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[Ordinaryundone]

Bethesda could put TESVI on the Morrowind engine for all I care, it's not that big of a deal to me. You can make a good game on outdated code/hardware if you really want to. The tools are secondary to the dedication and craft of the person using them.

I just don't like Schreier and how he feels it necessary to go to bat for corporations EVERY TIME they fuck up their PR (on something that isn't SocJus flavored anyway). They already hire people for that, his willingness to jump in front of the bullet every time just makes him look like an apologist/lickspittle or that he's trying to get some kind of favor or special treatment. You are a journalist man, or are supposed to be. Respect the neutrality your position is supposed to hold.

 

[Panajev2001a]

Bethesda could put TESVI on the Morrowind engine for all I care, it's not that big of a deal to me. You can make a good game on outdated code/hardware if you really want to. The tools are secondary to the dedication and craft of the person using them.

I just don't like Schreier and how he feels it necessary to go to bat for corporations EVERY TIME they fuck up their PR (on something that isn't SocJus flavored anyway). They already hire people for that, his willingness to jump in front of the bullet every time just makes him look like an apologist/lickspittle or that he's trying to get some kind of favor or special treatment. You are a journalist man, or are supposed to be. Respect the neutrality your position is supposed to hold.

Unless he believes that position and has valid reasons for this. Right now, nobody has shown the ability to create and populate worlds with that size, scope, and freedom.

The engine is not just a tenderer or an animation or sound systems, an engine is also a collection of tools to make creating games easier and a studio that did not just go crazy with mad overtime or hiring and firing tons of temps/contractors for every title (so not able to gather the man power of a GTA game so to speak) was able to deliver Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim (for a lot of platforms, VR too).

It may not matter to some people who just want a superb renderer like with Frostbite or animation like Spider-Man and I do understand the desire for less bugs in games, but the TES games keep defining and redefining a genre that more or less keeps testing on their shoulders. Creating those games is not easy and before Skyrim they made money but were not like rolling in it, so if s better game content creation tool that allowed them to keep doing the kind of games they wanted to create as well as have a better time doing that, they would have IMHO.

 

[Madonis]

As long as the engine has been upgraded, I don't think there's anything wrong with keeping it.

 

[WaterAstro]

As long as the engine has been upgraded, I don't think there's anything wrong with keeping it.

As someone familiar with reusing engines, and then using a completely new engine, it's not being upgraded.

When the devs need something new, they do patchwork coding to make it work with old systems, which creates more bugs and more problems. When the next game rolls around, they try to refactor old code to make things run more smoothly, but then the vicious cycle of needing new features and making more patchwork comes around, so the engine just becomes shittier and buggier since they haphazardly pile on crap and remove unwanted features.

It's literally like polishing a turd, but it's more like turning a diamond into turd, then polishing it.

 

[Madonis]

As someone familiar with reusing engines, and then using a completely new engine, it's not being upgraded.

When the devs need something new, they do patchwork coding to make it work with old systems, which creates more bugs and more problems. When the next game rolls around, they try to refactor old code to make things run more smoothly, but then the vicious cycle of needing new features and making more patchwork comes around, so the engine just becomes shittier and buggier since they haphazardly pile on crap and remove unwanted features.

It's literally like polishing a turd, but it's more like turning a diamond into turd, then polishing it.

Conversely, jumping to a new engine means they have to re-learn all the lessons and figure out what are the new limitations, since it's likely that the new one will not have the same mix of positives/negatives.

At some point you need to abandon the old engine, but it shouldn't be done in a hurry or out of obligation.

 

[DarkArterialGore]

Probably one of the rare instances where I will agree with this hack.

Without Creation, we won't be able to mod their games to the point where we can now, and I don't have many complaints about Fallout 4/76 or ESO graphics-wise. But can we please stop with the notion that it NEEDS a new game engine to get rid of its most glaring issues?

That's why a large company like Bethesda should have the foresight to reinvest some of the enormous profits they've made from their games into developing a new open world engine with a modern feature set + mod support especially when other smaller rival RPG devs have superior looking games and in-house engines. I understand a smaller developer like Piranha Bytes milking their ramshackle engine for all it's worth but sadly Bethesda has the means but the greedy lawyer fucks at Zenimax running the company lack the want to truly improve their tech. I'd take good player models, animations, textures and an optimized engine without mods over the dilapidated shitshow that is Gamebryo for a game or two until the modders get to grips with the new engine.

If Bethesda didn't switch over from XnGine on Daggerfall to NetImmerse(Gamebryo) for Morrowind you wouldn't of had the mods that you love so much so a new engine could bring with it much better modding capabilities in the long run alongside better graphics and performance.

 

[FF:Enhanced_Reality]

Whether you blame the overall engine or not, games like Witcher 3 and Red Dead Redemption 2 prove that games on a huge scale need not be so ridiculously buggy. At the end of the day they publish games that I don't think any other publisher would at their launch state and a day one patch bigger than the game install is just as telling. Their quality assurance just musnt exist. I mean I got Oblivion on PS3 and there are still game breaking bugs that aren't fixed and well known. The kind of shit that ruins your save file. I got Fallout 3 and Skyrim for PC and both were fucked at launch. Just something I do not expect from any other publisher / developer. Skyrim didn't work on my rig for weeks and all Bethesda asked for was information from my Dxdiag menu and never solved anything. I've come this far that after Fallout 4 that I think enough is enough. I'm not buying another Bethesda game until something changes.

 

[Ladioss]

As a (non-game) dev, I know the pain of working with outdated frameworks and/or engines : it's completely doable, as long as you don't expect access to features that have been commoditized in the rest of the industry the last ten years.

Jason Schreier's article is... curious. Of course what defines an "engine" can be relative, but he never discusses the precise structural changes (is they exist) that make up the new version of Bethesda's tool suite in comparaison with some years ago. It's not the first time Jason verge on dishonesty, but to do it in defense of a company when you have spent so many efforts to paint yourself as a champion of reporting against the evil corporations is always interesting.

 

[woigemok]

Is this the same engine that output games like Skyrim and Fallout 4? If yes then the gamers are right with their perception on how buggy the game will turn out.

 

[HaveButOneLife]

That's why a large company like Bethesda should have the foresight to reinvest some of the enormous profits they've made from their games into developing a new open world engine with a modern feature set + mod support especially when other smaller rival RPG devs have superior looking games and in-house engines. I understand a smaller developer like Piranha Bytes milking their ramshackle engine for all it's worth but sadly Bethesda has the means but the greedy lawyer fucks at Zenimax running the company lack the want to truly improve their tech. I'd take good player models, animations, textures and an optimized engine without mods over the dilapidated shitshow that is Gamebryo for a game or two until the modders get to grips with the new engine.

If Bethesda didn't switch over from XnGine on Daggerfall to NetImmerse(Gamebryo) for Morrowind you wouldn't of had the mods that you love so much so a new engine could bring with it much better modding capabilities in the long run alongside better graphics and performance.

You can't be so sure that they'd be able to create the mods that their fans like whilst at the same time doing these things. Who's to say that an engine upgrade can't fix all of its issues? The one things in, say Black Ops 4 for instance, that I'd say are outdated in terms of its outdated Quake III engine are the servers, but the biggest issues such as textures and frame rounding were already addressed with overhauls to the engine. So much so that the developers say that there's only a few lines of code from the original engine left. New engines take engineers, as well as much more time, effort, and (the biggest thing) money; plus the fact that Fallout 4 arguably didn't even take 7 years at all, more like 3 if we're going to say that they weren't working on it during the development of Skyrim or its DLC's, so there could still be work to be done in terms of satisfying fans with those major upgrades.

TL;DR What if better player models, animations, textures, and optimization could be fixed with just another major engine overhaul? I'm not saying that Bethesda should be given a free pass just because they make mostly good games, I'd take either/or.

 

[EverydayBeast]

Considering the game looked like this

less than 30 years ago, I'll cut them some slack because not ever developer is Dice.

 

[Scopa]

Considering the game looked like this

less than 30 years ago, I'll cut them some slack because not ever developer is Dice.

Still looks gorgeous.

 

[Ornoku]

The main issue I see with Bethesda's game are that there's bugs that were in Morrowind that are present in FO4.