this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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I don't think it's laziness, I think it's a tighter grip over development.
I've heard that with Skyrim's development, many of people's favourite side quests were conceived, performed, and coded in a couple nights by a couple of people just cause they thought it was a fun idea, vs. Starfield had a way more locked down and controlled development cycle with way more of a top down, prescribed, development style.
I never heard why that might be, but it does make sense in terms of if you were trying to plan content for 1000+ worlds and doing it top down, you would lean way more on procedural generation and consequently you'd want way tighter controlled areas and things that can happen to not mess with your multi planet generation engine, but then that ultimately results in them all being soullless.
That and they broke the fundamental exploration loop by making loading screens such a core and frequent requirement. In Skyrim you'd have to do a quest over there, start walking towards it, see something neat, go check it out, find someone doing something, help them kill this villain, collect a reward, climb to the top of the mountain you're partway up, look around and see some more cool stuff, remember you have a quest to do, and climb back down and towards the cave entrance that starts your quest.
With Starfield you have a quest to do over there so you fast travel to your ship, fast travel to the planet's orbit, and fast travel to the quest location.
It does make sense. I mean it's about resource management; they could add more locations, but that might mean more burden on QA, maybe some performance optimizations to support newer sections, maybe dialing back some of the art work on other areas to make it happen. Skyrim had great quests but no doubt it still performs quite poorly even on modern consoles at times, and still has more bugs given its relative size.