The reason chemical weapons are banned is because (they’re monstrous and) they’re useless. You can fire a chlorine shell and if the wind is juuust right, it’ll kill anyone within a few meters. You know what else will kill anyone within a few meters? A normal artillery shell.

Except, chlorine gas can be blocked by an airtight gas mask and a chemical suit. They cost less than $500 for complete immunity to the weapon. Good luck finding a $500 flak vest that’ll stop a mortar though. And meanwhile, if you want to press the attack and benefit from your chemical weapons, there’s one slight problem before you advance: there’s a bunch of chlorine gas in the way.

In other words, it’s an unreliable and inferior weapon that gets in the way of modern military doctrine. Although there are some good niches in shitty armies by dictators who are too paranoid of coups to give their junior officers any independence or proper kit. Like the Iraq army that the US army utterly steamrolled in 2005.

You don’t just spam jump, you wedge yourself under an arch or something so that you can trigger more jumps per second.

Their engine is not hamstringing them. Plenty of good games have shipped with Gamebryo/Creation engine, without massive numbers of bugs.

The problem is that Bethesda doesn’t give a shit about fixing anything - they ship bugs that have been in previous games, that users have outright identified and fixed for said previous games. They apply the exact same we-don’t-give-a-shit attitude to their engine.

Also every engine is “20 years old”, Source2 has some code from GoldSrc and Quake Engine, because if the code works perfectly then you don’t just rewrite it for no reason. You rewrite parts of the engine - the parts that are holding you back in some way. And Bethesda has been modifying and extending their engine.

But, ignoring all of that, suppose the engine really was the issue: it takes 5ish years to write an engine from scratch. Starfield was in development for 8 years. Skyrim released 13 years ago. Skyrim also released 2 years ago, and a couple of times in between those periods too. Bethesda could have rewritten their entire engine from scratch if they wanted to, in that time.

The problem is that Bethesda just doesn’t give a shit about quality, they chose their engine development choice by development choice. The problem is that Bethesda.