Story and worldbuilding wise, ES6 has a very bleak future ahead. Emilio Pagliarulo, the de facto director of Starfield and lead writer, has shown that no hole is deep enough that he won’t dig it further down when it comes to lack of quality and consistency. Not that Skyrim’s main story was good, but it was certainly better than Starfield’s. There’s also the disturbing indifference of “the world” to everything happening around it. Literally nothing you do in Starfield affects anything outside its own storyline. Hell, shooting up in the air or using fucking space magic in the middle of a city generates no reaction from npcs if nobody is hit.
If the Dreamcast had started development instead of the Saturn, and released even 2 years after the Saturns release date in 1996, the console would have fared significantly better.
You’re effectively saying that development of the Dreamcast should’ve begun before the tech for it even existed. The Saturn’s development began back in 1992, after the release of the Model 1, when 3D graphics were a wild dream for home consumers. The Sega Model 3, which served as a basis for the Dreamcast, saw its first arcade release in 1996. M3 was super powerful, but in 1996 it’d also be prohibitively expensive for any home consumer to afford. The Dreamcast that the world saw in 1998/1999 was literally impossible to achieve back in 1996, the “best” thing would’ve been something like a Saturn 2.5 which maaayyybeee could’ve run Model 3 games at significantly lower quality.
It certainly sold a lot. Bethesda once claimed to have over 10 million players across all platforms. Even if we assume half of those were using gamepass, that’s still 5 million sales.
Of course, if you compare it to Fallout 4’s first 6 months, with reported 12 million sales on day-one, that’s a significant letdown.
Starfield is a very real “could have been”, if only [huge list of changes] happened.
Reading it like that, the loop sounds straight off Diablo 1 on PSX. Get quests, head to the dungeon, loading screen, wipe the floor, loading screen, wipe next floor, back to town, loading screen, turn in.
That kind of loop is not bad in itself, but Bethesda applied it to the wrong type of game.
I never figured a reason to even bother with multiplayer in NMS, except maybe to speed up base building. The only real challenge of the game is surviving the first hour, even on hardcore/permadeath.
If the 32X and Saturn never released and instead the Dreamcast came out in place of the Saturn
The problem here is roughly 4 years, Sega was one of the big players in 1994, waiting until the Dreamcast was ready at the very end of 1998 and living off the Mega Drive (Genesis) + Arcades would be financial suicide
In fact, the GameCube sold very badly in some SEA countries because it was too hard to pirate games for. Piracy literally leads to hardware sales in some countries.
True, both PS1 and PS2 absolutely ruled sales in Brazil given how cheap and easy it was to get pirate games, which usually sold for BRL10 from 1999-2006, while original games would cost well over 10x that.