I feel like rambling
I understanding having concerns over the content, tone, and gameplay of Skyrim if you felt they went in the wrong directions in certain respects with Oblivion. That's about as strong of a prediction as is currently justified about the game based on the insanely little that is known about its actual content. Based on how one felt about the previous two games it is a little unreasonable to be expressing any stronger sentiments about a game that does not yet exist than "concern."
Sure it's perfectly reasonable to have formed strong opinions about the games released already though. I mean... they're out you can play them. Given the incredible differences between some of the Elder Scrolls games from one installment to the next - as ell as the very different experiences one has in playing any of the spinoffs- any talk of a truly meaningful "trend" beyond the technological one is something between soothsaying and blowing hot air. Obviously though if you haven't liked their recent games compared to how you liked their older games, why wouldn't you be more pessimistic than optomistic right? What is ridiculous is to proclaim "it wil be crap because..." and pretend the words that follow "because" provide any more support for that prediction than the simple fact that you hadn't liked their more recent products. I mean the only thing anyone is really able to argue honestly right now is whether or not they think they themselves are likely to like it using what ammounts to the same supporting evidence - whether or not they thought recent Bethesda games were better/worse than their predecessors and whether or not they liked the last bethesda game or two they bought. K- so basically
There's actually nothing wrong with that in the thread. That's the basis for the entire original article above - except they seemed to be giving excessive credence to the fact that they liked Morrowind better than Oblivion as the basis for predicting a downward trend. I wasn't a particular fan of Ultima VI over the previous games -besides the vastly improved graphics. This in no way predicted how I would feel about Ultima VII, which remains one of my favorite games of all times. Heck the parts of Ultima VIII I most took issue with and disliked provided no useful prediction for the principal reason I absolutely hate Ultima IX. Having played VIII I was having high hopes for the direction the story and tone had taken. Ultima VII, SI, VIII, and UW II all represented fairly novel stories and villains compared to previous Ultimas and I appreciate the dark tone the games took even if VIII took the gloom a little too far.
If were to use my opinions of these games and any apparent trend in tone, design, and theme over the course of that portion of the series I would never have imagined my playing of Ultima XI would be plagued by a constant sense that Care Bears should appear at any moment to assist the avatar in vanquishing the guardian with beams of saccarine sweet light and an important reminder of the the value of caring. Really at the end there I was half expecting the sillouttes of carebares to appear behind the symbols of the vitrues. Still if I had said I would probably not like IX as much as VII since I did not like VIII as much as VII and VII SI or UW II I would not have had reason to think the statement foolish.
The most empty and useless predictions though are those about the engine and how it will impact game quality since the development process of the Skyrim engine diverges from both Morrowind's engine development process and Oblivion's engine development process. That and we don't know anything about it whatsoever besides that it's not gamebryo and it's also probably not the Infinity Engine. I'm pretty confident about that prediction being accurate although it is useless. Anything more than predicting the obvioust is likely to be about as accurate as my post is likely to be concise and coherent.
If they are indeed developing a
new engine from scratch… just imagine how many bugs it'll have on release……… just another reason to not get excited about this.
Hard to relate faults in Bethesdas recents games which used a heavily repurosed 3rd party engine with a collection of 3rd party extensions to make it suitable to those games with potential problems in a 1st party engine designed from the ground up with the game in mind. The fact that the games most often cited as evidence of the buggyness and incompleteness of Bethesda games used 3rd part engines from the same developer while this one does not does not imply that this one will by virtue of not using the same or similar 3rd party engine os inherently more likely to have problems does not make sense.
This reasoning would similar to the following. A Homebuilder has contracted to the same subcontracting group to o wire the last couple of houses he built. Those houses all had creaky floors, poor paint jobs, and faulty wiring. The homebuilder decides to find and directly hire an electrician who will just install wiring in houses this homebuilder builds. What you are saying is like concluding that now that the Homebuilder has hired his own dedicated electrician his homes will get worse than they were before. That does not follow at all. In the same vein this does not imply new houses will not have the same paint/carpentry issues as the ones he already has built nor is the new electrician a guarantee that these houses will not have faulty wiring - though it seems a reasonable attempt at least that one issue.
Really now- if they said they were going to develop a seperate interface and menu system for the PC rather than just use a tried and true reskinning of the Oblivion interface/menu system in all platforms... would you be back to say how this will simply introduce more glitches?
Some of the problems were common across multiple gamebryo (and its predecessor) implementations (from RTS games to games like Fallout 3) including memory leak issues and problems integrating physics systems and other technologies that had to be coupled to it which were neither developed by the Gamebryo team nor by anyone at Bethesda.
That being said there have been a host of bugs unique to the Bethesda created Gamebryo games (this is the bad paint and creaky floors from my house example)- though it would be silly to think any significant number the programmers who made those games had very much at all to do with the actual creation of this new engine. Beyond "being able to code" the skillsets involved and experience required for creating an engine from the ground up are quite different. There's that and the fact the the programmers who were responsible for repurposing and modifying the gamebryo engine for Oblivion were busy working on Fallout 3 for most of the first couple years that Skyrim had been in development.
Considering Bethesda has not had to develop an engine for an Elder Scrolls or any of their other AAA titles for upwards of 15 years - and existing staff with even any experience heavily modifying an engine (those who did so for morrowind and fallout 3) were otherwise occupied, the team that developed the engine for Skyrim is either a new bethesda project team or a collection of software engineers from other Zenimax companies for the purpose of building the engine. It is impossible to know what technology this engine would be built on for certain (though Zenimax does own the id Tech engine and some other less likely candidate technolgies.) What is possible to be certain of is that the people involved with developing the new engine had, as a whole, very little if anything to do with Morrowind, Oblivion, or Fallout 3 or whatever pet peeves you have with those games.
There is no reason as of yet to be able to say anything about how good the engine will be since this is the first engine this team has developed for Bethesda - with the unlikely exception being if Bethesda scoured the globe to round up mostly laid off development team responsible for the Gamebryo engine. This is almost impossible though since most of the Gamebryo layoffs did not occur until late 2009 - far too late for Bethesda to have pounced and reassembled this game-engine-developing version of the A-Team (yes- sarcasm.) I suppose maybe the rounded up the original team responsible for developing their last in-house engine - though that would probably require dragging a few old programmers out of retirement at gunpoint. Well that or dragging a few executives out of their comfy offices and forcing them to program again.
So since the people who developed the engine for Skyrim could not have been the development staff at Emergent (hint- that's the company that developed the engines for Morriwnd, Oblivion, and Fallout 3) as they had not been laid off yet; and they could also not have been primarily involved in the repurposing of the general Gamebryo product for Fallout 3 or Oblivion (look at the credits). Most of the staff who had worked on modifying and re-purposing the outside developed Gamebryo engine for use in Oblivion and did not also move on to other jobs at other companies were doing the same for Fallout 3 during most of the first several years that Skyrim was simultaneously under development.
Basically - regardless of the severity of the engine-related problems in other Bethesda games produced in the past those problems are wholly unrelated to the new engine. Heck, the new engine can't even be based off of gamebryo technology as Emergent is still offering the exclusive ownership to that technology and its further development for sale so this engine can not be the continued development of the Gamebryo engine.
Unless it is a flat out lie to call this a new internally developed engine there is simply nothing we can compare it to yet to predict how great or awful it will be. It makes about as much sense to guess at the quality of the new engine based on experiences with past Bethesda games as it would have to make predictions that someone who bakes mishap-pen and bland apple pies couldn't possibly tend to a successful orchard.
