i mean it explicitly was the deal they made with bethesda, they both agreed to a deadline
the lack of focus on actual bug fixes and the overconfidence with how much content they could realistically finish in those 18 months was still absolutely on obsidian
They did not treat us badly at all - even the Metacritic thing was something they added, not threatened us with… and if we’d been better with fixing bugs, we could have hit the score needed to prevent layoffs, but nope - FNV when it was released had a LOT of bugs.
Unfortunately, the other interpretation made for a better story… but even Obsidian’s CEO clarified it. That said, FNV needed to be downscoped, and production should have ended and testing begun at least 2 months earlier than it was.
Bethesda’s engine was the easiest to create content for, by far. Source control was easy, iterations were fast, the scripting language was pretty powerful – just easy to work in. Not necessarily easy to change, but if you wanted to do what we did on F:NV, which was make a bunch of new content and new features for the F3 engine, it was great.
a big part of the hate for fallout 76 wasnt even about the bugs, to this day i am 100% convinced that it was stoked massively by folks that bought it expecting a game it was fundamentally never trying to be, never marketed to be and never going to be
76 has actually made me pretty hopeful for the direction of bethesdas games- it includes a return to older style dialogue, introduced more skill checks and the like, featured a more cohesive world and generally seemed like it went back on the simplification a fair bit
starfield similarly seems to be more of a return to form for them, focusing more on character builds, an expansive trait system etc
it is also being worked on heavily by the lead quest designer for far harbor iirc, which is absolutely a good sign and is setting my hopes high for a deeper, more complex and more forked main questline than Bethesda usually goes for