I don't know what you guys are talking about. It's perpetually 1998 in my mind.

Hey, crazy stuff going on with the president, huh? They're even talking about voting for IMPEACHMENT!!!

Boy, you know you have a political mudslide when they're talking about impeachment! Nixon almost faced that, but he resigned. Which means the last impeachment was in 1797! Crazy right???

...hey, what's going on in 2026?

.....

eyes slowly widen as jaw drops

Yeah, I once heard that in the video game industry, you start pre-production of a title about a year before you get started with proper development (a.k.a. "production").

So, pre-production means brainstorming the game concept, theme, maybe initial concept art, maybe some prototypes etc..

But to quote Wikipedia:

The game entered pre-production by 2018, formally being announced during Bethesda's E3 2018 conference. The game entered active production in 2023 following Starfield's launch.

So, presumably they kicked in pre-production for a few weeks in 2018, specifically to produce that trailer. And then put it back aside and didn't really get started until 2022 or so. 🙃

copium huffing noises intensify

... look, I know they'll eventually release ES6. The problem is the people expecting it to live up to ANY hype when NONE of the previous games have EVER been great on their own without mods...

The incentive structure is wildly different between the two.

Team Cherry is a small team of passionate developers. Bethesda has grown into a corporate monstrosity that drains developers of their passion to push out slop.