Todd Howard confirms Starfield and TES 6 will still use the Creation Engine - Sensationalist Headlines

I don't think the engine is the source of their problems. Gamebryo was a really barebones engine. Basically more like a game-dev library than an actual engine - look at the other games it's used in, like Civilization IV or Rocksmith or Catherine. None of those games had any real quality or bugginess issues, at least that I've heard of. The problem is that Bethesda sucks at polish. They are 100% focused on slamming out as much content as possible, as fast as possible. And their games are fairly massive, for the size of their teams and the length of their development cycle. Fallout 4 was about a three-year dev cycle, I think their staff maxed out around 350, minimal outsourcing. For contrast, Witcher 3 was about the same time, staff maxed out around 250 but involved over a thousand outsourced contractors... and I think Fallout probably has more gameplay if you're going to try to play it to exhaustion. But a big game is not necessarily a good game. Bethesda games are actually kind of bad - the movement and animations are floaty, the locations and quests are repetitive, the voiceacting is grating and the game design is "it's singleplayer only so it being unbalanced is a feature not a bug". We've known this is the problem since Oblivion. I've read interviews that casually mentioned an entire quest (the blatant Lovecraft homage in TES4) being the work of a single person over a day or two, and the game lead didn't even know it was in there. There is, best as I can tell, no review or polish phase. If you get hired to design quests, you go in, design and build a quest, shoot a request to the writing team to maybe replace your dialog before recording it, and then unless someone finds an actual bug during testing, it ships just as you made it. Which I'm sure helps them shovel out as much content as possible, but man that's a recipe for some shitty, unpolished quests and dungeons and crap. There are very few bad engines out there. Remember all the mockery Source has gotten, for being clunky and not all that modern? Like "oh it can't really do big outdoor areas" or "you can just tell when a game is using Source because the movement is always so 1998"? Titanfall 2 uses Source - not even Source 2 - and flips the bird to all those critiques. It's also a very short game that had a preposterous amount of people working on it, so the level of polish is insane. Likewise, old engines aren't bad except in how they limit things. Nintendo used the same codebase for every 3D Zelda from Ocarina of Time to the HD remaster of Twilight Princess. Extended and polished over the years, sure, but still the same "engine". And why not? It worked for the games they were trying to make - until at some point, it started shaping what games they tried to make. Every Zelda played like the same game because the obvious way to extend the game design (make it fucking open world) just wasn't doable in an engine originally coded for the N64. Until eventually they scrapped it and started over - though I'll not be too surprised if at least a little bit of the codebase lives on. Bethesda needs to make games that are sized properly for their dev team. Either expand the team (via hiring or outsourcing) or shrink the games. And then change your process so there's actual editing and polish. It doesn't matter how much game you make if none of it is fun, and no game's first draft is fun.

Oh boy can't wait for Skyrim in Space.

You can change up the engine to suit your hearts content if you get the code and the engineers to do it, Star Citizen took shit engine 3 and turned into something it was never originally designed to handle. Bethesda just has terrible project management, you can see this stem from non-engine issues such as sparse weapon diversity and abysmal writing choices from Fallout 4. Then you have bugs in the VR version which could of only happened if you're entire department was testing the game using only 1440p monitors.

Y'all best not be shit talking bonus builts https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/228931/155daae1-bd29-45d9-b5dc-6b503a5034f7/IMG_1134.JPG Them's fightin' words.

The end of a studio

As someone who's dug into BOTW's engine a bit, I can confirm there are still fragments of the original Zelda64 engine. It's mostly re-written but there's still bits and pieces. Also, they still use the same old file formats in many places.

As I've said before, the problem itself isn't really Gamebryo. Many games were made in Gamebryo that didn't have nearly as many issues as Bethesda's games. It's more Bethesda's tweaks to Gamebryo, and also their lack of fixing bugs and issues with their custom tweaks that have been known about for more than a decade now. Fallout 76 still insists on having its physics calculations tied to the framerate, still has the 64 hz bug which causes microstutters if you cap the game to 60 FPS. Not to mention the sometimes glaring jump in quality between certain aspects of their games really paints it as less of an engine problem, and more of a developer problem. How some animations can look alright, but others straight from the early 2000s. Etc etc. Also yes, putting them on a new engine would not only be a massive endeavor in having them re-learn how to do the same tasks differently, but that would also apply to the modding scene for the game as well, who's been using the same engine for just as long to make their own content for fix up Bethesda's. Changing engines means having to wait longer for more mods or even some older modders dropping the game entirely, which could lead to a potential loss in sales over time. Skyrim still sells crazy well for a now 7 year old game on PC to this day simply because of its mods And let's be honest. Even if we were to stick Bethesda on something like UE4, they'd still find some way to fuck it up.

They actually made id work on improving the gunplay for Fallout 4.

Yeah but Valve is a lot more competent at engine programming.

To be fair, I bet idtech 6 would be pretty awful for a Bethesda-style game. About all I'd want to take from that to spruce up Creation is the renderer and maybe the animation system. If I (somehow) became a bajillionaire and (somehow) decided to buy Bethesda and personally direct the next Elder Scrolls, I wouldn't throw out the engine. Give it much-needed improvements, sure, maybe copy some code from other engines (there's no way I'd have bought BGS without buying a ton of better devs first). But my main focus would be overhauling the whole dev cycle, focus on quality and not just sheer quantity. Probably put out a tech-demo-disguised-as-a-game TES spinoff, focused on making the core low-level gameplay good while removed from the massive open world, push that out after a year or so, then use that as the base for a full-scale TES.

there's absolutely nothing wrong with using an age old engine. Technically, Dota 2 is running on Quake 3's engine. The difference between Valve and Bethesda? Valve is willing to update the engine (ignoring current volvo memes) and modernize it, and Bethesda is not (or the changes they make are retarded)

I can't wait till Starfield and TESVI come out and you still can't climb ladders. Or have NPCs figure out basic situations, or vehicles that aren't jank, or performance issues despite the game looking like it came out a decade earlier.

According to this article, only over 100 people were part of Fallout 4's development team: It's nearly impossible to identify every possible scenario in such a game, reproduce it, and fix it (all without breaking something else in the process). The massive, incredibly difficult task was given to the game's publisher, Bethesda Softworks, and its 100+ person team of quality assurance testers. You read that correctly: "Fallout 4" was tested for quality by a team nearly the same size as the development team.

I refuse to believe this, or, on the contrary, believe that if this is true, they threw out almost all the feedback. There are bugs in Fallout 4 that modders fixed with simple .ini changes. That, and they never apparently discovered bugs like objects never intersecting correctly. Or resources turning off for no reason, or the fact that enemies can fucking spawn inside your settlements. Which, again, the last one was fixed in mere moments after the tools became available. And that's just a handful of bugs from one gameplay mechanic.

Everybody always misquotes this, it's honest a pet peeve at this point. It was a couple Ex-Bungie staff that worked on the gunplay, because Bethesda took inspiration from Destiny. https://www.gamespot.com/articles/fallout-4-gunplay-modeled-after-destinys/1100-6431981/

Morrowind + Havoc physics = Oblivion/Fallout 3 n NV Oblivion + HDR/better rendering = Skyrim Skyrim + proper gun mechanics = Fallout 4 Fallout 4 + Terrible netcode = Fallout 76 Every game still has the same console format, the same cvars. Maybe they just ported the commands they liked from scratch onto a new framework and it's similarities are just co-incidence but i don't believe bethsoft are that uh, methodical. imo though, beth's creation engine really isn't their biggest problem. The moddability of it + the community's familiarity with it means it'll still work. their biggest problem is the complete degeneration of their storytelling, worldbuilding and subtle game mechanics designed to ask questions of the player.

Todd Howard confirms two more shit games that I'm not going to buy.

Bethesda is owned by Zenimax right? A multi-billion fucking dollar corporation. They seriously can't afford to make a new engine and train people to use it? Gamebryo is clearly too broken and wonky to use anymore. If things don't change soon I suspect Bethesda is gonna be in some trouble.

I would honestly think ZeniMax's view would be "Bethesda's games sell extremely well regardless of bus, so why spend money to change it?" I'm just happy that Bethesda's free pass on having bugs in their games seems to be running out. What was once expected and some even found to be "part of the charm" of their games is now being called out as the issue it really is. Bethesda really needs to step up their game in terms of development (writing and engine especially), so I can only hope the backlash to all this is a clear enough signal for them to do so. However, when you have a team of modders who are more than willing to fix or improve your shit for no cost, I would think them improving things is going to be rather slow, if not unlikely.

The problem is this time they've limited their modders with 76 lacking mod tools from the start and a lack of single player worlds. The mainstream is about to really see how much of a joke the engine has become. The Rick and Morty stream was already a train wreck due to Bethesda's incompetence.

I don't think its the engine or incompetence thats the problem. It's just shoving in way too much. BGS's games are pretty complex in terms of the sheer number of working parts, and that's bound to cause some serious issues when something conflicts. They need to either expand their staff, lengthen their development cycle, or outsource a bunch of work so its more manageable. Or, I guess cut down on the quantity.

Hell, even Source is technically older (based on Quake engine), and not only has it aged remarkably well, but it's much more stable than Gamebryo/Creation.

Remember. No matter what game you play it will always lead back to Skyrim. It's Todd's punishment for our sins.

I wonder what engine is worst tbh, Bethesda's Gamebyro/Creation Engine? Or Payday 2's Diesel 2 Engine which is also used since 2001

NetImmerse was released in 1997, modified into Gamebryo in 2003, then into Creation in 2011. The base code is 21 years old and legally allowed to drink in the United States.

WHAT

I've had a smoother ride on Diesel than I ever had with anything on Gamebyro/Creation.

Bethesda insisting that the Creation engine is still good rings about as true as Homer Simpson insisting the pig is still good after it's crashed through a bush, fallen into a river and been shot into the sky. Yeah, you can apply as many patches and band-aids as you want and make it look nicer, but graphics will still bug-out like mad, characters will still float along the ground whether than having any real weight to them and objects will continue to fly off at random as physics bend and break.Everything still stutters above 60 FPS, game speed is still linked to the framerate, and going into an interior larger than a two room shack still requires loading into an entirely new cell and sitting though a loading screen. Oh yeah, but it's real modifiable! I love downloading mods and trying to find the right number that the game can handle before I get rolling CTDs, or what order I need to load them in to avoid CTDs, or installing third party patches and tools so I can avoid CTDs. And hey, I can always fix them in the Creation Kit so long as I can dedicate untold amounts of time it takes to start and skip through the requisite error messages that come with it, assuming it doesn't crash somewhere along the way. Bethesda can hem and haw all they like about how versatile the Creation engine is, but anybody who's played a Bethesda game in the past 10 years can see the cracks in the foundation. I can't imagine the engine is going to be any more reliable or advanced 5-10 years from now. Other companies right now are making open world games just as good if not better than what Bethesda can put out, and they're using engines that are far more reliable than Creation. Continuing to try to patchwork the Creation engine into the future to me just reeks of laziness and a lack of innovation on the part of Bethesda. Fucking id can pump out another id Tech engine for every major release these days and yet Bethesda can't produce a new engine after 7 years?

This seriously blows. It isn't simply that it is outdated, which it is, but also Gamebryo was garbage when Oblivion first came out. They can't keep polishing this turd and pretending that it is good.

I like the engine for what it does. To be honest, I 'm so used to their games that I can't really imagine what it would like on another engine. I've never really seen anybody bring forward a game that does what their games do 'only better', and that improvement can truly all be attributed to the difference in game engine.