Skyrim lead designer says Bethesda can’t just switch engines because the current one is “perfectly tuned” to make the studio’s RPGs
Skyrim lead designer says Bethesda can’t just switch engines because the current one is “perfectly tuned” to make the studio’s RPGs
42 Comments
For fucks sake.
Yes if the game you want to release is a bland rpg from 2011, then it sure is perfectly tuned.
I’d rather them try something new and bold and fail than whatever it is they’re doing currently
then don’t expect much success with those games, starfield should have been a lesson to learn from
Piece of shit engine that if you took the latest version back in time by 10 years it would still be a piece of shit.
This is double speak for “our teams are trained to work in our shitty in-house engine, and we don’t want to hire real talent to make good games.”
I can’t wait for Todd to hype another floaty, broken “rpg” slop fest.
I look forward to Emil telling us how good his writing is on Twitter too.
How can they see the success of games like BG3, compare it to the Starfield disaster, and still be like “Our technology from 2011 is still adequate”.
The worst bit is, I bet the next ES and Fallout games will be massive comerical success, even if they are trash to play.
People like Bruce Nesmith have been at Bethesda developing the creation engine for 30+ years. Its all they know, and they’ll fight tooth and nail to keep it.
The management at Bethesda has to be some of the all time stupidest people in gaming history. Sitting on a literal infinite cash cow and they’ve squandered it for a decade and a half.
mods show that the problem is not the engine. Fallout 4 and Skyrim are pretty impressive full of mods. graphically and technologically.The only problem that the engine can be blamed for is the loading and not that much. because there are mods that remove several loadings
all the remaining negative points in starfield is Bethesda’s fault and it would continue to exist in any engine.
List me any other engine where you can drop a thing from inventory, it is visisble with its own physics and it will stay there after hours of adventure. That’s the USP of Bethesda engine
It’s true. If the game didn’t have shit character models, shit animations, shit combat mechanics, shit lighting, and the same bugs and glitches for two decades straight, would it even be a Bethesda rpg?
This is something that’s sort of weird to have players talking about. Just like I wouldn’t tell an architect what tools to use I wouldn’t with developers either. It doesn’t matter what’s used to make a game at the end of the day. Unless the developers are the ones complaining they want to do something that they can’t because of the engine.
Do people here want every game in Unreal Slop 5 or what?
The only benefit that I can think of for staying with the engine, is that it is a highly mod-able engine
I don’t see why they should change it if they actualy work on making the game run smooth and fix bugs. Most of the issues Bethesda have is lack of good writing and making good map.
If they change, it will be most likely be that shitty Unreal engine which a stutter fest. Also, if they change, people would need to kiss good bye to modability and consol commands.
Take away CE and you literally take away what makes Bethesda games Bethesda games. Starfields problems weren’t from the CE engine, it’s because the way the game was built and how different exploration is to the previous games.
I don’t need a cookie cutter Unreal game like all the others. Jesus.
Please casuals stay far away from ruining Bethesda like you do with others. Lord knows you’ll get UR5 and still bitch like a baby anyways.
It was never about the engine. Engine is a tool, just use it properly.
Surprising amount of technical illiteracy for a subreddit called “PCMasterrace”.
What he really says is, that the current engine and developers are out of tune to make the kind of games people like today.
Its gonna hurt so bad when ES6 comes out and its just the same let down as starfield but for some reason bethesda will call it wildly successful
As long as they stay on Gamebryo, I’m never buying another Bethesda game as long as I live. It is utter trash and there’s a serious drought of creativity, attention to detail and just *standards* at Bethesda.
There is absolutely no reason for Starfield to suffer the same kind of jank as Morrowind, other than the fact that Bethesda are at their hearts lazy developers who think their fanbase will turn a blind eye to all their flaws.
I don’t think they need to change engines, in fact I’m a little worried about UE5 dominance, but hopefully all this talk gives them the impetus they need to enhance the current engine and bring it up to modern standards.
i’d rather have Bethesda stick with their in-house engine for good than ever switch to Unreal Engine 5. the Bethesda engine adds a layer of charm that is unmatched in gaming.
Most gamers have no clue what a game engine even is. It’s just a buzzword they throw around meaning ‘pretty graphics’ or specific game features for them. They don’t understand that how you use a game engine is what matters. Most gamers also think UE5 is a completely new engine compared to UE4 lol.
I stopped counting posts saying how Cyberpunk released with so many bugs ‘because of the outdated engine’ and how ‘they never be able to fix the problems’. Now look at it. The game is pretty much the gold standard when it comes to optimized open world games with SOTA graphics.
Sure, you could ‘just’ switch to one of those fancy pants hype engines like UE, reality is, a game engine means nothing if your tooling and asset pipeline is not tuned for it. I don’t know any other game that handles 10s of thousands of game objects with permanence and physics so gracefully like in Starfield.
What the creation engine wants and attempts to do is fantastic; how it executes that is extremely subpar.
EDIT: It cannot be stated enough how much a success ES6 must be or Bethesda will “die”.
I feel like BGS is fighting uphill battle here. It is absolutely possible to do a technically good game on home brew engine, like CDPR did with CP2077 (supreme graphics and close to no loading screens), but it is obvious that BGS are not able to pull it off for a long time, even after bragging about how much they improved engine for Starfield. Games become more complex in a lot of ways, and resources spent on engine have to increase too. Using 3rd party engine and spending their effort only on creation of their own tooling to increase productivity sounds like a good compromise (essentially, what CDPR does after CP2077).
But in my opinion, BGS problems with uninspired writing, lackluster direction, and scope creep are far greater, than technical ones.
If the engine cant handle stuff without that many loading screens, then you really should be looking into a new engine.
Yeah, it is pretty tuned to churn out the same thing with an overpaint. May be try making a different game for a change ?
I actually enjoyed Starfield. I can’t tell you why and I know it has zero consequences to choices, the environments outside of that one Vegas style planet were terrible, the temples were literally copy and paste, the story is dire but it was like a warm coffee in the morning or a Sunday roast.
Still, I’m glad I got it on gamepass.
I love threads full of normies who know nothing.
Creation engine certainly has problems.
But plenty of Bethesda’s problems existed long before people began bitching about it and are only coming to light now due to the actual talent in the company gradually leaving over the years and them not learning from mistakes, being over confident in that ”’Bethesda Magic”’ and as shown with Starfield, not having a world built by people with actual writing skill to use as a crutch, among many other things
Starfield has to load too many worlds and it’s a boring game in many other ways other than the engine. I don’t think the engine will bad for TES 6 though. There were quite a few buildings in Starfield where you could see the outside world properly rendered. If they can make it more seamless and keep optimizing it I’d prefer it over Unreal or any other mainstream engine. The game will also keep it’s unique character with the Bethesda engine.
I really tried to like their RPGs, and even after hours sunken into Fallout NV and Skyrim, I just end up “bored” by their worlds. There was always a moment when I go “too bland, too empty, same old NPCs” and while some of it was due to technological limits of the time, I still had this feeling when a friend showed me Fallout 4.
The most insane thing to me is ZeniMax owns Bethesda but also iD Software, the maker of iD Tech 5 the “godfather of 3D engines” which has been successfully used to create a post apocalyptic, open-world shooter in 2011 when they released Rage. They couldn’t do that with more dialog options?
Perfect designed to make RPGs…. From 15 years ago
Translation: “we haven’t learned anything from our mistakes”
Bethesda is toast.
Perfectly tuned to the key of shit
Perfectly tuned to keep making the dated robotic feeling games they’ve been making for decades. I get Oblivion and Skyrim but most of their other games are mid as fuck.
Engine that cant handle open world games and relies on loading screens in current gen consoles.
To make the same copy/pasted mess. Yeah, we know about that and that’s why a lot of people are asking for a new engine
It’s the same design that’s kept it from evolving.
So many games refusing to change and all I can think of is assassins creed and ffxiv as the longest contenders, definitely more but those must be the most popular?
My consoles and my computers disagree.
Their senior developers are old and don’t want to have to learn a new way of doing things so close to retirement.
“We’re arguing about the game engine, let’s argue about the game,” he says. “The game engine is not the point, the game engine is in service to the game itself. You and I could both identify a hundred lousy games that used Unreal. Is it Unreal’s fault? No, it’s not Unreal’s fault.”
So you’re saying you just aren’t very good at making games?