I only heard this guy’s name come up in the wake of Starfield, but none of this internet hate mob mentality is surprising. I still get flashbacks to how quickly the internet demonized and harassed Jennifer Hepler of BioWare. Internet bullying is bad regardless, but it’s especially hard to know whose work you’re criticizing in most video games, because they’re made by large teams, and “written by” will often be credited to something like 5-10 people on a game the size of Starfield’s.

I had a ton of things to critique in Starfield, including the writing, for one reason or another, and when I saw credits roll, I was looking for how many quest designers they had, because my criticism was that it felt like they were stretched so thin to make so many quests that hardly any of them could stand to be any good. Sure enough, for the hundreds of quests in that game, they only had a handful of people listed under quest design. I’m still not going to single out any of them as being bad quest designers, because I don’t know who worked on which quest and if this was a product of how much content they were under pressure to design. There is one person I can point to for a different criticism I had, and that’s because he proudly took credit for it specifically in an interview, but rather than bullying someone on the internet for a creative thing that they worked on, just note to yourself mentally that it was a subpar product and don’t buy the next one. It’s the sane response in a situation like this.