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 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.
No, this is nonsense, I happen to know a thing or two about this and not only did they try reverse engineering an engine that simply wasn't build for multiplayer. If I remember correctly they gave the job to ex-SOE employees who were involved in Star Wars Galaxies. Why the fuck they would give a job to any employee involved in that hot mess I will never know but it's not surprise they fucked up Fallout 76 as badly as they did.
Also the whole engine argument is a load of bullshit in of itself with their funding. They could have very easily switched over to an engine more suited for the task and carried over their 3D assets and even their skeletal rigs if they were sensible and made their stuff in a proper third party 3D software.
Don't excuse incompetence coders, I don't get any slack when I fuck up or write bad code, why should they?
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.
Perhaps, it does depend on the engine, however I'm somebody who recently had to make a switch to a new game engine for my main project and I had to learn an entirely new language in the process, all while living in a house under renovation I I should add. Yes it did take me a fucking long while, but I did it and so far it has been totally worth it. I made the switch from Unity to Godot and many others did as well because not just that Unity is a bug ridden and bloated mess at the best of times but they were making highly questionable business decisions that an ex-EA executive had a hand in. Adding that with the security breach problems precisely due to their over-reliance on third party dependencies for almost everything and you have the absolute mess the engine is today.
It wasn't worth it for me to continually stick with all that crap for the sake of finishing my biggest project when it was still early days so I made the switch and it's been absolute bliss ever since. The best part about the new engine is the Godot 4 update and the fact it's open source so in theory I should have no future problems even if the internal devs do something silly but they seem to be pretty intelligent people. I also got a massive performance boost recently with Godot 4 and was pretty surprised by it.
I thought I'd detail this little drama I had with my own work to show I'm not just posting out my arse on this topic. It does depend on the engine whether or not it transfers over quickly. Honestly though, I did all this being a fairly noob dev and I managed it fine after frustrating over the syntax. The only real issue is converting your code over.
If you need to do anything more than that, your engine choice is shit and that's why I ignore Bethesda titles now. I have zero faith in Starfield doing anything meaningful wouldn't be shocked if it ends up being a typical 'AAA' produced affair where they have a few cities here and there with content and their 'big open worlds' have some encounters scattered about but are almost completely empty.
In terms of multiplayer netcode itself, again, it depends on the engine, if they had just picked a modern engine Fallout 76 would have been half-decent. However, like a lot of devs, they insist on sticking with their ancient and buggy internal engines and that's why they have the problems that they do. The smart devs out there are making the switch to engines like Unreal, at least then it will be stable for the most part.
I'd say it's probably a little of both.