Fallout

Are you fucking kidding me?

These goobers (Bethesda) tried, and somewhat succeeded at a semi-working prototype of implementing a more cohesive, world-faction-conflict paradigm.

https://www.eurogamer.net/inside-the-unpredictable-goblin-wars-of-the-elder-scrolls-4-oblivion-i-introduced-controlled-chaos-whenever-i-could

Oblivion has the Goblin Wars, which is mostly a simulated system that runs in the background, out of sight of the player, that determines how some minor factions will fight over territory.

Then, they just forgot about it, and did not include it in FO3.

Probably because it was half-broken, what a surprise.

"I don't remember the specifics, but the goblin war was stretching the limits of our game systems, especially the AI and scripting," Kuhlmann says. "My guess is that because of the scripted nature of the goblin wars system, when you use Wait the scripts aren't getting updated properly." It might be that the time the goblins set out from their base falls in the middle of a Wait period, and so isn't triggered when that time is skipped. "You might try short Waits of one hour," Kuhlmann suggests. "Or just let game time pass naturally and see if that makes a difference."

So here, in the OP article, we have fucking GOOBERS saying:

"We made 90% of the art, we built the engine, we did it in a very limited window of time, and we put in all this effort, and they got to just work on the stories."

No, you fucking asshole, you gave them a half broken mess, and they figured out how to do a much more scaled up version of what you couldn't figure out how to do, by way of working around the mess you gave them, in more clever ways.

Also, you didn't 'build the engine' in a 'very limited window of time'. You... purchased a liscense to use Gamebryo. And you customized that... rather messily, and then let Obsidian use your mess.

"As time has gone on, Obsidian killed it," Lobe proclaims. "It did make me feel a little bit sad that our design team could not implement the same scale of really ambitious, multi-arc hug choices, kind of thing."

Yeah, yes, the broad strokes of that have been obvious to most people who played Bethesda games in that time, have you heard of this Hbomberguy person, maybe?

But you... would have known much more of the details about how the whole Goblin Wars thing just got abandoned.

... Butthurt, egotistical goobers.

Literally enough time has passed that Harry doesn't even have hair anymore.

The man has developed, accepted, and embraced male pattern baldness... in the amount of time it took you to fully absorb a video he made a decade ago.

Fuck Bethesda.

... They even had a framework to do this with Fallout 4.

You know the whole mods based off of competing settlements?

You could have just done that. Made it into a kind of open world / sim hybrid, sorta like Kenshi.

Abandoned your terrible storyline, and made a world where there's an emergent story line, where different games play out differently, because faction settlements and conflicts play out differently, different sets of world conditions enable different sets of or variants of major and minor quests.

But that can only work if you actually have a really solid, clever, and compute efficient background simulation manager.

You know, stable, without bugs, well optimized.

Things that Bethesda isn't capable of making.