





Whenever a new Bethesda game comes out, I hope and pray that it’s just as buggy and unpolished as its previous games.

Thankfully, Fallout 4 is no exception, with reviewers and players calling out its creaky engine, poor companion AI, sub-par animation, and many other glitches and bugs. Some see this as a failure of Bethesda to get with the program and embrace modern-day AAA polish. I don't. Each time a new release is as rough and buggy as those that came before, it shows Bethesda is focused on the right things.

Zak McClendon

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Zak McClendon (@zakmcc) is a game designer with 15 years of experience building and leading design teams at studios like 2K Marin, Crystal Dynamics, and Harmonix. Currently, he works in the Bay Area as a design/management consultant and full-time indie dad.

Players see the lack of polish in Fallout 4 as a separate issue from the game's greatness, an issue that could be teased out and fixed. As a game developer with 15 years' experience on teams large and small, I see something much different, and incredibly rare: A highly successful studio focused on sustaining a team and its games through slow growth, reasonable team sizes, strong company culture, and creative fulfillment.

While the rest of the AAA game industry has ballooned team sizes and budgets in a dogged pursuit of slickness and sales, Bethesda has remained small, lean, and, yes, sloppy. It may be impossible to make the games Bethesda makes while giving them a high level of polish, and trying to do so could destroy the studio.

Tiny AAA Teams

Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was the third best-selling game in the United States in 2011, topped only by Call of Duty and Just Dance. For so monumentally successful a developer, Bethesda has grown incredibly slowly. The 2002 release Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind featured a team of about 40 people. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the company's first Xbox 360 game, saw a big leap to about 70. But then, after its biggest mainstream success, Bethesda added only about 10 more heads for Fallout 3. Skyrim was another "big" jump, to just 100 people. For the leap to Xbox One and PlayStation 4, Bethesda told GameSpot that it only added 8 more people.

Compare this to the 450 people who worked on Assassin's Creed 2, and the 900 who worked on Assassin's Creed IV a few years later. Or perhaps the 1,000 people who worked on Grand Theft Auto V.

There's no secret to how other AAA developers working on large, open-world games achieve that fine sheen: With veritable armies to keep their technology at the cutting edge, generate massive worlds of content, and polish increasingly complex game systems. Were Bethesda to pursue the same path, such explosive growth could not help but have an impact on its sustainability as an institution, as a culture, and as a creative entity.

The Power of Trust

Leaving aside the very real problem of aggressively recruiting game developers to move to Bethesda, Maryland, expanding small teams is notoriously difficult, especially at a single-project studio. Because the bulk of a huge staff often is focused on production and polish, it’s often impossible to keep everyone busy as new projects ramp up. Pre-production teams must be kept small, and ramping up headcount on a project before it’s ready is a surefire way to run it aground.

This can be mitigated by having much of the team work on downloadable content created after a game ships, or starting the next project before the current one wraps—two things Bethesda already does. But it still can be impossible to find meaningful work for everyone. Those post-game layoffs that you hear about every year stem from huge teams scaling back to start a new project. It doesn’t take many layoffs to change the culture of a studio from someplace people consider a long-term home to one that feels temporary and treats people that way.

Bethesda is made up of a fairly small number of veteran developers, many of whom have worked together for a long time. Its slow and gradual growth has allowed it to integrate new employees into the culture and process. While Bethesda's tech and tools have seen updates and revisions, they are built on much of the same core tech and workflows that date to, in some cases, Morrowind. This combination of flexible tools and a lower level of polish allow people to work fairly quickly and autonomously. Yes, there is always a need for of direction, review, and process, but the strength of a small team that knows each other well is trust. And trust in a creative endeavor enables amazing things.

“You would not get this much good content that comes together the way it does without that kind of chemistry,” Bethesda creative director Todd Howard recently told Game Informer. “You couldn’t build a studio and say, ‘I’m going to build something like that.’ I just don’t think you could. We work together very well.”

Imagine quickly adding 200 outsiders to that group. It is impossible to recreate that chemistry in a reliable way. You'd discover that "trust" must be replaced with something else—process, oversight, and centralized control. The bigger the team and more rapid the growth, the more rigid the process must be to keep things on the rails. Things once handled by personal relationships become a formal process. Tasks a few developers could do on their own now require a small army.

This leads to a different creative environment. One studio I worked for instituted a formal “change control form” for any substantial changes to a feature or level. It required approved by all leads and directors. I’ve even seen situations where designers fought, and lost, to cut bad content of their own making, because the changes would have added too much risk. There was nothing nefarious about this. A formal process isn't there to discourage iteration or creativity. But it is there to regulate, normalize, and control it, which can feel like the same thing.

For individual developers, large teams offer less creative satisfaction and fulfillment. Large teams diminish personal creative impact, ownership, and autonomy, and this drives some of AAA's best talent into indie developers. Many of the most talented developers from my old studio 2K Marin chose to work on smaller games like Gone Home, The Novelist, or The Magic Circle, rather than throw themselves into another massive AAA production.

The Beauty of Bugs

But what if you’re a gamer who doesn’t care about Bethesda’s staff turnover or work environment? What if you don’t care how the sausage is made and you simply want a tasty, bug-free sausage? It turns out how the sausage is made has great bearing on what you end up eating.

Bethesda's games allow for absurd levels of player freedom in a huge playground of quests, characters, and systems. You can create your own character, equipment, and, in Fallout 4, town. You can spend hundreds of hours exploring aimlessly. You can join factions and guilds, be good or evil. Many games do these things, but Bethesda's brilliance is that it places minimal restrictions on how players interact with, or overlap, these systems.

Want to kill some major quest givers, locking yourself out of a ton of content? Sure! Want to skip hours searching for your father in Fallout 3 by stumbling on his hidden location? Why not? Feel like putting so many cabbages into your house in Oblivion that the game barely functions? Knock yourself, and your framerate, out!

Meanwhile, every Assassin's Creed protagonist will "de-sync" if he kills too many civilians. Solid Snake's missions are aborted if he leaves the area. You can't pull out a gun in Mass Effect unless the game decides it is Designated Gun Time.

This isn’t to say these games are bad. They're quite good, actually. They’re just trying to avoid messy edge cases that make the fiction, the world, the tech, or the gameplay look bad. Such restrictions are like the berms encircling Disneyland, ensuring you don’t see anything less than perfect or see what's happening backstage.


Bethesda games don’t care. They excel at what I’d call the "minimally-supported edge case." They let you do what the systems and the world imply you can do. Even if it’s not well supported. Even if it’s going to look bad. Because that freedom is what’s important and special.

"Polish" is all about smoothing these rough edges. There is no cost-effective way of polishing most goofy edge cases. In fact, it's often harder than building the core system. If you’re focused on making a polished, bug-free game, the smart move is to remove them, or make them impossible to reproduce. Bethesda’s games don’t do this. They often do the absolute minimum needed to make these edge cases work, but they keep them in.

There are smart ways to develop and polish games with huge scope and scale. The most reliable is to make the core design more predictable and repeatable, and less interdependent. Create a set number of formalized game play primitives or mission types, and repeat them over the game with a few mechanical twists and scaling difficulty. Make each “story mission” self-contained and separate them from the “free roaming systems.” Keep friendly “story spaces” from overlapping with combat. Mete out major upgrades on a tight schedule in line with story progression, but have less important or cosmetic upgrades be something you can grind for.

Does this sound like a game you’ve played recently? It isn’t a coincidence. These are some of the most reliable solutions for reducing edge cases and making implementation (and results) as predictable as possible in a large, open-world game. This also is exactly opposite of what makes Bethesda’s games magical. They’re sloppy, sprawling, surprising messes that show the sticky fingerprints of the people who made them. Polish says "no" a lot more than it says "yes," and you can hear a lot of yes in Bethesda’s games.

Polish says you probably shouldn’t do a quest with a talking dog, because it's going to look terrible with the lip sync system. Polish says you shouldn’t do a one-off Rube Goldberg trap using hundreds of physics objects in the game’s “creaky engine.” Polish says you probably shouldn’t put a “flying” spell that will kill the player 20 minutes into the game because it will playtest badly.

I simply don't think it's feasible to make a Bethesda game that's polished in the same way other AAA games are. That requires focus and formalization, and Bethesda excels at the opposite. So why try to fix this at all? If you’ve built a studio that works, making games your audience loves, why not slowly grow that success in a truly sustainable way, instead of risking it to keep pace with the rest of the industry? As developers, they're in an enviable place—making epic games at a human scale.

Of course, none of this means squat when a save bug wipes out hours of progress, or you get locked in an elevator. I’ve been there with Bethesda games myself. These are things I do wish they could fix, and I’m sure they do, too. I can’t even fault the gamers who can’t get past less severe bugs, the lack of polish, or the general jankiness. Who can really blame them for not wanting a gristly sausage when we’ve got all this smooth, delicious gaming foie gras, stuffed full of the blood, sweat and tears of hundreds and hundreds of developers?

Yes, video games, like Soylent Green, are made out of people. Knowing this, and experiencing it from the other side, I really value playing games that still feel like they were made by actual humans; vast, complex, and sloppy games where you can feel the specific personalities, creative passions, and playfulness of the people who made them because these things haven’t been ground out into one uniform standard of quality. As a developer, I love working on games that actually allow every person involved to contribute and own something that feels like unique creative expression, and have it survive to the end of the development cycle.

But as AAA scales to $100 million-plus budgets and four-digit team sizes in search of a smooth, unbreakable surface of polish, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find these things, for players or developers. But I still see it in the quirks and glitches of Bethesda’s edge cases, and I see it in a development team that is small enough that you can still see each expression in a single photo.