There is no needs for new. Only improvement.

Weird demand this new stuff as people on this site are addicted to UgoIgo, an antiquated format and most products, not only do not add improvements to the UgoIgo department but also do not match the level of quality of past UgoIgo products.

Nothing new and worse.


Or focus.

The article reports physics issues over 60 FPS.

TES does not benefit from higher FPS. It adds nothing.
Running smoothly at 144FPS wont make it a good game. Running smoothly at 60 FPS capped wont make it a poor game.

This demand shows the cultural supremacist background: the product must be meant for people, if it is not, then people feel insecure.
This kind of demand come from people who buy a rig not to play game but products that run at max current technology.

TES6 is unlikely to show any improvement over TES5, causes wont be 60 FPS only.
Higher framerate adds nothing.

144? Who on twitch cares. Stream output can't reach that frequency.
On the other hand, gamers gonna game.

Please Joxer, it was the first post in months that Chien wrote without using the S word. But then, you had to provoke him. :)

If I knew how to use meme generators on internet you'd be seeing an avatar "stirring the pot since apr 2009." ;)

Wait, you can't give up those radiant quests, level-scaled enemies and randomized, boring loot only to stay at home, furnituring it :)

I do not care that much about the Engine. Engine development, when an internal process, is done through lot of iterations and the codebase present in Skyrim has been modified a lot since the last 8 years.
With Bethesda, I am more concerned about bugs in the game itself and their slow or lack of support on that matter. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition (2016) was launched with hundreds of bugs already present in the first version (2011).

For me Fallout 76 is not so much a game than their own little world scale beta to implement what every other huge companies have implemented years ago: Always Online.

Despite what people say it probably means Mod death, unless you consider skinning or changing the color of some objects a mod. It is unlikely than Bethesda would allow something like the Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch to correct the thousand of bugs still present in that game.

I'm with you, that's why I still play Morrowind. Modded graphics are decent and the lack of physics makes decorating easier.

While I do like that the Creation/Gamebryo engines have been wonderful resources for modders, I'm not too happy to see this news (though predictable as it was).

I had been saying to friends and family for years that the Gamebryo/Creation engines were very old and outdated. Bethesda was so insistent on reusing older technology, that by the time a game like The Witcher 3 came along, it completely upended one of their titles (like Fallout 4) by showing them that a game could look gorgeous and run beautifully. Top notch writing, fantastic character development, and so much more were the cherries on top - much of which Bethesda titles lack already. Now Fallout 4's flaws are out there in the open for everyone to see. And I'm glad, because now the general public is starting to realize how, well, dated the foundation is.

Interestingly, it seems like some AAA studios get a free pass on good reviews, in that positive reception is proportionate to the amount of hype a game receives if it is made by a certain developer (Rockstar and Bethesda are good examples), even if the average player rating is much lower (RDR2 and Fallout 4 reflect that). Though, players are seemingly becoming more aware of developers recycling older designs, which is wonderful. Fallout 4 was fairly received by critics, but a lot of them made note about how aged it looked and functioned in comparison to recent games like TW3.

That said, I'm disappointed. I wanted Bethesda to spend the money and time to move on to something newer and better built - money is clearly not an issue. Again, I'm happy for the modders, but I shouldn't have to resort to using a mod to fix a quest bug or engine limitation.

One thing I do know is that modders fix as much as they break. Meaning people are quick to say that beth games always need to be fixed by modders. Yet I played Morrowind, some of Oblivion, some of FO3, Skyrim, and FO4 all unmodded with few issues. Modding makes it better but modding can also cause some of the biggest head-aches. So I don't buy into the whole "broken" dogma people have with the games if only because personally I have never had any big issues with any of them. I have had far more problems using mods than without.

I have thousands of hours in the combined games and do not use unofficial patch mods - as often that becomes a modding headache to get compatible stuff. Most of the stuff they fix (although not all) is more minor and not game breaking. At least in my experience which is all I have to go by.

I seem to be lucky as so many games out there you find people who seem to stumble over every single bug in existence while others never seem to find them.

I also think the Beth engine does some things differently then say W3 or ACO or games like that as far as physics, tracking objects, interacting with things … but could be wrong on that. Was something I read by another poster on these forums a while back.

I have thousands of hours in games like Skyrim and FO4 yet only about 50 or so in W3 and that is because I restarted it 3 times trying to get into it and failed each time to get captured by it. So a fancier engine isn't enough to capture my interest so I have a strong bias there to begin with.

That being said I am not above wanting a new engine either. Just that I understand some of the reasoning on keeping the old one. Still eventually you need to upgrade to keep with the times (as @Maylander pointed out) and you can only patch, update, and try to renovate an old engine so much. FO4 is nice enough but you really need mods+ENB to make it look its best. That being said I never had issues with its mechanics myself so don't use any mods that change those.

Still I would love to see some type of game that merges RDR2 + W3 + SKYRIM.

100% agree. Odyessy is amazing. Yes there's micro transactions but it's beautiful and right on the heels of Witcher 3 in quality.

I totally respect your experience @wolfgrimdark but I do not know how you can play the full campaign of Skyrim without for example a mod like the Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch. There are like thousand of fixes, going from trivial misplaced texture mappings, to essential quest fixes. Many of those bugs being present since the first Skyrim edition.

I seem to remember some of your posts, years ago, where you mentioned you loved to mod Skyrim. You returned to the vanilla experience since?
The talk was around Werewolf: The Apocalypse, a tabletop from White wolf and you posted some screenshots of your quite modded Skyrim :)

I used the UNOF patch for a while but for the most part didn't see it as needed for my own game play. I simply didn't have that many issues with the base game and I have done all the main questlines for vanilla and all the DLC. When the UNOF moved to Legendary and a lot of mods became out of date that had dependency on it I stopped using it. I know it fixes tons and tons of things. But since my game worked fine without and I didn't seem to notice not having it installed, after playing for a month without it, I stopped using it as it meant more flexibility with many older mods I used.

I suspect some of that is little issues seldom bother me in games and the only issues I had were small side quests ones or ones that had work arounds - like the Vilkas one.

I have 3340 hours in Skyrim. Half of that is probably from time spent making ENB persets, mods, and doing story writing and screen-archery. The rest was mostly game play.

I still mod a lot though. I have 140 plugins (excluding official) and 267 overall mods. My game has been nice and stable ever since the fall creators update came out for win10. While I now use Vortex for FO4 I continue to use NMM for Skyrim. I don't use LOOT or BASH or any of that but I also don't use a lot of overhaul or complicated mods that tend to cause more conflicts.

I still play on classic though. Don't have any interest in SSE.

I just started a new game with a Tiefling character I made in the CK and have an existing game with a main character I write about. Overall running smooth so no real complains.

I am most certainly NOT saying the UNOF does nothing - its very useful for many people. I can only say in my own experience I simply have not had any big issues (where a big issue for me is a bug that crashes the game or otherwise breaks the main quest line). Could just be lucky after 7 years I guess.

PS - Also modders are a niche to some degree so obviously non-modders do not use the UNOF patch. I just don't think it is as really critical as some make it out to be. People's mileage varies on these things though. I know many passionate modders swear by it. I just don't happen to be one of them.

Yuck, the same engine. Really? Yes, this is Bethesda….

I'm not a mod heavy player. I have hundreds of hours on PS3, 360, PC and PS4. The only 2 annoying bugs I can remember was:

1) Losing Lydia completely once. Just disappeared. Maybe she just hated being sworn to carry my burdens.

2) My weapons became a permanent fixture on my weapon rack in Solitude. It was fixed the next week with a patch.

That, and having to use a mod for Ultrawide support, since it's not official. Boohoo me.

Again I get what you're saying, but a lot of it is still just an experienced guess when it comes to game engines. I also work for an enterprise company, and we have an entire team of developers that do nothing but fix and re-write in-house enterprise accounting software programs full time. If you're still using an old Foxpro database, eventually you're going to want to migrate that to an SQL backbone. Foxpro was fine back in the day for a light or Shell OS like DOS or Win 3.1, but when pre-emptive multitasking OSes became the stable ones of choice, then it was time for a re-write. When saying the legacy code becomes a massive outdated behemoth, it's an oversimplification of the facts. What's really happening with old code, is it's designed to work with an old operation system. So when just updating the legacy code, you're essentially designing your own integrated emulator. You're designing a way for the old code to talk to the new OS and its core applications. The old program iterations probably went something like this:

1) Foxpro DB > Single Task OS Program (DOS)

2) Foxpro DB > Single Task OS Program > GUI Shell (Win 3.1)

3) Foxpro DB > Single Task OS Program > GUI Shell > Compatibility Layer > Win 95/98 GUI Shell

4) Foxpro DB > Single Task OS Program > GUI Shell > Compatibility Layer > Win 95/98 GUI Shell > Compatibility Layer > WinNT Application

Now we see the complications compounding, so we decide on a re-write:

- Export Foxpro DB to CSV

5) SQL DB > WinNT Application

- Import CSV to SQL DB

Now the OS progression is much less dramatic. Once you've gone that route, you keep the core code, and upgrade your DB backbone with newer iterations of SQL, and anything else can be upgraded with some sort of MSVS script like VB or VCPP (which is why everything you install these days always wants a new version of .NET or some sort of MSVS runtime).

A fairly updated game engine doesn't have near as much as an issue. Most engines are just using a few different APIs, that can be changed or upgraded, and the core code-base can stay similar. It's also why almost every engine has some sort of DX or OpenGL element to it. And of course i'm oversimplifying it, but there's a difference.

Re-writing banking software makes sense. If that's the decision they made, then there was an enterprise risk analyses done, and from a financial perspective (including future legal and security costs), it would probably cost less money in the long run. You can absolutely bet on a company the size of Beth also having a risk analysis team.

As for Witcher 3 as a comparison, that's apples to oranges. You've got one game that's story oriented, and one that is exploration oriented. They each have both, but one is heavily biased. Witcher 1 used a modified version of the NWN Aurora engine. Yet the graphics and animation compared to NWN was very obviously superior (in some ways it was probably better than vanilla Skyrim). Fallout 4 compared to Witcher 3 wasn't necessarily because one engine was superior, it was mostly because the animators and artists were superior. And personally I agree Bethesda needs to improve those aspects. They've improved over the generations, but there are those that do it much better. However, that doesn't mean it's needed in the form of a brand new engine. In fact, as far as physics issues go that you mentioned, the Redengine in Witcher 3 originally used the Havok engine (currently used in Bethesda's Creation Engine), but was switched to PhysX. Bethesda could go a similar route with the hints technological horsepower needed for future projects that Howard has talked about. This won't need a new engine. This is no longer "legacy" code. Daggerfall was legacy code. And then there's modding. We were promised that Witcher 3 would surpass Skyrim and Fallout for modding. Mods are there, but it's not nearly as accessible. Neither engine is superior, but CDP probably did take better advantage of theirs.

And ironically, the reason CDP upgraded their engine in Witcher 2 was not to because of the limitations of the software, it was the limitations of the console hardware at the time. If you think the Creation Engine is a resource hog, try going back to playing Witcher 2 on PC and see how well that beast performs (hint: not so well considering the generation of hardware it was designed to run on).

EDIT: Sorry Couch! Large wall of text :P

No, I'm actually talking about literal behemoths here. The code in question takes 20 minutes to build on high end hardware. Every single build. Whenever a developer gets tasked with any kind of fixes in it, you can consider him gone for the week as he just fires up the XKCD comic about code compiling and then spends the rest of the week trying to remain sane.

This approach works for databases and similar. It doesn't really work for monolithic applications, as everything is self-contained. It doesn't have endpoints. The GUI is directly attached to the business logic.

The Witcher 1 is an excellent example. They re-wrote half the engine, and they were still struggling with the limitations of the Aurora Engine, because the Aurora Engine has huge problems with the Z-axis, and that's not something you can easily rectify. It's why you can't jump over the tinyest pebble in the game. It made perfect sense for them to create a new engine from scratch as soon as they had the funding for it (REDengine).

At some point, the Creation Engine will be in a similar position. In my opinion it already is. It's the Aurora Engine at this point, and certain parts of it, such as the basic handling of physics, requires a massive overhaul to fix. The same goes for the fragmantation of the world where each building requires a loading screen. I have no doubt they can make TES6 look good in terms of having a beautiful sunset or whatever, but I strongly suspect it will still feel very outdated.

Edit: We obviously won't know until it's out, however, so we'll have to wait and see how it turns out. :)

No problem I'm bushy eyed and awake with my one gallon cup of coffee at 4am in the morning. Just stopped in to check replies then going back to Assassin Creed Odyssey.

Gamers dismiss that story of 60 FPS as it does not affect gameplay.


One month is a long time, months ever longer.

https://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/show…5&postcount=20

But it does.
What it doesn't affect is watching a slideshow. A slideshow may as well run 1 FPS, it'll still be passive watching. Not gaming.

I agree that this sucks, especially considering how long we've been waiting for ES6 (and we still have a ways to go). I often don't really care much about the graphics of games unless they're terrible. Yeah, it's great that modders will be able to hop right in and start fixing everything for Bethesda, but I think Maylander is right and this engine is just getting too bloated and cumbersome by now. Also sucks to hear that the engine is limiting modders from doing some stuff.

Overall though, my biggest concern about ES6 is about the gameplay. Ever since Morrowind (I never played the earlier ones, so I can't comment on those), the gameplay has been getting dumbed down with every new entry (same with the Bethesda Fallout games). If the trend continues like it has been, it'll end up being an action-adventure game by ES9 or 10 (probably in the year 2080).

But, you’re on this site. Does that mean you’re addicted to UgoIgo? It seems you’re addicted to typing it.

As for a new engine it’s a bit disappointing as I hoped that’s why it was taking so long to release.

Really though as long as they keep it highly moddable, I’ll be happy. Unless of course they want to start charging me for mods.

Sure.

Like saying there is an addiction to typing RPG on this site.

Of course it affects gameplay. All scripting in a gamebryo game expects to run at 60fps; anything less and you get adverse effects. Something as simple as sprinting away from a griefer becomes more difficult/slower if you're sub 60fps.

I have no doubt the term "engine" is often used without a clear understanding of what it is. Game engines are constantly changing, after all, so using that as a basis for an argument on every game title a company develops within its lifespan isn't entirely applicable, though it does apply.

However, you could just as easily replace "engine" with 'codebase" and everyone's point would still stand.

At the same time, when you witness recurring issues that have plagued Bethesda games for years (hiccups/hitching being persistent in every iteration of their games that used Gamebryo, for example), there's obviously a very clear connection that can be drawn there.

And?

Article claims issues happen beyond 60 FPS.

This kind of product's gameplay does not benefit from more than 60 FPS. Smooth, steady 60 FPS are enough.

It adds nothing.

This kind of product does benefit a player - can be used as laxative.

Ask a streamer to add 2 + 2 if you still don't comprehend. A developer's choice, because an engine is rooted in archaic, poorly written code, that the "fix" to this is limiting frames altogether - it's utter foolishness.

The problem is that gamebryo is full of this ill-optimized coding (for modern computers) and its myriad of band-aids. Apologists (and modders) have been content with this for the most part; judging by the large majority of reviews, their patience is at an end.

Don't be silly. We've already covered this. The engine uses Havok physics (same as Dark Souls 3, Wolfenstein, and Civ 6), and the renderer was completely redesigned (more than once) by Bethesda as a 64-bit DX11 implementation.

And? This could be fixed without pushing for more than 60 FPS.

Steady, smooth 60FPS+ adds nothing to this kind of games.

Your opinion. Sony's opinion too because of outdated hardware incapability. Blind people's too, because they can't see anything anyway.

Not mine.
What was that about 2+2?

Of course, who else. Also the opinion that the earth is round. And?

Gamers are interested in gameplay and discard features that do not work in favour of an improvement in gameplay. They buy games, not vid products burdened with unnnecessary features provided to hide that devs did not bother developping a game.

Higher than 60 FPS serves nothing in this kind of products.

There is a huge difference between fact and opinion.

I'm still waiting for 2+2 explanation.

No.

Opinions may be factual. The earth is round is an opinion. Fact based opinion but still an opinion.

LOL
Ever read The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy? You should.
A quote from it, perfectly fit for 2+2 question here and your answers on it and the most probable epilogue:

… and the sad truth is that Beth still uses the old Gamebryo foundation under its Creation engine.

Gamebryo was a good engine 100 years ago (one of the first "component-based" engines), but its main issue still remains: it cannot properly synchronize its game systems (render, physics, network, game logic, etc)
BTW, this is the problem with basically any game engines that are not Id Tech.

If you are interested in the technical background, here is a quick and dirty overview:
Syncing game systems together is much much much more harder technically, than rendering trillions of polygons at 600 fps.

With the renderer, you can do shortcuts, and gain performance.
With the synchronization, you must do parallel, asynchronous and thread-safe programming, which is a very complex thing to do. There are no shortcuts. Either you can do it right (=you are John Carmack), or not.

So, the easiest thing to do is to hardcode the engine for a fixed frame rate, and make the synchronization frequency locked as well. No threads, no async subsystems, nothing. Paycheck.

On the other hand, Id Tech's game systems are running totally async in parallel.
… and that's the reason why Id Tech-driven games are super smooth and hyper cool to play, despite lacking certain graphical bells and whistles.

!!!

The tales were true; flat earthers DO exist!!

2 + 2 = 4. There, I said it!

Which again, isn't some shocking reveal. We already know this. The only thing "Gamebryo" left is game, map and player object handling (pretty much anything that would be left if you stripped everything off the engine and made Skyrim a text-only RPG), and cell based loading. For single player RPGs like Starfield and ES6, it doesn't really matter, unless they were doing a game with a very complicated height map or a massive amount of NPCs with individual AI in one area (which those games don't call for).

Interesting sidestory: at one time, I poked and prodded Fallout New Vegas quite a bit under the hood and, while using a mod (MMUE+), I was perplexed as to why Red Rock Canyon was an FPS nightmare; my frames would drop by 10 whenever I got near. Turns out that having a single extra NPC (and their AI) enabled - previously disabled in the base game - was the culprit. This was on current hardware with what should have been overkill specs.

The problem with Gamebryo is that it is incredibly temperamental, prone to bugging out, and highly single-threaded, lacking the code infrastructure for modern multicore computers. Bethesda can put all the bandaids on it that they want (and they surely have), but it's simply putting lipstick on a pig these days.

I look forward to Cyperpunk being released alongside an oh-so-very antiquated TESVI.