Comment by ang_cire

I feel like this is just an emotional argument, because if I asked a human team to black-box recreate a complex piece of software, it would absolutely be thousands of hours of work. Pretending that the ability to look at a piece of software and recreate it is straightforward or simple is just false.

And no, the procgen techniques and capabilities utilized by NMS were not available 30 years before NMS (important distinction, because NMS is already 10 years old, and 2006 vs 1996 is quite a big jump in game complexity as well).

Saying, "isn't equivalent to handcrafted content" is a fallacy, because hand authoring doesn't denote any particular level of quality or outcome. You can absolutely hand craft the NMS assets and game systems, but not at the scale that NMS did using procgen.

Wrt TR, it literally has tens of years (if not hundreds) of labor hours that have gone into it.

I'm not sure where you got the idea it's about recreating Daggerfall- it's not, it's about implementing the rest of the Morrowind province beyond just the island of Vvardenfell- but it's a massive, multi-decade project with hundreds of contributors.