Do they even use facial mocap? Fallout 4’s best facial animations were all reserved for Preston Garvey, and they are so not very smooth, I always assumed they were done by hand.
I remember it being a thing I didn’t use. It was like a voice chat/messenger thing with a built in game browser like GameSpy, right? I used TeamSpeak and some other tool mostly over xFire. I didn’t know anyone else who used xFire so it was kinda useless to me. A lot of communication apps in the late 90’s/early-mid 2000’s had that unfortunate downfall for me. No point in using something nobody I would talk to uses 🤷🏻♂️
Have you only played the Steam version? The non-steam build has Adventure mode, where you control just a single character in a turn-based roguelike. IDK why it wasn’t included with the Steam release, but it’s always been my favorite part of the game.
I agree the name means nothing. Which is why when people go gaga over Creation, I have to remind them it’s still GameBryo, but with more graphical features tacked on to it. The foundation of shit that is GameBryo is still at the heart of the tech driving their games. If Bethesda’s games were buildings, they all build them on a foundation of sand.
I also agree it’s not the reason why their games suck (their games in and of themselves tend to not suck), but it will be the reason why it performs like shit or has the same technical issues that have existed since they started using GameBryo. Unless even after all the time they’ve spent using the engine they still suck at using it, and that’s the reason they have so many problems.
The only other company and series of games I see having the same stuff holding back making better products because of the engine used is Bohemia with ARMA. They have just kept piling stuff on top of Virtual Battle System and all the problems stemming from VBS are present in the current iteration of the engine. Even the devs themselves hate it, but it would be way more work to make an entirely new engine.
Cross platform multiplayer isn’t held back by Steamworks. It’s held back, mostly, by Sony and Nintendo. You notice that PlayStation and Nintendo are the only platforms that regularly do not allow cross platform play. Even in games that do have cross platform play, Playstation usually only allows it with other consoles and not PC. Because Sony is fucking stupid.
I don’t even know wtf you mean by “cross launcher.” Every source of the game on a PC has always been able to connect with other players who got the game on different stores. IE Steam players can play with EGS players and Origin players just the same. If you just mean launching the game from one launcher rather than another… Steam lets you do this! You can add literally any fucking program to Steam and have the benefit of the overlay and even controller support when the game doesn’t have it native. Can’t say that about any of the rest of them.