this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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I feel like this is emblematic of why many AAA titles are so dull.
I mean, you gotta give Bethesda some props here for developing their own engine. Indies don't do that.
But still, 8 years ago, they had this idea of a Bethesda game in space. Maybe they should have seen it coming that this concept won't work out terribly well, but ultimately someone decided to go ahead with it and then they spent 7 years building a space physics simulation, procedural planet generation and so on.
There was no way, they could have not released this game after realizing the concept doesn't work out terribly well. Or taken a step back and shifted the focus of the game towards space flight. Or taken a step back and deviate from the Bethesda-typical formula for this space theme.
These are options you have, when you've spent a few months prototyping, not after multiple years. They had to roll with the concept and basically try to bruteforce the fun into it.
Blizzard, back in the day, was willing to simply can games, even highly anticipated ones, when they didn't meet their standards, even after a couple years of work. StarCraft: Nova, Lord of the Clans...
And Square-Enix managed to take an MMORPG that was already released, tear it down to bare bones and completely rebuild it to make it good, with FFXIV: A Realm Reborn.
So it is possible to completely redo something if it doesn't work out...
They do not get props for trying to recycle their engine for the 100th time, because Creation sucked when they used it for Oblivion and it sucked when they upgraded it for Skyrim and it continued to suck through Fallout 4 into Fallout 76 and is very clearly not an engine designed to support a large game in space. Same bugs all the way through like five consecutive games.
Starfield was the least rocky release probably in Bethesda history in terms of bugs, but that's only because MS took literally the entire QA team from Xbox and assigned them to Starfield and brute forced a lot of the initial bugs out of the launch. A good engine doesn't need an entire megacorp's fucking quality assurance department to get ironed out.
Ultimately it feels like the same engine, despite having been improved to 64 bit for SKSE, upgraded even further for FO4, and then slapped with netcode for FO76 - it's still not good. It's unbelievable that we can have games with life-scale cities and zero loading screens, while Bethesda still needed to cut Neon in half and instance basically everything behind a billion loading screens. Even Jemison is like, 4 separate zones and not just one whole city.
Believe me, I really don't care to defend Bethesda. I'm not saying their engine is incredibly good.
I'm mostly saying, I feel like their games would be different and even more AAA-generic, if they built it on top of Unreal or Unity. And I'm giving them mild props for not just buying into the duopoly.
But I'm also just saying that, as a result of building their own engine, Bethesda can't just quickly prototype something. To see what the final game looks/feels like, they have to invest years into engine development.
Anyone who wants to make a space exploration game needs to play The Outer Wilds. It has one star system all the planets are about 10 miles across and the game resets every 20 minutes and there is no combat, and yet it's still an infinitely better game than StarField. Why?
Because it actually has things to do and explore and interact with. Everything you do has reason to it, It has intention. There's nothing in the sidelines that was added just a pad the experience out because it's embarrassing having 11 quadrillion planets and nothing to do on any of them, so better add some random quests.