starfield, be such an amazing games, with minimal bugs and glitches, and maybe people will forgive them for their previous mistakes.

Point taken.

I'm not particularly arguing that all devs at Bethesda -- like Arkane and Machinegames -- are terrible (they aren't), but moreso the corporate culture at the publisher Bethesda is staunchly anti-consumer (has been for quite a long time) and this ends up infecting much of Bethesda's output. Wolfenstein Youngblood? Fallout 76? The Elder Scrolls Online release? Yes, artistically Arkane is one of the few bright spots at Bethesda, Hopefully they continue that with Deathloop.

But again...

When a Bethesda VP -- Pete Hines -- consistently attacks and demeans fans and consumers, you get a pretty clear picture of the publisher's corporate culture.

Plus the issues with the original Prey sequel ,arkane studios and the Fallout interplay lawsuit.

That's one reason, not to mention they don't really need to bug test when modders will do it for them.

Keep hearing worse and worse news on Bethesda's recent actions. At this moment i would suggest not buying anything Bethesda, even if it's on sale on GoG.

Todd has been lying for ages about what will be in the next TES. I've never liked Bethesda. I admit, I enjoy their games but only in a weird kind of meta way where the real game dealing with what goes wrong in terms of glitches - or spotting funny things or lack of attention to detail. In terms of the latter, I remember that guy in the first town in Morrowind who sneaked out each night to put things in his little tree stump hiding place. You have to go up this tower and wait for him to leave his house in order to find where he's hiding stuff. So there he goes, in the middle of the night, sneaking through the village hoping no one notices him... while holding a flaming torch and illuminating the entire village. Not a bug, just an oversight and lack of care. Their games are flooded with stuff like that and it always ruins my suspension of disbelief. Nothing feels handcrafted, it just feels generated by algorithms. Same as just about every NPC in any given region saying the exact same thing.

But oh I guess you can do anything you want (as long as "anything" is either kill people, kill animals, steal things, or buy things) so they'd get away with it. I don't think they've got worse, really, just that people are finally waking up to how bad they are. Especially since that they've been left so far behind in terms of quality and TLC for their products. In Fallout 4 I've been attacked by a headless corpse - not some kind of ghoul, but a dead human that came back to live and shot me as he lay on the ground with no head.

Oblivion gifted me with the unforgettable sight of a guard with a torch walking through deep water but the torch still being lit when he came out the other side. They're almost like Monty Python sketches, just like the bizarre NPC conversations that go like "Hello", "Hello", "I saw a mudcrab", "I hear Morrowind is in danger!", "Good bye", "Hello". Almost everything they do is a malfunctioning, laughable mess. At least everyone else seems to be on the same page now that Fallout 76 is getting so much coverage.

This was my major criticism of Skyrim -- big, beautiful, expansive, and bland in a strangely corporate, market-researched way. (Funny, I would later feel this same way with Bioware's Dragon Age Inquisition.)

IMO Bethesda has been effectively "evil" for quite awhile, but their openness to modders tempered a lot of bad feelings. Now that they've locked down modding and cut story (as well as moving toward paid MMO styles), a severely broken release is much more apparent.

Haha, I hadn't seen that one before. Awesome.

Yeah, I hadn't either until the recommendations suggested it a few days ago...sometimes that feature works very well in YT.