Nah, ain’t no one woke up to anything. Every decade proves that human beings are capable of bad shit. Even those you would consider good, are going to have dark thoughts about someone or something. I guarantee you that there’s some hidden darkness in Mr. Rogers, Levar Burton, and Bob Ross that never got revealed. Probably stuff they never even told another person. There exist people who know they are capable of really bad shit and have enough forethought to keep it inside them.
I take it as a wild ride to know that while I may not be the smartest or any kind of -est, that I have enough awareness to know that blind anger will never lead any place good. It may get results and even last centuries, but it’s a hollow victory. Along a long enough time line, the victims are likely to become the oppressors. The watchers become the watched. And, the powerful become weak.
I just don’t think Bethesda has it in them anymore. Except for Id and formerly Tango Gameworks, Bethesda proper and a lot of the other studios it had, have just been missing the mark. Like a lot of big studios, they get big, start to regurgitate what they’ve already done, and then fail to capture people’s attention after a while.
Why do you think Valve’s employees haven’t pushed for many new games? Anticipation got too high and they didn’t want to compete with the legacy of Half-life or Portal. Half-life Alyx came out and it was decent, but it didn’t move the story forward that much. It was mostly about doing a good VR game. Now, they have Deadlock coming out and it has nothing to do with any of it’s previous games.
At a certain point, it’s like reading a book from an author that’s run out of ideas or hearing a song from an artist that doesn’t have anything relevant to say anymore. It’s time to move on and make room for someone wants to do something new. Only problem, these big ass companies are now mostly about making money and not about making games. They will ride whatever wave they can until they crash and burn.