Bethesda's engine is famed for fostering rapid content creation, so how can they spend 7 years in development and have so little game to show for it?
What I'm more curious about is the headcount. Everyone knows staffing up is a case of diminishing returns, especially across distinct locations, but these numbers are pushing it. Per the PC Gamer piece, Skyrim was around 100 people, Fallout 4 at 150, Starfield's over 500... Even accounting for higher labour demands in the visuals department, is Starfield at least
twice as large as Fallout 4 in terms of playable content? And I'm talking about bespoke, handcrafted designs
excluding the proc-gen crap, the whole (often misguided) idea behind proc-gen is to create more content with less labour.