This is a misdiagnosis, you say they are being reactive when the issue is that they don't have any sort of coherent design or vision in the first place and can't deliver on quality and fun. You also can't blame marketing for this, they're just putting out there what the team is saying they're making and are planning on. [...] It's not the fault of marketing, it's early design failures and leadership failures to maintain a consistent vision and ensuring that the various part of the games mesh and make sense.
But the two aren't mutually exclusive, and while core design failures are rampant and the main reason we get the AAA games we do today, I think it's also undeniable that the post-release support cycle is increasingly and
negatively influenced by a desire to distract public reaction on the cheap. Taking CBP's example, you said so yourself:
being able to buy apartments and properties, and the car customization which were all cut didn't really have a place in the game anymore after the failure to deliver on that larger design promise reducing them into pointless fluff, but at least it was additional content.
And yet they chose to cram them back in absent any sort of meaningful integration into the game's mechanical loops. The initial "promise" is a moot point because games change through development and cut systems all the time, CBP moreso than others, and these concepts just weren't relevant to the released product anymore - they didn't fit the final "design vision", but they were slapped onto it after the fact only to score cheap publicity points with a gullible, hyperactive audience because said audience had latched onto these "promises" without a more profound understanding of their requisite designs.
I'd even argue against calling them "additional content", particularly when it comes to the Metro system. The apartments would've needed some proper survival mechanics woven into the gameplay, but that in turn would've relied on major changes to systems and narrative pacing, so CDPR gave them the most rote busywork buffs imaginable for sleeping or taking a shower or some shit, nothing more than a transparent token effort. The Metro, however, is
literally non-playable, it's just an optional real-time cutscene and an obscene monument to CBP's biggest design mistakes, but it sure as fuck got the lemmings excited.
And now the same thing's happening with Starfield - Todd's quoted
just two posts above yours defending the exclusion of land vehicles as a deliberate design decision, not a concession to limited development time, and yet now the idea's making a surreptitious comeback. Why? It's not going to be gameplay content proper because the rest of the mechanical structure wasn't built to support it (vehicle gameplay needs vehicle combat, resources etc., this thing will be less "playable" than early CBP's driving, having less eyecandy and not even any traffic to needle through), but the rovers themselves aren't a costly undertaking and they'll successfully grab headlines.
It's just a marketing exercise where the devs are addressing superficial public feedback, rather than a genuine design fix or restoring cut content. The marketing departments monitor public reactions and report with "customers are screeching about X, Y and Z", which leads to the determination that X is hard, Y is expensive, but Z is cheap even if it's pointless and should help pursue that trendy "redemption arc" narrative. And that's how you get multiple apartments in a Cyberpunk where you head home twice and cars in a Starfield with no Lord Humongous - i.e. key-jangling.
P.S. Nevermind NMS, that thing was a true blue ripoff long before any Sony deadline approached holding a baseball bat, it's a different kettle of fish.