Skyrim Lead Designer admits Bethesda shifting to Unreal would lose ‘tech debt’, but that ‘is not the point’
Skyrim Lead Designer admits Bethesda shifting to Unreal would lose ‘tech debt’, but that ‘is not the point’
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If Bethesda shifts to unreal engine I’ll never buy a game from them again.
Creation engine is massively better, I’ll just play modded Skyrim, Starfield, and Fallout 4 forever.
Why would anyone want unreal engine in a Bethesda game? The appeal of Bethesda is the buggy engine that allows creativity and mods.
Man this is such a conflicting topic for me. I want Bethesda to move forward with a better optmized engine, but I also know that its this shit engine that makes the majority of mods possible.
Hopefully, if they do develop in unreal, they provide a good modkit since the start.
When everyone talks about Bethesda moving to Unreal engine, it reminds me that most of us know very little how a game engine works. Unreal is great, but it has big issues. Especially when it comes to open worlds. Also I have yet to see a game using Unreal where I can flip a table and everything on it goes flying. I can pick the table up and put everything back. Not applicable in every game but I think it is impressive when playing an RPG. But let’s be real (pun intended) for a sec and acknowledge that Bethesda’s problems are not it’s engine, it’s out of touch devs full of hubris.
Owning IP is important, and that can include the game engine. They are big enough that they don’t want to be beholden to Epic Games to build their own products.
As I understand it, Creation is very, very good at placing & tracking of a bunch of physical objects on a map, each with their own physics. That’s an integral part of Bethesda’s game design, and can’t be substituted easily. Their options are to fundamentally change how they make their games, keep their fingers crossed and keep chugging along with their current engine, or spend two years cleaning up Creation’s spaghetti code.
Honestly, I think the best thing they could do is that last option – have their engineers spend two years fixing & documenting their engine while their creatives take their time on pre-production for Fallout and Elder Scrolls. Yes, that would delay both franchises even longer, but the extra time might actually let them focus on the writing and actually have a decent narrative for once, and not having to fight their engine should actually give them more freedom to be creative when it comes to the actual game. I actually liked the art direction in Starfield – they don’t need help there.
And in the meantime, they could contract out some smaller interim games using the current engine & assets, like they did with New Vegas. They just need to swallow their pride and let someone else play in their sandbox for a bit. It might sting the ego a bit, but the money they made off of New Vegas probably made it go down a bit easier.
Toxic bubble mentality personified, why change if you have slaves that keep gluing the engine together? It’s crazy to me how some people consider this a “good” thing, the base product is so weak and mediocre, but that’s not a “problem” because the modders are going to fix it. And if you change the engine, the devs will actually have to work, justify the insane price point, but the mods will be limited… and that’s a “bad” thing? C’mon now, Bethesda is so pampered, disconnected with the reality of the market. And don’t be naive, to assume the engine changing, that will magically improve the writing and gameplay design in general. The jurassic engine is the core of the problem, but Bethesda is plagued with issues
This topic is going clear over people’s heads.
His last quote summarizes the entire issue perfectly.
>“I would be shocked if that entered into the discussions as to whether or not they should go to Unreal Engine,” we were told. “You got to make the best damn game you can make, and then once you’ve done that, then you look at your mod community and say, what can I do to serve you?
>But you can’t let the needs of the mod community dictate whether the game is what the game needs to be to begin with. Because if you produce a substandard game, you’re not going to have a mod community.”
And that is why Bethesda will probably not switch engines. It doesn’t matter what engine they used: the flaws in Starfield come from the core of its design, not technical limitations.
This sub’s hate for Unreal is nonsensical and weird
Bethesda could absolutely switch engines, they’re just too lazy to make it work for them because they’re well aware people are going to buy whatever they put out no matter what engine it runs on. Bethesda stuck with Creation Engine for Starfield and look how well that turned out for them.
Gamebryo, the creation engine, is crippling their game development. The cracks have been showing for a while, but they’ve widened into yawning chasms in starfield.
And while you’d lose out on modding in the short term? Long term you could easily have mods introduced. There would be initial tech debt by having your staff learn the new engine, but past that you’d have a much better long term outlook.
Every game they insist on using the creation engine is just making it a bigger task to transition away from it. Meanwhile every game past skyrim has been suffering for their insistence on using it.
The engine is FINE. It’s the lacking creativity, writing team, and overall game that is lacking. If you are going to use an inferior engine for some aspects at least make the aspects it thrives at good.
Like, I enjoy the gameplay of Fallout 4 but good lord they need to work out the story more, role play and decisions if they are making games with this engine.
Make the games replayable, story and writing rich. Then, you have a thriving community to make mods for the game.
The real issue is their team’s work ethic and direction. It’s just not good.
That’s not to say upgrades to their current engine wouldn’t be unwelcome. It’s that their main issues come from other directions at the moment.
Stutter-fest plus lose “modability”? No thanks.
For all its faults, at least Bethesda games allow you to customize them to your liking
Bethesda own id software. If they switch to Unreal, something is seriously wrong.
As a game dev, this sub never ceases to amaze me with what absolute confidence people parrot clueless narratives when it comes to game development.
Bethesda games without mods are mediocre at best. This would be a death sentence for them.