this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2024
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What’s really crazy is to compare Bethesda with CDPR. I’ve been replaying the Witcher 3 and it just struck me how I won’t have to wait 15+ years for the next entry. And to look at how much more efficient they’ve been in the past.
For a timeline, Witcher 2 released in May 2011 and then the Witcher 3 released in May 2015. Took 3.5 years to develop. Cyberpunk released December 2020, only 4.5 years after W3 had its last major DLC. Then in 2023 they released a very large update for Cyberpunk, about 2/3rds the runtime of the main game. And then in 2025 we’ll probably get the next Witcher game. They have like 3 games in active development now.
So what’s the difference with Bethesda? Well Skyrim sold 30 million units and Witcher 2 sold about 8 million. Less than a third the income. Yet if you compare CDPRs staff to Bethesdas at time of their next games, CDPR had doubled Bethesda's work force. And guess what happened? Witcher 3 sold 40 million while fallout 4 sold 25 million. Thats despite Witcher 3 costing an estimated $81 million while Fallout 4 sits closer to 1.5x that at $125 million.
Then you talk about engines and it gets even worse. CDPR arguably started with a worse engine and I shouldn’t need to explain how much they’ve destroyed BS in that regard as well. Witcher 2 looks worse than Skyrim by a lot imo. But by the time their next game rolled around, it was an industry leader in graphics. And cyberpunk 2077 is like the next Crysis now while starfield is.. oh boy. And guess what? After all that work on their engine, they abandoned it. Why? Because their resources are better spent making games and systems in an engine someone else updates for them. Bethesda meanwhile not only can’t juggle the ball of updating an engine and game dev, but they’re not even smart enough to swap engines.
Bethesda has all the signs of a dying studio and Microsoft is the sucker for buying them. And it’s a waste of talent more than anything. Talented people exist at Bethesda whose resources and career development would be far better off being applied on UE4.
Microsoft now owns the elder scrolls and fallout IP, plus everything under the smaller studios (Doom, etc). Bethesda won't matter in the long run.
Witcher 1 using the NWN engine is still hilarious to me
I actually didn’t know this but I did play through that recently and I actually have really good things about how that game looks even to this day. I know they did some touching up and I’m assuming updated textures for the enhanced version but it aged a lot better than many other games from that era did
Given the technical problems with Cyberpunk at launch, I don't know that it's a great idea to champion them. Both studios have had a similar release cadence in the same time periods.
When Microsoft bought Bethesda, they bought Zenimax, which includes far more than just the likes of Elder Scrolls.
I swear people forget how atrocious the cyberpunk 2077 launch was.
It's almost created this double underdog scenario for CDPR. First, they released Witcher 2 and then 3, where their game quality jumped incredibly drastically from the first game.
Then they brought their reputation crashing down to earth on Cyberpunk's release, but fixed the game well enough that it now feels like an underdog overcoming odds in the public memory. They've basically fully recovered their public image, which I'm unsure if they deserve. People can like how it turned out now, but they shouldn't forget.
Yeah they fixed it up pretty good and I think that's why people moved on. Just pretty bad for the Playstation fans considering it unlaunched from the ps4 until the following year while the ps5 was still unobtainium.
On machines that were actually strong enough to run it, it was mostly fine. I played on PC and while I admit the later balancing update was probably necessary, I didn't run into most of the real nasty bugs people liked to talk about. I had a great time putting in 100 or so hours in version 1.
A solid 80% or more of all the problems Cyberpunk had at launch stemmed from trying to launch it on last-gen consoles. It absolutely was not intended for PS4 or XB1 and targeting those platforms was a mistake. Once they pulled availability for those and buckled down on getting it prettied up for next gen, the quality jumped by a mile within the next year and a half of updates.
The launch was rough, I grant you that, and maybe I'm just simping for CDPR but even at the time I was in the vocal minority saying, hey this game really isn't that bad if you give it a chance and run it on hardware that it was intended for.
And of course now with its updates and DLC it's just genuinely a great game.