BadMoonRisin said:
I'll keep an eye out but is it just me or do all of these really vast and ambitious projects always seem to flop?
Spore
Sim City 5
Cyberpunk 2077
No Man's Sky
Star Citizen
Fallout 76
Starwars Battlefront 2
Or do they just over-promise and by the time it comes out its underdelivered? This is why pre-ordering should not be a thing people do.
I worked on a game many years back that was hugely hyped after showing footage at game conferences. Because of that hype, despite us saying it wasn't ready and needed to be delayed, the publisher pushed harder, and the game was released to universal panning. From the inside, you could see it coming from a mile away, but from the outside, people were blown away by what a mess it was.
There's always a similar pressure factor pushing on projects like the ones you mention. Sim City and Battlefront (and the new Battlefield) were pressured by EA to include features that were universally hated by players and to release within a certain window. Cyberpunk and No Man's Sky started drinking their own koolaid and believed they could deliver on things they could not in the time frame. Fallout 76 was trying to make a multiplayer game on an engine that was built for single player, by devs who had mostly only worked on single player (Kotaku recently had an article that went into the difficulties:
https://kotaku.com/bethesda-zenimax-fallout-76-crunch-development-1849033233). Star Citizen hasn't even come out yet, so who knows how that one will actually turn out.
At the same time, Bethesda has done a good job releasing games like this because it does fit into what they know how to do, and they have hit many more times than they've missed. There will be issues, most likely, and people will complain, but I think this is a case where they deserve the benefit of the doubt because it's something they have proven they know how to do. Could it be disastrous? Absolutely. It's probably worth waiting to hear reactions before pulling the trigger instead of preordering. But I do think the risk on this one is *probably* less than most super hyped games.