From experience I know I’ll be downvoted but it is a pretty goddamned impressive engine. And yes that is even considering that Skyrim was buggy, what, 12 years ago?
It’s still buggy after 13 years of patches and re-releases.
Well yeah, that’s what happens when you make enormous games with basically no player safely rails. With unrestricted freedom comes unpredictable interactions and inevitable bugs. Feel free to point out any other game that comes close to the scale of a Bethesda game without being full of bugs.
How quickly people forget how common it was to see Roach on rooftops in the Witcher 3.
GTAas an entire series has tons of reels of people doing ridiculous and hilarious things.
I’ve never understood the weird hate for Bethesda games in that regard.
No one forgets that—the artwork for Roach’s Gwent card has her ON A ROOF.
Yeah I feel like people like to just bandwagon against Bethesda games, but no one makes games with as much detail as them. Hell, even Starfield has an insanely robust physics engine.
But! That’s cool for a game like KSP, where people craft rotating rings to drive circles in the artifical gravity. But in an RPG? Why do they need to track every spoons position? It just looks like they spent too much money on a too capable/complex engine and can’t really innovate because of it.
Play Skyrim and do fus to dah in a tavern or something, having all those physics objects feels amazing. Also being able to walk in a house and steal all the cutlery and junk just feels so immersive for being in the world imo. Not to mention the crafting systems in Fo4 and Starfield using those clutter objects for crafting systems.
Agreed, the way they can preserve the position of any object, anywhere, with thousands of objects and an obscenely large world, is exceedingly impressive.
What I don’t get is why the hell any of that is a priority. It’s a neat party trick, but surely 99.9% of the gameplay value of arranging items for fun could be achieved on the player ship alone.
Like… it’s neat that I can pick up, interact with, and sell every single pen and fork on every table. But is it useful, with a carry weight system deincentivizing that? Fussing with my inventory to find what random crap I accidentally picked up that’s taking up my weight? Is that remarkably better than having a few key obvious and useful pickups? Is it worth giving up 60FPS on console, and having dedicated loading screens for nearly every door and ladder around?
Again, it’s cool that they have this massive procedurally generated world, that a player could spend thousands of hours in. But when that area is boring, does it really beat a handcrafted interesting world and narrative? What good is thousands of hours of content when players are bored and gone before 10 hours?
So like… from a tech perspective, I respect what Starfield is, and it’s very impressive, but as a game it feels like a waste of a lot of very talented work, suffering from a lack of good direction at the top.
I could generally take or leave their clutter items, but persistent NPCs with dynamic schedules or the full stat and inventory systems of the PC are still extremely rare, never mind both. Most games simplify NPCs such that they don’t actually have equipment or just have one item (typically an unlootable weapon) and reduce their stats to just HP and defense stats. By contrast, the only difference between an NPC and the PC in a Bethesda game is that the player has controll over the PC.
For me, if they moved to a new engine it would need those persistent fully-featured NPCs to feel like a Bethesda game. Ten years ago, there wasn’t really anything else that did that. Now, there’s got to be something they can make work. Hell, BG3 has all this stuff, it’s just from a top-down perspective. And it can handle ladders, which Bethesda’s engine still can’t do.
The problem with the latest Bethesda games has not been the engine. It’s the writing and the design choices
People really need to understand what an engine is before complaining about it.
counterpoint: if it isn’t the engine holding them back, then everyone left is just fundamentally bad at designing games (i’m not counting “let’s just copy what we designed last time” as design), and that’s worse
then everyone left is just fundamentally bad at designing games
Obviously. The problem with Bethesda was never the damn engine, they’ve been consecutively dumbing down their games ever since Oblivion. The only anomaly was New Vegas made by Obsidian, which are actually competent at making RPGs and even with the dated FO3 engine at the time they managed to make one of the best games ever. The problem was never the engine, it’s their game design philosophy.
the average player doesn’t care about crunchy rpg systems. they do care if the core gameplay would’ve been outdated in 2010.
bethesda doesn’t seem to be able to improve the core gameplay because the engine can’t cope.
even if you fixed the writing and tossed out the awful procedural generation in favor of hand-crafted environments, at it heart it’s still going to play like a stripped down borderlands 1
bethesda doesn’t seem to be able to improve the core gameplay because the engine can’t cope.
No, Bethesda can’t improve because they keep catering for the lowest common denominator, engine has never had anything to do with it, it never has. They don’t need a complex RPG system with a ton of flashy new things; New Vegas wasn’t complex, it was fairly streamlined as far as RPGs go, what they need is better writers and better game designers that know how make interesting worlds, quests, characters and gameplay mechanics.
even if you fixed the writing and tossed out the awful procedural generation in favor of hand-crafted environments, at it heart it’s still going to play like a stripped down borderlands 1
Because they’ve been dumbing down their games since forever, bring back more robust roleplay with more actions and consequences, fully fleshed out mechanics, get better writers. Just look at Fallout: London, despite the bugs everyone that has played it agrees it’s the best “Bethesda game” since New Vegas, another game that wasn’t actually made by Bethesda. I’ll repeat: the problem was never the engine.
I think they (and by that I mean management) just don’t want to spend the time getting the developers themselves up to speed on a new system. They’ve used the current one for so damn long, they likely based all scheduling on the fact that most of the people working there know it inside and out.
They’ve probably also put considerable work into the next project already and don’t want to start over.
They’ve probably also put considerable work into the next project already
fallout 4 was 9 years ago, and people wanted them to switch to a new engine then
you’re right, of course, but good lord have they had ample time to course correct since then
The train in fallout 3 was just a guy with a train for a head running along a track
That may be silly to think about but it worked.
Is that the same engine they used for Star Field? Because I can hear the creaking from here. It’s absolutely time for a new engine.
Yes, the same they’ve been using since Morrowind.
Yes, and the German city of Cologne is the same since it was built by the romans. Because when the name and the foundations are the same over the ages then everything is the same, no major changes are possible ever!
The philosophical argument is called Theseus’ Ship. Here is a better comparison for you: Unreal Engine. It’s “the same thing” since 1998 or so. There’s also idTech engines, which are “the same” since Quake. Either engine would better fit the Cologne analogy.
Your city comparison also misses the point because Creation 2.0 is still using the equivalent of roman aqueducts and plumbing in 2024. They might work, sure, but not for a city of 1 million people where every building and home has its own plumbing. A better comparison would be a city that has some road holes older than some of its own residents.
Yeah, the Unreal Engine comparison is what I normally do. But change is the spice of life 😁
Have they played their own games?
Bethesda RPGs are fun. But I’d say they are far from “perfectly tuned.” Always found them to be wonky, clunky, bug-riddled.
When was the last RPG they released that didn’t require tons of patching?
It was 10 years into playing Skyrim on my 4th medium of playing it that learned the courier wasn’t supposed to be naked. I thought it was a comment on his poverty or something
It makes sense. It would be pretty costly to train everyone there on a new engine and tweak the new engine enough to play nice with the kind of games they want to make.
I mean it is, but it might be less costly than continuing on the proprietary engine. CD Projekt and Halo both cut their losses and moved to UE5 as a compromise moving forward .
If CD Projekt, creators of one of the best RPGs of the last 20 years, thinks they can benefit from an engine switch I’m inclined to think they might be right.
Skyrim is a better RPG than anything CDPR made, and Skyrim isn’t a good RPG.
Perfectly tuned my bubbley ass bro
Just give this over two decades old crypt of an engine up already
