shikamaru317 said:
I don't trust Schreier's claims on this one. - He's going against about 6 other insiders who all believed it was Holiday 2021 until a recent delay pushed it to Q1-Q2 2022. He is the only insider claiming it's late 2022 currently, the others all think it is early 2022 now, with 1 still claiming it is Holiday 2021.
- He says to look to the credits to back up his claims that Starfield's dev team was tiny for the first 3 years of development, so I did, and it looks to me like the Fallout 76 core dev team is smaller than he thinks it was, meaning that the Starfield core dev team was larger than he thinks it was during those first 3 years. Quite alot of the Bethesda Game Studios devs on the Fallout 76 credits were listed as providing assistance, rather than being core devs, and if they were only providing assistance, that likely means that they were switching back and forth between assisting the Starfield core team and the Fallout 76 core team as needed during those years.
- Bethesda is able to do alot more than most AAA devs can with alot fewer devs. Here is the size of the core dev teams for Bethesda's 4 most recent singleplayer RPG's (Oblivion 70 devs, Fallout 3 80 devs, Skyrim 100 devs, Fallout 4 130 devs). Yes, that is correct, Bethesda made Skyrim, a game with over 150 hours of content, with just 100 core devs, in only 3 years). Starfield by comparison will have likely had a core dev team growing from around 50-90 devs over the course of the first 3 years of development, plus some assistance during those first 3 years, shooting up to over 180 core devs after Fallout 76 released, and is likely around 220 core devs currently, with other BGS teams and other Zenimax Studios providing assistance as needed. Starfield then has more developers working on it than any previous singleplayer Bethesda game, by quite some considerable margin, and has about 2 years more development time than any previous Bethesda game. With a March-April 2022 release, Starfield would have a grand total of 6 years and 4-5 months of development, with a core dev team size growing from about 50 devs to probably 250 devs over the course of those 6 years and 4 months. A delay to Q4 2022 just seems unlikely.
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From my experience I'll put his credibility above the other insiders tbh. The rest is just hopeful thinking and speculation on our side, we don't actually know anything about the team size on the game at specific points in time or any internal development changes etc.
In game dev terms, a window of fall 2021-fall 2022 is not that big. No one would question a fall 2022 release date if it wasnt for recent rumours of it coming this year. Those rumours may well have been jumping the gun but we'll soon find out
