I get where you’re coming from, but I don’t think that was a risk. Bethesda-style games take awhile to make, and they only have gotten longer. They used to be 3 years between releases between Arena, Daggerfall, and Morrowind. Then it was 5 years between Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim. And now it’s been over 15 years since Skyrim. And Fallout hasn’t been much better, with Fallout 4 releasing 10 years ago.
And there’s 2 main reasons for the dearth of Bethesda releases: Bethesda really needed to split into 5 teams: 3 creative teams for their main franchises (Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Starfield), 1 for programming (Creation Engine updates, bug fixes, etc.), and 1 for finishing (Q/A, clutter). Right now, almost everything needs to go through Todd Howard. They need to instead have Todd be in charge of 1-2 creative teams, and have other people take the reigns of the others because Todd only has so many hours in the day.
They could probably get back to releases every 3-5 years for each franchise and have enough wiggle room to take chances with delegation
BigBananaDealer@lemmy.world 2 days ago
for sure, but i also think with starfield overhauling the engine and then COVID happening threw a gigantic wrench into bethesda’s future. we’d have probably gotten es6 by now if not for that
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
The engine overhaul for Starfield definitely took a lot of time. I still want to see what they could do with it in an ES game, or even porting older games into the new version.
I think it’d be cool if they used some procedural generation to place trees in forests, so you could cut or burn some down and have the forest naturally grow back over time. Or officially add in seasons
BigBananaDealer@lemmy.world 2 days ago
theyve actually had procedural generation in all elder scrolls games, though for those it was purely for scenery and then touched up when needed, while in starfield it was for whole planets with procedural POIs and some touch ups on specific planets
i am really excited for es6 because of starfield, the jetpacks are very fun and it gives me hope that levitating will come back from morrowind