Yes, and the German city of Cologne is the same since it was built by the romans. Because when the name and the foundations are the same over the ages then everything is the same, no major changes are possible ever!
The philosophical argument is called Theseus’ Ship. Here is a better comparison for you: Unreal Engine. It’s “the same thing” since 1998 or so. There’s also idTech engines, which are “the same” since Quake. Either engine would better fit the Cologne analogy.
Your city comparison also misses the point because Creation 2.0 is still using the equivalent of roman aqueducts and plumbing in 2024. They might work, sure, but not for a city of 1 million people where every building and home has its own plumbing. A better comparison would be a city that has some road holes older than some of its own residents.
it literally has decades old bugs. stop. we know it’s “updated”. the problem is that each time it gets updated to the decade before. also there are hard limits. that’s why starfield was the least “open” world they had despite using the most “updated” engine. not to mention you have to go through an external loading screen everytime your character breathes too much air.
Well; you could use that engine to produce something well-written, deep and interesting like New Vegas, but that still got dinged for being an absurdly bug-ridden release with serious performance issues. It was great despite the engine, not because.
There’s some slightly-shonky open world engines that support some really impressive RPGs (eg. Baldur’s Gate 3 on the Divinity engine - looks great but performance is arseholes) and some very impressive open-world engines that support some lightweight RPGs (eg. Horizon Forbidden West on the Decima engine - looks great and smooth as butter). And then you’ve got the Creation engine, which looks terrible and has terrible performance, and which runs bugs and glitches in a way that combines into (usually) very shallow RPGs.
kenshi is also an awesome game on an old engine. Very excited for the sequel using unreal engine that’s coming out in probably 10 years because the indie devs want to release a finished product
Ubisoft is worse. I swear, AC mirage has the same issues, glitches and bugs that it has had since the first game. Switch the engine and rebuild from the ground up already. Stop releasing the same game reskinned
counterpoint: if it isn’t the engine holding them back, then everyone left is just fundamentally bad at designing games (i’m not counting “let’s just copy what we designed last time” as design), and that’s worse
I also don’t think it’s fair to blame the devs,I think they have a lack of direction.
Ever since Fallout 4, they’ve been trying to take their games in every direction possible at the same time.
Crafting? Check
Vehicles? Check
Skills? Check
Online? Why not?
Thousands of procedurally generated planets? Go for it
Story? Anything goes, it doesn’t need to make sense
The gameplay loop in Skyrim made sense, quests took you to dungeons that gave you loot which took you back to towns and more quests.
Ugh the crafting is a drag. You need to level up, you need to build outposts for materials, and you need to create useless stuff as practice, and you have to deal with an inventory system from 2010. It’s like after the daggers in Skyrim they decided crafters in a single player game needed to be punished. Any one of those systems would have worked to provide a feeling of progression and keeping people from going too fast on crafting.
then everyone left is just fundamentally bad at designing games
Obviously. The problem with Bethesda was never the damn engine, they’ve been consecutively dumbing down their games ever since Oblivion. The only anomaly was New Vegas made by Obsidian, which are actually competent at making RPGs and even with the dated FO3 engine at the time they managed to make one of the best games ever. The problem was never the engine, it’s their game design philosophy.
the average player doesn’t care about crunchy rpg systems. they do care if the core gameplay would’ve been outdated in 2010.
bethesda doesn’t seem to be able to improve the core gameplay because the engine can’t cope.
even if you fixed the writing and tossed out the awful procedural generation in favor of hand-crafted environments, at it heart it’s still going to play like a stripped down borderlands 1
Starfields core gameplay is actually leagues more refined then prior games on the same engine, feels really good to play, where it lacks heavily is story, which is historically how they made up the difference between the lackluster gameplay.
To clarify a little, I mostly mean the FPS style gunplay.
Elder Scrolls lore is pretty cool, they’ve never been AMAZING stories, but there’s enough there to RP and make decisions and such that have some kind of impact.
bethesda doesn’t seem to be able to improve the core gameplay because the engine can’t cope.
No, Bethesda can’t improve because they keep catering for the lowest common denominator, engine has never had anything to do with it, it never has. They don’t need a complex RPG system with a ton of flashy new things; New Vegas wasn’t complex, it was fairly streamlined as far as RPGs go, what they need is better writers and better game designers that know how make interesting worlds, quests, characters and gameplay mechanics.
even if you fixed the writing and tossed out the awful procedural generation in favor of hand-crafted environments, at it heart it’s still going to play like a stripped down borderlands 1
Because they’ve been dumbing down their games since forever, bring back more robust roleplay with more actions and consequences, fully fleshed out mechanics, get better writers. Just look at Fallout: London, despite the bugs everyone that has played it agrees it’s the best “Bethesda game” since New Vegas, another game that wasn’t actually made by Bethesda. I’ll repeat: the problem was never the engine.
Bethesda can’t improve because they keep catering for the lowest common denominator
even in your ideal world where they perfect the world, quests and characters, tes 6 is still going to suck if core gameplay plays the same as skyrim, which played the same as oblivion
they can’t improve that core gameplay without a better engine
new vegas and london are popular in the same way 1 and 2 are popular, which is “not mainstream enough to sustain a studio like bethesda”.
People have been saying this since Half Life 2, possibly even longer, then everyone said it about Crysis. To be fair, Cryengine has some validity as a future proof engine. It was first made in 2002, just 5 years after Gamebryo and is still being used in heavily modified forms by a large number of studios. But even that is showing its age and is getting heavily refactored yet again for the Open 3D Engine that the Linux foundation is working on. With that said, the amount of active development and intensive refactoring that the Cryengine has gone through at this point eclipses what has been done for the Gamebryo engine. But it still seems like lack of respect for tech debt is the larger problem than “just switch engines”
I get your logic but Source was developed as a foundation engine and it had a road map to improve its performance and graphics. Example: HL2 vs Dear Ester.
Cry Engine again, designed to be perormant and push graphics. Opened up to multiple developers as a service.
Bethesda’s engine is tuned for RPG elements, fair enough. But there is apparently a limit to how graphically rich it can get.
Bethesda have pushed there engine as far as it’ll go. There ex dev is saying “it isnt the engines fault the RPG was bad.” These are 2x separate issues.
There will always be tech debt making large scale IT changes.
RE the point on Risk, I’d write it like this:
IF the engine is changed THEN there could be a delay to current projects. Mitigation: finish projects in flight. Start new projects on a new engine.
How about this risk:
IF the engine is not able to be modernized THEN there is a risk that Bethesda games fall beind their competition. Mitigation:
Better RPG elements (Dev says this didn’t work).
Migrate to a new engine in a rush when the next project doesn’t sell (cutting corners on the tech debt).
P.s. do you have a good definition of tech debt? Ive always used “Something we need fix in the future.” Quite loose but ive had lots of arguments about this lol
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Is that the same engine they used for Star Field? Because I can hear the creaking from here. It’s absolutely time for a new engine.
Yes, the same they’ve been using since Morrowind.
Yes, and the German city of Cologne is the same since it was built by the romans. Because when the name and the foundations are the same over the ages then everything is the same, no major changes are possible ever!
The philosophical argument is called Theseus’ Ship. Here is a better comparison for you: Unreal Engine. It’s “the same thing” since 1998 or so. There’s also idTech engines, which are “the same” since Quake. Either engine would better fit the Cologne analogy.
Your city comparison also misses the point because Creation 2.0 is still using the equivalent of roman aqueducts and plumbing in 2024. They might work, sure, but not for a city of 1 million people where every building and home has its own plumbing. A better comparison would be a city that has some road holes older than some of its own residents.
Yeah, the Unreal Engine comparison is what I normally do. But change is the spice of life 😁
it literally has decades old bugs. stop. we know it’s “updated”. the problem is that each time it gets updated to the decade before. also there are hard limits. that’s why starfield was the least “open” world they had despite using the most “updated” engine. not to mention you have to go through an external loading screen everytime your character breathes too much air.
deleted by creator
Well; you could use that engine to produce something well-written, deep and interesting like New Vegas, but that still got dinged for being an absurdly bug-ridden release with serious performance issues. It was great despite the engine, not because.
There’s some slightly-shonky open world engines that support some really impressive RPGs (eg. Baldur’s Gate 3 on the Divinity engine - looks great but performance is arseholes) and some very impressive open-world engines that support some lightweight RPGs (eg. Horizon Forbidden West on the Decima engine - looks great and smooth as butter). And then you’ve got the Creation engine, which looks terrible and has terrible performance, and which runs bugs and glitches in a way that combines into (usually) very shallow RPGs.
kenshi is also an awesome game on an old engine. Very excited for the sequel using unreal engine that’s coming out in probably 10 years because the indie devs want to release a finished product
If they lean any harder into the sunk cost fallacy they’re going to be walking on the bottom of the ocean.
Perfectly tuned to only release one buggy-ass game a decade?
Bethesda, my hand is perfectly tuned for my dick.
That doesn’t mean it’s preferable to a moist orifice.
the tech debt effect is hilarious
Ubisoft is worse. I swear, AC mirage has the same issues, glitches and bugs that it has had since the first game. Switch the engine and rebuild from the ground up already. Stop releasing the same game reskinned
We have seen how that ended on Halo Infinite…
Same game engine that had me spinning uncontrollably during the unskippable opening credits on a fresh install?
Perfectly tuned to churn out mediocre crap. Checks out.
Mediocre fun crap, please.
Are they, though? Starfield was so lifeless that I felt scammed even getting it for under $50 on release.
People really need to understand what an engine is before complaining about it.
counterpoint: if it isn’t the engine holding them back, then everyone left is just fundamentally bad at designing games (i’m not counting “let’s just copy what we designed last time” as design), and that’s worse
I also don’t think it’s fair to blame the devs,I think they have a lack of direction.
Ever since Fallout 4, they’ve been trying to take their games in every direction possible at the same time.
Crafting? Check Vehicles? Check Skills? Check Online? Why not? Thousands of procedurally generated planets? Go for it Story? Anything goes, it doesn’t need to make sense
The gameplay loop in Skyrim made sense, quests took you to dungeons that gave you loot which took you back to towns and more quests.
Ugh the crafting is a drag. You need to level up, you need to build outposts for materials, and you need to create useless stuff as practice, and you have to deal with an inventory system from 2010. It’s like after the daggers in Skyrim they decided crafters in a single player game needed to be punished. Any one of those systems would have worked to provide a feeling of progression and keeping people from going too fast on crafting.
And it doesn’t even interact with anything else!
You can either get materials by setting up a bunch of outposts which is a complete drag or buying them at like one shop in Akila City.
It’s like they saw they had that in Fallout 4 and 76, ported it over and then remembered that you can’t scrap random junk to get the materials.
It’s not even used for ship upgrades. Why does it even exist???
Obviously. The problem with Bethesda was never the damn engine, they’ve been consecutively dumbing down their games ever since Oblivion. The only anomaly was New Vegas made by Obsidian, which are actually competent at making RPGs and even with the dated FO3 engine at the time they managed to make one of the best games ever. The problem was never the engine, it’s their game design philosophy.
the average player doesn’t care about crunchy rpg systems. they do care if the core gameplay would’ve been outdated in 2010.
bethesda doesn’t seem to be able to improve the core gameplay because the engine can’t cope.
even if you fixed the writing and tossed out the awful procedural generation in favor of hand-crafted environments, at it heart it’s still going to play like a stripped down borderlands 1
Starfields core gameplay is actually leagues more refined then prior games on the same engine, feels really good to play, where it lacks heavily is story, which is historically how they made up the difference between the lackluster gameplay.
To clarify a little, I mostly mean the FPS style gunplay.
you and i must have been playing different bethesda games, because none of them have been particularly interesting story-wise
Elder Scrolls lore is pretty cool, they’ve never been AMAZING stories, but there’s enough there to RP and make decisions and such that have some kind of impact.
No, Bethesda can’t improve because they keep catering for the lowest common denominator, engine has never had anything to do with it, it never has. They don’t need a complex RPG system with a ton of flashy new things; New Vegas wasn’t complex, it was fairly streamlined as far as RPGs go, what they need is better writers and better game designers that know how make interesting worlds, quests, characters and gameplay mechanics.
Because they’ve been dumbing down their games since forever, bring back more robust roleplay with more actions and consequences, fully fleshed out mechanics, get better writers. Just look at Fallout: London, despite the bugs everyone that has played it agrees it’s the best “Bethesda game” since New Vegas, another game that wasn’t actually made by Bethesda. I’ll repeat: the problem was never the engine.
even in your ideal world where they perfect the world, quests and characters, tes 6 is still going to suck if core gameplay plays the same as skyrim, which played the same as oblivion
they can’t improve that core gameplay without a better engine
new vegas and london are popular in the same way 1 and 2 are popular, which is “not mainstream enough to sustain a studio like bethesda”.
Sounds more like “We’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas!”
Perfectly tuned is not the right environment for creativity.
“perfectly tuned” means their game engine is coupled to their game design, which yeah, more or less makes genuine creativity impossible
not to mention the psychological factors, like the hurdle of convincing higher ups to try something new when simply not doing that is 10x less work
I think were seeing diminishing returns in graphics. Some games are almost photo realistic.
This means that any engine capable of these graphics will be largely future proof.
They should bite the bullet and build/move to a new engine. It likely won’t need changing unless there is a major breakthrough.
People have been saying this since Half Life 2, possibly even longer, then everyone said it about Crysis. To be fair, Cryengine has some validity as a future proof engine. It was first made in 2002, just 5 years after Gamebryo and is still being used in heavily modified forms by a large number of studios. But even that is showing its age and is getting heavily refactored yet again for the Open 3D Engine that the Linux foundation is working on. With that said, the amount of active development and intensive refactoring that the Cryengine has gone through at this point eclipses what has been done for the Gamebryo engine. But it still seems like lack of respect for tech debt is the larger problem than “just switch engines”
I get your logic but Source was developed as a foundation engine and it had a road map to improve its performance and graphics. Example: HL2 vs Dear Ester.
Cry Engine again, designed to be perormant and push graphics. Opened up to multiple developers as a service.
Bethesda’s engine is tuned for RPG elements, fair enough. But there is apparently a limit to how graphically rich it can get.
Bethesda have pushed there engine as far as it’ll go. There ex dev is saying “it isnt the engines fault the RPG was bad.” These are 2x separate issues.
There will always be tech debt making large scale IT changes.
RE the point on Risk, I’d write it like this:
IF the engine is changed THEN there could be a delay to current projects. Mitigation: finish projects in flight. Start new projects on a new engine.
How about this risk:
IF the engine is not able to be modernized THEN there is a risk that Bethesda games fall beind their competition. Mitigation:
Better RPG elements (Dev says this didn’t work).
Migrate to a new engine in a rush when the next project doesn’t sell (cutting corners on the tech debt).
P.s. do you have a good definition of tech debt? Ive always used “Something we need fix in the future.” Quite loose but ive had lots of arguments about this lol