video

can’t answer for wow but i imagine the change is similar for runescape, where

• people engage with the game more efficiently than before, which slurps the fun out
• people have jobs now, so they don’t have as much free time to play games

• absolute population growing
• share of population with feasible access to pokemon-compatible consoles growing
• share of population who see video games as a legitimate pastime growing

e.g., starfield would’ve been a very different game had you been able to fly space -> surface, and had there been vehicles to do actual exploring with

it would’ve completely changed the way the game plays, and opened up new possibilities for design. it also would’ve removed many of the oft-criticized loading screens and made the whole experience flow better.

but they can’t do any of that, because the engine isn’t good enough to support it.

sometimes you can’t make a choice because the engine says no

Bethesda can’t improve because they keep catering for the lowest common denominator

even in your ideal world where they perfect the world, quests and characters, tes 6 is still going to suck if core gameplay plays the same as skyrim, which played the same as oblivion

they can’t improve that core gameplay without a better engine

new vegas and london are popular in the same way 1 and 2 are popular, which is “not mainstream enough to sustain a studio like bethesda”.

which is historically how they made up the difference between the lackluster gameplay

you and i must have been playing different bethesda games, because none of them have been particularly interesting story-wise

the average player doesn’t care about crunchy rpg systems. they do care if the core gameplay would’ve been outdated in 2010.

bethesda doesn’t seem to be able to improve the core gameplay because the engine can’t cope.

even if you fixed the writing and tossed out the awful procedural generation in favor of hand-crafted environments, at it heart it’s still going to play like a stripped down borderlands 1

the writing, yes

but if their engine is “perfectly tuned” then that means their engine is informing their design

they can’t make good design choices because they have to work within the limitations of an over-fitted engine

They’ve probably also put considerable work into the next project already

fallout 4 was 9 years ago, and people wanted them to switch to a new engine then

you’re right, of course, but good lord have they had ample time to course correct since then

“perfectly tuned” means their game engine is coupled to their game design, which yeah, more or less makes genuine creativity impossible

not to mention the psychological factors, like the hurdle of convincing higher ups to try something new when simply not doing that is 10x less work

counterpoint: if it isn’t the engine holding them back, then everyone left is just fundamentally bad at designing games (i’m not counting “let’s just copy what we designed last time” as design), and that’s worse

josh sawyer has said their engine has the best content creation pipeline he’s worked with, which is probably why they’re reluctant to give it up

but surely at this point they have to be doing something in the background to move to a different one. i seriously doubt they didn’t try to get space-to-surface flight working, but evidently the engine didn’t let them…which is more or less the same story as every other time they’ve tried to break out of the mold they’ve carved for themselves. it always ends up a janky mess.

whenever they build out actual new mechanics for the engine, like the settlement building in fo4, or the space flight in starfield, they’re always just grafted on, rather than being interwoven with existing systems.