This is actually a good news and I am glad creation Engine will be used, The best part of Bethesda games are the modability creation engine and its predecessor provide. Unreal engine is not moddable and is not even beginner friendly, while someone like me can fire up Geck or creation kit and do a full fledged quest mod.
I guess you’ve never had to reconcile the disaster that ensues when multiple CE mods update different parts of a game’s .esp data.
If they touch properties that happen to be near each other, the mods that try to preserve properties that don’t concern them end up stomping all over one other, leaving the player in a horribly broken land of conflicts and sadness. The mods can’t help it, because the engine’s modding system and data structures are fundamentally too coarse to allow touching only what’s needed, and too stupid to make reliable conflict resolution possible. The endless quest to work around this flaw is why Skyrim has uncountable patch mods, which shouldn’t be necessary in the first place. It’s a bloody awful design.
I get that you love the possibilities afforded by modding. We all do. But please don’t glorify Creation Engine in this area. What’s under the covers is embarrassing, and particularly bad when more than a few mods are used at the same time. Players and modders deserve something better, and a competent engine developer absolutely could deliver it.
As someone who has spent too many hours dealing with its fallout, I wish Creation Engine would die.
It’s mostly a tooling issue, so they really could, but I still doubt it.
I remember installing conflicting mods with Fallout 3, and you just had to run a tool to examine the mods and merge the changes together (and warn you if they genuinely conflicted). It was like a 1 click process and I’m amazed it hasn’t been moved into the engine itself.
I love this story because it’s obvious your son asked this during the several minute long loading screen. No matter what year it is, Bethesda games take at least a minute to load.
And Unreal Engine started on 1995. This argument always shows people’s ignorance of software development. When the first pieces of the engine were built is not why it’s shitty. It’s because they haven’t invested money into it where it matters. (Unreal Engine also has some serious issues. It just looks prettier.)
a similar thing happened with arma reforger a few years ago, it was supposed to be a tech demonstrator for a new engine but it turned out to still be the same codebase as operation flashpoint from 1995. the engine is solid but it’s super annoying to program for, they have this custom scripting language that’s completely batshit insane because everything is infix by default, and an ui toolkit that is written as c++ classes meaning the actual game has a compiler in it for a subset of c++. so the scripts can be edited at runtime but if there is an error in the ui the game crashes at startup. people were hoping they’d finally switch to something that made sense but no.
They don’t work well anymore though, that’s the whole point. Bethesda’s codebase is past “mature”, it’s just straight up old and outdated now. Has been for a decade at the very least. Their games have looked and performed noticeably worse than their contemporaries for a good while now.
I didn’t think Skyrim was too outclassed compared to its peers in 2011, given that it was so much larger and doing so much more than a lot of them under the hood. But Fallout 4 came out alongside The Witcher 3, and the difference between the two was night and day. Then of course Baldur’s Gate 3 next to Starfield, and I have to scratch my head wondering what the hell Bethesda is doing still running this tech stack.
It’s not entirely out of question that they’ll use Unreal for graphics while retaining Gamebryo for gameplay. That’s kinda how the Oblivion remaster works. And might be best of both worlds if they manage to make Unreal not suck in terms of performance and don’t fall for the photorealism trap
I think graphics are pretty low on my list of priorities for how those games need to modernize. Starfield looks pretty alright in sheer fidelity, but the faces don’t animate well, the conversation system is dated even compared to The Outer Worlds doing basically the same thing, and the engine seems (for some reason) incapable of putting together a proper cut-scene.
Ah to be fair I haven’t played Starfield or even watched too many videos. I also didn’t like FO4 much so I was pretty much running with the assumption that they hadn’t changed much since 2011
Still, they may not need as many engine programmers if they reduce what their in-house engine needs to do. Could free up finances to hire more people to work on the meat and bones of the game. Or they could just pocket the difference and not give a fuck about making a good game, that seems quite likely too.
I love how the Gamebryo site is still up. I thought it was funny it was still up like 10 years ago when I looked last, and it’s still up now without any changes.
Even if it wasn’t owned by Microslop I don’t have any confidence BGS could make a good TES game. They’ve been sitting on their laurels for far too long.
If they go for a small-ish hand-crafted world, this is probably the best tool for the job. I don’t really care for loading screens when I enter/exit buildings…, I care for a compelling narrative within an amazing world, something I haven’t seen since Morrowind.
We are not talking about a scenario where they only had 2 years to pump out new content so they had to work with what they had. That they didn’t manage to build a new tech stack in the absurd amount of time since Skyrim is just embarrassing.
That they didn’t manage to build a new tech stack in the absurd amount of time since Skyrim is just embarrassing.
1: They were making games in that time, just not Elder Scrolls
2: Completely switching engines would make all the tools the modding community has built over the years useless, potentially killing that community for the new games
3: Every other game engine is also just as old as Creation Engine if you only look at when the code was first made, like you’re doing right now
I feel like we go through this every time Bethesda releases a game. Yes, every other engine is just as old. I’m sure there’s some ut99 code still in unreal, and maybe some quake code in source 2. The difference is those other engines already work pretty well, and have improved over time. The creation engine is still somehow just as janky every time, and somehow still has bugs dating back to skyrim or oblivion. I want to believe they can fix it, but their track record does not inspire confidence.
I’m sure they’re well aware that the biggest knock on Starfield are its forgettable plot and universe and too much loading screens. It’ll be less of a problem in an Elder Scrolls game as it’s building on a great lore foundation and it’s a region rather than a bunch of planets. I’m sure in the 7+ years later I expect to actually play the game, loading screens won’t be much of a problem. Improved graphics will be a given. It won’t set the world on fire but it’ll look firmly like it belongs in the PS5 generation which is good enough for me
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i have appropriately low expectations.
We need more diversity in game engines, not less, so I’m fine with this
That isn’t really saying that much. It could still be a creation engine that has a UE5 renderer on top. Like the Oblivion remaster.
Ok and does it run optimized on old hardware and Linux? I’ll easily skip it if it doesn’t. 😜
it’s 2026, so obviously not.
If it works on Windows, it works on Linux. (God I love Proton)
You might have to upgrade your PC for this one (/s)
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Shit, haven’t got much time left to finally play through Skyrim.
Bethesda…Bethesda never changes.
Good, I take loading screens than unreal slop
Loading screen after loading screen after loading screen, but hey you can put a cheese wheel in funny places.
They should steal the old trick from Diablo II where it pre-loads nearby areas.
Of course, because we have infinite RAM during the RAM crisis. /s
Now we need to change that to
A: Don’t you have NVMe SSD(s)?
B: Don’t you have SSDs?
This is actually a good news and I am glad creation Engine will be used, The best part of Bethesda games are the modability creation engine and its predecessor provide. Unreal engine is not moddable and is not even beginner friendly, while someone like me can fire up Geck or creation kit and do a full fledged quest mod.
I guess you’ve never had to reconcile the disaster that ensues when multiple CE mods update different parts of a game’s .esp data.
If they touch properties that happen to be near each other, the mods that try to preserve properties that don’t concern them end up stomping all over one other, leaving the player in a horribly broken land of conflicts and sadness. The mods can’t help it, because the engine’s modding system and data structures are fundamentally too coarse to allow touching only what’s needed, and too stupid to make reliable conflict resolution possible. The endless quest to work around this flaw is why Skyrim has uncountable patch mods, which shouldn’t be necessary in the first place. It’s a bloody awful design.
I get that you love the possibilities afforded by modding. We all do. But please don’t glorify Creation Engine in this area. What’s under the covers is embarrassing, and particularly bad when more than a few mods are used at the same time. Players and modders deserve something better, and a competent engine developer absolutely could deliver it.
As someone who has spent too many hours dealing with its fallout, I wish Creation Engine would die.
I mean, it’s a new version, you’d hope they’d fix at least some issues - me, massively coping
It’s mostly a tooling issue, so they really could, but I still doubt it.
I remember installing conflicting mods with Fallout 3, and you just had to run a tool to examine the mods and merge the changes together (and warn you if they genuinely conflicted). It was like a 1 click process and I’m amazed it hasn’t been moved into the engine itself.
This is also available for the more recent Elder Scrolls games, like Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind
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It’s 2026, and you are literally eleven 're’s short of the current number of rereleases.
I love this story because it’s obvious your son asked this during the several minute long loading screen. No matter what year it is, Bethesda games take at least a minute to load.
There’s and SKSE plugin that fixes that
this must be a pc problem that im too console coded to understand
I laughed 3 times!
deleted by creator
Hey, what’s your middle name?
deleted by creator
shiny metal knee 🦿
Translation: it’s the same shitty gamebryo they’re always using.
Not content to look outdated in 2015 or 2023, now they’re going to look outdated in 2030.
2015? that codebase started in morrowind. and say what you want about that game but it is not a looker. it launched the same year as metroid prime.
And Unreal Engine started on 1995. This argument always shows people’s ignorance of software development. When the first pieces of the engine were built is not why it’s shitty. It’s because they haven’t invested money into it where it matters. (Unreal Engine also has some serious issues. It just looks prettier.)
i mean, a 23 year old codebase is bound to have some tech debt.
They rebuild the engine to be 64-bit (instead of 32-bit) for Fallout 4, and that version is what Skyrim Special Edition is running on
that’s not a complete rewrite. hell, depending on how it was architected it may just be a recompile
Very probably yes, but it will also have an extensive feature set and stable, mature functions that work well after 20+ years of development.
A mature codebase is often a double edged sword I agree. But it’s not always a good idea to just throw away all that progress.
in bethesdas case though?
a similar thing happened with arma reforger a few years ago, it was supposed to be a tech demonstrator for a new engine but it turned out to still be the same codebase as operation flashpoint from 1995. the engine is solid but it’s super annoying to program for, they have this custom scripting language that’s completely batshit insane because everything is infix by default, and an ui toolkit that is written as c++ classes meaning the actual game has a compiler in it for a subset of c++. so the scripts can be edited at runtime but if there is an error in the ui the game crashes at startup. people were hoping they’d finally switch to something that made sense but no.
They don’t work well anymore though, that’s the whole point. Bethesda’s codebase is past “mature”, it’s just straight up old and outdated now. Has been for a decade at the very least. Their games have looked and performed noticeably worse than their contemporaries for a good while now.
I didn’t think Skyrim was too outclassed compared to its peers in 2011, given that it was so much larger and doing so much more than a lot of them under the hood. But Fallout 4 came out alongside The Witcher 3, and the difference between the two was night and day. Then of course Baldur’s Gate 3 next to Starfield, and I have to scratch my head wondering what the hell Bethesda is doing still running this tech stack.
It’s not entirely out of question that they’ll use Unreal for graphics while retaining Gamebryo for gameplay. That’s kinda how the Oblivion remaster works. And might be best of both worlds if they manage to make Unreal not suck in terms of performance and don’t fall for the photorealism trap
I fucking hope not. Unreals’s graphics engine looks terrible
It doesn’t if you disable TAA and shit, but by default it’s horrible
Bugs, bugs, always the same bugs.
I think graphics are pretty low on my list of priorities for how those games need to modernize. Starfield looks pretty alright in sheer fidelity, but the faces don’t animate well, the conversation system is dated even compared to The Outer Worlds doing basically the same thing, and the engine seems (for some reason) incapable of putting together a proper cut-scene.
Ah to be fair I haven’t played Starfield or even watched too many videos. I also didn’t like FO4 much so I was pretty much running with the assumption that they hadn’t changed much since 2011
Still, they may not need as many engine programmers if they reduce what their in-house engine needs to do. Could free up finances to hire more people to work on the meat and bones of the game. Or they could just pocket the difference and not give a fuck about making a good game, that seems quite likely too.
Todd Howard doesn’t know how to make games any other way.
Morrowind? Gamebryo is the continuation of the NetImmerse engine. Development started in 1997 with the first game released in 1999.
yeah morrowind used netimmerse, first time bethesda used it.
I think Gamebryo (neé NetImmerse) is even a bit older than Morrowind.
yeah it’s not bethesda’s engine. but my point was about where the codebase for the creation engine comes from, and that’s the morrowind code.
I love how the Gamebryo site is still up. I thought it was funny it was still up like 10 years ago when I looked last, and it’s still up now without any changes.
www.gamebryo.com
rip, you killed it
What do you mean?
site doesnt load for me, says site account suspended
Works fine for me on mobile and desktop.
It’s broken for me too, account suspended. Something about not being supported in the user’s environment.
I love the Elder Scrolls series, but I’m not convinced that 6 will be good. Owned by Microsoft in this age of AI shit.
Even if it wasn’t owned by Microslop I don’t have any confidence BGS could make a good TES game. They’ve been sitting on their laurels for far too long.
If ES6 isn’t Skyrim with better writing and better combat, it will fail.
We had that, its called Morrowind.
Yup. As I said, it’s better combat than Skyrim.
This is magnificent.
Unfortunately no. Gamers were always riding the hype vave. Spent money on Star Citizen and blue gun skin. Gamers are idiots.
It will probably be fine, but it’s very unlikely to be especially good.
If they go for a small-ish hand-crafted world, this is probably the best tool for the job. I don’t really care for loading screens when I enter/exit buildings…, I care for a compelling narrative within an amazing world, something I haven’t seen since Morrowind.
Also please revamp your animation system
We are not talking about a scenario where they only had 2 years to pump out new content so they had to work with what they had. That they didn’t manage to build a new tech stack in the absurd amount of time since Skyrim is just embarrassing.
1: They were making games in that time, just not Elder Scrolls
2: Completely switching engines would make all the tools the modding community has built over the years useless, potentially killing that community for the new games
3: Every other game engine is also just as old as Creation Engine if you only look at when the code was first made, like you’re doing right now
I feel like we go through this every time Bethesda releases a game. Yes, every other engine is just as old. I’m sure there’s some ut99 code still in unreal, and maybe some quake code in source 2. The difference is those other engines already work pretty well, and have improved over time. The creation engine is still somehow just as janky every time, and somehow still has bugs dating back to skyrim or oblivion. I want to believe they can fix it, but their track record does not inspire confidence.
I’m sure they’re well aware that the biggest knock on Starfield are its forgettable plot and universe and too much loading screens. It’ll be less of a problem in an Elder Scrolls game as it’s building on a great lore foundation and it’s a region rather than a bunch of planets. I’m sure in the 7+ years later I expect to actually play the game, loading screens won’t be much of a problem. Improved graphics will be a given. It won’t set the world on fire but it’ll look firmly like it belongs in the PS5 generation which is good enough for me