So, I'm not alone in this.
Yeah, pretty good interview. Initially, I had a negative knee-jerk reaction towards Todd. He seemed like a suit. This interview puts him in a positive light for me.
Funny you should mention that, as I had a similar reaction to Todd the first few times I heard him speak. That also had something to do with my somewhat unreasonable opinion of what they were doing with Oblivion and - to some extent - Morrowind.
Of course, Pete Hines didn't exactly help matters - and he IS a suit.
I thought they were dumbing the games down for purely commercial reasons, until I "grew up" and realised that they were trying to create worlds for people to enjoy, and made some natural compromises, like not making hardcore stat-driven games that would have put them out of business for good.
Whatever you might say about the mainstream approach of their recent games, they still manage to create fantastic worlds with amazing freedom.
Sure, I would personally prefer hardcore stats and challenge - but I'm older now, and I understand I'm not more important than other gamers, and immersion has always been at the forefront of TES games. That core vision was never compromised.
I'm just hoping that the mainstream will latch on to ever more complex systems, but I'm not going to expect huge financial risks taken over and over just for me.
In this age of games like Star Citizen - where you can have the community fund a 50+ million dollars insanely ambitious project, where the ENTIRE creative vision is fully intact, I see no reason to bitch about a bit of realism from a company that publishes its own stuff and has to be a little bit more realistic, from a financial standpoint.
Sure, we'll always have EA and the like, who corrupt everything they come across - but at least they're not controlling the entire market as I once feared they would end up doing.
The fact that companies like Bethesda and, especially, CDPR are allowed to exist and flourish - is a testament to the waning power of the dark side.
The good guys fought a hard battle, and they're still standing