Sounds more like “We’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas!”
Have they played their own games?
Bethesda RPGs are fun. But I’d say they are far from “perfectly tuned.” Always found them to be wonky, clunky, bug-riddled.
When was the last RPG they released that didn’t require tons of patching?
It was 10 years into playing Skyrim on my 4th medium of playing it that learned the courier wasn’t supposed to be naked. I thought it was a comment on his poverty or something
I think he means “perfectly tuned to the way fans want it” which is to say “highly moddable.” Skyrim is kind of the first game in the series that sold really well on platforms other than the PC which strangely brought in a lot of fans who play the vanilla game. But as far as I can remember, the bulk of the longterm fanbase plays on PC and installs tons of mods for the game.
Sure, there are other games that fans like to mod (Minecraft being a big one) but I can’t think of any other game where fans stack dozens or even hundreds of mods by different authors all on the same game and actually expect it to work. The fact that it does work at all (and fans have created custom programs to merge mods and to carefully tune the loading order) is rather a miracle!
So this is what I think he means by “perfectly tuned.” A brand new engine would mean putting in a ton of work to support all the different forms of modding fans want to do and in all likelihood would be far less flexible and powerful, leading to modder community outcry.
When was the last RPG they released that didn’t require tons of patching?
I would have said “that terminator game they made in the early 90s” but that is hardly an RPG :)
I don’t recall Arena having many patches, but since there wasn’t a great way to distribute patches back then, they probably had no choice but to get their shit at least mostly stable before shipping.
Perfectly tuned to only release one buggy-ass game a decade?
The problem with the latest Bethesda games has not been the engine. It’s the writing and the design choices
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
I think that’s a reach - the difference between boring choices and interesting ones isn’t the engine - look at New Vegas and Daggerfall.
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
Well; you could use that engine to produce something well-written, deep and interesting like New Vegas, but that still got dinged for being an absurdly bug-ridden release with serious performance issues. It was great despite the engine, not because.
There’s some slightly-shonky open world engines that support some really impressive RPGs (eg. Baldur’s Gate 3 on the Divinity engine - looks great but performance is arseholes) and some very impressive open-world engines that support some lightweight RPGs (eg. Horizon Forbidden West on the Decima engine - looks great and smooth as butter). And then you’ve got the Creation engine, which looks terrible and has terrible performance, and which runs bugs and glitches in a way that combines into (usually) very shallow RPGs.
