Admittedly, Bethesda's work process is such that they probably had 76 "mostly done" when they announced it (which makes it a little more ironic that it's still only "mostly done" in most people's eyes).

I'm not against the concept of a pre-order, but I think you need to think critically about it. I use Kickstarter a lot, and I've had a lot of good experiences and bad experiences with it.

The video games industry has taken the concept in a very toxic direction. It's often more of an elite/"real fan" distinction that they draw with pre-orders. It relies on FOMO rather than "help us build this game." Big developers know what they're making anyway, and the early funds go toward their next game instead of improving their current title. I really think an early access system would have been ideal here, and generally would be better than pre-orders for AAA titles, but that flies in the face of traditional publishing and will therefore never be adopted except in a similarly crappy, toxic way.

But I work with print rulebooks, where you've got less complicated design processes, so I'm predisposed to judge video games harshly because they're the glitzy "dad's favorite" younger brother.