1) I don't recall ever saying their not responding to their own forums was shameful.

2) I also never said they owe us their presence here.

All I did was point out that Obsidian responded to questions while Bethesda doesn't and I doubt they read their own forums. I didn't pass Judgment.

I understand the reasons. But how much to you want to bet we won't see them even after Fallout 4 is released? I am saying in all my time here on the forums, I have never seen a Bethesda developer, ever.

Yes, they read their forums here and elsewhere. Todd even posted a thread after Skyrim came out, and Gstaff (or maybe someone else, I forget, but I think it was Gstaff) stressed how Skyrim's reception had completely caught them offguard.

Styles, your claim of never seeing a developer here indicates that you are not paying attention while you are here because I know you have been here quite a bit. The devs have posted here from time to time. Like I mentioned, Todd even posted a thread right after Skyrim hit the market. As someone else mentioned, he even participated in a fan interview. BGS is the ONLY developer I know of in the entire game industry (global, not national) that communicates that closely with their fans. Heck, one dev just posted a couple of days ago in the thread complaining about the Pip Boy Edition being sold out and no more being made. The dev pointed out that he also missed his chance to order one even though he saw it in the office.

For Fallout 4, Todd has already explained in interviews after E3 that he watches the mod community quite closely, particularly the mods that use scripting, but doesn't pay attention to mods that alter their original artwork.

BGS is not a large company unlike what some posters here have claimed. They are much larger now than when they made Morrowind, but they are still quite small compared to many other development companies. Keep in mind that they acquired Fallout in order to alternate with another franchise and TES. It is very likely that there is some preproduction work being done on TES VI right now. Very early, to be sure, but that is the way Todd's team works based on what he has said during "Making of" documentaries and interviews after each of the past few games.

Finally, I'd like to point out that some people seem to have extremely rare experiences with game company forums. These would be the people who claim that developers for other companies communicate often. That is totally untrue and always has been. Look at the entire game industry, not anecdotal evidence, and you'll notice that from decades ago to the present day it is very rare for game devs to chit-chat on forums. This is also true for any company. There are specific people who are designated as spokespeople for any company's products. Anyone else talking about the product is quite likely to be violating some sort of clause in their employee contract (as well as NDA if it is before a product actually hits the market).

People seem to have this ridiculous idea that posting a few comments equals listening to fans. No; comments should not be posted, they should just read what we have to say and incorporate things we want into the game. Read my previous post.

They definitely do. Bethesda staff usually doesn't respond or post. This is likely because they don't want to accidentally leak info, and if they do post, any jerk that feels like they've been slighted by Bethesda in some way ends up attacking them. Some of them, like GStaff, handles it quite well, but that's because he's kind of a PR guy.

Main reason to hand around at this stage would be firefighting if fan paranoia gets out of hand, perfect example was the 1080p at 30 hz did obviously not apply to pc for various reasons.

After the game is out following the forum is an good way to get an feeling not only common bugs but also major issues and wishes who can be included in DLC.

They read a few. Those who are really good, almost all of mine get read for example.

There are numerous developer posts in one of several http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1164248-meet-the-devs-11/page-2?hl=%20meet%20%20the%20%20devs threads for Skyrim.

Post #25 in this "http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1528506-name-your-gun-just-for-fun-p/" thread for Fallout 4 is more recent.

Yeah, why respond, let alone acknowledge any criticism at all? Criticism is part of the package, and in many cases, helps improve and build upon existing ideas. In any case, I can't think of one member here, let alone many members, who are so fanatic with their criticisms or even praise that it would scare of a developer. Everyone here, in general, is pretty constructive with their posts, regardless which side of the fence they sit on.

In any case, the devs have posted here before, not often, but they have. I'm satisfied with that. In addition to what I've written above, it's likely the developers do listen to the fans, especially the ones vocal with their criticisms if Skyrim is anything to go by. They reintroduced many things that Morrowind fans have been wanting, that were missing in Oblivion. That says enough right there.

That is good to see. Hopefully they will spend more time on the Fallout forums.

I know they were reading the various threads during the runup to Fallout 3 *coughMIRVcough*, so I suspect they'll be doing so again for Fallout 4.

Pretty sure they are watching but aren't going to add much because Fallout 4 is different. Due to the way that Fallout 4 is released we are already at debugging stage and hardly anything besides balance stuff and menu stuff will be added. I could be totally wrong but that's how I see it.

+1

This is true. The only company I remember that really interacted with the fans was the now defunct ensemble studios. Not only would they regularly post on the heavens games forums, they often played multiplayer games against members. LGS/irrational were pretty good too. Levine and one or two others would fairly often post on the TTLG boards until it became pretty hostile not long after the first BioShock.

I don't blame them for not posting anything because no matter what they write it will be trashed by those who think they know better.

Because it does not work like that. In the history of everything ever created it has never, ever, worked like that.

First off then the de facto head of a group says he's happy with the people he has working for him, and said person has has had nothing but one success after another after another, never mind that the biggest success they have had to date came about in large part because the development team BLATANTLY ignored fan feedback AND shipped a game that had not one but TWO of the biggest selling features de facto gutted from the game (the civil war and radiant ai driven dynamic quest creation) then let's face it, you can pitch a fit all you want about how they need to hire someone just to listen to your oh so inspired input all you want, but it's just not going to happen.

Second, game development companies have started to realize a very painful lesson, there really is a functional limit to just how big your team can get. The crew at CCP learned this the hard way recently when they realized that there teams were getting swamped and no longer on the same page because of all of the internal background noise that no one really knew how far along various projects were. WOW realised to late that team bloat and redundant cross communications and a growing internal backlog resulted in them launching the half of an expansion pack That should have been named Wimplords of garrison quest(not a typo)

Third, they already do have people who's job it is to keep an eye on the forums. Unfortunately all forums tend to do is generate a lot of noise and furry and It "should be trivial to code this in" from people who clearly do not get it. Frankly if anything the resulting list of things they should get from the forums would be at best a giant list of things they should no do.

Forth, this will probably come as a shock to you but the people who create games already have a lot of very creative people who work there who are coming up with ideas all of the time.

Smed over at SOE once had a full sized computer printout filing cabinet he set up for a tour they aranged that was nothing but art, quests an features that were created internally, but were never implemented pre ROK (the fist eq expansion).

Depending on the development company and project anywhere from 20 to 80 percent oh the ideas they come up with never make it into the game, so if the developers themselves can't get there own ideas into a game.......

Finally Todd Howard has said that he tends to pay attention more to moders and at that to moders who actually come up with mods he finds interesting.

I suspect that is because if you are the kind who has gotten off your ass and done something to try and put you thing into a game....

lol, well who honestly knows better than the fans? I mean we buy their games and earn them success? If we don't like it, then the opposite is true, they fail. We are the determiner of what is good, not them. They just hope we like their product.

The problem is, every fan has their own idea of what direction the franchise should take. When they do listen to fan feedback, no one seems to attribute it to them paying attention to what the fans want. But hey, they listened to the fans when they opened up Fallout 3's ending with Broken Steel. They listened to the fans when they gave Skyrim more sensible level scaling and deeper background politics (both of which were huge complaints in Oblivion). For Fallout 4, they listed to the fans that complained about 3's crappy FPS mechanics, and put a huge focus on improving the combat.

But regardless of what happens in these forums, the sales and critical reception speaks for itself.

I've never been in a creative environment where me and my peers expected people to say good things about our work. We expected everyone to tear our ideas to shreds, question our choices, and challenge pretty much every aspect of our work. And we were expected to have justifications for our decisions beyond "well *I* liked it."

Blind praise does no good. Having your creative decisions challenged and having to answer those challenges is how you improve.

Not saying the devs need to do that on this forum, but avoiding it because people are going to say mean things to them seems ridiculous. They're professionals. Not toddlers.

I'm just a moderator, I don't have all that much insight into the inner workings at Bethesda and can't really speak for them or their practices. I do know that Gstaff and Jfinst at least keep an eye on the forums and I wouldn't be surprised if others lurk on here from time to time even if they don't post terribly frequently.

As far as the whole "shill" thing goes (paying people to post positively on the forums) that's one of those things where if Bethesda was doing that, there's no reason that I'd be privy to the practice. It would seem pretty silly to me, though - this forum represents such a small and specific cross-section of the fanbase that I can't imagine it being worth the effort. We do get crabby members on occasion that like to assume anyone who disagrees with them is a payed plant, but in my time on this forum I've never seen any evidence of this actually being a thing they do.

As far as listening to the fans, I think that's far more complicated than it might seem on paper, personally. There have been DLC and other additions that are clearly the result of fan request, and certainly if nothing else they're keeping tabs on mods. People also like to exaggerate the popularity of the requests they favor - it's always something "everyone" wants when it's a feature you care about, it seems. Plus, look at any thread on this forum - for everyone who wants something included in the game, there's another who steadfastly does not want that thing in the game. So... no matter what Bethesda does, they're going to be "not listening" to someone.

And forums being what they are, I think we tend to lose sight of the fact that these are people with their own ideas about the game they like. Not everything is going to be about "well, this idea was popular this idea wasn't." Not every single time a feature gets put in a game when there was a mod like that in a previous title means it was entirely a marketing choice. Around here we tend to lose sight that maybe some of these devs saw a mod and just liked that idea - I doubt it's always about what is or is not popular.

I can't imagine a development team not being full of people who also have very clear ideas of their own about what they'd like to see in these games and I'd be very surprised if there weren't constant heated debates internally about a lot of the same ideas talked about on here, too. (I'm sure there's been at least one argument over there about spears in the Elder Scrolls games, for instance. )

One thing I do recall from various interviews with some of the lead developers over the years is how they try to "read between the lines" when taking a barometer of popular opinion. Trying to look beyond just plopping in every feature that's ever requested on here, and instead trying to look past the surface details to really get at what people are really asking for, if that makes any sense (it's been a long work day...)

The sales represent the success of the company, and the fans influence the sales. I think people here tend to underestimate and try to lessen the importance of the opinions here, as though they are "fringe" or something. They're not. You can guarantee that if a fan or even critic here has an opinion about the game that there are probably 100 others that do too.

I don't think you can make a successful business (or at least not one I'd support) if all your decisions just came down to ticking off a checklist based on what everyone else wanted you to do. At some point you're going to have to put out a product you can stand behind, and I doubt anyone gets into that business without some pretty passionate ideas of their own about the sort of game they want to make.

Well, it's an interesting thing though. I mean the devs are ultimately owned by Zenimax right? I don't doubt for a second that the developers would love to make whatever game they wanted, but if they're owned by Zenimax, then I'm sure in the backs of their minds they have to think about the bottom-line. If the game doesn't sell, will Todd keep his job? And you know Zenimax isn't afraid to give people the boot, look what happened to Chris Weaver who founded Bethesda.

Maybe if it were a start-up you were passionate about. I totally understand where you're coming from, but this is a major brand. They have a lot to lose, and there's pressure to ensure success. I don't pretend to know the inter-workings of business, but I've worked for business owners, and I can tell you, when it comes between your ideas and profit, profit ultimately comes first. My question is, if Todd were working for himself, maybe owned a new start-up, would he make Fallout 4 as it is right now? What would be the game he would like to make?

But maybe I don't know a thing about Bethesda. Maybe there's some light you could shed on all this.

And most fans have no idea on the work their ideas take. Like I want drivable cars! Would create a need for flat areas, or a script that could take in account bumps in the road, additional clipping concerns, balancing issues, etc etc.

I am sure if they had a highly resticted forum, where only established modders could post, they might be interested. As they'd have at least an idea of the effort invovled.

edit: On a side note, I am sure they take an account of what the community wants. By monitoring the popular mods on sites like nexus. If you look at features added from fallout 3 to nv, to skyrim you would notice some interesting occurences.

It seems like they've implemented a lot of stuff that people were asking for on the forums. Many of the suggestions that didn't make it were probably found to me impractical to implement or just not all that much fun when tested.