I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. They clearly skimped on the content for all those planets and handwaved it away as perfectly normal and expected, when it clearly wasn’t good. Why? To add breadth without adding time to the development. To “increase their output” without adding more input.
It clearly didn’t work there, but it could have worked with some decent mechanics and a little more thought into the content. It worked for No Man’s Sky.
Luckily for Bethesda, AI has suddenly gotten a lot better, and they’ll be able to use it to generate a ton of content that feels better than standard old procedurally generated content. That is, of course, if they can manage to work it into their tooling for their ancient engine.
It’s really hard to fill a space game with content. It’s not that surprising that a lot of the world’s are empty. This is an issue for all space games, not just Bethesda.
Which is why smarter devs either keep all the action in space, or limit it to specific places in specific planets. Besides, do we really need to land on literal hellscape planets like Mercury or Venus?
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. They clearly skimped on the content for all those planets and handwaved it away as perfectly normal and expected, when it clearly wasn’t good. Why? To add breadth without adding time to the development. To “increase their output” without adding more input.
It clearly didn’t work there, but it could have worked with some decent mechanics and a little more thought into the content. It worked for No Man’s Sky.
Luckily for Bethesda, AI has suddenly gotten a lot better, and they’ll be able to use it to generate a ton of content that feels better than standard old procedurally generated content. That is, of course, if they can manage to work it into their tooling for their ancient engine.
“Yes, but space is boring and therefore it’s realistic” is still one of my favorite excuses for a game.
It’s really hard to fill a space game with content. It’s not that surprising that a lot of the world’s are empty. This is an issue for all space games, not just Bethesda.
I agree! Which is partly why so many people were surprised and excited that Bethesda took this challenge on. They failed at it.
Which is why smarter devs either keep all the action in space, or limit it to specific places in specific planets. Besides, do we really need to land on literal hellscape planets like Mercury or Venus?
I don’t think the devs are making the decisions in AAA games like that. They’re pretty much always just doing what they’re told to do.