Fallout 76 General Thread - Bethesda does it again!

[Tanner Glass]

Well, you made me look like an idiot, I genuinely have nothing to add back about those examples.
The one thing I will say though is that if anyone here really thinks that an industry crash will save videogames as a medium, then either you'll have to be extremely that something as catastrophic as that will in any way save the market or the videogames industry (and by extension, the entertainment industry and the economy) must be so royally fucked that to destroy the industry and build it back from scratch is the only way to make it function.
Personally, I prefer the option where thousands of people don't lose their jobs and there's plenty of opportunities and platforms for people to start creating genuinely good ones.

Sorry, didn't meant to .

I can't speak for everyone, but I don't expect a catastrophic crash in the video game market nor do I think it would save it. However, as "AAA" titles get more "expensive" to produce (those are in quotation for games like FO76 and Mass Effect : Andromeda which were obviously asset flip cash grabs) and return less profit, some people will simply leave the sector and focused on more scaled down productions.

I would like thousands of people to have jobs but it isn't really tenable the way the industry is right now, and when smaller studios try and branch out or size up they frequently die a horrible death instead of simply remaining a small studio. While there are tons of examples, the most obvious and recent one to me was Telltale Studios.

Telltale, if you don't remember, made a Walking Dead adventure game in the same vein as King's Quest. They were a small and productive studio before that point, working with a few publishers and had a studio of ~40 people. Walking Dead sold like gangbusters and people who had shares in the company decided (without any kind of knowledge or passion) that if Telltale were to make more games, that they would make more money. So a small studio that had one large successful project found itself with ~300 employees trying to get out games on a much, much faster schedule. The rest, as they say, is history and that studio is now closed and all projects effectively shuttered.

The main takeaway for me in that example is that people without passion cannot gauge a market, especially a market they themselves are not a segment of. Telltale games, even when they were firing them out at breakneck speed were generally well received. The problem was, while very few people liked Adventure games like Telltale made, substantially fewer people wanted to play multiple Telltale games in succession. It's very hard to find anyone who played multiple Telltale games, much less people who have played all of them. If they didn't get overly ambitious and were able to gauge the market, they would still likely be a company today. But, someone had assumed that the success of The Walking Dead was easily repeatable and that the studio had found a way to find amazing success every time it put an entry and saw dollar signs.

A huge red flag that Telltale was done for was that no other studio bothered to try and copy their success, meaning they had done some level of market research and decided it wasn't worth the risk. Compare that to the huge swathe of "Battle Royals" out now after H1Z1 and company got popular, or how many "Digital Card Games" are popping up after Hearthstone, and how many "Online Battle Arenas" showed up after DOTA got traction.

That tale repeats across other studios, either struggling or outright killed and it's been that way for years. This is not the environment for video games and their creators to flourish in.

EDIT - I know more people who have played every David Cage game and can't think of anyone who has finished every telltale game. Cage's games are horrible but they don't come out twice a year.

 

[AnOminous]

But, someone had assumed that the success of The Walking Dead was easily repeatable and that the studio had found a way to find amazing success every time it put an entry and saw dollar signs.

I don't know why. It was pretty obvious the main reason that had huge success was that it was associated with a hugely successful franchise that was also maybe the top rated action series on TV at the time, so they got a lot of bonus from cross-marketing the game to fans of the show.

That's not going to get people generally interested in what is basically a text adventure with graphics like King's Quest or even just a visual novel with minimal gameplay.

 

[Tanner Glass]

I don't know why. It was pretty obvious the main reason that had huge success was that it was associated with a hugely successful franchise that was also maybe the top rated action series on TV at the time, so they got a lot of bonus from cross-marketing the game to fans of the show.

That's not going to get people generally interested in what is basically a text adventure with graphics like King's Quest or even just a visual novel with minimal gameplay.

I think that Telltale put out a lot of good games that I would be interested in, or was interested in at least. I think the main problem was how many they were putting out and how similar they were. A of the later titles could be described as "a telltale game but it's <x> world instead" where x was batman, borderlands, fabletown, or minecraft. I think if the smaller studio took their time with each of those that would have been more successful than shotgun blasting a "telltale" game out every few months.

Also they were episodic which is another industry thing that had already died out before that point and even if they weren't they almost always ended on cliffhangers.

 

[BillionBisonBucks]

I thought games with new grounds quality was why people wanted a crash to begin with?

Newgrounds quality is fine when it's amateur and free. From a professional studio and $60 is much less fine.

 

[Shadfan666xxx000]

Well, you made me look like an idiot, I genuinely have nothing to add back about those examples.
The one thing I will say though is that if anyone here really thinks that an industry crash will save videogames as a medium, then either you'll have to be extremely that something as catastrophic as that will in any way save the market or the videogames industry (and by extension, the entertainment industry and the economy) must be so royally fucked that to destroy the industry and build it back from scratch is the only way to make it function.
Personally, I prefer the option where thousands of people don't lose their jobs and there's plenty of opportunities and platforms for people to start creating genuinely good ones.

I thought games with new grounds quality was why people wanted a crash to begin with?

At least you then you would pay what you felt the creator was actually worth with the bonus that you could get porn and not have your data sold.

 

[GethN7]

https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/36779

Mod that takes the piss out of that shitty overpriced IRL Nuka-Dark Rum Bethseda fucked up.

 

[rabo]

I think that Telltale put out a lot of good games that I would be interested in, or was interested in at least. I think the main problem was how many they were putting out and how similar they were. A of the later titles could be described as "a telltale game but it's <x> world instead" where x was batman, borderlands, fabletown, or minecraft. I think if the smaller studio took their time with each of those that would have been more successful than shotgun blasting a "telltale" game out every few months.

Also they were episodic which is another industry thing that had already died out before that point and even if they weren't they almost always ended on cliffhangers.

What didn't help is that the game touted the hard choices you had to make, but as more and more of them came out it became painfully obvious that all this tough choice stuff was an illusion. And that those games were largely on rail and when your biggest novelty (Beside let's face it everything else was just QTE and adventure game without actual puzzles) ended up to all be fake it really killed the interest.

I think I can best illustrate this using their own style:

[Your audience will remember this.]

 

[Ponderous Pillock]

The thing is, they should know that if they want to make a hit, especially an Elder Scrolls game, they need time. Lots of time. While I don’t doubt that they’ve been working on it long before it was announced, making the production hasty only damages the product. You’d think Bethesda would know that, especially after Fallout 76, which came out half a year after it was announced. They have the companies they own to salvage money from like the upcoming Doom: Eternal, Rage 2, and so on. They should use their profits from that to make something that would actually salvage their reputation, and that takes time and money. After Fallout 76, it’s likely that they don’t have as much of either of those as they wanted.

I should point out Bethesda don't do long advertising campaigns, they only tend to confirm a game is coming when it's six months or so from release, meaning the Starfield and TES VI teasers at last year's E3 was a surprising step change, brief as they were.

Normally, Bethesda don't say they're working on a game till they're in the home straight of six/eight months.

I know this game is supposed to be an experiment, they pointed this out a lot themselves which is at the end of the day fair enough. The problem is threefold.

1) Charging full price for this game

2) Fucking up, constantly, with the perked games, unforgivable nonsense like advertising a canvas bag and handing out nylon ones.

3) Everything else with third party folks.

Had this game been given the half price treatment or sold at $30 with all the crap micro-DLC/transactions and such and still pushed as an experimental game I think it'd be a lot more forgiven. But the way they've behaved (and doubly so when they have a whole fucking subdivision specialising in online only games) really fucking baffles me.

Just make a fucking Fallout MMO and give it to Zenimax online for fuck's sake.

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

It has become awefully quiet... Does that mean it's winding down or are they working on something big and spectacular? Like a patch that will fry people's graphics card or a microtransactions-glitch that drains people's credit cards to their limit?

 

[Ruin]

It has become awefully quiet... Does that mean it's winding down or are they working on something big and spectacular? Like a patch that will fry people's graphics card or a microtransactions-glitch that drains people's credit cards to their limit?

I suspect the servers will quietly go under sometime this summer. No way they're making enough money from this mess to offset the neverending PR nightmare and bad press.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Fallout 76 really is the best example of how fucking absent minded it is to put down $200 on a game you have no guarantee of quality. Pre ordering is cancer.

 

[shartshooter]

EDIT - I know more people who have played every David Cage game and can't think of anyone who has finished every telltale game. Cage's games are horrible but they don't come out twice a year.

Me too now that I think of it. That really does say it all. Better to fail being original than a lifeless franchise product.

The one thing I will say though is that if anyone here really thinks that an industry crash will save videogames as a medium, then either you'll have to be extremely that something as catastrophic as that will in any way save the market or the videogames industry (and by extension, the entertainment industry and the economy) must be so royally fucked that to destroy the industry and build it back from scratch is the only way to make it function.
Personally, I prefer the option where thousands of people don't lose their jobs and there's plenty of opportunities and platforms for people to start creating genuinely good ones.

We're because most of us were playing videogames in the 90's when small companies of artists created cool shit... like Fallout. Somehow, without billion dollar companies squeezing old franchises through their latest profit model, they found a way. It isn't an artist extinction event if today's corporate profit models deflate.

It's also not some cosmic injustice to the employees if a place like Bethesda finds itself shuttered. If any dev really thinks they're going to make cosmetic power armor, broken programming, or BioWare-tier animations until retirement then they're the sort of fat that unfortunately will be trimmed. Hope they keep a savings account ready for a rainy day. The biggest companies all work their employees to near death without any security anyway, so worker welfare isn't even a reason to want any of these giants to keep going.

 

[QB 290]

It's also not some cosmic injustice to the employees if a place like Bethesda finds itself shuttered. If any dev really thinks they're going to make cosmetic power armor, broken programming, or BioWare-tier animations until retirement then they're the sort of fat that unfortunately will be trimmed. Hope they keep a savings account ready for a rainy day.

So they deserve to lose their job and go bankrupt because they did what their boss told them when a really shit game was made? I have to ask, since you know so much about art and videogames with your 90's experience everyone else here also had; have you ever been homeless? Destitute? Hungry? Have you ever had the financial ladder pulled out from under you and ended up in a really shit situation through factors that weren't your fault? I'm asking because this solution you're suggesting will probably end up doing that to a whole lot of people, people who were just trying to make a living and feed their families.
The men and women who made this game aren't moustache twirling villains who would love to see videogames as a medium destroyed to spite you; They're just ordinary normies trying to meet a quota and do as they're told. If the videogame crash occurs and companies left and right get shut down these people will have nowhere to go and the skills they've developed and built up for years or even decades will all be for nothing, their business lives ending and them either having to start at the bottom in a shitty retail job or staying unemployed. A few smart eggs in the thread have brought up a few indie companies that made great games; which is fantastic for them, but how many of these thousands of newly unemployed people will have the tools, finances, time, connections or experience to do that too? And how many of them will actually succeed in doing so rather then failing, again.
If you want to blame anyone for the failure of fallout 76 (which is horrible, nobody's defending it), blame the producers. Blame the higher ups who gave the orders for fallout 76 to be made how it is, or who saw the mess it became and said "sure, that'll do", or who created the PR nightmare and lied to consumers again and again and again. If you think an industry crash is worth toppling the appalling decisions of the management and investors, then remember that the little guys will be hurt first and hurt way worse then they will.
But even then I don't get why everyone seems to think that the industry needs to implode all because a few shit games have been released, lost a bunch of money and made people laugh at it's failure. Just because Fallout 76 and Battlefield 5 were made and were bad doesn't mean good games can't be made. You know what Fallout 76 was? Beyond the terrible PR and the garbage AI and the bugs and the nazi mods? It was really really funny. It made a 50 page thread be made because people found so much to laugh at and i may be the only person in the world to think this but i'm glad that this game was made and i wouldn't change anything about it because this whole months long saga has been so hilarious that me and the world will never forget what an insane clusterfuck it was, and i'm sure bethesda won't either. I don't think the gaming market needs to crash because this one game is shit and i don't think thousands need to lose their job because this game was shit.

This bullshit argument and this post are both way too long, so i'm leaving this here. I wish discussing vidya on a cyberbullying website wasn't such serious business.

 

[RJ MacReady]

I suspect the servers will quietly go under sometime this summer. No way they're making enough money from this mess to offset the neverending PR nightmare and bad press.

I think they'll just allow private servers instead.

They've been ambivalent about private servers since before launch and I'm certain that was to give them an out, i.e. they knew the game would be a disaster that would have to be saved by modders eventually and had to prove to Zenimax that the MTX weren't making money before they could go ahead with private servers.

 

[Tanner Glass]

So they deserve to lose their job and go bankrupt because they did what their boss told them when a really shit game was made? I have to ask, since you know so much about art and videogames with your 90's experience everyone else here also had; have you ever been homeless? Destitute? Hungry? Have you ever had the financial ladder pulled out from under you and ended up in a really shit situation through factors that weren't your fault? I'm asking because this solution you're suggesting will probably end up doing that to a whole lot of people, people who were just trying to make a living and feed their families.
The men and women who made this game aren't moustache twirling villains who would love to see videogames as a medium destroyed to spite you; They're just ordinary normies trying to meet a quota and do as they're told. If the videogame crash occurs and companies left and right get shut down these people will have nowhere to go and the skills they've developed and built up for years or even decades will all be for nothing, their business lives ending and them either having to start at the bottom in a shitty retail job or staying unemployed. A few smart eggs in the thread have brought up a few indie companies that made great games; which is fantastic for them, but how many of these thousands of newly unemployed people will have the tools, finances, time, connections or experience to do that too? And how many of them will actually succeed in doing so rather then failing, again.
If you want to blame anyone for the failure of fallout 76 (which is horrible, nobody's defending it), blame the producers. Blame the higher ups who gave the orders for fallout 76 to be made how it is, or who saw the mess it became and said "sure, that'll do", or who created the PR nightmare and lied to consumers again and again and again. If you think an industry crash is worth toppling the appalling decisions of the management and investors, then remember that the little guys will be hurt first and hurt way worse then they will.
But even then I don't get why everyone seems to think that the industry needs to implode all because a few shit games have been released, lost a bunch of money and made people laugh at it's failure. Just because Fallout 76 and Battlefield 5 were made and were bad doesn't mean good games can't be made. You know what Fallout 76 was? Beyond the terrible PR and the garbage AI and the bugs and the nazi mods? It was really really funny. It made a 50 page thread be made because people found so much to laugh at and i may be the only person in the world to think this but i'm glad that this game was made and i wouldn't change anything about it because this whole months long saga has been so hilarious that me and the world will never forget what an insane clusterfuck it was, and i'm sure bethesda won't either. I don't think the gaming market needs to crash because this one game is shit and i don't think thousands need to lose their job because this game was shit.

This bullshit argument and this post are both way too long, so i'm leaving this here. I wish discussing vidya on a cyberbullying website wasn't such serious business.

I don't think that anyone wants anyone to lose their jobs, specifically not people living check to check helping to make video games. However, in any job (not just video games, but especially video games) you should always have a contingency plan to leave and find something else if shit goes south.

Specifically in this case - If you were working on Fallout 76 you knew what state the game was in. If you were told "we're still releasing this in 2018" (and even if you weren't, you could have watched e3) and knew what the state of the game was; that is a tremendous sign to start preparing your resume. If that wasn't enough of a sign for you, a letter released from Todd Howard basically apologizing for the game before it's release would be another time to start preparing your resume. If you're on the FO76 team and think that this whole experience is going to turn out great for you and then shockingly lose your job after your studio releases the biggest bomb in franchise and studio history; I'll be sad for you but I will still think "man he probably should have seen this coming".

It isn't just the Bethesda folks, either - it's nearly the entire video game industry. If you want to get into the industry, that's your choice, but it's dishonest to not acknowledge that it's a dangerous choice for stability. Smaller studios (BioWare, TellTale, NCSoft, DeepSilver, Volition) are usually one big failure away from being forced to close and frequently do so. Larger Studios (Activision, EA, Microsoft) frequently chew up and spit out smaller companies, publishers, and developers like clockwork. Going independent is very tough and for every success story (Shovel Knight, Celeste, Undertale) there's a huge factor more of failures.

People talk about the video game market crashing not just because of FO76, it's because of currently how utterly bloated it is and what kind of bad state it is in. FO76 is just a more recent and hilarious example, but video games are basically creatively and morally bankrupt. New IPs are super rare and most studios focus on an releasing and re-relasing the same old games with new coats of paint (here's another annual Assassin's Creed game, another Tomb Raider, the same sports games, another Final Fantasy, another Battle Royale game, another CCG game, another Batman game, etc) or just straight re-releasing (here's a high res GTA3, a high res Final Fantasy 12, here's a retouched Shadow of the Colossus, or the new hotness in 2019 - a switch version).

These games don't separate themselves from each other and are fully-loaded with the worst video game microtransactions ever (Day 1 DLC, on-disc DLC, paid DLC in a full priced game, season passes, multiple seasons passes, lootboxes as DLC, lootbox keys as DLC, pay-to-win DLC, DLC in a subscription based game, etc) and even though these games make more money though all of these revenue streams - none of it ever makes it way to the employees who are still asked to work 100/hour weeks during longer and longer "crunch time" windows, often unpaid and frequently terminated after release as you don't need as many employees to support a game as you need to create it. Employees are frequently treated like garbage and consumers frequently don't get a quality product. There are very few people who benefit from the video game industry as it stands and it really isn't sustainable. Companies are incredibly risk-averse in the current environment meaning it's incredibly unlikely they will want to do anything untested, which is hugely stifling for the creative process. This industry really doesn't need to be this shitty and only truly is to increase the bottom line for already huge companies and their shareholders.

So, it's larger than Fallout 76. Fallout 76, while hilariously bad, at least was predictably so. If you pre-ordered and saw and/or played the BETA, saw any pre-release footage, or saw Todd's "I'm sorry for this game" letter and still went down to the store and paid $60 dollars for it, that's on you. More insidious video game stuff would be all of the DLC shenanigans (in Fortnite, PUBG, FO76, and Valve games), Battlefield V's release, Star Wars : Battlefront 2's release, WoW's Battle for Azeroth, all culminating in video game companies being so greedy that they're facing legislation in several countries. This also goes hand in hand with the severe decline of video game journalism who are now too afraid of losing ad revenue to push back against the larger publishers and frequently are so disregarded they aren't even sent review copies.

 

[shartshooter]

have you ever been homeless? Destitute? Hungry? Have you ever had the financial ladder pulled out from under you and ended up in a really shit situation through factors that weren't your fault? I'm asking because this solution you're suggesting will probably end up doing that to a whole lot of people, people who were just trying to make a living and feed their families.

Yeah, that's how I grew up, it sucked. I also worked my ass off and am now relatively wealthy for my age so I can leisurely shitpost on a Thursday afternoon Anyone self made will almost never share your ideas of helplessness.

So they deserve to lose their job and go bankrupt because they did what their boss told them when a really shit game was made?

Your logic is backwards. Who "deserves" what is only relevant to how you divide the paychecks, not whether the paychecks exist. It sucks to lose a job but that doesn't mean dreadfully mismanaged corporations will have infinite work and welfare. Entertainment is a volatile and hyper competitive industry to start with and all bubbles will eventually pop.

And lmao at your narrow emotional angle of 'think of the children, the families will suffer!' EA, Rockstar, et al work employees like slaves, provide little job security and regularly buy up then shutter smaller studios (who made better games).

It made a 50 page thread be made because people found so much to laugh at and i may be the only person in the world to think this but i'm glad that this game was made and i wouldn't change anything about it

I love a dumpster fire but this is extremely stupid.

 

[SJ 485]

The men and women who made this game aren't moustache twirling villains who would love to see videogames as a medium destroyed to spite you

Yeah they're incompetent retards who chose to work at Bethesda. If any of them are worth the paycheck Bethesda pays them they'll easily find work somewhere else. Not that it isn't extremely to think Bethesda is going anywhere just yet.

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

Yeah, somehow I don't quite follow the "Customers should suffer atrocious business practices and being seen as mere piggybanks by multi-billion dollar companies in a multi-trillion industry, cause someone who's treated like easy-to-replace shit by his employer might lose his job if the whole fucking thing came crashing down" rhetoric.

Maybe we should have never shut down the inquisition and witchburnings, just imagine how many poor torturers, witchfinders and random dudes with pitchforks lost their jobs!

Nah, joking aside, as people have pointed out, working as a low level game creator is a pretty fucking terrible job.
A bunch of suits tell you what to do, you follow their absolutely idiotic orders, have no input to tell them how shitty their ideas are, churn out the soulless, focus-tested, committy approved copy-cat turd that they crave... and when it fails you're blamed and fired. Awesome. Just awesome.
And above all that, you have managers of small or large divisions that are in constant infighting over petty bullshit, caue otherwise they might be the next ones to leave. Bloated, mismanaged structures that eat up revenue without providing much reason to keep them around.

And then you end up with poorly made games like FO76, poorly thought out ideas such as throwing decades long fans under the bus in favor of the chinese mobile market, poorly thought out ideas to copy whatever the fuck is popular at the time, absolute creative bankrupty and a stagnating market that should be all about being creative and testing out new things.
FO4 had base building, cause that was the latest craze back then. FO76 is ... I don't even fucking know. Does this attempt to be the wimpiest Battle Royale game without being a BR game? It's "Daily MMO Grinding - The Game: Post-Apocalypse Edition", for sure though.

Don't get me wrong, the market needs huge companies like Bethesda, Activision and so on, but when they start to behave like they do now, it's time to cut them down. Small companies releasing niche titles to a stable crowd of hardcore fans don't suffer as much as the likes of Todd Howard, since their shtick is a lot more humble to begin with.
And it gives other companies to get a foot in the door, after all, the last crash allowed Nintendo to enter the scene.

From movies over comics to video games, these media are being run by companies that hold their core customer base in contempt, since all they see is the money they can shake out of them via shitty business practices. That has to change.

 

[Ledian]

Since the other replies pretty much deconstruct most of this post well, I'm just going to take the snippet that caught my attention.

I don't think the gaming market needs to crash because this one game is shit and i don't think thousands need to lose their job because this game was shit.

Wait one moment there, do you really think it's just this one game that people see as the reason to flush the industry down the toliet?
No, not at all. In fact it isn't the problem at all.

It's a symptom of the problem.

The industry, much of the high level, AAA games from EA, Activision, Ubisoft, and others, is suffering from the same bullshit all round.
Extremely shitty DLC practices, crappy sub-standard yearly sequels to cash in on a franchise, "always online" games, microtransactions, PR clusterfucks; the whole lot.
It's not because of F:76. F:76 is just a product of how the industry is and it is complacent.

The corporates in charge of the companies publishing these AAA games are so out of touch that they don't realize in trying to make a quick buck, they are gradually losing their audience and making them angrier and angrier at what they're receiving, it's honestly astonishing.
They had a great example in recent years to what this kind of thinking, of only thinking in the short term, leads to:

The US car industry.

Ford, Chrysler, GM. They became complacent. They sold shitty cars, with shitty reliability for slightly inflated prices with no care for the consumer. They just wanted sales. And slowly, the Japanese and German car manufacturers took over the market with quality and reliability. The end result is well known. All three went through bankruptcy, Ford a few years before GM and Chrysler did so. And now? Even years past that time, the "big" three are in the shadow of Toyota, Honda, and VW. GM only sells as much as they do thanks to China.

Now look back to the big publishers. They're acting almost exactly like the Big Three. Half-assed products shipped out with little care for the consumer, with DLC and microtransaction slapped in to make even more money.
Admittedly, there are publishers who don't seem to be completely stupid like this (Nintendo, Paradox, Bandai-Namco, Square Enix) so there is still hope.
Adding on to the fact the big AAA publishers are giving not a single shit, they are clearly shafting the very people who develop games for them, working them like slaves, treating them like dirt, and firing them if a game goes south. And why wouldn't they? They're replaceable because the industry is filled with people willing to work for whoever they can. It's an employer market, not an employee one and it shows.

You might think this industry is fine and that's okay but what I see is an industry so throughly coporatized that things are going to keep getting worse until they get better.
If the industry has to crash, or at least stumble, then maybe that will work. Maybe then they'll learn and maybe we'll have some new publishers as well.

Will people lose their jobs if this is the case? Most likely but as pointed out, the industry is volatile. Unless they're a public figure of the company or a director, there is no guarantee a developer will keep their job. For all the contempt people have of developers unionizing, and I despise unions myself for their lack of actually doing anything for the workers, it's actually not a bad idea with the way the industry is.

I wish discussing vidya on a cyberbullying website wasn't such serious business.

It wasn't serious until you posted your post; pretty much all the thread was lambasting Bethesda's terrible decisions, with laughter and sheer amazement they could keep fucking it up.

 

[sad cowboy cat]

https://segmentnext.com/2019/01/09/bethesda-is-now-going-after-youtubers/

I just... I'm in complete awe. They just keep digging.