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

this analogy is beyond shit man software is complex, they've built a knowledge base and workflow for more than a decade, getting rid of it or doing something entirely new is a huge risk which would cost both time and money and to what benefit?

Judging by the amount of bugs (some nearly a decade unfixed), the engine is clearly exercising that right to drink rather heavily.

They can keep using Gamebryo all they want but please can they at least finally fix the game logic being tied to framerate? It'd be nice to actually play their games without the physics and everything going haywire anything beyond 60fps.

modders have proven that the creation engine is perfectly fine as is if work is put into actually utilizing it. bethesda, the people with the source to the engine, can't even manage that let alone modernize some very aging concepts in it. you can't just "make a new engine", especially when youre entire dev team is used to one. you use iterative design to improve what you have, something bethesda clearly doesn't understand as witnessed by the disaster that is 76 and their just godawful downloading client

Aye. They've got iD Software under their belt; if they're having trouble moving physics and stuff away from framerate, they should get more competent people on the job. They also need to either start paying attention to their QA dept, or fire them all and get a new bunch if they're just incompetent. Maybe looking at how modders have fixed bugs and implementing them, too.

The Creation Engine is far from "perfectly fine" even with the patchwork fixes that modders have put in place. You still have a hard 255 plugin limit, you still get graphical errors at above 60 FPS and engine speed is still tied to the framerate. I'm in the middle of a Skyrim playthrough as we discuss this and even with unofficial patches and the SKSE and a variety of other tools and fixes I've still had to dig into the files and cap the FPS, or open the Creation Kit and fuck around to get everything running somewhat smoothly and even then the game crashes like a motherfucker whenever it feels inclined. Obviously the solution is far more technical than "making a new engine" but lets not pretend that the Creation Engine in whatever iteration they decide to move forward with is somehow going to solve problems that have been hampering their games since the Gamebryo days. As for the argument that you can't have change because the entire dev team would be unable to adapt to a new engine, that sounds more like a staffing issue then a technical one. As Sgt Doom suggested above, maybe the solution is in getting some better developers and QA on staff rather than pretending that the problems aren't there.

"just get some better developers" you could probably hire consultants or an architect that's experienced in a new engine but you still need to train staff which costs time and money and you'd have to get rid of or overhaul whatever they currently have in place.

Then do so? Are Bethesda employees somehow special in that they're completely incapable of learning anything new? This isn't a small independent studio we're talking about here, it's a Triple A developer owned by a holding company worth billions. They're not strapped for cash or resources. If they need to invest the time and resources in order to expand their capabilities rather than produce and publish a new game every three to four years, maybe they should do so.

The engine isn't the issue. That bethesda doesn't hire animators and UI coders and have dedicated multiperson story team is the issue. The engine can be modified to suit whatever specification is needed for compelling an engaging presentation. The engine's 'age' is entirely relative to how the code is factored, and it can be refactored at any time. Meanwhile no delta timing on physics or animations, half assed havok usage (that they pay for) and lack of contextual and behavior based mechanics which their engine does support, but Bethesda chooses to ignore.

Nothing makes space feel so open and immersive like planets popping up right in your face because of the bad draw distance I hope they at least put some work into it so the engine doesnt look and play like its running raw coal and sewage

Shit, at this point I just hope they don't use retarded systems like the dialogue wheel. Imagine another 7~8 years of this shitty engine. I already want to fast forward to Fallout 5, now I'll want to fast forward to Skyrim 3.

The equivalent of having a 2019 sports car with leaf springs

Weird how Rockstar, CPDR, From software, and many other studios manage to massively update their games every time they make a new one. It's almost as if you can do everything from scratch and come out on top regardless. If they keep this up they aren't going to be profitable forever. They can't keep using this shit engine. F76 is the worst we have seen yet.

Having an old codebase isn't that bad, to be honest. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. John Carmack suffered untold tortures making the Quake engine as good as it was back when nobody had a true 3D engine that ran on average consumer processors and since it's open source, sure, take some netcode code and some renderer code, everyone does that, even today, in the rare case someone still bothers making their own graphics engine. Bethesda's problem above all is being too small and too set in their ways for their breeches. The way they keep cranking out games gives them no breathing room to actually make refinements to what's already there, it's just a neverending grind for more content, content that ends up being completely shit that only has an idea supporting it and little else because they also seem incapable of hiring a competent writer. I find it fitting they brought in ex-Bungie devs to make the gunplay in Fallout 4 better because I bet Bungie spent untold hours refining the gunplay in Destiny, tweaking numbers here and there until they got it just right. Sure Todd says they made a new renderer and lighting system but what worth is a game looking better when it plays marginally better than Fallout 3 did 10 years ago? I get that sinking feeling either Bethesda will keep making jank until the heat death of the universe or their luck actually runs out with Fallout 76 and they're either relegated to supporting other game studios or closure by ZeniMax.

is it really that hard to just use a modern engine and give up on creation

citation needed on what engines and what you're referring to i can at least speak from a software dev perspective, retooling an entire team is a massive task and from a business perspective there needs to be a benefit for it. If you just spent millions training a team to use another engine just so you can drive cars in fallout then was it worth it? Or would it have been cheaper and easier to try to work it into what they already have? also for the re question, are you a software developer or have any experience? It feels like you're just being an armchair game dev, any embarking has to have a good reason and overhauling what has been in place for over a decade isn't as easy as just hiring someone that knows ue4 and calling it a day, that's naive as hell and not how the real world works.

You might well say they don't have any reason to change anything, since no matter what pile of shit they excrete from their studios they'll still make huge profits.

I stated the studios, what more needs to be said. Look at GTA and how well they've updated each sequal. Look at Demon Souls, Dark Souls, and then Bloodborne. Look at the Witcher series. Look at Metal Gear. Each entry is an overhaul of the last game. You know these games. Virtually anyone out there who is familiar with gaming would recognize the history that these games have. the engine itself doesn't matter for shit. What matters is that these studios consistently release games that are very large upgrades from the last. Bethesda releases games that suffer issues that existed for a very long time, and these studios release games that do not follow this pattern. There are games out there that are built on shit engines and do just fine. What matters is that the software behind it is updated into a modern framework. I would argue that I don't care about the engine itself, but its very clear that their engine just isn't going to last forever with the issues it has had over a decade now. You can build a home out of scrap lumber. And you can rebuild a home from scrapping that one. But there is a point where the lumber just can't handle it any more. You have to update shit. The framework itself of their games just isn't good enough. "You have to be a chef to say this pizza is bad" Any random idiot can understand that Bethesda has a serious issue. Don't resort to shit like this, its weak.

Oh, hey look. It's this same old tired argument again. almost every engine today is based on older iterations that are 10+ years old. Some go back 20+ years, and in the case of id-tech, 25+. It's not about the engine itself, as much as it's about Bethesda refusing to do feature clean-up and trimming and refusing or chosing to be wholly ignorant (which i think is the case here) of what you could call a technology consensus in gaming. Untying physics and game logic from frame-rate and so on. It's not going to be fixed by a new engine for two reasons: -Gamebryo could be overhauled to handle this easier and cheaper than writing a new one. -They really don't give a fuck. Not in a "go fuck yourself" way, but they can't be arsed. they can't fathom anyone thinks these issues matter and they're not invested in the technical side of their development process IN THE LEAST! If the engine needs to do something, they add it. Like This new Multiplayer capability. But from a divorced perspective, Fallout and ES works fine at 60 FPS. The physics are fine until they break, then it's just "quirky and funny." It's not the engine in the sense that it can be made to work around those "usual suspect" issues if they bothered. The problems is they really don't care about said issues.

Look at Unitys reputation. People think it's literally worthless and only good for freeware trash horror indies. Yet some of the best games ever were made on it. If they took their current engine and unfucked the issues that it had, they could absolutely make it work. They have managed to update it enough to make relatively acceptable games. If a game can be built on the same engine Wolfenstein was made on, a game can be built on anything.

Bethesda is genuinely one of the only developers that I can call legitimately lazy. Hiding behind 'engine limitations' despite the fact that people constantly have to fix, and will fix, and can easily fix the bizarre issues. One of the prime examples is Fallout 4, again. Game doesn't have a pump shotgun. At all, even though there's concept art for multiple pump shotguns including a whole range of pipe shotguns. Why? Couldn't be assed to make a weapon that reloads one round at a time. No. Really. That's the reason. They even doubled down on this bullshit when they put out point lookout, where the lever-action rifle requires you to load every round before you could fire it again. A lever action, a weapon that you manually reload each individual round. And has animations for you loading each round separately.

Their entire company is based exclusively in the idea of "Ok, we did this thing and its good enough I guess, time to move on to the next thing" its so LAME

It's pretty damn good but it has its visual limitations.

Forest for the trees. Crock$tar uses the same engine they have and they don't update it until they want a new feature, when at which time they deploy a team culled from 300 software engineers that only do base coding and engine throughput, pulled from a roster of about 2300 employees. RD2R is also a literal walking highlight reel of shitty AI, nonsensical interactions and bugs out the yangyang. CDPR spent 30 million making their new engine with a literal grant from the government, an engine that broke consoles and had to be downgraded massively because of it, also failed to deploy their engine tool because they didn't want to pay for user license permission. They also employ people in the thousands. From also uses the same engine they have they don't update it very well either, as we see all the very interesting PC ports and bugs they still haven't fixed that are still used for griefing as we speak Konami doesn't make games anymore, and when they did they outsourced most of their fixing and tuning. BGS doesn't have many software engineers but the salient issue is zenimax's willingness to spend money versus BGS's output, and that problem isn't remotely unique to bethesda, quite the opposite. Call of Duty still has some bugs present since literal day one, that simply aren't considered expensive enough to fix. Their issues have jack to do with the engine, and everything to do with attitude and choice of content focus versus customer concern.

I'd say Engine is the least of my issue with bethesda, the mishandling of their respective Game Serie is. Fallout is a shadow of its former selves right now, and I know it is perfectly possible to make a great fallout RPG nowadays even in the creation engine. For all I care, they can make fallout 5 in the same engine version as fallout 4: what made the game so.. bad. shallow. was the fact that it had little lore, and what little lore is present is of very bad quality (the institute being cartoonishly evil) so not only you have at most 1 paragraph of backstory for the quasi majority of the in-game characters/ location/item/monsters, you also have the little of it in very bad quality. Fallout 4 feel like an unfinished game with too many wasted opportunity & thing that NEEDED to have more content: The memory den & goodneighbors are obvious example of that. For example, the conflict between Diamond City & Goodneighbors is not explored much in the game. John Hancock right hand girl is useless past "The big dig". The gunners cannot be spoken with or interacted in any way beyond shooting, and they have little lore explaining their presence, why are they so trained, but also their objective and why do they shoot at everyone on sight. The obvious Combat zone & Robot race course. And of course, the lack of actual in-game content such as weaponry, outfit & technology you can get by explorating around the map (which offers very little reward overall & the legendary system is an a lazy way to make unique without really making them unique, this abomination must be removed.). Those are not engine-level issue as Fallout: New Vegas mostly succeeded in getting most of these element I cited right: I am more than surprised to read about the hate of the engine, which I believe is just more than fine at this point.

I think it would be easier for them to get ID to make IDTech openworld and make it load content like Gamebyro than to try to fix the engine. But if they don't want to change it, they better get people who can fix it, even tho, I think that would cost more money and take more time

The Creation engine is only horribly broken because they refuse to fix anything unless forced to. It's not that they can't fix the issues it has, it's that they don't see a need to. Physics break over 60 FPS? Just lock the frame rate. All actors stop working when more than 16 are active? Limit the number of active actors to 15. They've basically built a castle on a swamp, and just keep building it higher the more it sinks. The enigne can be fixed and can be improved, but they would need to dedicate resources to it to optimize, and remove the spaghetic code in it. A ton of this issues are addressable, and have been addressed by mods and edits.

This idea that a long running studio is entirely incapable of switching gears and creating a new pipeline from the lessons they learned and making a new engine that better identifies with their current needs and for future releases boggles my god damn mind. You're calling a bunch of well paid and experienced developers babies who can't handle change.

They aren't incapable, it's just not economical when they're making profits hand over fist re-releasing Skyrim for the sixth time. Bethesda isn't going to switch to a new engine until they get burned and rejected by the market on their current one. For them to learn their lesson and get pressure towards a new engine, FO76 needs to tank so hard it's all but abandoned by March 1st of next year, and that's unlikely to happen if GTAO is anything to go by.

I don't care what engine they use I just want borderlands style multiplayer in an elderscrolls game, that'd make me so damn happy.