first major release under daddy Microsoft, so things may be different

I wouldn't hold my breath:

1. Bethesda's management have always unvalued spending effort on engine development
2. Microsoft's awful mandated top-down rules are what seriously messed up Halo Infinite:

• To go into this point in more detail:
  • 343 industries hired a large amount of "temporary" contractors to work on Halo Infinite (this is standard in AAA games)
  • For legal reasons, any contractor who had worked on a project for 18 months is given workers protections
  • Microsoft mandated that each contractor be "let go" right before reaching this 18 month time-frame.
  • During the regular process of development, different developers would build different things, then over time either help out with any questions on how to use it, or tweak it to support a new use case.
  • During Microsoft's mandated development, the developer who built a tool or best knew how it worked was let go. Since it's easier to write new code rather than read existing code unassisted the developer who needs something done before a deadline has to build a new tool. After 5 years we now have 40 something tools that are all built based on different assumptions that keep overwriting each other's results in wildly expected way. No one knows how anything works anymore.