As far as I know, Bethesda are unusual in modern Devs in that they have a small team for the size of game they make, but they have strong retention of staff so have huge amounts of institutional knowledge about how they do things. Shifting to a new engine would basically mean starting from scratch on a company level. Unlike Ubisoft or Activison, they can't just throw several thousend Devs at a game to brute force the development either.

[–] rambaroo@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

But that's their biggest problem. There's no reason for them to have a small unchanging team. It's very very obvious that they never get an influx of new ideas. Starfield feels like it was made in 2016 and the optimization effort is comically bad. The writing is still mostly boring, campy and naive like it was written by a 15 year old Mormon. The facial animations are incrementally better than fallout but still noticeably worse than much older games like Witcher 3. I could go on.

It's not a bad game at all but it could've been so much better if Bethesda execs weren't greedy cheapasses and the dev team was open to changing their process.

This why Bethesda needs to be criticized instead of constantly getting fellated by fanboys. ES6 will be an outdated mess because Bethesda never sees any feedback except over the top praise for half-assing their games.

[–] Saltblue@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Fanboys downvote you but you are right, even if I love the fallout franchise, the same gameplay loop, the same engines, potato faces in 2023, outdated animations... etc, right now I would prefer Microsoft to force obsidian to take care of the next fallout, and ban Todd Howard for ever putting one foot in the dev took, even in the building. He can go fuck himself and his shit engine.