if RPGs have done this plenty of times, then it's not a new idea, and why are we talking about it in the context of the new ideas starfield had?
people replay games for the gameplay. bethesda wanted a game you could replay for the story, and then have it still work as a story when the player deliberately sequence breaks everything because of their omniscience
I don't even mean I wouldn't trust Obsidian. I mean I wouldn't trust the specific team they had working on New Vegas, which was an absurdly stacked deck that they seemingly haven't been able to re-create since.
Films you can re-watch twice and have it be just as good the second time are rare. Bethesda wanted a film you could rewatch ten times while simultaneously larping as a cosmic god and trying to break everything you could.
All the new ideas in Starfield fall into one of two categories:
The technology doesn't exist to implement it.
The talent at Bethesda is incredibly ill-suited to implement it.
The Bethesda response to fans saying their main storyline was trash was to make a game where the main storyline is the primary focus and draw of the game? That's a bold move.
The NG+ stuff is a cool idea, but again, Bethesda just fundamentally lacks the talent to implement it. You can't hit what they were aiming for with a handful of gimmicks. I wouldn't even trust the team behind New Vegas, or whoever writes at Larian, to do it justice.
It feels like Skyrim was the game they'd (and by they I mean Todd) always wanted to make, and Skyrim was the first time they had the resources and technology available to make it more or less exactly as they envisaged.
Fallout 4 probably would've been in the exact same situation of the technology finally catching up to their ideas, except they completely botched the landing by adding in voiced characters.
Fallout 4 releases and it's disappointing but it's okay because it's just a blip. They had some good new ideas in there, they were just balanced out in the other direction by a lot of bad ones. Bethesda's track record is still solid, if somewhat tarnished.
Fallout 76 releases and it's disappointing but that's because they've never made (and shouldn't have made) an MMO before. A lot of the coverage is centred around the shoddy launch, which doesn't really matter for a non-MMO title.
gods am i glad microsoft didn't have to dip into their literal trillion dollar valuation to pay independent artists any money at all to advertise the independent developers they're so gleeful to take credit for
if there was a movie that was 200 hours long and you chose to stay for the entire duration and not walk out, then you either enjoyed the movie or you need to learn about the sunk-cost fallacy