So it’s no longer enough to wait for reviews before deciding whether to buy or not, now you have to wait a few months longer to see whether the devs add crappy features they held back to deceive the reviewers. That’s just fucking fantastic.

I don’t mind the wait, but I do mind the Denuvo DRM.

Sean Murray may be riding that high and lost track of the lesson he should’ve learned

Oh hell no. He learned his lesson very well, that being that you can lie through your teeth, sell unfinished garbage, spend a decade implementing a fraction of what you promised, and become one of the most beloved studios in the business as a result. He’s doing the same thing again because it worked like magic the first time.

You’re not wrong, but if you want to use policy to regulate business models that exploit dumb consumer choices, there are way bigger fish to fry than videogames.

Or going further back: Remember Star Wars Galaxies?

The game that was shut down less than a week before Star Wars The Old Republic released? You’re not wrong about the other stuff, but this one definitely wasn’t just a big patch.

At first I thought, “Oh cool, they’re showing what the game used to look like before they reveal the new graphics.” But that is what the game looks like…? I mean, the before and after comparison footage looks completely identical, doesn’t it? It’s October 1st, not April. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

it’s going to be a lot more like a kind of Fable - Black and White - Dungeon Keeper kind of experience

Based on this description and given the only thing two of these games have in common, I can only conclude his latest project is a game focused on using your floating god hand to slap the shit out of your minion(s). I’m just not quite sure about the Fable connection…

Always has been.

I’m honestly at a loss about how it’s “mechanically old” and how it could possibly be updated. It’s been a few years since I last played it, but I thought it was basically perfect and even did some things few if any other games do, such as the whole grappling/climbing system.

More of the same? Awesome, can’t wait!

Some people were annoyed by the pawns, but personally I loved them. Their chatter can get repetitive at times, but there’s also a lot of detail and subtlety that’s easy to miss. Each pawn gains knowledge of different enemies, quests, and areas as they interact with them, and what they say depends on how well they know the subject they’re talking about. If they know nothing, they will react with surprise or curiosity, otherwise they will offer advice of varying helpfulness. One time I encountered a cockatrice, and my pawns started yelling to watch out for the griffin. At first I thought it was a bug, but after the fight I realized they had some knowledge of these bird-like enemy types but not enough, and as a result they confused one for the other. Now that’s what I call attention to detail!

Bethesda hasn’t made a great game since Skyrim.

Since Morrowind. Skyrim wasn’t bad, don’t get me wrong, but it can’t hold a candle to its granddaddy in terms of world-building and stat-based character advancement, which was sacrificed for the sake of action combat that is not even close to good enough to carry the game.

But here’s the thing… Bethesda hadn’t made a great game before Morrowind either. That was their big breakout hit, and ever since then they’ve just been remaking that same game with slightly different coats of paint hoping to catch lightning in a bottle for a second time. They used to make more varied and innovative games before that, but none of them was really all that good. Terminator: Future Shock had fully 3D environments and enemies and a mouselook control scheme a year before Quake, but there’s a good reason why the latter game is remembered as one of the foundational pillars of the genre and the Bethesda offering lies forgotten.

So I agree with you that expecting TES6 to be amazing is naive, but I don’t think it’s because Bethesda has gotten worse. It has simply regressed to the mean.

their ambition is getting the best of them

Always has been. I haven’t played Starfield yet, but from what I’ve read about it online, including your description, it sounds a hell of a lot like a sci-fi version of Daggerfall, which was insanely overambitious for its time. It’s a shame they seem to have focused on making the graphics prettier rather than the procedural generation more complex and interesting.