What has Bethesda done now?

Risewild

Risewild

Antediluvian as Feck
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This is a thread to talk about the latest news about Bethesda Game Studios and Bethesda Softworks.
This is the place to gather all the good and not so good stuff.

Ok, so I will start by posting a link to an article shared by @Kilus in the Order forums:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019...dventure-taken-down-amid-cries-of-plagiarism/

What that article shows is that Bethesda plagiarized a Wizards of the Coast Dungeons and Dragons adventure written by Paige Leitman and Ben Heisler.

That article shows comparisons between "The Black Road" original 2016 D&D adventure and Bethesda's "Elsweyr" Elder Scrolls Adventure. And it is painfully obvious that it was a copy and paste job, only replacing some words to change it from the Forgotten Realms universe into fitting the Elder Scrolls universe (even the attributes/skill checks are pretty much the same).

Bethesda said that the adventure came from "Bethesda Netherlands". Bethesda already removed the adventure and is now having an internal investigation about it.


This reminds me of the whole debacle with Bethesda's "Brain Dead" quest in the Fallout 4's "Far Harbor" DLC and the "Autumn Leaves" quest mod for Fallout New Vegas. But this latest one is obviously plagiarism and has no defense possible.

29/7/2019:
I haven't had time to keep up with gaming news, so I missed a couple things. Like how the Elder Scrolls Blades was called a total cash grab with it's ridiculous long timers and the amount of them. Bethesda seems to have patched those a bit, so I don't know how the situation with that game is now.

Bethesda also implemented DRM on the classic Doom games:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/26/...rm-log-in-online-connection-bethesda-quakecon
It took less than one full day for the backlash to hit home and now Bethesda says they will remove the bethesda.net account login requirement:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/27/8933167/doom-login-requirement-being-removed-bethesdanet-drm

I really don't know what Bethesda is thinking. After Fallout 76, you would think they would be more cautious, but instead they seem to burn themselves over and over. What is funny is that they seem to always backtrack their bad decisions now.
I start to think that the Fallout 76 backlash really hurt them somehow and so they now always backtrack their bad decisions quickly. I bet it won't last, but at least it seems like they are spooked at the moment.
 
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Yeah, nothing really new. Bethesda loves to get 'inspired' by certain content, particularly modders. I mean, look at how many features in Fallout 4 existed as some kind of modd before it - and often in a better way. Yet, when someone is just using a name like 'Scrolls', they get paranoid and crazy about it.
 
I didn't know about the Far Harbor rip off. This kind of stuff comes up regularly in Hollywood and nothing happens because nothing can happen. You can't copyright an underlying idea (in this case a vault full of robots in which you solve a murder mystery). Plus the whole being made in Gamebryo Engine or whatever abomination of a tool they call a "kit" adds some more problems.
 
Wait hold up; Elsweyr had skill checks?! That right there should’ve told everyone it wasn’t theirs. Bethesda doesn’t make RPGs, the fuck?
 
And then there are still people coming up with defenses for Bethesda:
How exactly is a company supposed to prevent a contracted writer from doing something like this? Assuming the writer isn't Filip Miucin and doesn't have a history of doing stuff like this, there's pretty much nothing they can do, I'd sa. It's not like they can compare it with every piece of media ever written
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I know its popular to hate on Bethesda but this alarmist post mortem of an obvious gaff is ridiculous.

While we're at it lets just chalk it up to Todd Howard smoking weed out of his Sheogorath bong while sitting atop a big pile of money ordering his minions to deliberately plagiarize some D&D campaign.

They're taking steps, expensive steps at that, to correct this. It's not the first time a large company subcontracted out a project like this and it turned out to be less than legitimate nor will it be the last.
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To be fair, this is clear plagiarism, but I doubt it was really the decision of the company on the whole. Rather they hired a writer, and didn't realize the one writer did this.

Bethesda will likely fire the one writer, pull the module, apologize and move on. And that is all they need to do.
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Probably going to get buried at this point, but this article is bad, clickbait journalism. This isn't intentional plagiarism, the DnD campaign was just being run for fun by a group of Bethesda Netherlands employees. Like almost every DnD campaign, they reused information from the Wizards of the Coast source books--which is the entire point of these books being published, that's what they're for, so DMs don't have to write entire campaigns from scratch. The Elder Scrolls Online official Twitter account heard about it and retweeted a link to their Dropbox.

It was a dumb mistake from the Twitter account. But this was never meant by the DM that created it to be an official promotional product, and omitting that fact and making it seem like this was some professional product is pretty poor journalism IMO.
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BigGuyCIA said:
I didn't know about the Far Harbor rip off. This kind of stuff comes up regularly in Hollywood and nothing happens because nothing can happen. You can't copyright an underlying idea (in this case a vault full of robots in which you solve a murder mystery). Plus the whole being made in Gamebryo Engine or whatever abomination of a tool they call a "kit" adds some more problems.
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When it comes to plagiarism what happens the person bringing the case get cash and maybe a writing credit. Harlan Ellison got an out of court settlement from makers of The Terminator for ripping off the episode of Outer Limits he wrote where soldiers from the future travel back in time to the modern era. Right now Star Trek is getting sued because their plot about a couple gay guys using giant tardigrades to travel through space sounds like this one guy's game about a couple gay guys using giant tardigrades to travel through space.
 
How exactly is a company supposed to prevent a contracted writer from doing something like this? Assuming the writer isn't Filip Miucin and doesn't have a history of doing stuff like this, there's pretty much nothing they can do, I'd sa. It's not like they can compare it with every piece of media ever written
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But telling them not to do it given that this is a game release? I see that there are still Bethestards defending this shit company, even after all the controversies.

Also love the "it's trendy to hate Bethesda". It's trendy to hate them because they have been fucking up royally for a while now. Zealotry is far worse than being critical, because with the former they don't improve, while the latter puts pressure on them to improve.
 
I'm glad you mentioned the Far Harbor quest cause that's where my mind immediately jumped after reading about more Bethesda plagiarism. Honestly, if it didn't require more work to make it again but less good, I think we'd be seeing a lot more cribbed from the modding community of Skyrim and Fallout. Like, for example, if The Forgotten City wasn't its own game now, I'm absolutely certain we'd see that in the next Elder Scrolls.
 
Well, in regards as to "how are they supposed to know?" what would make sense to me is to just have someone act as a fact checker for the writing, who's job is simply to google paragraphs of the written material and if something pops up that matches it then the writer needs to be evaluated. Bethesda is a massive company, they can afford this kind of employee.
 
If they have people who go around in file hosting sites and send takedown notice to those sites when they find mods/files that they think infringe copyright in any way. Then they should have people just doing a "plagiarism check".

There are tons of free sites and software that can do that, just by pasting the text and pressing a button.
 
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But why it happens to Beth out of all developers out there?... Surely, all great content is inspired by something else, i.e., copies something to an extent.

I dunno, maybe hire people who like doing game design? Beth should be swimming in dough right now, even if 76 is what it is.
 
Bethesda has enjoyed a substantial amount of time in the "positive" limelight, so people are not too aware of their transgressions in shameless copy/paste territory. Fallout 3 is basically where it started - it's the Fallout 1 quest for water but OH NO IT'S THE SUPERMUTANTS ENCLAVE.
 
The earliest trangression Bethesda has made was actually the horse armor DLC debacle. I know that people love to defend this by saying they were testing the waters with the pricing of the DLC, but this is stupid.

What testing is it required to realize that fucking horse armor for 2,50 bucks is absolutely ridiculous? Besides horses being pointless in Oblivion, because fast travel, it's pointless armor for your horse. Some people got a glimpse to the true Bethesda.
 
I'm speaking within the context of just blatant copy/paste story-telling. Microtransactions (more like macrotransactions nowadays) are another debacle.
 
They didn't even copied the plots of the first two games into Fallout 3 correctly. They didn't even know why those two plots even worked on a basic level.

There's copying and then there's copying it wrong.
 
Point is that they were just copying other people's work. Be it successful copying or not.

[edit]

But hey, Emil's "I'm a father so I want to shove my newfound experience down your throats with a tutorial of growing up" was at least not copied. And what a great piece of original writing it was. :rolleyes:
 
Mr Fish said:
But hey, Emil's "I'm a father so I want to shove my newfound experience down your throats with a tutorial of growing up" was at least not copied. And what a great piece of original writing it was. :rolleyes:
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SHAAAAAUN!
 
They copy Wizards of the Coast, they copy the old Fallout, they copy mods made for previous games, hell they even copy their last game code into the next one.

We like our editor. It allows us to create worlds really fast and the modders know it really well. There are some elementary ways we create our games and that will continue because that lets us be efficient and we think it works best
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