I sometimes play GTA 5 (because I have over 100 million in that game, I have I don't give a fuck money) and they've released a new update. Nothing major just a few additions and changes.
Since the update however, there's been two bugs, one that could delete ANY personal vehicles and the current one that randomly removes insurance so if your vehicle is destroyed you lose it for good.
Between Rockstar with this, Activision not knowing when to just shut the fuck up and Fable looking like their character artists use downs syndrome patients as their models it seems all the talent has gone out of the western video game market, at least in a major studio sense.
So which ones do you think are the biggest fuck ups that you're surprised hasn't burned down their own studio by now?
I would say the most incompetent is generally Bethesda. Their games are always afflicted with bugs.
I don't know if that's incompetent or laziness as they know the modders will fix it
It's like having a slouch older brother who has a responsible younger brother that will clean up his mess. Actually the one thing that really ticks me off is how they made it that mods disable the trophy system as your games pretty much REQUIRE mods to be good!
Edit: that's probably one of the reasons why Fallout 76 had such a bad release, it was a live game so they couldn't fall back on mods and their staff had to keep it running daily.
It was also their first attempt at giving a game on that engine multiplayer support. Never underestimate the challenges in adding netcode to a long established singleplayer game.
I know a fair bit on this topic as well, and you're "slightly" oversimplifying the technical hurdles for the alternative solutions you're suggesting. IE, porting to another engine. Assets only account for a tiny fraction of how much work that involves. There is a fuckton of framework and functionality that you'd have to redo on another engine, especially given just how the Creative engine was designed to handle cells (my memory fails me on more specific details than that, and I haven't exactly slept well).
Netcode-wise, the rule of thumb, as I learned years ago, is that if you're going to make a multiplayer game, implement the netcode from the get-go to save yourself massive trouble and headaches later on. The game they were basing this on had gone on for over a decade without so much as a even stepping foot into multiplayer support, so obviously it was going to be a trainwreck, especially when it's rushed.
I WILL agree though that they fucked up. The project was doomed to failure based on their intended objectives. They wanted to make it a quick easy to do multiplayer project with minimal development time, and keep it as close to Fallout 4 as possible. They released it early, before they even had proper PVE content available, and then ended up stuck with a half-complete game with no long-term vision for what the game was supposed to be, resorting to pathetic microtransactions to justify its continued existence.
I'd say it's probably a little of both.
That may be true, but they're still the masters of the moddable sandbox open-world, and not by a small margin. It really is impressive just how flexible the engine is. You can create your own world entirely and not even have to think about actor groups or loading zones, the engine just does it. Then you can drop a couple DLLs in the folder and change how the engine handles skeletons and animations.
The only engine I know of that even comes close to that level of flexibility is GZDoom, and it's a 25-year old overhaul of a 30-year old game so simple that it cut corners implementing all three dimensions.
I have never understood Bethesda and the Elder Scrolls series' success.
I played Elder Scrolls 1 and 2 and found them to be an interesting core idea but buggy, unplayable, bland messes.
Elder Scrolls 3 comes out and everyone I know that's playing it says it's more of the same, yet it sells. Every subsequent game comes out and does better than the last, despite having the reputation for being buggy, unplayable messes when they release.
And now Bethesda is a gigantic AAA company. Probably indicative of why I no longer pay attention to AAA games.
I tend to agree with this. When TES was in it's heyday I was playing the Ultima games, then later Gothic. TES felt like tabletop simulators with a high fantasy coat of paint, neither of which I was a big fan of. (Ultima were like "low fantasy" JRPGs) I didn't understand why they were so popular when houses and the outside world were on entirely different maps (you couldn't even break doors down), you couldn't have a party of followers, and NPCs didn't follow daily schedules. Those seemed like basic features to me at that point.
Now when I got to Skyrim I later went back and played Daggerfall and Morrowind. I do see why people enjoy them. The core of an amazing fantasy world are there, especially if you study the lore, and Bethesda gradually figured out how to "streamline" them to the point of actually making profit unlike Origin Systems. I don't think I'd want to play them without mods though.
Basically with the modding community it's become one of those "there's nothing else like it around" series even when "it" is kind of meh.
You probably hopped on the wagon too early. Morrowind was the starting point to a good portion of the fanbase, and then it kind of grew with more newcomers to each sequel.
And I have played Daggerfall a little bit, long long after having played other titles.