WHYAREWEALLCAPS

That is a teensy-tiny problem compared to what has to be done to make a game like Starfield. Go look at the credits. Now understand that each of those teams had weeks or even months where they worked 60-80 hours to solve problems or design things or write or rewrite the story to fit a problem that the programmers can’t solve. Now, imagine putting all that work on one dev or even a tiny dev team. And now you know why the market isn’t flooded by indie dev games of this size and complexity. There is a reason why so many people involved in games burn out quickly - they are often ground down by the grueling work.

You are also conflating ability to do one thing really well with being able to do all things really well.

I can’t shake that it just looks like No Man’s Sky with a fantasy skin on it. I hope it’s better than that and is something new.

Greed has always been the word. I don’t know where you get the idea that this is new. They have been trying for years to monetize modding.

The problem is so many studios are owned by publicly traded companies. Those companies expect, nay, demand that product ships during the quarter it was supposed to lest they face the stockholders’ wrath.

Let’s not forget that Skyrim has TONS of cosmetic mods to improve upon the look of the base game. Base Skyrim can be pretty. Modded Skyrim can be stunningly gorgeous. There was a time when people mainly only used ENBs that gave it a dimension of realism for screenshots because it’d bring a system to its knees. Now people use similar levels to actually play the game with. This is what I’m waiting for to happen with Starfield before I buy it, so it might be a few years before I finally do. Until then my No Man’s Sky still mostly scratches my scifi gaming itch.

Exactly. My kids wondered why I didn’t want to get Skyrim for the Switch since it has been my go to game since it came out. No mods? No thank you.

Honestly, release dates are more akin to putting it early access than an actual release nowadays.