The only thing they showed as a quest there was collecting bear asses from generic dialog with a scientist (but possibly there's more to it) so that's not a great sign. I can live with bugginess but if the content isn't compelling why am I playing? if the content is compelling enough I'll deal with a lot of bugs.
and yeah I think there might be a lot of cool mods around adding content to spawn on these planets if the structure of the game allows it. It would allow modders to create smaller self contained one shots basically.
This is the part that really worried me. They were talking about how the planets are procedurally generated but have the little "environmental narrative" elements that Bethesda is known for. So I thought, okay, maybe they procedurally generated 1000 planets and then populated them by hand with quests, NPCs, etc.
Then they go on to talk about how "your experience on a planet may be different from your friend's experience on the same planet," and they show an obviously procedurally generated fetch-quest from a generic NPC. So I'm getting the feeling that anything to do with the main story or the main faction quests is done by hand, but everything else in the game is just going to be procedurally generated nonsense. I could be wrong, but it's worrying.
I'm expecting (if the game is made like a better Bethesda game) good story, good enough combat, and enough bugs to keep Mortein in business for the next decade alone.
Basically, preordering incentivizes companies to release games that are not finished.
In general, companies will always maximize revenues while minimizing costs. If they can release a game that didn't cost them as much to produce (getting massive preorders through good marketing but pinching development and quality) then they absolutely will. look at any AAA released this year
IMO it's generally not a great idea to pre-order anyway because it's not like they can ever run out, plus you never know what's going to happen on launch day. The game could be a big mess like Cyberpunk was, or the servers could go down because everyone's downloading at once so then there'd be no point paying to get it on day 1 anyway.
And on top of that, Bethesda has a bit of a reputation for putting out games that are... let's say unpolished on release day. I usually find the best approach is to leave it for a day or two, see what people are saying about it online, and then pick it up if you really want to.
IMO it’s generally not a great idea to pre-order anyway because it’s not like they can ever run out
Except the collectors editions, those are physical products and not just bits and bytes. On the Dead space recent one the edition size was defined by how many were preordered, they had a cutoff where they closed the run.
I think one reason is that Bethesda's previous game's, Fallout 76's, release didn't go very smoothly. Not at all smoothly. Internet Historian has a good video about that: The Fall of 76
That and preordering a digital product that literally can't run out has no benefits.
You just put down money for something without any idea what you're getting.
Preordering physical copies used to be a thing because shops would run out of them.
I feel lucky. The only game I have ever pre-ordered was Battlefield 3 for PS3. Considering it's EA and Frostbite was relatively new, I really lucked out