I wonder how long Bethesda will beat this dying horse. Don’t get me wrong, the engine is great for modding, but that’s about it. Games made with it are dated, janky, and pretty much frozen in time… circa 2011.
I wonder how long Bethesda will beat this dying horse. Don’t get me wrong, the engine is great for modding, but that’s about it. Games made with it are dated, janky, and pretty much frozen in time… circa 2011.
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Meanwhile Half-Life: Alyx was found using code that pre-dates Valve as a company.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree that Bethesda has some deep rooted issues in their codebase but I don’t think the problem is “they’re still using Creation Engine” cause most game engines are updated by just updating the existing code.
If I had to guess some of it is also probably a shared framework that sits on top on the engine that results in the gameplay mechanics being so similar rather than the actual engine but eh, that’s semantics.
Complaining about the Creation Engine as the root of Bethesda’s problems is…I’ll say misguided. Frankly the problem is the company is run by lazy people who know they can put out garbage and it will still sell.
The benefits of creation engine are modding/ease of content creation in general and the physics that are able to be tied to all objects/all objects being actual props.
Modding is still cool, but there really isn’t any use for physics on objects. And personally, I’d rather get a game that doesn’t feel like it’s working around decades of tech debt than a mediocre at absolutely best game that relies on a modding community to get true value out of.
I don’t think the engine is the problem, it’s their framework for games being too identical.
I feel like the loading screens to do anything in these games is the thing that makes it feel the most dated. In starfield going from one planet, taking off, traveling to the system where the new planet is, landing and leaving the ship is like 6 loading screens. Also not an engine problem but every companion being a good person limits role-playing when if you do anything bad they tell you off like a mom putting an 8 yo in time out for putting a baseball through the neighbors window.
Don’t worry, I’m sure the community will be there to beat a dead horse even longer.
Edit: Also… hasn’t there been a whopping *one* game made so far on Creation Engine 2.0? Like the engine blaming in this post seems *really* desperate this time, should game developers just game the engine every game now lol?
Half the game industry still has lines of code based on the Quake games
Unreal 5 still has Unreal 1 code
The problem was never the engine.
I mean it seems like it can do anything.
Just very shittily.
The moment a game releases with as detailed and interactable interiors as Bethesda games and at the same density, and can pull this off without loading screens or mayor performance issues, I will agree that the creation engine is at fault.
As far as I’m aware, these games do not exist. Every other game I played limits and seperates interiors and/or makes them really basic and unintresting.
I haven’t played every game however, so i’m open to counterexamples. And maybe Avowed will prove me wrong in a few months.
I wonder how many Redditors will beat this dead horse.
How long until Epic ditches Unreal V. It’s a dead engine that they keep modifying, frozen in time
They’re not gonna change it, unfortunately
IS it even good to mod in? I think its more that its well known rather than actually being good
So a few things.
The engine isn’t the main reason Bethesda games feel like the same game over and over. That is more complicated and has to do with design decisions made for these games. Ever since Skyrim, these games have become completely formulaic for Bethesda, and they’ve been riding the coattails of their success for over 20 years now ever since Morrowind, and later Oblivion, became huge successes for the company.
That all culminated with Skyrim, which sold at levels completely unseen for Bethesda before.
So they figure, why not slap a fresh coat of paint on it repeatedly and keep releasing basically the same game for over a decade.
And it worked.
But now people are bored of it, and Bethesda, rather than acknowledging they need to do something new, doubles down and accuses critics of Starfield of not understanding the vision for the game and other idiocy like that.
The engine is there like a spectre through this all, causing these games to consistently have the same look, feel, and even bugs as the ones that came before.
So in short: the engine is part of the issue, but the main issue is that Bethesda hasn’t actually made a truly new game since Skyrim (one could even argue as far back as Morrowind if you wanted).
I doubt they learn this lesson until an Elder Scrolls mainline series tanks in sales, however. And if that happens, they probably end up on microsofts chopping block.
I wish they would ban reddit instead of tiktok
Hey I own one of those lol
Jeez! Can we get a spoiler tag on this?
We all know Elder Scrolls 6 is gonna be Skyrim with slightly better graphics.
They’ll still be glitched out water, half loaded trees in the distance and every city will have 5 buildings that all require a loading screen.
Cool
While folks are definitely levelling legit criticisms here, I’d like to see their game engines.
First, programming video games (or more accurately real-time simulation) is among the most difficult computer programming there is. All kinds of state management concerns , interaction of graphics+physics+audio systems, there’s just no end of pain-in-the-ass problems to solve.
Taking THAT pile of problems and saying “I’m gonna create an extensible generic solution that solves all of these problems while also solving 80% of any domain-specific problems designers may encounter.” ? There are things that are difficult and there are things that are easy to do wrong and creating a game engine is both.
It’s a new engine, we just developed it. (Still has the same bugs from fallout 4 in fallout 76)
People don’t realize how little the engine has changed and give Bethesda too much credit when defending them.
Do people really know what they’re talking about when they claim an engine is old? There’s no such thing as starting over again with new versions of an engine. Do you know how complex RED Engine 4 is to make a game like Cyberpunk: 2077? Unreal Engine 5 literally cannot run such a game as it is now. Okay, but do you think RED Engine 4 is completely new from the ground up with nothing from RED Engine 3? Of course not. Engines get iterated all the time.
The problem isn’t that Creation Engine is “too old.” It just has certain limitations and issues like any engine (just like RED Engine 4 did leading to CD Projekt abandoning it for future titles). Even Unreal Engine 5 is impressive in a lot of ways, but that shader compilation stuttering issue on PC sure isn’t. I think Creation Engine is largely fine for the games Bethesda wants to make (easily moddable open world games with interactivity), and if Starfield had better writing and design, people wouldn’t be focusing so much on it.
Creation Engine was outdated back in 2002 when it was still called “Gamebryo”.
I had a friend who worked there, showed me some failed prototypes the company decided not to push for. They’ve been averse to change all that time.
the problem isn’t the engine
the problem is they just got worse at game design over the years
The thing people don’t really understand is, the Creation Engine is very good and doing very niche things that no other engine really does.
Like, take Skyrim. You drop a wheel of cheese in the middle of Whiterun. IT IS THERE FOREVER.
Every time you go back to town, the wheel of cheese is where you left it. Every wheel of cheese you dropped. Every item you dropped. Wherever you left it, there it will remain, and the game has to keep track of all that.
Not a lot of engines really focus on that. You can’t just “do that in Unreal Engine”. It’s not so simple.
(BTW I’m not defending Bethesda, just explaining why it is the way it is.)
I feel like people who are saying Bethesda’s problem is not the engine don’t know enough about game dev. It is 100% the engine. It cannot handle large modern games of the type they want to make. They still have not figured out any way to optimize their games using it, leading me to believe it’s probably impossible.
They made a space exploration game with loading screens between planets. Like come on lol.
Don’t get me wrong, they have other issues like bad quest design and bad writing too, but the engine is the source of all their technical BS
You can easily tell that someone knows practically nothing about game development when they complain about the creation engine being “old”, bro Unreal Engine 5, Source 2, among others are based off previous engines, the problem with Bethesda is their game design (Starfield is the most notable example) and lack of proper game testing, just compare Fallout 4 on release to modern FO4 with just a couple of mod fixes installed, it’s night and day on how shitty it was on release and how good it is nowadays with updates and a couple of fixes from the community.
How to out yourself as a person who has no understanding of game Engine creation or game development. ..
The creation engine is here to stay and it’s a fine engine… Bethesda softworks is just a small (AAA) studio in comparison to their contemporaries and they often become far more ambitious than what they’re capable of.
The creation engine does a lot of things that other engines simply cannot do. I would be absolutely devastated if they announced that Fallout 5 would be on UE6 (or whatever it is in 2030) as it just wouldn’t feel like a fallout game.
Daring today, aren’t we?
Half of r/Starfield on their way over here with torches and pitchforks now.