Zanteogo wrote: ↑Tue Jul 18, 2023 6:53 pm
Zanteogo wrote: ↑Wed Dec 01, 2021 1:24 pm
So we are looking at late 2024 / early 2025 release for Elder Scrolls 6 now.
So it's looking like 2026 now.
Crazy.
What's strange to me about the ever-increasing time required for Bethesda games is that, while they certainly have a lot of game-spanning interacting systems, as open-world games they tend to emphasize breadth -- they are vast fields of content.
If that's so, then it seems like time-to-create could be reduced somewhat by simply throwing more creative bodies at content creation. That doesn't work for complex, "tight" products (see Fred Brooks's "Mythical Man-Month"); adding more people to a team doesn't reduce the time needed to complete projects of that kind.
But for a big open-world game, where 10,000 small pieces of content can be added without affecting each other, why not bring in qualified contractors to build those things, freeing up the Bethesda creatives to build the medium, large, and main-game content?
Of course there are obvious costs to this: you have to pay contractors; their work needs to be good quality and not lore-breaking; their work needs to be supervised; and they all need to respect the NDAs they presumably have to sign. But none of those seem insuperable. In fact, I'll bet at this point Bethesda has a very good idea exactly how much "content" needs to be built given the breadth and depth of one of these games -- so why not bring in enough outside creators to pull the ship date to the left?
I guess when every game you build rakes in billions of dollars, you're not so worried that every game takes longer to make. Maybe Microsoft will feel differently about that than Zenimax did, maybe not.
But as one of the creatives building these games over a decade, wouldn't it be more satisfying to be able to work on more than 2-3 games in your entire career?