Ex-Bethesda Dev Drops Bombshell: 95% Of Player Complaints Were Already Known Before Games Shipped
by Andrew Berson
'Fallout' (Image: Bethesda)
A veteran Bethesda insider has just confirmed what many fans have suspected for a long time: developers knew about the bugs and problems in the game after it launched.
Dennis Mejillones worked at Bethesda Game Studios from 2009 to 2021 as a senior artist. He has a lot of credibility, having contributed to major projects such as Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76 and Starfield. His comments came from a 2025 Kiwi Talkz interview that resurfaced in a social media clip.
The clip quickly spread across gaming communities because he said what many fans had already suspected.
Mejillones said he could “almost guarantee” that 95% of the issues players had complained about after launch had already been raised in internal developer meetings. He said, “We’re gamers, we’re going to play the game, we play and see the same things that the gamers do.”
The bugs weren’t a surprise, and the development team saw them coming. They expected the criticism.
Todd Howard, the director and executive producer of Bethesda Game Studios, would reportedly say in meetings, “We can do anything, but we can’t do everything,” according to Mejillones. This philosophy explains the impossible scope of Bethesda’s open-world games and why known issues still make it to launch.
There is also a more difficult layer to this story. Mejillones said that many employees simply did not want to push back on Howard’s decisions.
“A lot of people were afraid to say no to Todd,” he said, adding that the culture around disagreeing with Howard negatively affected the quality of feedback Howard received. Mejillones said that he himself had an objection to what Howard wanted to do “more times than I can remember.”
Mejillones admitted that it was common for many of his co-workers to remain silent when they disagreed with something Howard wanted to do, because if they spoke up, their co-workers might think they were going against one of the best-known leaders in gaming.
Mejillones said that Bethesda won’t walk away from troubled launches, citing Fallout 76 as proof. He said the team “kept pushing it and improving it,” and Starfield was receiving similar treatment. The gaming community was still questioning whether this defense is justified.
With The Elder Scrolls 6 still on the horizon, the question of whether Bethesda can deliver a cleaner, more focused project remains open. Mejillones’ comments only make the question more pressing.
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