Blizzard had a long period where it was mostly the same people at the top did they not?
You mean the period when they were covering up sex crimes? Up to and including at the very least attempted rape (and harassment to the point of suicide). When they were going to the Cosby Suite and so on? When the work environment at Blizzard was both sexist and racist, and if you weren't a fratty white boy you were on the outs? When they were hiring people solely on the basis that they "fit the culture" - i.e. were fratty white boys - despite the lack of any relevant qualifications.*
So yes, Blizzard did have a long period where it was mostly the same people at the top!
It's notable that WoW (their biggest ever success and nothing else is even close) was in decline for the majority of the period too. Only after the "mostly the same" people left, largely because they were strongly implicated in covering up sex crimes and encouraging labour violations, including a hostile environment towards female employees (at the very least they 100% knew about it and had the power to do something about it), did WoW, finally, and rapidly improve. The people in charge of WoW are a lot younger, less white, and more female than the old guard, and WoW is doing absolute gangbusters - possibly making more money than any point up to Cataclysm (which was the real fall of WoW).
In any case I do not think Starfield failing will necessarily mean TES VI will be a failure. It is a different kind of world, and one with a metric butt tonne of pre-existing lore to go with it.
It means TES VI will be pretty crap writing-wise, if as
@Gladius Legis points out, Emil Pagliarulo is allowed, once more to be the director of all the writing in the game. He just isn't good at the job. But that's how Bethesda Games Studios works - a small cadre of guys, most of who joined the company 20-30 years ago or so continue to be in charge despite the fact that in all the departments they're in charge of, every single BGS game since Skryim has been a larger relative downgrade compared to the rest of the industry.
Here's his credits if you wonder:
Emil Pagliarulo - Video Game Credits - MobyGames
(Mobygames is the game equivalent of IMDb except usually more accurate and without the incredibly weird and horrible attached community.)
Note that companies that genuinely want to excel, will gently move aside people like him. For an easy example, look at Larian. Up to and until BG3, Larian had the same lead writer (who I will avoid naming because, like he's clearly decent enough to step aside) with the same bad habits and same dodgy, very "Low Countries" kind of ideas about humour (bad, scatological), acceptable treatment of female characters (like "kind-hearted misogynist" is how I'd characterize it - it's a weird kind of misogyny that's common Holland, Belgium, Denmark etc. which isn't at all like "a woman should stay in the kitchen" but more like "Haha all women are overemotional and slutty, it's just how they are, forgive them!" - ugh I say**), and so on. He also just wasn't a very good writer and leaned into a lot of hugely edgelord-y stuff.
They hired in two other writers, both with technically less industry experience than him, and put them in charge of him and a much expanded studio of writers. And those two lead BG3 to be a staggering well-written game, particularly given how insanely many lines of dialogue it has and how many twisting little paths through the story there are! And the other guy didn't get fired or anything and I assume is pretty okay with the result given he's still there.
So you absolutely can fix this!
But you have to recognise that you have this weird little boys club (because 100% of the time, it's a bunch of white guys, usually of similar backgrounds or least ideas about how the world works)!
And I don't believe Bethesda are capable of that. It goes beyond story too - Starfield has atrocious gameplay. The combat is dire. It's about as good as Fallout 4 - now Fallout 4 was a big improvement from Fallout 3 and NV, but it's literally the only time we've ever seen gameplay improve meaningfully in a BGS game. And they had seven years from FO4 to Starfield to improve it further - and they absolutely didn't. Fallout 4 was about as good as mediocre 2010 shooter, in 2015 - Starfield is about as good as a mediocre 2010 shooter in 2024. That ain't right. Not when they sell tens of millions of copies. That's gross mismanagement. Instead of reinvesting in this hugely successful genre they have, and improving their games (like say, FromSoft do - or really most companies), they're just absolutely sitting on their laurels.
Now, it is possible Starfield's very muted reception will be enough of a kick in the ass to BGS that they change their ways. However, without Microsoft stepping in, I don't think that'll happen, because Todd Howard is clearly completely 100% disconnected from reality on this. Pagliarulo's own comments very clear show that, despite being 100% in charge of
all of Starfield's writing and story, none of its failings are on him, they're all on "game development is hard". And it's like, yes it is hard - but it's funny how CDPR, Larian, Obsidian, Bioware (usually) and so on have good writing that makes people care, and you have terrible bland, insipid writing. It's been getting worse, too - Skyrim was a huge writing downgrade from Morrowind (this was much discussed even in 2011), FO4 a significant downgrade from Skyrim, Starfield a significant downgrade from FO4. He wrote a whole (now-deleted I think) Twitter thread about how people were just haters who didn't understand game development, and it's just facepalm-worthy, because it doesn't even matter whether people "understand game development", they're capable of identifying that his game had bad writing and other games had good!
Sorry I've gone on too long but the whole of BGS needs a clear-out. I'm not saying they even have to fire these people (Larian didn't) - but they sure as heck need to put them all under new leadership, and remove them from leadership roles.
* = This did admittedly stop in like, 2009 or 2010 when they hired this horrific racist, sexist, homophobic piece of trash proto-influencer, like Asm*ng*ld version 0.5, just a guy who ran a website (that I'd never even heard of, note, despite being a keen WoW player back then). The basis they stated was that they "loved his work" and he was a "great fit for Blizzard" (literally something like that). This was the sort of guy who would have been using the words "woke" and "DEI" in every post (if not actual slurs!) if he was around today, and put him in some kind of public-facing PR position (!!!!??!?!?!!!!), and like, within a couple of weeks he'd done them so much PR damage that he mysteriously disappeared and then we learned sometime later (months I think) he'd been let go.
** = I will say there is sometimes a similar brand of misandry you see which is like "Haha all men are stupid clumsy sports-obsessed oafs who are terrible fathers, it's just how they are, forgive them!" - this you even see in the UK. I guess it boils down to a kind of gender stereotyping but I'm getting off-topic.
