It's why I won't buy Devil May Cry 5; I do not want to look at Adam Driver's face.
Anyways, I do not understand how Bethesda continues to exist as a company. They are quite possibly the laziest AAA studio I've ever seen. They never do quality assurance, don't even bother optimizing their games, have mediocre aesthetics, never fix the jank in their games, but they expect the fans to mod their games into playable states AND then players actually do clean up their messes. So, of course Starfield is shit; they've learned their customers have the shittiest taste in games and have the bizarre work ethic to work for free.
Second place is CD Projekt Red, but that's because they only recently became AAA with Witcher 3. Bethesda has been one since Fallout 3 or New Vegas or something like that.
Bethesda up until recently was a studio of maybe like 200 employees. Compared to most other AAA companies who have thousands they might as well have been an indie Dec for the first 20 years of their life. And taking that into account, the fact they made games that set the standards for what an open world/sandbox rpg should be is nothing less than amazing.
Seriously, even Nintendo sited them as the inspiration for BoTW which has gone on to be heralded as the new standard despite having even less to do in its open world than fucking morrowind which might as well have been a serious of checkpoints without a marker.
Then you look at Witcher 3 and RDR2 and BoTW2, the most recent examples of " we wanted our own skyrim",
, its pretty clear why they're still a thing.
Bethesda, as much as the online love crying over, is THE measuring stick for what an open world should be. At least as far as western, offline, game dev is concerned. And that's before mods. And when you take into account the fact Bethesda is arguably the most modder friendly dev in the industry, it's no wonder why they're not only still around but considered the ideal when it comes to this type of game.
Bethesda COULD use a better engine, but they don't specifically because it would fuck over they're unparalleled modding community. Look at how difficult it is to mod games like GTA/RDR and the various reskins of Demon's Souls Fromsoft shits out. The most you get are ports of other assets within the same franchise and shit like flying or laser eyes. Or at best the RP community that GTA fans built themselves because the actual game has literally nothing of value to offer the player outside of missions.
And as far as QA goes, for better and worse, Bethesda are uber autistic in their insistence that every single NPC had their own schedule that gets carried out whether your there or not and that almost every single item is capable of being moved around in real time. No other game, that I can think of anyway, has it so that random shopkeep decides to go down the road to the mead hall, gets killed by wolves and had another random NPC take over their shop or let's you collect a billion cheese wheel and store them in your basement individually.
The fact that we can collect 1k gourds, dump them one by one into our house even though it tanks the framerate or outright crashes the game. And the game let's us, is something no other studio would be retarded enough to let happen.
No shit the games are buggy when you need to take all of that into consideration. Of course shit like using a plate to glitch and sequence break into the final boss at level 1 within the first 40 minutes of the game is goin to end up flying under the radar. And if they did catch it and fix it, we'd have just as many retards crying that they aren't allowed to do it.
It's a no win situation. Bethesda is, arguably, the most gamer friendly dev on the market who allows us to do all of our autistic bullshit no matter how much it might brick our shit. Which is a godsend in modern gaming. But they're also very buggy and very behind the times in terms of GRAFFICZZZ and animation which means they're completely dogshit and shouldn't be allowed to make a product at all ever.
