How this thread is going:

- "The engine is old and buggy"

* "Those issue have nothing to do with the core engine code base"

- "Ya but the engine is ancient and problematic"

* "You just said the same thing. Those issue have nothing to do with the core engine code base"

- "Ya but the engine is not new, and is bloated with issues"

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://img.devrant.com/devrant/rant/r_491530_rsb1M.jpg

Is that a fact or your opinion? ;)

There was a time when RPGWatch news editors made corrections to their news when it was wrong and they got a hint of it. It's sad, when wrong statements like "THQ Nordic - Acquires Logic Artists" can still be found on the site when even the quote within the newsbit says otherwise. Also it is sad, that there is no news that clarifies this news statement was a misinterpretation of something that meant something totally different.

https://www.gamestar.de/artikel/engi…t,3337156.html (german)

https://kotaku.com/the-controversy-o…ded-1830435351

I have a counter to that biased Kokatu article once again.


Really hate that site especially it's writers.

Anyway I love click bait articles they get the most replies.:lol:

I don't give a damn about distracting media production and clickbait. It all started with someone claiming Bethesda said. They did not, someone interpreted something.

Welcome to gaming journalism 101 nowadays.:lol:

That's not journalism, that's simple entertainment. You can choose which one you want to pursue.

I'll pick entertainment thank you. :biggrin:

Though to be blunt I hate most major gaming sites and the current crop of journalists.Love that quote as it's true.

Then go tell a different story, but not based on willingly misinterpreted quotes and with respect towards all parties involved.

:cool:

Kotaku and anything that comes from Gizmodo Media Group is usually a load of shite. But in this case they happen to be right. Even a broken clock can be correct twice a day.

That counter-argument from Yong is basically a really fancy, almost 20 minutes, of saying that it might, or might not, be the engine.

It still comes down to this:

The things people are complaining about are not a Gamebryo issue, but a Bethesda issue (and in some cases neither).

TBH, I don't find the two cents-worth of a Kotaku writer makes the situation much clearer. I think some of the confusion comes from using the word "engine" as if it always means the same thing. I've argued several times that Unity-bashing is often unjustified, because, to a large extent, a commercial engine like that provides only the bare bones needed to make a game, and the quality and performance of games made with it is very much down to the developers using it.

But there are also engines like, for example, RPGMaker. That's very different to something like Unity, in that it is essentially a fully pre-coded RPG game, which you then customise and fill with content. I'd say it's more like a game-making kit than the basics provided by commercial engine. When you see a game is made with it, you know roughly what it's going to deliver - the way it does things, the constraints, the pros and cons. Every time it receives an update with some fixes and new features, you could say it is no longer the same engine, but it is still very much RPGmaker.

I think the Bethesda engine is more comparable to RPGmaker in that regard, though of course much more advanced. I think when people hear that essentially the same engine is being used again, people look back on the pattern of fairly incremental change, which has left it behind technically and tended to retain many of the same problems and limitations, and they're disappointed to see that continue. The idea of a brand new modern engine would seem much more promising. It's not impossible that the existing engine could be evolved into something much more cutting edge, but their history (and latest effort) suggests that we're not going to see a huge leap forward, and I think it is worth reporting.

Mark my words, this rusty heap of engine will outlive humanity. :)

But seriously anyone who did any work on their engines, knows it's incredibly unstable. The damn thing crashes so often, often without any "pattern" or reason.
How they have the patience all these years working on it.
When you look at how something like Horizon/Decima/PS4 runs and looks next to Fallout 4/76..inot even a pro vs amateur comparison.

As I said before, visually, it's pretty obvious the engine is not keeping up with the times. It is being held together by some duct tape and rubber bands at this point. Take one look at CD Project Red's Cyberpunk's graphics in terms of any aspect and then look at Fallout 76 or any of the other recent Bethesda games, and it's no contest.

I can't wait to see the next two anticipated games, Star Field and the next Elder Scrolls game and see what the graphics look like in those. I would bet heavily that it will look like a slight upgrade to what they have now, and will still be ages behind what the Cyberpunk game will look like. Then we will get to hear the fanboys tell us that its not the engine, just that we aren't looking at the game properly, either with both eyes closed or nearly closed or at an angle, and that we just don't understand technology…:p
Uh huh. surrrrrrreeeeeee…:biggrin:

Cyberpunk is still in development so I have to point out some of the released games in this year: Kingdom Come D, Softhe Tomb Raider and Assassins Creed Odyssey.
Compared with these FO76 looks horrible, and I have no reason to believe Skyrim2 will look better.

All those reasonings it's not Gambryo engine any more because there are some parts added and some changed is IMO nonsense. Coke removed sugar and is using corn syrup instead but it's still - coke. Just as Beth uses same shit in new wrapping.

Too expensive to develop a new engine while keeping old modding systems in it? Gimme a break. Beth is not a small studio like PB who also uses the same engine for years due to development costs. Beth can and should make a new engine from scratch. Sadly, the money was spent on developing Fallout Shelter and random MMO garbage.

FO76 looking horrible isn’t an engine limitation though.

For example my fully modded skyrim looks significantly better than AC odyssey.

I didn't play Fallout 4 or 76, but I did play Skyrim Special Edition which runs on the updated engine. The problems it has:
- Awful AI
- Low draw distance for stuff like grass (and becomes unstable if you raise it through config files)
- Shallow combat system with no location based damage (mods have tried to add that but it is, in my experience, script heavy and slows down the game)
- problems with dynamic lighting (sometimes some lights will simply turn off if you have more than few in your field of vision)
- physics based on framerate (lightly touch a pot and it flies all over the room)
- popping and low draw distance for shadows and such (this can be raised, but again, it becomes unstable and/or tanks the fps)
- problems with spawning/despawning npcs (go to an inn at 10PM, see a lot of people there, go to sleep for 8 hours, and when you wake u all of the people are still there, all of them leaving the same moment)
- countless bugs and instabilities (flying horses, t-pose npcs, swimming through the air, scripting errors, etc.)
- it still looks only marginally better than the regular Skyrim (and that also applies to the new Fallouts since I saw what they look like)
Again, I didn't play the new Fallouts so I don't know if any of this has been fixed or not, but if it was not fixed they have to change a lot in the engine to impress me personally. And I feel a lot of people share my experience.

Well my Skyrim with only two mods (SkyUI and norespawn) looks like Chrono Trigger.

Then again, is this thread about mods and modding effectivness? If yes, we can also discuss GTA 5 mods fixing $34785637845678367856 worth PC port visuals too.
But I don't think the title contains the word "reshade".

You have an SKSE plugin for it. Tested it a bit, didn't find any issues.

Well, the Unreal Engine is based on the same engine we saw in 1998.

The Creation Engine is based on Gamebryo - which has been around for many years as well.

The engine is not the problem, really.

Yeah, I've tried that and it was buggy, but that could be a problem on my end.

I don't think the problem is the evolution of game engines in general but the evolution of this particular engine. In case of Unreal and idTech (even Unity if you remember it from its infant days) the gradual upgrade went well, but in case of Bethesda's engine (what ever they decide to call it next) it started to show its age with Skyrim (even Oblivion, if you ask some people). And I can't speak about latter games, but people say it hasn't progressed much.

Well, I think the strength of the Creation engine is more about the data structure and how they handle the amount of items combined with the size of the world. As well as the interactivity level of items, including physics and what not.

We must remember that idSoft and Unreal games tend to focus more on visuals and performance - where Bethsoft games are largely about very big worlds and huge amounts of data.

To me, Fallout 4 was a decent evolution over Fallout 3 - and Fallout 3 was a decent evolution over Oblivion.

So, I expected FO76 to be a decent evolution over Fallout 4 - and, instead, it seems to have regressed.

But a lot of people seem to be underestimating what it's doing in terms of data integrity and the multiplayer environment.

It's not easy to handle thousands or - potentially - perhaps even millions of items that physically exist within the game world - in a multiplayer environment where all 20+ players must be aware of all items, in all states - at all times.

That's key to the design - and something which might not translate exceptionally well to an entirely new engine.

To me, Bethsoft games have always had problems with the balance and the finer points of the mechanics - and they won't be solved by fancy engines.

I would be happy to see visual upgrades - but that's not really my primary complaint when it comes to their games.

Personally, I got tired their formula for games. Even Fallout 3 looked like a reskin of Oblivion to me but I played it since it was the new Fallout. It was fun, but it was more of the same. Then Skyrim came along and I still wasn't tired of it. About that time I got into modding and it was a lot of fun that way, but I nowadays can't imagine playing it vanilla.
By the time Fallout 4 came out, I watched a lot of gameplay videos of it, read a lot of the reviews, opinions and forum posts and yet again it looked like more of the same. This time, not even the prospect of modding it to hell could get me interested so I skipped it.
I will still follow the news of their new games (Starfield might be interesting since it is a completely new game) but they are no longer a must play before their release like Oblivion and Skyrim were.

That's fair enough :)

Not all games are for everyone.

Seems a lot of people really, really dislike their games - and that's ok.

Personally, I'm not tired of the formula as of yet - but maybe it comes later.

I can't disagree that a new and shiny engine would certainly suit their games - but it's not my primary concern.

I love the core concept - so I'm likely to like most of their future games.

But nothing is for certain in this world of ours.

I don't get skipping a sequel to a game you enjoyed because it looks like more of the same. The most important factor in playing something is whether or not you're having fun. Who cares if it looks similar? Except for the engine, I thought FO4 was an improvement over FO3 in almost every way.

I don't recall many people skipping FO2 because it looked so similar to FO1. ;)

That said, if Bethesda is indeed going to use the Creation engine for Starfield, I hope they manage to improve the visuals and animations by a significant amount.

Bethesda games, with the exception of Morrowind never really had stories that were interesting to me and the big thing that pulled me in was exploration of semi-believable world and new and interesting loot around every corner. That is what I consider the Bethesda formula.

I think that the thing that bothers me the most is their insistence on dragging you all across the world during most questlines (main, faction, or some other) and on my (long) journey to the next location I always get distracted by a cave, a fort, a mine, a dragon, something shining in the distance, etc. But in the end, those distractions almost never lead to something useful and only prolong my play time and I ultimately found them tedious. Now I dread the site of such landmarks.

Regarding Fallout 1 and 2, well there were only two of them and they had interesting stories (to me, much more interesting than any Bethesda game) and were big on choice and consequence. I played 4 Bethesda games so far and only Fallout 3 had any meaningful c&c that I can think of, but was still a far cry from the first two Fallouts. Like I said, it felt more like an Oblivion reskin than a proper Fallout game to me. Fallout 4 would have been fifth such game to me (and I don't know how many times I replayed the previous games, my combined playtime is near 500 hours), but by that point I was already burned out.

If they decide to do something different design-wise with new games, I'll be all over them. Oh, and a new engine :P

I think their games do environmental storytelling better than most "open world" games - but obviously not as well as dedicated immersive sims, like Prey or Bioshock.

I fully agree that their main quests tend to be rather crap - or, at best, mildly interesting on occasion - but that's ok with me, as I spend very little time on those.

As for the locations, I think the reason they work for me is that you never actually know if it's going to be "one of the good ones" - or one of the more repetitive ones. There's enough quality in enough of their stuff that you never really know what to expect - and that's precisely what makes exploration worth it.

If you think about it, it's not that different from games like Baldur's Gate or Pillars of Eternity - when you go free roaming. The majority of the locations are essentially just mostly empty maps with a few potentially interesting encounters - but there's just enough there to make you go and check it out and sometimes you DO find a particularly interesting bit of quest or a nice dungeon.

For my part, I think Bethesda excel at doing distinct content within the formula of "huge open worlds" - and I can't think of other games of that kind of scope that even remotely provide as much interesting content - even if much of it IS repetitive and "samey".

As for the future, I'm still hoping they will tone down the amount of locations from hundreds to dozens - and, instead, focus all the content in fewer but more significant locations.

So basically exploration is a purpose but the invitations to explore are distractions.

Exploration pays itself off. Exploration is not plundering/ treasure hunting/ raiding or whatever. Exploration is its own reward.

Explorers gonna explore, streamers gonna not explore.

I haven't had a decent playthrough of BG in a while, but for Pillars I have to agree to an extent. It was also riddled with side areas with no meaningful rewards at the end of them, but I would personally rate PoE's story higher than any TES game, except Morrowind. Most of the side areas in PoE were tied to sidequests and those were mostly interesting to me (with some of them having multiple conclusions that would affect your playthrough). Loot-wise they were mostly a disappointment, the whole game was underwhelming in that regard (unique items never felt truly unique).

As for your last paragraph, I 100% agree, but I just don't see them doing that. Their marketing campaigns always revolved around how the new game is "huge, even huger than the previous one", and that seems to sell.

It's hard to say, but I wouldn't be too sure.

I mean, their first two TES games were much, much larger in terms of scope - and then they started focusing on smaller areas - refining their approach to content creation.

Also, I wouldn't have expected the BGS team to develop a multiplayer Fallout, so that was another surprise.

That said, I do expect Starfield to be a huge open world game, for obvious reasons. I mean, even the name would suggest it. Probably wouldn't work well with a few dozen detailed locations.

As for ES6 - we'll have to wait and see.

I do like their current trajectory - with the continued emphasis on more ways to progress your character than ever before (perks of Skyrim and FO4), and they've finally wised up to the fact that their games can be great fun with more sophisticated difficulty settings (Survival mode). So, I hope they stay on track with those things.

FO76 is somewhat of an outlier (though not really), but it doesn't change anything about their approach to singleplayer games, I don't think.

Who knows, though.

A lot of great points in this thread to keep the engine or to start from scratch. There's also a lot of stuff on the internet with various Bethesda reps educating everyone about what their "engine" is which essentially a "collection of technologies" that each can be modified in perpetuity apparently.

Still, after having played AC Origins and quickly recognizing how fantastic that engine would be for TES games, I'm of the camp that Bethesda should sooner, rather than later, move on to a totally brand new "collection of technologies."

It all sort of reminds me of that scene in Star Trek First Contact where the captain and the black woman are arguing about blowing up the ship. The arguing goes on back and forth when it's so obvious what to do and finally she screams "blow up the damn ship." With the total horror show that is Fallout 76, It seems obvious at this point that it's time for Bethesda to blow up the damn ship already. Like Picard, I can already hear Tod Howard yelling back "NO… NOOOOOO!"

You’re right this thread is not about mods but, mods show that this engine while definitely dated is still capable of amazing visual.

Explorers gonna explore, plunderers gonna plunder, looters gonna loot, raiders gonna raid, treasure hunters gonna hunt and streamers gonna stream.

It just takes to find that black woman equivalent in Bethesda, get rid of her and on to a new graphic engine.

My monitor is fixed at 60 fps. Now what ?

Probably the recommandation of buying a 144Hz monitor so that the useless technology of running a TES product at 144Hz can happen.