That is, defining the project and the scope and budget - then as things proceed, staying on that same target even though an accurately produced product just isn't fun OR a big game comes along that shakes the industry (Dark Souls, Diablo, Girmoire) and makes every game being developed stop in its tracks. Not sure how I'd design for the way the industry itself is managed.
It seems like the more money a studio has at the moment, the more sloppy they get. It's understandable to a certain extent, but you look at the history of troubled AAA game development and this pops up a lot. Duke Nukem Forever and Diablo III are some fairly big examples of this. Bethesda seems to be in this situation now with Starfield. Fallout 4 was nearly ten years ago, and Starfield just came out. Sure, Fallout 76 was between those two, but I think that was developed under contract and Bethesda only got involved late in it's development? I might be thinking of something else, but I don't think Bethesda proper was that involved in that project. Plus it used a lot of the assets from Fallout 4 as well. But I'm refering to their teams that develop mainline games, and there's an eight to nine year development cycle between FO4 and Starfield. They had a lot of money from all the releases of Skyrim and Fallout 4, so they slopped around until Starfield was released. There's some rumors that Elder Scrolls 6 is "playable" right now, but Bethesda has yet to announce it for their typical November launch date. We'll see.
WTF they did in these years?
Daggerfall was big because it used decent automatic environment generation. (Aside of dungeons, dungeons WERE atrocious.) Morrowind land was done by hand because they wanted tight control. Oblivion and Skyrim were kinda average in terms of landscapes.
Frankly there are not that many things to do when decent game company wants to make game like Skyrim. Bethesda has a lot of experience and tools from making previous TES games, which should allow them to make decent large seamless world with ease. Well 6 years is on the long side and team likely sucked, or they were 80 percent of size, or they should use more automatic content generation. I actually suspect the relatively longer development cycle was because of stuff like dragon shouts...
Oblivion was 1 year in pre-production 4 years in development. (Actually Bethesda tried to put it on Xbox 360, and lately on PS3. Which might explain all these limitations and under par graphics.)
Morrowind was 6 years in development. But that could be explained by theirs attempt to have proper alien looking world, and moving into full 3D.
So, Bethesda has kinda slow development cycle, and for some reasons they tend to release weirdly high number of bugs. Considering they had time to create mostly bug free Skyrim...
Funnily Fallout 3 was 2 years pre-production, and 2 years production.
edit: Actually I wonder, if some of critical members of Bethesda teams didn't retire already. That could explain the fucked up development cycle of TES 6. (and to some extend Starfield)