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Even if they switch to a new engine, they still have to put actual effort in their game design and quest design. Better tech can’t make up for a lack of passion
Exactly this, graphics were far from the issue, the lack of doing anything different and the same ole mechanics is old. They could have had players travel without load screens and the game still would be very mid. They didn't build the worlds in a convincing way and it was empty and repetitive.
Quest design is FINE, it's no different than any other game which combines quest, destroy, escort, and explore. Game Design is also fine, there really wasn't anything different from starfield and skyrim other than the space aspect and the PG element and skyrim is still going strong. The main issue in a way really is the tech: Their in ability to escape loading screens at almost every single doorway is a major limit. There's a shop in new atlantis that LITERALLY has a loading screen to go into a one-room back office. Elimination of loading screens outside of launching into space and changing systems would literally have propelled the game into the top of several years for rpg/space games.
Agreed. I want more fun things to do. Like discovering new species or help a civilization that is starting to show themselves. More Fictional Sci-Fi Fantasy. More reasons to explore certain places and get encounters to expand on the universe. Quests that helps with that new Species or something. Instead, all I find of intelligent creatures are just Humans from America. It's literally just Skyrim in Space with nothing else. Sure, that there are some Alien Lifeforms but what about other intelligent beings? Clearly the "realism" that they want isn't working. Gotta add more. More quests that expands their game but nope... The best they got is the same old Escort this. Deliver that. Kill this. With nothing else to add on their world. It's just "chores" to do and that's not "Fine" here. That's a Bare Minimum. Yet the fans doesn't realize that the Quests or Missions are empty. If you do them or not, doesn't make the experience any more fun nor memorable nor unique, nor it adds to their universe. Quests like BG3 are good because they give you things for builds or even affect the campaign. This? Nothing but this is "Fine" right? Nothing innovative at all... Just do a Palworld. Take quests from other games that are memorable or good and change it up a little.
@@TheWorldsprayer the game was review bombed by 100 million sony playstation users. No one had an issue with the loading screen. Your mom & dad playing the game preferred them. As did streamers. It gave them a chance to use their mind, to tap into their imagination. And also to see their photos.
Undoubtedly they'd benefit from not having a frankenstein of a decades-old engine, but that's not going to save them from their habit of cut n' pasting game and quest designs without giving two tugs about whether or not it makes sense in different settings. I get that people don't mind that, I liked Skyrim too, but don't ask for maximum money for minimum effort.
if they make their games like starfield or fallout 76, it doesn't matter if they switch to a new engine. their recent games show they don't even want to put to the effort to making a memorable world and characters. it feels like Bethesda wants to not make games with the way they make games.
FO76 was more a response to the ongoing craze for online games. They had a successful IP, investors demanded more money, and like most studios these days they did what is natural: take a current IP and make it multiplayer. Starfields major weakness outside of loading screens was they relied too heavily on procedural generation when there HAD to have been SOMEONE at the company reminding them that PG use when used too much (very very easy to do) would make things repetitive and flat.
@@TheWorldsprayer they should just change their formula and make normal games again
@@heroicgangster9981 not sure what you mean, starfield was pretty dang close to all bethesda has ever done: Generic fantasy "you are the hero" questline with shallow characters who MIGHT have a day/night schedule with a wide world with stuff scattered around to find all seperated by loadscreens. Fallout 76 was the only one that really broke the mold with multiplay.
@@TheWorldsprayer yeah but where's the fun looking characters? why did they choose a space game to suddenly go boring hard sci-fi? i go into bethesda games for fun ideas, not lame restrictive ideas.
Even skyrim and fallout 4 were along the same trend if you compare them to their previous games' worlds and characters. I don't expect ES6 to be anything but an even further watered down version of Skyrim with graphics similar to 2013 mods
Bethesda is a monument, much like BioWare and Blizzard. The life and creativity is gone. It's just a stone, a reminder of what was.
Times change dude, plus it is a company they are running. Can't run a business on catering to select few customers. You guys are way to dramatic and if it's that bad just stop playing games, it's simple honestly.
Except Todd Howard’s there, so no excuse
@@RobT192 So if someone loves tennis and people started complaining about the Tennis racket manufacturers producing garbage tennis rackets you would just suggest them to stop playing tennis? Why shouldn‘t people go and complain about that such that the companies stop producing terrible tennis rackets?
@@RobT192 And here we see someone who is part of the reason gaming companies continue to dish out shittier and shittier games! And weird take btw. Skyrim was extremely successful. FO4 was extremely successful. Following Either of the methodologies for those games, but expanding on concepts and/or adding to when making starfield, would have made it just as popular if not more so. So "catering to select few customers" isn't even an argument.
I'd still agree with Luke in that Bioware and Blizzard are way worse off than Bethesda, though. Bioware had two failed projects in a row, and Blizzard's last release was the first half-success in almost a decade. Bethesda has FO76 going for it and Starfield did decently for them, despite its reception.
Bethesda needs to put the "Role Playing" back into "Role Playing Game". In Skyrim, the Blades, Companions, and Thieves Guild questlines all ask the player to make a very irrational decision in terms of the world's lore during the course of their questlines. This is a problem with the writing and the railroaded quests. I really appreciated the hidden quest "Destroy the Dark Brotherhood" which gives the player the choice to destroy rather than join the Brotherhood but that was all too rare in Skyrim.
They need a new writer since Emil clearly doesn't actually enjoy his job, and admits to not doing certain things because most people would never see it, or don't actually care about writing. Meanwhile you have BG3 who is like "yeah we have some permutations that probably less than .01% of players will see, but we put it in there for those who do!"
Switching away from the Creation Engine won't fix their problems, but not switching away from it is a problem. It's something on the list of things they can do to improve, but it's only one small step. There are a lot more steps to take on top of that.
Just make games that aren't made to suck on purpose. I'd be happy with that.
Graphics aren’t the issue, people are still playing Skyrim from over 10 years ago and that’s just 1 example there are tons of games from years and years ago that people prefer to play than modern games. Put fun first then worry about everything else
Graphics have peaked anyway
To be fair a huge chunk of that is because of mods, a number of them actually improve the graphics. And the problem currently is that they haven't switched to a new engine SINCE Skyrim
@@Ashbrash1998 the engine is from Morrowind if i am not wrong
Graphics are a issue and no one fucking plays skyrim lmao. Expect PC users with mods.
@@Ashbrash1998 Eh, I usually play Skyrim without graphical mods. Played it again about a month ago and was quite surprised how beautiful much of it was, they created a pretty incredible visual atmosphere. Though elves are still weirdly ugly.
I don't believe the engine is the problem. If Starfield had interesting characters and good stories, then the loading screens wouldn't matter. The aged feel wouldn't matter. New Vegas has aged quite a lot yet it's still a great game worth playing time and time again. The engine isn't the issue. It's the world, the characters, the stories, the lore, the identity.
If graphics were that big of a limitation, people would never play 2D pixelated games these days
Fun fact New Vegas was developed by Obsidian and used the Gamebryo engine.
If NV came out today, people would 100% complain about it more than enjoy it because of how aged it feels lol. NV gets a pass from us because of either nostalgia, or because people can understand for it's time, it was at least pretty decent, so they aren't as hard on it.
@@Th1sUsernameIsNotTaken That's me. I played NV for the first time in 2019 and just couldn't get into it because it felt so dated. I'm not touching FO3 or Oblivion because I fear I'll feel the same way towards them. I got no problem with Skyrim, though. And yeah, the press was pretty harsh on NV when it initially released, mostly because of the technical state.
Totally agree with you. The starfield main quest was so badly written my heart sank every time there was a starborn encounter. As a sci fi fan the starborn dialogue was the worst sci fi writing I have ever come across. The world lore is very inconsistent. They can't decide how multi-dimension travel works and how time travel is involved. it's totally impossible to feel immersed in the world when it constanly contradicts itself and the characters are equally contradictory. As exploration guild that doesn't really do any exploration. Go and scan animals and plants that already have names so must have already been discovered and catalogued. There really is no hope for ES6.
One positive of their engine is the physics of individual items. The potatoes in the ship is Bethesda fun through and through but they may have spent too much time on that and I truly think Starfield wasn’t really a complete idea until a year before release
The engine doesn't matter much. Bethesda is creatively bankrupt. They need a whole new team, not necessarily a new engine; though that could also improve things.
I agree, theyd be better off building games about things that already have lore like fallout. Because they cant seem to come up with anything interesting alone. An update to the current engine or a new engine would help but if the writing and gameplay suck then the game is still gonna stink
No they need new leaders.
@@soljaboi911 Yeah if they had a good engine we would end up with another Skull and Bones Situation, looks great, but there is no reason to play
@@XSquidbeatsXThat's what caused an issue. People left during Starfield's early days.
To me, Starfield's NG+ (The Unity) just feels like a way for the writers to get out of having to write a compelling ending to the main story.
No we want Emil Tortilini to write his meaningless quests and next game will only have radient quests and Emil-quests that are have exactly the same dialogue. 'Go to a place, kill a thing, report back, I have updated your map'. We want sixteen times the load screens.
Yeah bro emil is the only dude that has shit fetch quests in his games.
You just described most side quests in most games.
Another factor likely affecting why CDPR changed engines is that they had their Red Engine source code stolen.
While it can help create cheats, and do SOME nefarious things, we didn't see any of those happening after that cyber attack on them, and I don't think they ever plan on doing live service / multiplayer games. At least not yet, so it wouldn't have really been a huge issue. Even EA's frostbite Engine had it's source code leaked, and they stuck with it as did the companies under them.
Not true, they literally stated that they are switching from RED Engine to Unreal because it`s a lot easier to get experienced developers already familiar with the engine, every time they hired someone new it took almost a full year to get them up to speed in the development process, Unreal allows them to hire people overseas, it allows them to be flexible, and way more efficient. Even if it costs more initially, over time will be a good investment.
@@shippy1001 Link the source. because from an interview: "CD Projekt Red's Art Director, Jakub Knapik, noted that thanks to Epic's collaboration with many other studios there are already many desirable features in Unreal Engine 5. "The fact that Unreal is used by a lot of teams already in the world, a lot of perspectives are projected into the design of the tools and that helps the tool to be way more agile." As such, CDPR will benefit from the ideas of other Unreal users." "CDPR's CTO Paweł Zawodny said "It was the shift towards open world support that brought Unreal Engine 5 to our attention."" Had nothing to do with familiarity according to actual people at CDPR
As long as they stay in their lane, the engine is fine. The popularity of Skyrim, Fallout 3, New Vegas, and Morrowwind are testimony to that, people to this day rave about these games, still mod and play them. Not every game needs The Last of Us levels of motion capture and cut scenes. To me good writing and good game design are way more important than any motion capture or ray tracing will ever be. If they stick with the engine and give us a New Vegas in space, or a New Vegas in Tamriel, I'm sure no one would complain.
There's no way they can give us a New Vegas because they didn't make it. Obsidian has been continually giving us what Bethesda should have.
@@Marcus-zx8su No? Obsidian has released very meh games since Fallout NV, they have been getting worse just like Bethesda and Blizzard.
@@Marcus-zx8su Of course they can, both studios were owned by Zenimax, now they're both owned by Microsoft. They can make Id software make New Vegas 2 if they wanted to. All that aside, that's not what I meant, If Bethesda gave us a game like New Vegas, of the same quality as New Vegas, but set in Space or Tamriel, no one would complain, well, some would, it is the Internet. My point being the engine shouldn't be the focus of making better games.
Yes they need to switch, but they also need to fire Emil Pagliarulo and hire passionate devs. No amount of tech upgrades will make up for boring, stale, uninspired game design.
the issue is xbox and microsoft.
@@mnemonix1315no it’s really Emil, he is a writer who doesn’t care about the produce, he is PROUD of not using design documents and a man who doesn’t know the difference between Tone and Setting.
@@mnemonix1315 The issues pre-date XBOX and Microsoft. I remember first hearing about Pagliarulo long before Starfield came out, as part of the criticism of Fallout 4's writing and it's fair criticism. The "yes", "different yes", "sarcastic yes" answer options in dialogue really got on my nerves and I also hate the "acting tough" routine some characters do. I'm not saying he's the worst ever, he has moments where the writing is good, but that's more of an exception than a rule. And again, this dates back to F4 and maybe even Skyrim.
No, to many games use the same engine. Now all games look the same so you guys don't hyperventilate or meltdown like a toddler
@@RobT192 How so? Most games for over a decade now have been either unity or Unreal Engine. And big games still don‘t look the same. Baldurs gate 3 looks different from Hogwarts legacy, Elden Ring differently from EA games, Far Cry looks different from Call of Duty, Red Dead Redemption 2 looks different from God of War, God of war looks different from Spiderman, … What games actually look the same? And even games from the same engine look vastly different: Satisfactory, Ark 2, Mass Effect 1-3 and Fortnite are all Unreal Engine games, they look very different! Both Subnautica and Besiege use the Unity Engine, do they look the same to you?
the fact that they STILL have game breaking bugs that have been an issue since the creation engines inception that they wont ever fix is insane to me, Tbh i was 1000% surprised when starfield ran above 60fps with out breaking lol
The engine isn't a problem, I would honestly say it's their only saving grace because modders might try to make something good out of it. The vast majority of the things people complain about can be done in their engine, because modders put it into their games after the fact, it might sometimes be a bit janky but it's one person getting close vs a whole games studio not even trying. Bethesda has only ever exceled at creating worlds you wanted to explore, even going back to Morrowind/Oblivion the game mechanics are still shit, but their saving grace was creating environments with stories you find in them that were fun enough to explore that you didn't really care. That held true for most people until FO76 and Starfield where they fucked up the only things carrying their games after all this time and created worlds with either none/boring characters with barely any reason to explore them.
They should be we all know they won`t, so this discorse is kinda useless at this point. But in the event they would eventually change engines they would also need to change their entire writing department, because that part of their studio is absolute trash.
Unreal 5 is not the messiah, can we stop putting it on a pedestal? It still has major issues with performance as well that take a long while to iron out.
I spoke about this before and the "Floating Point" issue is an implementation issue moreso than an engine issue an engine is more responsible for the libraries implemented inside of it. Moving engine DOES NOT fix that issue and most of their issues in "Engine" are framework issues over the "Engine" being outdated. I will go as far as to say like many companies in the industry they have a clear bottleneck in the company. For example instead of having a steady workflow it tends to be something similar to this: Game Design -> Programmers -> Producer/QA then if something goes wrong it goes back to the queue. Will Shen was also saying because there is soooo many writers he couldn't get through everything so again it's bottlenecked through 1 guy. Guy I believe no longer is at BGS. But again to reiterate changing engine WILL NOT help, in fact they need to figure out how to make things more efficient and run things smoother IE making the team smaller and more manageable I think that would be more beneficial than just moving engine completely.
They didn’t even have a _design document_ *no engine in the world* will save you if you have no coherent vision of what your idea was to begin with
I don't work in games I don't even understand that.
@@Ashbrash1998 it's not only for games, it's a document explaining what you want your product to be. Imagine if you are part of a cellphone company and the sector that makes the shell have no idea what the size of the screen is going to be, that's basically what happens in Bethesda
apparently thats not entirely accurate.
This is bullsh!t, don't regurgitate obvious bs. He added that they don't have a single central doc but a wiki. Repeating lies will not make them more true. Pretty sure other studios work exactly the same. Having a single central doc does not work for big teams and evolving design. Obviously their multi billion dollar development studio follows best practices.
@@pylotlight how so? i saw emil explaining that they abandoned the idea of a design document and i think it shows """nasa punk""" gimme a break.
BGS games would look amazing in UE5. But the engines are not the main issue. Its the dev teams and Todd issues
If it means losing that massive modding support than no, because it doesn't change the fact they make basic ass vanilla storylines that bore people to tears and rpg elements that are lackluster. Fire who ever has been handling the story elements of your games and get some new people in. I use to be a Bethesda fanboy but I haven't finished a vanilla story line sense Skyrim and even that was just average, changing your engine wont magically make your game fun if the same people are still following the same ol super safe, soft modern story lines and gameplay elements.
Without a doubt, yes. The Creation Engine is a fekkin joke and Starfield only reinforced that it's past it's time. Also, the writing is shite, and they need to take a game design class again. There is so much wrong with BGS over the last decade or so I cannae even begin...
The writing was god awful. The conversations were so odd. I didn't have fun with this game. The start of the game did not pull me in at all.
switching to unreal engine doesn't just magical make games better
I honestly dont think changing to Unreal would really solve any of Bethesda's problems. The only thing moving to unreal would change is giving designers better tools to design stuff but that's not reaally the problem at bethesda .The graphics weren't really the shortcomings of Starfield, it was the gameplay. Bugs will always be a thing in open world games of this nature ( see Dragons dogma 2 ) changing to Unreal wont just magically make them go away. Starfield actually ran far better than Dragons Dogma 2 did at launch too which means that the creation engine might not be as bad optimization wise as everybody thought.
My problem with the writing was that SO MUCH of the Starfield game felt like the writers weren't told that it wasn't an elder scroll out fallout game. Some quests like the historical clone thing felt like just new age reskinned Vaults. Others like the freestar rangers quest felt like scraps reskinned from the storm cloak rebellion. I could never quite put a finger on why but they just *feel* like the other old games and not this "new" thing.
I think something else that is REALLY not spoken about enough. If BGS swapped to UE5 sure they would have to pay for it but that cost comes with UNLIMITED technical support form epic engineers to help with literally anything they want the engine to do. We know that big studios work closely with epic engineers to get custome things in the engine. BGS being a huge name would get loads of help and support to mold the engine into what they need it.
That still needs time and still has its limits. Just like it is incredibly hard to make Bethesdas Engine capable of dealing with bigger worlds than 64 km^2 it is insanely hard to make Unreal Engine support nearly source code level modding, simulate NPCs wandering without them being rendered, store and keep track of every item in the entire game and its position and rotation, …
They are to arrogant
It's time for Bethesda to close down and sell their IPs to competent developers who care about the games they make. They hire developers that think Skyrim is the single greatest game ever made and have no hunger for improvement or innovation so every game release just becomes a progressively more watered down version of Skyrim. That and Emil Pagliarulo's existence is a plague on the gaming industry as a whole.
Exactly, they are just skating by on old achievements, the Bethesda that made oblivion and skyrim are long gone. I was really looking forward to the next gen version of fallout 4 but they can't even get that out in a reasonable time frame...
I posted the exact same comment somewhere. Bethesda needs to transfer their IPs to an actually competent developer. They're wasting the potential of wonderful IPs and I can't stand it.
Alot of Skyrim devs left BGS after Skyrim.
How about we see how the next project pans out before declaring such a drastic change lol
That is so damn dramatic lol
The issue is not with the engine - its with the game design... The Creation Engine 2.0 works just fine for games like Fallout and Elder Scrolls... The problem with Starfield was the reliance on procedural content, and too many loading screens, not the engine itself...
I feel like it is a illusion to think switching is a good idea. The problems with starfield won't change when changing engines. They are going to have the exact same issues as before. By using unreal, you will: not get rid of the loading screens and not solve the float point problem. performance will be worse, cause like bethesda stated, the CE is extremely fast.
Bring back attributes, skills and classes. That’s the move. We can track skill progression better now with modern UI, this solves for how awkward it was for new players to get comfortable with the class system of old (Morrowind/Oblivion). The heaps of skills and attributes played squarely into different rpg play styles and they moved away from it.
The engine doesn't really matter. You look at BG3 with a custom engine, star Citizen too... It's more about the creative identity that is absent.
the funny thing with comparisons with star citizen is that star citizen needs literal cutting edge server technology to pull off more than one star system. starfield has to run on an xbox series s.
@@victorscheffers3890 No it doesn‘t? There is the single Player focused Squadron 42, which runs on local PCs. The Reason why it need cutting edge server technology is because they want thousands of players in that Starsystem at once, Starfield however is entirely single player.
There are more mods available right now for SF than there were for Fallout 4 or Skyrim at this point in their lives despite the lack of a construction kit...what modders are you talking to? Because I have my doubts on your authenticity on this aspect of the subject.
there is no way, that switching would be a good choice. their physics engine is unique, and switching will cause it to be worse.
It's time to take that Skyrim fridge money to develop a new engine
The modding scene would look completely different.
Which is why they would never do it. They're the only game studio that supports mods to the degree that they do, no one else comes close. They're not going to sacrifice that.
@@VanityOfEliCLeePlenty of other game companies release mod tools and what not. It's just that Bethesda recognized that molders do a lot of their work for them and give replayability to their games.
@@Ashbrash1998 Plenty of other game companies release mod tools, but name one that allows you to do half the things you can do with the creation kit
@@Ashbrash1998 Which game apart from Minecraft Java and Bethesda games can be turned with mods into an entirely different game Genre? With mods you can make Skyrim a 3d Mario game, a linear story based game, an Elden Ring/Dark Souls like poise and stamina based combat game, a multiplayer game where you fight your friends, or play co-op with your friends, an FPS shooter, a World of Tanks clone, …
The devs can choose to make their games moddable if they want to. Look at the Unreal Engine Fortinite editor, and what it can do. If Bethesda allows it, the scope of the mods could be so much larger than on the creation kit.
Keeping the new RED Engine apparently is more expensive & time consuming for CDPR, especially when it comes to possible multiplayer projects. They want their devs to focus on solely developing game & a faster development cycle & more chances to release multiple products within a gen of platforms. It's exactly what happaned to Square Enix the moment they also use UE4/5. Remember CDPR only release one big game per gen so far btw (CP2077 is clearly a PS5/XSX game). In comparison, since SE used UE4/5 on top their in-house engine, they could manage to release almost a dozen of games (AAA & AA scales) within one gen of platforms alone.
the todd howard candle scent "sweet little lies" :D
Todd Howard realized that most basic level generation existed in 2023 and thought it would pull all of the gamers in the entire world
I don’t think them switching engines would really be that big of a deal considering ue5 uses c++ and so does ce so it would be a matter of importing assets and certain files if I’m not mistaken. I don’t really think the “training time” is the reason they won’t change
Unreal 5 won’t fix game design and story
Switching away from creation would be a disaster, it's such a big part of their games' identities.
That is the literal problem
@@thegreat7878 No it's really not.
Not sure if I would like to see them switch engine, a large reason why the modding scenes for there games are as big as they are is because of the level of customisability the creation engine and respective creation kits which are designed in tandem with one another give the modder. I think BGS's main issue is alack of proper leadership and direction in addition to scope creep in their most recent games, if they can restructure their approach there's no reason they can't deliver a great experience developed on the creation engine imo.
I'll say, Starfield is the first BGS game that I've played (maybe Fallout 76 as well?) where they fixed the BGS game bug where if you want to switch between your PC speakers and a USB or Bluetooth pair of headphones, you'd have to quit the game and relaunch it. In Starfield, it just auto syncs the audio output device with Windows, and I was so grateful for that. And nobody online even seems to mention that detail.
No matter what they do, they'll lean on modders to do their jobs for them. "Fix the bugs!" "Make it fun!"
can unreal allow you to put 5000 cheese wheels roll down a hill. i think at its core the devs are still getting giggles from the things morrowind did that was inovative
Bethesda was amongst the industry leaders of open world games. They've gradually lost that standing, yet still behave like they're on par with the competition. The reaction to valid criticism from them and Howard felt outright arrogant.
The main issue with the creation engine that has always been a problem is the way that it handles level loading and streaming. The reason you can’t have cars in fallout or vehicle in Starfield on the ground is that if you go to fast you can drive faster than the levels can load. Fallout New Vegas seems like it has a good mod that adds in really awesome drivable cars tho so it definitely is able to be worked around or fixed.
Just in time they announced the land vehicles in Starfield.
They should switch to UE5 or build a new creation engine from the ground up. I mean, Phantom Liberty feels like you're playing a next gen game, and even CDPR understood RED Engine was going to hold them back or at least slow them down in the future. I mean, load times being the only thing that felt next gen about Starfield is probably more about SSDs than the actual engine. Play Starfield on a hard drive and it probably loads like slowas hell.
even if they change engines, theyre going to keep making the same games with the same design philosophy. they might have a little better graphics and slightly shorter load screens. but they'll be the same games with the same design issues.
No, I wouldn't see Red Engine as better than Creation Engine at all. I value modding above all else, and trying to install hundreds of mods for Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk 2077 would be a nightmare, but relatively easy for a Creation Engine game. For Witcher 3, if more than one mod had script changes, those changes would be in script files that replace the vanilla game's own script files. And for each mod that replaces the same vanilla script file, you need to open them all up in a text editor, run a doff checker, and merge the changes into one file. With Skyrim, for example, even mod that includes a script has its own modular script files that rarely get overwritten by another mod, and if they do, then they probably directly conflict with each other anyway.
Whats the game engine going to change about the content it runs?
The time to switch was about 10 years ago right after the switch to Xbox One/PS4 generation, dragging the Creation engine along this entire time is insane. The devs might need time to train on UE5, but after Starfield, it seems like they need to train on the Creation engine too
I mean they HAVE to do it at some point. It's just a question of how many more titles they are willing to throw under the bus
Unless they go back to making games as simple as Skyrim then the modding scene is going to be irrelevant because modders won't want to mod the newer games when they're just a load order change from breaking everything. The bandage is going to have to be ripped off sooner or later. Whether it's switching to a different engine or rewriting Creation Engine without all the built-in quirks from being decades old.
Mods would actually be easier in UE because of the nodes, asset creations etc. Damn near able to just drop stuff into any unreal games and to quote Todd Howard "it just works!".
Considering that BGS just started the production of TES6 pretty much immediately after Starfield, means they DIDN'T switch to UE5. Another problem with CE is the new staff. If they're gonna hire new developers, they'll have to train them a very niche skill that they won't be able to use outside of Bethesda. And with UE5, there are tons of people who are already familiar with the engine, which makes the hiring process much easier.
The Real problem is that Bethesda is a medium size studio, pretending to be a big studio. It simply does not have the manpower to rebuild the game engine, and work on the game, and work on all the other side projects they're also doing. It also doesn't have the expertise to rebuild the engine in a way that brings it up to the level of Unreal Engine. Not to mention it's lost a lot of its best people. Bethesda has simply had its day. If they move over to Unreal and host their game on the Epic Store the savings from selling on Epic instead of Steam would cover the loss in Royalities from using the new engine.
Just to address the point at the end about games all starting to feel/look the same if they are all built on the same engine. I think thats possibly a good thing. If we have an industry standard for what games look like. Of course there are art styles and such like Sea of thieves is made on unreal and so is the next witcher game, they will look nothing alike. So aside from artistic directions, these games will now rely on what they bring to the table. At some point the technology is going to cap for what we can conceivably do graphically for video games right? Like UE5 is getting insanely close to having life like graphics, that technology is going to cap at some point. So where will games go from there? It will come down to the stories, the features, etc. It's going to come down to what you bring as a studio, to the table, that will set your game apart and I don't really think that is a bad thing. The Witcher 4 made on UE5 is still nothing like TES6 even if it is also UE5... TES6 will take inspirations from other places, they will tell different stories, they will implement different systems and different animations and build different worlds and vibes and then we will be able to compare them without really needing to consider the graphics.
it feels disingenuous to say to "the modding community abandon starfield" when the creation kit for starfield isn't even out yet.
Something that people dont seem to understand, is that for modding, what you need is the tools that the devs use to create mods. But a lot of the times, these tools are either bought from 3rd party companies, so they cant legally share them or, the tools are private to the company and they dont want to share them. The modding community works around this by creating their own tools, and since creation engine doesn't evolve much, tools from the past work in the present. But when it comes to unreal engine, since its public and free to download, all users can use the actual dev tools to create mods. Meaning that the modding community would have an infinitely easier time modding. Just look at some games like Fortnite and Arc. Both got unreal engine tools, and modders are able to quickly create any content with far more ease.
Not even close in terms of ease of use... installing Unreal alone takes a lot more energy let alone doing basic stuff. Skyrim modding in particular attracts novices and more artsy people. And you want Bethesda to ship the tools they created to build a multi million dollar rpg... yeah right. Fortnite is basically an infinite money machine and Epic wants people to use these tools and their engine, in the best case to create whole games with it. Epic gets payed in a constant revenue stream of ads and royalties, what exactly would Bethesda get there. Ah, and loosing 5% (even 1%) of revenue to Epic.
That's complete nonsense and it only shows that you've got no idea how modding works. Unreal isn't designed for modding, usually people can't do anything more than replacing models and textures.
@@Bloodlinedev what? Have you created any mods for Skyrim/fallout. The process of importing one mesh with textures is already a far more complex process than installing a custom unreal engine. Meanwhile for unreal engine tools, importing meshes with textures is literally as simple as dragging in your files.
@@bobsteven2363Fair enough but I'm talking about the other stuff, tweaking values, adding items, quest, dialog, adding npcs, ... that's all pretty simple and quick. Like 15 minutes from clicking download to creating your own mod quick. Also a result of how their engine is structured. Like everything works the same, you have these records and every plugin may add or overwrite some. Simple to understand. You could add the same to Unreal but at what point are you just recreating parts of their engine. They could have a better import workflow, it's not like that's a huge task that you need a whole different engine for. They just chose not to \o/ But to be fair, you are right, some things would get easier some harder.
Making changes to the worlds and creating new content from existing assets, like quests, buildings, dungeons... is super easy with the Bethesda engine and does not really require any prior knowledge. Having a simple tool for these things is something unreal engine does not provide out of the box. Of course if Bethesda would "recreate" their editing tools for unreal engine this would be no issue.
Has Luke played the Stellar Blade demo yet?
Man the sheer amount of work for an AAA company to dump whatever they were used to just to switch to UE is like ugh… Smaller studios can work around that sure but when you are a mega company like BGS it’s just so difficult. I can’t imagine the amount of time and effort just to integrate UE into a studio pipeline.
As most have pointed out, it's not the engine. Its either the story or the characters. If they want to improve the engine they should actually do a deep clean and try to clean up the old code. You cant build a castle on old ruins and expect to not be shaky..
Outerworlds to me is what BGS games look like outside Creation Engine, was it better?
I don't think they necessarily need to switch the engines, but if they do stay with Creation Engine then need to substantially update it to modern standards, something they were so far either unwilling or uncapable of doing. Even with updated or switched engines though they still have severe issues, like poor world building, writing, animations, unfocused game mechanics that they need to fix also.
I think what a lot of people are missing by saying changing the engine won't matter, is that MOST PEOPLE taking game design classes, are going to have worked in UE. it's easy to learn (in terms of if you're putting in the effort to learn it obviously), and is quite adaptable. I'm quite certain a huge issue with Bethesda is anyone they hire has to learn THEIR engine. Not many people are going to want to make that switch. While it isn't an immediate fix of other issues, it opens them up to potentially getting a lot more devs who still CARE about making good games.
Another upside that it hasn't been brought up is that if you are looking at new hires, you will find more gamedevs with UE4/5 experience than Red Engine experience, I do remember them mentioning this in an interview last year, and this is probably something that Bethesda should consider. Bethesda has been around for almost 40 years, most certainly they have people that will retire soon, and since they've been acquired by MS, they will probably try to grow and work in more than one project at once, so you need fresh blood, and the creation engine is definitely something not friendly to new users.
Moving engines wouldnt be such a big deal if they had started back when people suggested it the first time, over 12 years ago. it takes time, but the longer you wait, the longer it takes.
He summoning THE TODD 😂. So their game engine just loads everything in a limited area and then you are loaded. Other games everything loads around you the player and disappear when you are far enough, everything ahead of you loads as you approach, “Draw distance” applies. That is why if you lower your graphic settings, things will suddenly appear “pop up” as you approach. (Lower draw distance)
I still have fun with skyrim, FO3, NV, FO4, Oblivion, and Morrowind. Its the moment to moment that makes it fun for me. It feels like Uncle Todd is just thr salesman now to get you hyped...but if you go back and watch his excitement on older behind the scenes videos you could actually feel the excitement from the devs. I wish to see the passion again where someone makes a game for the fun again and not money. Waiting almoat 15 years now for ES6...and i am really on the fence.
My take is that Skyrim lives on for similar reasons that the sims and stardew valley live on. They made a world that is amazing to escape to and simply exist in. The writing and combat mechanics and all that don't matter so much. Fallout 4 and Starfield aren't nearly as immersive or fun to exist within. Starfield especially requires quests to stay interesting and Bethesda's quests have only gotten worse with time.
CD PR say the problem with Cyberpunks launch was that they really underestimated how much work it is to update and improve an Engine. Bethesda can keep the Creation Engine if they take the time to recreate the Engine from the ground up and improve and evolve the engine to a modern standard. But this will take a lot of time and work. The Question is: Are they capable to do this side by side with the creation of a new game? Maybe the better way would be if Microsoft take all the Engine creators of all their studios and build with them a new in house engine and evolve und update this engine and let all their studios work with it. The pro would be that every studio always have an up to date engine which can be customized to all their needs.
I think it is a mixture of a lot of things, but for me, there are 2 major factors as to why BGS is seriously lacking. 1. Environmental storytelling - That was something I always found to be such a great factor in their games. Every location had a story to tell, no matter how small. Aside from seeing what kind of loot, or reward you could find, you were also encouraged through exploration of said location, to see the story that unfolded. 2. Immersion - plain and simple, it was easy to get lost in their worlds. You start as a prisoner of some sort, go through an escape sequence (a.k.a. tutorial), and then the world opens up to you, and you go on your adventure. In so many ways, you got to forge your own story within their worlds. Starfield has none of this. There's no reason to explore as the vast majority of planets are barren with a few bits here and there. No story to be told or uncover, and there's no "world" to discover the secrets of. No depth anymore, just vast open spaces void of any reason to explore.
Agreed 100%
Assets are just polygon coordinates +texture uv coordinates and pbr textures, to transfer assets between engines is as easy as export fbx, import fbx
One thing Todd Howard said about ES6 is that the technology didn’t exist yet to do what they wanted to do. No clue what that means but my anticipation is that they’ll stick with CE. Also as an ES fan, I hate they waited so long to make a sequel
The issue with switching to unreal is the licensing fees they run into since they are a big publisher. It would eat into their revenue, as where the creation engine is theirs and free to use.
As for the modding community, I'm not seeing it becoming better with an engine switch, quite the contrary. There won't be a toolset anymore, one that hasn't really changed for 20 years or so that was easy to adapt. Either you know and use UE5 yourself or you don't, and if you do you won't have access to Bethesda's custom tools, assets, all that - I don't know any UE5 games that are nearly as moddable as Bethesda games are, simply because you miss the actal content you need. Honestly I think it'd kill Bethesda's modding community and all we'd see is some basic mods like e.g. Mass Effect's textures, bugfixes, .... - Definitely not new models, characters, areas, homes, stories. I don't think it'd be worth it, Bethesda lives from modding, an Engine change for PR reasons would be horrible. Oh, and I bet none of their staff is "fluent" in UE, they'd have to fire and rehire half the studio. But maybe I'm wrong and there are examples of highly moddable UE5 games?
The floating point problem exists in Unreal Engine too. Particularly in UE4 which uses 32bit floats, but they switched to 64bit floats in UE5 to allow for more precision and thus larger worlds. By the way, float precision is the reason why all endless runners are faked. The character doesn't really move, the level under the character moves backwards and spawns/despawns as needed.
To be fair I've got a gut feeling that even if Bethesda moved to UE they would fuck it up. They would need a "burner title" to fuck up before they tried it on one of their flagship properties..
The problem isn't that the engine is a problem, it's that it's not the only problem.
Imagine if they saved all that time on trying to jury rig their engine to work and debugging all its issues. Training new hires on the industry standard program can’t be that time consuming. So the only downside is the cost and maybe harder modding but I find it hard to believe UE5 can’t support mods.
they use the creation engine still because its super easy to mod. i dont mind that but modders will always find a way. personally i think its a management and writer problem.
Just starting to watch this my initial thought is that yes, they should dump the creation engine. But, that won't fix all their problems. They need to do a lot more work on the design and writing to make it good.
I see a lot of people saying that the engine is not the problem.. My take is, we don't know and we will never do. Th engine not only renders graphics, it also provides tools for the designers to create stuff, make missions, cinematics, AI for NPCs, interactions... if those tools are outdates or are difficult to use/manage... the designers might not have a proper environment to develop new ideas or even good old ideas... in the other hand, doesn't matter how good your engine is, if the people actually using it to design the game are not good enough the game will be bad... as I said, only Bethesda knows the actual problem
I agree that the Creation engine IS A problem, I don't think it's THE problem. There's plenty of cool features and mods in previous games that would make their next games amazing, but BGS always removes them or don't bother implementing them. At the end of the day, the only thing that really holds BGS back is themselves.
17:00 I think you should ask some UE5 developers and perhaps some mod makers for UE5 games. I used the old modding tool for Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout 3 when I was like 12-16yo and sure it was easy. But I’m not sure UE5 is that complicated
Chat talking about lack of passion and refusal to move forward in BGS, but culture flows downstream from management. I wonder how quickly things would improve if they got rid of Todd and the old guard.
They already annouced that right? A few years back it is confirmed that starfield was the last game on the creation engine ^^.
14:56 that's EVERY faction in Skyrim. And you know what, Wendy's Hamburgers are SUPER popular. Are they junk food? You betcha.
nah they don't need to, creation engine is fine. just make good game with good mechanic and story.
They cannot change their game engine because of their workflow. What is shocking about their workflow is they do not use design documents. You can look that up. To use UE5 they may need design documents so everyone knows what to do. Their proprietary game engine may take care of that.
I think when you make games of the complexity that they do and on the scale that they do than UE5 is not so easy of an answer that it seems. UE is great but when you need peak optimization and specialization for the games you're making then it can still be quite beneficial to have your own engine. Even if they did use it they'd likely have to do a fair bit of customization to it. Once you start going down that rabbit whole it starts to make sense just to have your own. That said Bethesda really has not invested enough in keeping their engine up to date which is probably what should have happened and may be to late to do. That's what a wise company would have did at least. Take time in between projects to upgrade the engine to keep it relevant. I think capcom is a good example of how this should be done. In the 360 / ps3 era they had the MT framework engine which they updated quite a bit overtime and once it reached it's limit they replaced it with the RE engine and have been upgrading that for awhile now. EA is another good example with the Frostbite engine. It has undergone quite a bit of iteration. Creation Engine 2 added some modern touches but it still so far behind where it should be.
that would be so god damn funny if they did
Even if they did or had a chance 😅 is it too late for elder scrolls 6? It is in a "playable state" after all.
Some of the, “costs,” you’re describing are not technically, “costs.” Call it, “investment.” They SHOULD have been, “training their staff,” on the other leading engines anyway. Imagine if they had all their programmers spend one hour a day learning how UE5 or the Unity Engine worked? Imagine how many tweaks and improvements that would have lead to in their own engine?
It's not the engine, Starfields tech problems aren't ideal but you could have a good game with dated tech. It's design philosophy. You can look at their games since Todd got into a leadership position and you can see the dumbing down of rpg elements, story and so on. There are interviews with people who worked on Morrowind saying it was a difficult development because you had a push and pull between the old leads who were rpg nerds and Todd who "was more interested in looking coll while swinging an axe". He's an action game guy. His sensibilities served well for a few games but it's gone to far. It went to far a long time ago.
maybe they will use that microsoft money and build a new engine from the ground up don't think they would but it would be cool maybe make a game engine for rpg game development specifically
This question comes up all the time, and has been asked pretty much since oblivion/skyrim days. They should have made the switch then, but now, that window is closed. It's too late.