I think its the opposite way around. Todd was an amazing manager who could coordinate a pool of incredibly talented developers to get a staggering volume of good content shipped.

And then, games journalists went ahead and did a lazy thing that they really should know better than to do, and attributed the entirety of Skyrim’s success to him, because attributing specific work in a game to specific team members is hard and takes time to research.

And when you repeat a lie enough times, you begin to believe it.

Todd forgot he was the least talented member of the team on Skyrim, he was the guy at the end of the production line that collaged the hard work of everyone else into a shippable game.

Fast forward to Starfield. Todd is fully drunk on his own mythos. All of the old team has left, and honestly? Good riddence. Their sensibilities were only holding him back. Don’t they know he’s the star? The genius that singlehandedly cracked the code on how to make a perfect videogame?

But the truth is, his his team was right when they said Starfield wasn’t fun, and Todd was dead wrong.