Schreier is one of the only game journalists around and it's funny how much shit everybody gives him here. I get the history of neo and him but he does do real investigative shit which is more that most video game personalities do at their sites.
Bethesda's models looks like shit, especially their facial animations. I dig the art direction they are going for but it's getting played out especially when things like the Witcher 3, uncharted 4, rdr2, etc come out and put it to shame. That doesn't even mention the modders who put in all that unpaid work and do a great job. It's buggy as hell and I'm not interested in fo 76.
I agree that he does more actual journalism than almost everyone else that calls themselves journalists, but this kind of nonsense undermines that effort in my eyes.
It's incredibly patronizing, for one. I've coded. I know what a goddamn engine is and isn't.
He's using a semantic argument for the express purpose of undermining gamer's concerns with the quality of their software. It's childish, and it's not even entirely correct: It tries to address the oversimplification "same engine, same problems", but if it still is, to enough of an extent to call it the same engine, in fact,
the same engine, it still carries the same concerns over to new iterations until explicitly shown otherwise. There's not some bad module generating all the bugs - it's clearly emergent issues from the aggregate interaction of these modules... aka the fucking engine.
And honestly, after reading it, I don't believe he understands what a game engine is and isn't. It's the same level of 'howdie-do-dat' understanding from the Horizon piece where Guerilla blew their minds to pieces that only what is in and reasonably close to the camera is rendered aka frustrum culling aka a technique as old as 3D rendering.
His motives here, however, are the issue. This isn't a desire to educate and explain or do good journalism, which we both agree he is capable of. It's an attack right in line with the #gamersaredead pieces. He's calling gamers idiots, as if that should unjustify thier concern or disappointment.