Also DS3 despite being conservative feature-wise wasn’t playing it safe really given scope cf. budget and engine.
To put it in context, F:NV and DS3's development budgets were in a similar ballpark, and while there were certainly some tech debt issues the F:NV team had to solve, they did have an essentially working game very early in development. On the other hand...
DS3 started with an engine that hadn't shipped a game yet, and none of the gameplay code "above" the engine existed or was useable with DS3 - it all had to be made from scratch. Getting a character walking around in an artified level took a non-trivial amount of time.
DS3 had to solve a lot of problems that a game in an existing IP with an existing engine didn't - How would levels be built? How would the camera work? How would we present dialog? And all of those had to be built from scratch in a very compressed timeframe.
None of this is a criticism of the F:NV team, btw, who it must be said made a pretty objectively better game and also made a better game (imo) with less time and less support than other teams have with that franchise/engine
So I don't want to seem like I'm taking away from their accomplishment, just saying that decisionmaking on DS3 was very focused on being able to ship the game within budget, and within those constraints we executed a lot more than seemed possible.
