As long as Bethesda continues to be completely creatively destitute, there's no game engine magic that can save them from putting out mediocre to bad games. Starfield in UE5 would have still been a boring slog of proc gen garbage and bad writing.
Sure, but Starfield in UE5 wouldn't have all the loading screen and would make seamless transitions from flying to landing possible. The main difference as I see it is that Bethesda tries to use the Creation Engine in a way it was never designed for, whereas the Unreal Engine just suffers from bad optimization. Optimization is relatively easy to fix, whereas trying to make the Creation Engine do what it never was designed to do is very hard if not impossible and it will never come even close to what the Unreal Engine can do.
Yes but the main reason they refuse to leave the garbage ass creation engine is because they wouldn't be able to just copy and paste a fuck ton of code from one game to another. Their entire engine is fucking trash and needs to be trashed.
Agreed. Captains Macks' starfield reviews perfectly demonstrate that the game design philosophy fundementals are broken over there, not just the engine.
@@tjroelsma They could have done all that without loading screens. Their engine isn't a binary blob they can't modify either, they do have the source code of the creation engine and could basically expand it and rewrite part of it to make it pretty much anything, but they have been complacent with it for a looong time, barely upgrading things. Also, the main issue isn't their engine, but their creativity and sure, they could do with -a bit- *a LOT* more investment in their engine, but switching to something else wouldn't fix how bad their games are designed, how terrible their writing is, and how shallow their RPG element became, etc. And let's not forget that they would lose most of their modding community that rely on the same tools since forever. The only reasons to switch from a proprietary engine to something else is if you really don't have the money to keep investing in your in house tools, have limited personnel to work on it that are needed on other projects, or the new hires takes too long to get familiar with it and you're trying to expand your team fast. Everything else is just stupid trend chasing that will cost a lot of time and money.
The engine may not help if they're spending all their time just making the game *work*. That's how you get quotes like that Starfield is their biggest achievement, when it's actually boring.
yeah, but limitations of the engine are also infuencing game design. some things are just impossible to implement, even if you're creative enough to come up with it
@@llamatronian101 True, but with more interesting premise, better writing, with more dengerous planets and more hand made surroundings of the major cities, the game would be way, way better. Even in this engine and million loading screens.
So true. After 400 hours playtime I can't remember any location in the world that is interesting or any quest that is exciting to play. The best moments were created by accident by me timing the main quest drama or by game engine creating some funny events. I restarted Skyrim again and the magic is still there. Someone wise enough could explain why Starfield does not have it. It is not the loading screens that are ruining the game. Or the engine - they have succeeded with it before. For me Starfield is at it's best with the dialogue... that's it. Lately I've been thinking about role of music and I must say Starfield does not shine with that either. Shattered Space tried more open world approach and fails again to make the game more interesting - why in this game even exploring fails.The very aspect that usually is the the best thing in Bethesda games.
@@512TheWolf512 Limitations of the game engine? I'm not gonna lie they haven't even used the game engine to 100% capacity xD they've added a ton of things into the engine and haven't even used it xD
It’s not the engine it’s how you use it. RDR2 was made on a heavily modified version of the R.A.G.E engine that originally was used for Rockstar’s table tennis in 2006. Bethesda just clearly doesn’t have a good vision or know how to use their engine properly. GTA6 is using the RAGE engine again so it’s clear Bethesda just has a skill issue.
That's incorrect. The Creation engine and the ancient tools they use for it go back to Morrowind when it was called Gamebryo. This engine has had the same core design failures back when we expected much less from hardware. It's "load node" design is a core function on how games are created. They can frankenstein it (as they have been doing for decades), but they cannot fix it with a "vision". Its failures are in how it actually works and the tools are designed around this.
You’re making it sound like the RAGE engine was made for Table Tennis, and then, wow, look what they’re doing with it now. The RAGE engine was made for Grand Theft Auto, (EA had bought Criterion Games a couple years before, who made the RenderWare engine Rockstar North used to make GTA, and didn’t trust EA with the information they’d have access to about GTA development) Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis was just a thing Rockstar San Diego made to test the engine they were making, it’s an internal test that got released. The not trusting EA because of how huge they were bit is kind of funny now given how large Epic has become in recent years, and how almost everyone seems to be using Unreal like it’s the old 360 days again.
I've been saying this since Fallout 4. They're making first-person shooters. They own _THE_ first-person shooter company. Just give Id the requirements for some new tools and let them do their job.
As a modder quite proficient with the creation Kit for all their games, all this talk about the "bad" engine is quite misguided tbh. Not saying I don't understand the distaste given Bethesda's recent releases, lol. But without the creation engine, the actual feel of the games themselves just won't be there. The engine is what allows for every mechanic that makes a bgs game a bgs game. Genuinely. Good and bad. The problem is the design of the game in accordance with the engine. Not to mention just God awful writing.
Yes there is also the fact that the engine is only a tool, what matters more is how you use it, Bethesda could had definitely improved the asset streaming performance so that we had less loading screens on starfield, but it seems like it was never one of their main focus/priority for the game, which unfortunately shows a bad design choice and lack of understanding of how a space game should feel on the transversal mechanics.
one of the best and worst experiences playing mods is in FO4 playing Kinggaths mod SS2, i both love and hate that mod, i love the story and the concept, however the mechanics just aren't there because the limitations of the engine cause significant issues to the mod, sadly Kinggath created this mod around the mechanics that cause issues in the mod overall. again i love the concept of these mechanics for his mod, but they are simply too limited due to the creation engines limitations, so it's really frustrating playing through that mod only for the script lag to catch up and suddenly nothing in the mod or outside of the mod work properly because the mod messes with the scripts too much, his mod also causes significant save bloat that makes saving your game take it's damn time, there is a fix for that, but it's still uneasy because the bloat is saved in the save, even if it's a hard save.
BGS's greatest strengths were the game's modding potential, but now they wait until most of their players have moved on to release the creation kit. It'd be a shame in many ways but I think a move to UE would be a net good.
I agree. I was on a spiel many moons ago about how Creation isn't really fit for a game of the scope and scale of Starfield, the devs and modders quickly ran into the ceiling of capability that the Engine has. Skyrim is Perfect for it, Fallout games can be phenomenal, big ole giant playground with stuff in it and questlines to do.
as a unreal dev, I can guarantee one thing, unreal engine is not capable of managing so many physics, they would have to build their own sub engine within unreal engine for this to work. bypassing all of unreal engines UObject based render system. fun fact, CDProject Red is actually doing this. their lecture talk about it was "Decoupling in unreal"
Luke I noticed u showed the motion matching from unreal. That wouldn't be possible for Starfield. It would take up too much of the performance. its not optimized at all. maybe it would work if they are able to switch between standard animations and motion matching. but it is not a quick fix.
I disagree with the opinion that the physics aren't what is important for Bethesda games. It wouldn't be a Bethesda game without the physics. being able to see every item as a separate entity/ being able to interact with them separately, that is a great plus to me. Most other games fake clutter by combining multiple unique items into a single mesh. even the latest mega lights unreal trailers are doing this method. These combined meshes can never be separated.
Except.. what am I gonna do with all those physics in a game about slaying dragons or in a space shooter? It would be a great concept to keep with VR but with a controller or mouse/keyboard? Complete immersion breaking as you don’t even pick them up physically they just float in front of you cause the game engine would probably melt trying to render hand holding animations. And what can you even do when picking them up? Dropping it back down? lol I remember trying to organize a book shelf at my house in skyrim and all I could do is drop and hope it lands upright. Or the classic case full of shards? Watch them all fly out the case every time I load into the house. These physics have been the bane of my skyrim characters existence and that’s just the tip of the iceberg with how annoying everything else in Bethesda games are. Don’t even get me started on their rabbit hole of a bugfest involving mannequins and weapon holders 🤦🏻♂️
Those physics would probably work amazing if someone like cd project ever worked on it. But Bethesdas physics involves walking into your house and watching all your books or placed objects just shake uncontrollably while they’re ACTUALLY just supposed to be sitting there on the shelf. Or better yet find every object you carefully placed ended up falling onto the floor because Bethesdas primordial engine couldn’t handle having so many objects in a single area for them to sit still. Like I can’t tell if it’s just shitty game design in general or if Bethesda couldn’t pull their own weight if their life depended on it.
Idk id just really hope a ‘Bethesda game’ would be known for something more than just a ‘game where I can store 10 000 hot dogs inside a room for no reason 😃’.
@@alexdoan273they could, crazy idea, work within the limitations (and strengths!) of their engine instead of just try to retro fit it to every game. Wild concept I know.
@@elvickRULESyup, 4 highly detailed, content rich planets should've been a no brainer. I don't understand how Todd looked at the released game and thought "yh, this is fun." 1000s planets in an engine that isn't designed for seamless space travel is a wild choice.
I agree. Even if Starfield was in UE, there’s no good bones there. But they continue to double down and defend their shitty design, shitty writing, boring copy-paste companions. We will probably see a similar situation with new Elder Scrolls
Have two problems with this. First off swapping to UE5 doesn’t solve your problems. A well built custom engine will do far better that slapping it in Unreal. 2nd issue, is people didn’t like starfield, not because it looks bad, but because it was a bad game. If it was made in Unreal, it still would be bad.
If Bethesda ditched the creation engine all we would hear for elder scrolls 6 is how so many of Skyrim's features were missing and how it wasn't nearly as mod-friendly
I'll never forget the removal of athletics and acrobatics from the elder scrolls series, the birth of non-stop ridiculous fast travel compared too actual exploration and being rewarded for it, if they switch that engine what else will we lose now? Look, I get it especially since Fallout 4, the normies have just gotten upset with their games, and that's okay but it doesn't mean we should ruin the whole experience for everyone else that likes it. You know what I do when I want to go back to the good ol days? I play the older games, and mod them, it takes time, that is far better than Bethesda having to completely keep having to change the design of their games. Unreal Engine 5 will ruin the whole experience, its even worse than what Bethesda uses at the moment, huge step in the wrong direction.
From what I've seen, modders LOVE the Creation Engine. It's what they know how to use. Bethesda, being as small as it is compared to CDPR or Rockstar, ends up leaning very heavily on its modding community for what is essentially free labor. From bug fixes to full questlines, modders are a core component of Bethesda’s business model now. They’re even integrated into it through Creation Club. It even acts as a hiring pipeline. They seem to have decided that falling behind industry standards is worth it if they can keep leaning hard on their modding community instead of ramping up staffing or cutting the project scope. TBH, if BGS games just had better writing, acting, and animations, it would almost be forgivable.
From everything I can find, they had more employees in 2023-2024 than CDPR. But about 1000 less than Rockstar. Dont forget that subsidiaries count too. "Bethesda Games" is just the name on the building writing the checks. Zenimax was 65% of the workforce.
Did you know that Blackrock and other investment companies are not allowing good writing anymore? I can't even blame Bethesda here, Starfield has terrible writing, but it's all over when you get in the actual gameplay which I forgave it, if it was a movie game I would've gave up on it.
The Creation Engine was not the root of their issue. The root of the issue is that Starfield’s fundamental design was not compelling even on a conceptual level. Also the writing is dogshit and there wasn’t an interesting conversation or bit of worldbuilding in the game. It felt like it was dreamed up by a 17 year old who thinks NASA is cool and has never read a book longer than Goosebumps.
@@KintablI completely agree and found the gameplay loop of Starfield boring... But gotta admit if the load screens weren't so excessive I may have tolerated the game a lot more.
Paul Tassi writes whatever he thinks will garner clicks. He literally wrote an article attacking Star Wars Theory and other youtubers who are critical of Disney Star Wars, then wrote his own "Star Wars Sucks Now" article expressing their exact talking points. He's a two-faced shill, that's why people don't like him.
One thing going for Creation engine is the mod support, but then, Bethesda mod community is shadow of what it used to be compared to Skyrim era so maybe no point.
Modding community is only as good as its game 🤷🏻♂️ Cyberpunk modding tools was dogwater but the community grew and built their own tools and scripts. You only get that if people genuinely like and want to invest in a game. Starfield has official tools yet don't have as many advanced mods due to lack of interest. BGS can say modding is important but if the base game sucks then they might as well drop support
This again? The engine isn't the issue the framework, management and higher ups are the issue, no amount of Emil/Todd hate will change that there is people higher than them making the decisions for people saying "But the loading screens" bro, not only are UE5 games unoptimised 80-90% of the time and I think UE makes devs lazy with optimisation the creation engine isn't as bad as people make out, if it was that bad how did it produce 2 games? Thats something an outdated engine couldn't do. The loading screens ain't a thing that just exists in a game engine thats something you have to setup, they could do without 80% of the loading screens if they took their time optimising the game on top of just taking their time in general, I feel like the team wasn't delegated well enough nor had a decent work flow as half the things are still being worked into the new engine from what I have heard.
"Had we moved yo Unreal engine things would have been better" really don't think that UE5 is the solution to every problem bro. If everyone changes to UE5 we will have aestheticly similar games with bare bone physics. And UE5 looks pretty but also looks generic af.
Exactly. And then there is the problem of being a hostage of Epic Games. UE is not free. It is proprietary with Epic Games having a tight grip on the direction and featureset.
If they switch engines, say goodbye to modding a Bethesda game as you know it; say goodbye to every single item in the game having a placeable model with physics. Say goodbye to NPC schedules. Say goodbye to Bethesda Game Studio.
Switching engines wouldn't necessarily be a "goodbye" to npc schedules. Npc schedules are not just a creation engine feature. Other games with different engines had it, too, such as gothic 1 and 2.
Because at this point they should just hire their modders and have them actually make a good game for them. If they refuse to figure out their creation engine (which their modders already did for them over a decade ago) then what’s the point in making half-assed slop where nowadays the writing doesn’t even hold it up? Halfassing games so your modders can finish them for you is some next level scum move and these frauds shouldn’t get any shred of our money or attention especially with how they backhand their own fans for so many years 🤦🏻♂️.
@@onabiv I disagree, in fact I think it is one of the things responsible for making them feel more dead. The endless numbers of persistent items coupled with the terrible scripting system is what makes their engine incapable of having, for instance, cities with reasonable number of citizens. Keeping track of every last apple and plate contributes to the inability to have a nightclub with an actual crowd, or a bustling market with more than a dozen NPCs in it. As someone who loves environments with life, I would much rather have crowded streets and smoothly animated people than the ability to pick up 126 plates or 350 sandwiches.
@@SolCrown80 100% huge disagree. Interactables make the world feel alive, not dead. Every game that has elaborate set dressing you can't interact with feel dead. It feels like the plastic grapes on a movie set. Majority of games feel dead because of this.
@@Billy-bc8pk Eh. They're a nice-to-have, maybe, but the point is that with the CE they come at the cost of too many other more important things. It's not simply having them vs not, it's a tradeoff, and I just don't understand the view that immovable clutter makes a world feel dead but a pathetically unpopulated supposed capital city doesn't. Especially when the movable clutter doesn't even behave like real objects. Food and dishes go flying across the room because you bumped into a table -- that doesn't happen in real life. The physics is awful, and it actually calls even more attention to how extremely FAKE the objects are. It makes the apples seem MORE like plastic fruit. And that's the thing I'm getting in exchange for the ability to have the game run well and have a reasonable number of NPCs on screen? Sad. I'd go further and suggest that if people are paying so much attention to cheese wheels and forks because they're the thing that makes the world feel most "alive" then the game has a lot more fundamental issues, but I digress. I suppose everything has its fan base. I hope you're enjoying collecting your cheese wheels, or kicking them, or whatever one does with all those painfully unrealistic random objects. I still think more, better, less glitchy NPCs with better animation would be preferable, but to each their own.
@@SolCrown80You’re clearly not representative of people who like Bethesda games if you think cities in Bethesda games should have realistic amount of characters. What people like about Bethesda is how their cities are smaller but have more interior access and more named NPC that you can interact with, nobody want Bethesda to make cities like Witcher 3 where 99% of the NPC are uninteractive and 90% of interiors are either procedural or not accessible. Nobody care about having a nightclub with an actual crowd if the nightclub has more unique NPC with unique dialogue and interactions. Market in Bethesda games aren’t realistic but you can have dialogue with all vendors, markets in CDPR games are very realistic but the vast majority of vendors are unarmed and do not have any dialogue. You’re basically asking for Bethesda to completely change the design philosophy behind Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3/4 and Starfield to do something more like CDPR. « As someone who love environment with life » go play CDPR games for that, Bethesda games have always prioritized smaller scale and less realistic environnement with a higher concentration of handcrafted content.
Classic Bethesda dev. I don't think ppl realize that it's more than just an engine issue, actual good Writing and Game design? Hellooo??? these bethesda devs need to be ashamed, the stuff that their modding community has done ON THE SAME ENGINE mind you is honestly impressive, and makes the whole UE5 argument seem like they're barking up the wrong tree.
I'm not sure I'm really with you. Bethesda's biggest problem isn't an outdated engine, they have a very serious quest design and writing problem. Second, I think the biggest boon for them is their still unbeaten modding support. You change engines and you lose the best thing they have going for them and solve what's only a minor problem.
Iv been in the BGS modding community since 2017, and you are spot on, its really not an engine issue. If the animations look bad to you, its because they made bad animations not because the engine took a good animation and made it bad. Also the CK does have animation blending, not sure what he's talking about, every engine has animation blending, folks really need to stop talking about things they don't know anything about. Losing the ability to mod at the level the CK allows would be a disaster for BGS as BGS games get substantially better after a few years of mod support.
More like: from and engine that tries to do what it's never been designed to do to an engine that at least has the capabilities but needs to be optimized.
@@tjroelsmakinda the opposite actually. UE5 is designed for Fortnite. A cartoonish looking game with complex lighting systems and a fully dynamic environment with very large draw distances. The Creation Engine (& GameBryo) was made for games exactly like the one they have been re-releasing since Oblivion. Gun Oblivion. Western Oblivion. Oblivion II. Gun Oblivion II. Space Oblivion. It is used for the exact type of games that it was designed for. They just don't know how to use it. Neither on a technical level, nor in a creative direction
@@hundvd_7 The Creation Engine has never been designed for large gaming worlds, as it uses the so-called fishbowl type of worlds rendering. Those micro-stutters and endless loading screens so many people are complaining about, are caused by the Creation Engine having to completely re-render the world whenever the player runs into the limit of the fishbowl. It literally has to create a new fishbowl. That becomes painfully clear in Starfield when you go from flying your spaceship to landing and disembarking on a planet: it's loading screen followed by loading screen followed by loading screen. But on top of that, the Creation Engine is getting quite long in the teeth and Bethesda's traditional strategy of simply tacking on sub-engines to the main engine to add functionality just creates the buggy mess that Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 were notorious for. Sure, Bethesda/Howard finally saw the light and put in some effort to integrate all the sub-engines into the main engine, but that doesn't really upgrade the engine; it only makes it less buggy. There simply is NO getting around the fishbowl type rendering, as that is core engine behaviour. The Creation Engine will therefore never be able to render seamless game worlds or get rid of the many loading screens. Now that isn't a huge problem when you use the engine to create small and tight game worlds, like games that mostly play indoors, if the game developer makes clever use of cutscenes to camouflage the re-rendering of the fishbowl. However, the problem is huge when the player is just running in one direction in an open world and therefore runs into the outer limit of the fishbowl over and over again.
Because they don't optimize for shi.. Any engine can have that problem if you have lazy development. Back in the day devs cared about that way more since HW was slow af.
To be fair, UE4 didn't fair much better in its early days and near the end of its life we have gotten some of the best results we could have never imagined with the engine. Just imagine years from now when UE6 is dropping, the quality of games we will be getting near the end of 5's life.
@@IlikebeatzzzAnd you think Bethesda, out of all game publishers gonna do better job with UE5, The Bethesda that don't even care optimizing their own engine and let modders fix it for them, yeah nope.
I'd rather they invest on a new proprietary engine than start using UE5. One of the biggest appeals of Bethesda games is how moddable they are and how the community engages with them, which is primarily a thing on PC. Unreal Engine was never all that good on PC, but I feel since UE4, things keep getting worse, Bethesda games going UE5 is just trying to put out a fire with gasoline.
As a long-time Star Citizen backer I can tell you that if Bethesda were to start today on a brand new engine that can do everything they use Creation Engine to do, they'd be able to _start_ making the next Bethesda 3D adventure (whether that's TES6, TES7, or what) in like four or five years at the earliest. Then they'd actually have to make the game while suffering most of the same problems of switching to UE when it comes to things like tools and dev training. Unreal Engine at least already exists so they would have a big leg up on at least beginning the process of switching over if they dropped Creation for something else.
I'd rather wait a decade than have the next Elder Scrolls be another UE stutter fest on PC. That being said, I know no business would choose that route over any other that would net them revenue faster, which is why there are so many UE stutter fests on PC nowadays. Unreal Engine's ubiquitousnes in this industry already feels tiresome enough as it is, any development initiative that goes a different route feels like a breath of fresh air.
The engine is not the issue, Bethesda just doesn't have any talent anymore, I used to think that the engine was the problem but there are so many mods out there disproving this there's even animation blending mods they even added animation blending to Morrowind for gods sake so yeah no it's not the engine it's just the developers.
Games on UE5 look shit. For the next 10 years games will look worse than 10 years ago. All games now look blurry, especially details like hair/trees and especially while moving. Seriously pause a UE5 game in motion, it looks way worse than a UE3 game
Dont know if there is just an unreal5-thing with the look, but there is a lot of slop-tools in use these days that makes everything blurry/smeary. DLSS, framegent, TAA etc. The optimization on the other hand really seems to be terrible every single time that leads to heavy use of said smear-tools
Nope streamers and UA-camrs have by continuing to push for 4k and 60fps trash games needed to be 1000 hrs long so they can make content so if anyone blame content creators
Animation blending exists in all engines, it is the most basic way of transitioning from one animation to another. Motion matching is an advanced tool that selects and blends animations based on player input. The game that does it really really well is For Honor.
Motion matching just pick right animation for your trajectory. Meaning direction of movement. Notice the line at the bottom where character moves. Animation blending is just transitioning from one animation to another in a smooth way. You find keyframes where limbs are closest to each other, then you move them from one to another and you switch animations. Is just a normal thing. There is also animation layering that do similar things but allows you to apply animations to specific bones. This way you can for example make lower body play walking animation while upper body have shooting animation. That means you can walk and shoot in game. Also not everything is "simulated". First of all it's not a simulation. It's just that items have psychical properties. And other engines not only do it too but do it better. Also not everything have those properties so often you can move cup on a shelf but you can't move shelf. And when it comes to dialogue system - I can just use a plugin and then all I really need is to adjust GUI. And writing from scratch dialogue system Bethesda style would take like afternoon. At least as long as you have localization in place. Finally main reason why companies switch to UE5 is due to growth. They want to grow and hire people and not train everyone how to use their own engine and how to do stuff their own way. It's easier to just hire people that already know the engine.
The most important point is the one that's not really been mentioned - I can walk around a stunning Skyrim in VR and literally chat to ChatGPT AI NPC's who know more about their own characters and the world of the Elder Scrolls than I do, and they roleplay all that accordingly, all in a gaming world so rich with content that there's no other gaming experience that can even come close. That's all down to the Creation Engine + modding community, and that combination is the only reason why Bethesda and Todd have the cult status they do today. Leaving a large section of that behind for what might be some rather underwhelming improvements to animations and graphics is quite the gamble, and I'm not sure if BGS have the talent to go it alone without their dedicated modding community.
For CDProjectRed to justfy abandoning the tech to focus on the creative side makes some sense. They have been shown to be good at one and not so much with the other. But starfield is not bad because of the engine. it's a creatively bankrupt game. If Bethesda were to abandon something, it would make more sense to invest in the uniqueness of the creation engine and license de IPs to some other studio.
CDPR switched to UE for financial reasons. They lost many experienced devs that worked on the Red Engine. As they are the only studio using this engine, they could not replace these people with (cheap) new hires. A own custom engine needs in house experts to update and improve its features. UE is used by a order of magnitude higher number of devs, free courses lower the entry barrier and you can easily find cheap workforce that has basic experience in UE and works for lower salaries. It is all about money.
Bethesdas problem are dysfunctional management and inefficient team structure. Its not a engine problem. I recommend watching Will Shens (Starfield developer) talk at GDC2024 where he speaks about the problems during development, the inefficient communication, problems with leadership like noticing they had no final quest in the lage stage of development. There were also challenges with relying on several support studios around the globe working on the same project. The different teams worked in their own bubbles which contributed to the disjoint feeling of the gameplay systems. It looks like they do the bare minimum to keep their biggest asset - CE - in a working state. Same for their live service game FO76 which is held back by bugs (cancellation of the christmas event, caravans being stuck, exploits in the new raid).
Do they, though? Using your own engine means you need to dedicate people to maintaining and updating it to improve graphics, optimization, implement new tech that might be needed (like procedural generation in Starfield), as well as keep up with new hardware and software and deal with all tech issues that pop up.
UE is not really Mod friendly and making it so would be a major undertaking. Witcher 4 will be the first massive open world game in UE5... and CD Projekt have literally spent over a year optimising their own version of it for open world and integrating their own engine's features. The most important thing for Bethesda is to make a compelling game. People are much more forgiving over engine quality when the game is fun.
Im one of those people who need to pick up every pencil. At least if the game calls for settlements or creating a home. Thats one of the main reason I like bethesda games is all the junk is meaningful.
Focusing on the engine issue: Red engine can do a full seamless open world with interiors and exteriors, multiple tuned vehicles, large random-gen npc crowds, MULTIPLE animated ads and VIDEOS (actual videos on tv screens) on screen at the same time, & top notch character & face anims. And it can do all of the above at the same time. The creation engine is FAR off from being able to do even a single one of those. Make a world space too big: lag. Too many characters on screen: lag. Add multiple vehicles: lag. Too many texture animated objects: lag. And so on. It is so lacking that, aside from rudimentary gameplay, we will never see anything more impressive or innovative. Being able to dynamically move over or around objects (like AC style climbing or parkour), or having more dramatic meaningful combat, and the like. Hell, being able to clamber or climb up chest high walls would be a HUGE step up for BGS, but has been solved in other games for the last 2 generations. The best we can do in the creation engine is janky, canned animations with interaction markers. The engine is very easy to mod (once we are given the creation kit tools) and that is it's only saving grace. But even the modding scene won't save Starfield. And now that CDPR has given us real modding tools for Cyberpunk, this point may actually be moot.
Doom Engine is great for FPS games, open world RPGs need an engine for wider range of tools. But Microsoft Said they are switching to Unreal 5 for their FPS like halo. Which is wild because they Own Bethesda/Doom
I feel like BGS is on a different scale as a dev than the industry as a whole. The needle can move as high on that scale and the scale can be as large as you want, but ultimately, the impressiveness of one BGS game is measured against other BGS games, and they never mix with the industry. I had this realization when seeing something in Starfield that I've seen in countless games since countless years ago, but it seemed impressive for a BGS game. How sad is that. Granted, I love the essence of a BGS game of adventure, looting and exploration and that BGS way of doing it, but they're falling farther and farther behind the rest of the devs (at least among the ones I play) that they've become the equivalent of "guilty pleasure" movies, especially considering team leaders like Emil Pegliarulo doesn't seem to take his job seriously and Todd doesn't look to weigh his options thuroughly.
If they work within the creation engine's constraints, they *could* pull it off... It also has a lot to do with their ambitions, the engine was made to do thinks it wasn't ment for in Starfield, that's where the majority of my gripes lie.
maybe todd will switch after working on indiana jones if they switched to ID tech 7 they could keep mod support and customize the engine as they please
Thinking about how "grate" Bethesda is at optimize there games in there own engine a switch to UE5 would meen runing at 1080p at a 20 to 30 fps with stutters on a 4090. This is not even a joke
I don't think switching to UE5 is quite the no-brainer that people seem to think it is. Visually, the engine is top notche, but increasingly, we're seeing that it has a lot of issues in terms of performance. When it comes to Creation Engine, it's complicated. We know it's buggy and outdated in many ways. But, arguably, the biggest strength of Bethesda titles has been the modding communities around them. Creation Engine is very easy to mod, with a huge global community of modders who already understand the engine and know how to make it do exactly what they want it to do. I'm not sure we want to lose that. What we do need is for Bethesda to return to their true strength, which is to craft compelling handcrafted worlds that players want to spend time in. They didn't do that with Starfield.
The engine isn't as much the problem, it's that they can no longer write and their game design in the last few games have been fundamentally bad. Also I do actually think having immovable objects in the game world makes it less immersive.
They do need to do something about their archaic loading screen simulator game engine. However Unreal Engine 5 has a lot of issues too. But UE5 Version 5.5 is a game changer. Example Lumen megalights has a 50% performance improvement over current Lumen and looks better. Not mention the streamlined loading so there would not need to be as many loading screens. The engine makes better use of current hardware such as ray traced lighting and direct storage. Natively supports ultrawide and larger FOV. To this date. Starfield is literally one of the only big 1st party Xbox titles that does not support new tech like ray tracing etc. They had to patch in proper ultrawide support without the UI being cut off and FOV slider 😂😅
It's crazy to think that Cyberpunk came out first and is still leaps and bounds a graphical powerhouse next to Starfield. I'd say it was still better looking than Starfield even when it first released with all the bug issues. Then they release Phantom Liberty which can be an entirely separate game on its own.
Cap: Motion Matching is not the same as animation blending, animation blending is closer to what Luke talked about here where multiple animations are blended together based on the current state of the player movement, meaning that if you go from walking to running, or strafing left to backing up, it will blend the animation values together from a blend tree in order to smooth the transition or create "dynamic" hybrid animations when for for example not running at full speed, but still faster than walking, so it takes the averages between the two and adjusts the movement (usually based on a multiplier from the input value (0 - 1). Motion Matching on the other hand isn't just blending between multiple different animation clipos, it is inteligently picking the next pose (per frame) the character will have for a (usually) very large library of possible poses, all with animation data on them that indicate what type of use that animation pose has (sharp bank to the left, etc). As Luke mentioned it looks really smooth and dynamic, but there is actually a good reason some games choose not to use motion matching, mostly related to control responsiveness as motion matching adds some additional delay between input and a cooresponding animation sequence playing, it also adds limited but certainly not insignificant computational overhead.
10:30 he did all of that and there's no comprehensive mod support, so no, bethesda shouldn't leave their engine behind until UE can have mod support as good as their engine.
Having so many non-static objects really peaked in Fo4, due to the nature of scrap and settlements. They dialed it back quite a lot in Fo76, and though I didn't play Starfield nearly as much, I don't remember it really being a thing there at all. If they're not making games that lean into the strengths of their engine, then tying themselves to it seems increasingly pointless.
Dude! Quit fumbling around your mic or get a shock guard. Your face doesn't need to be right in front of the mic at all times. This is a podcaster 101 level concept.
Going to Unreal Engine would be one of the biggest mistakes Bethesda could make. One of the biggest advantages BGS has is the longevity of their games. People are still buying and playing Fallout 3 and New Vegas; people are buying Fallout 4 again for Fallout London. They are doing this because the games are not only easy to mod, but because they enable a wide range of mods. Look at Skyrim and Fallout 4. Modders can add fully voiced companions, quests, and new areas to the game. Unreal Engine just doesn't work that way, and that kind of a switch would kill Bethesda games as we know them.
19:20 "is there anyway ES6 will outdo Witcher 4 in anything?" well Luke... seeing how all the actually talented, skilled and experienced people are leaving CDPR in droves to start their own companies. I'm expecting W4 to be a whole lot worse than the previous games CDPR has made. while Bethesda will follow their same path of the same old thing, but with less than their previous game. resulting in a safe and consistent 6 or 7 out of 10 game that the mod community needs to spend 8 years on to make it a really good game.
On CDPR using the Unreal Engine. I believe Bellular News talked about this, and the reason CDPR went this route, according to them, is it lets CDPR work on two projects simultaneously using two engines. The reason for this is trying to make improvements upon one engine to share between two projects at the same time is a big headache, apparently. I might be misremembering a couple details, but that's the gist of what I understood.
First I want to see if the Oblivion remaster rumors turn out to be true: graphics are handled by UE5, while the rest of the game is still Creation Engine. If such a thing is possible, and modders get their hands on the Oblivion remaster (possibly only a few months from now) and find it easy to work with, that could have huge implications for Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout 5, etc.
After playing Stalker 2, I realized making it so you can literally pick up everything and check every drawer all the time wastes so much time instead of actually adventuring. It's tedious and rewards addictive behavior.
The technical issues of their engine wouldn't be quite as grating on their fans if they just made worlds worth exploring and brought their writing up to merely serviceable. I wouldn't have cared about loading screens in Starfield if they gave me worlds worth checking out.
I'm just astonished, how good the physics are in starfield. It was magnificent to see location in zero gravity. The visuals.... Are amazing and I do care about them. Body ragdoll in 0g is awesome. But it feels like they don't use it.
Another aspect of the engine problem is the people. Will a talented dev want to go work for Bethesda and become an expert with tools that no other studio uses? Or would they rather go work for a studio that uses UE5 so they can keep their skills current for when the inevitable layoffs happen?
Absolutely not, after dealing with the nonstop issues with Stalker 2 caused by the game being on UE5, not in a million years would i want bethesda games to move to Unreal. Bethesda's problem is Bethesda themselves, not the engine and people need to stop implying otherwise.
There is some weirdly common idea that Creation Engine is what makes Bethesda's games what they are, but I'm yet to hear what specific features it has that make their games unique that are impossible with other engines. Skyrim is a great game because of it's interesting handcrafted locations and quests. Things that have nothing to do with CE. Everything in it that is related to mechanics and graphics is decent at best, and subpar more often than not
I don't know if this is true since they haven't announced it, but I think Epic should create a special version of Unreal Engine 5 for any game studio that wants to transition to it. I believe if something like this was announced, studios like FromSoftware might switch to it, along with other studios that might find Unreal Engine more efficient. With this special version, any studio would be able to redesign the engine according to their vision, and the engine's features would certainly help with that
It doesn't matter what engine is used if what they do with it doesn't work. Switching away from the Creation engine doesn't make their games better if the design decisions and quality control remains the same. If a developer is constantly improving the engine and including that as part of the development cycle a specific engine is not a problem. The primary advantage of switching to a UE5 engine is that it allows hiring and training to be done quicker which in theory cuts some development costs. But since the games industry has an issue with firing not hiring while also throwing around obscene amounts of money that it probably not a big enough incentive for them to switch over. I'd also say that Luke saying that they just threw the "2" on the end of the Creation Engine without there being anything meaningful is irresponsible and based on very little actual information. Engines like all software are version/revision controlled. The people that built it decided that whatever updates that had been made warranted a version control update, same thing Unreal do. Unless you know the engine inside and out, know the differences between versions and know the reasoning why they went to a V2, stating it hasn't made a difference or fixed anything is just an uninformed opinion.
The irony being CDPR is moving from RED Engine to UE5 after the massive success of Cyberpunk and Bethesda is keeping to Creation Engine when they were lambasted by millions for how objectively dated that engine is yet refuse to MOVE to a more current engine like UE5.
UE5 is the industry standard. LOTS of people know the environment and can be hired from the outside. Their current proprietary monster requires lots of inside knowledge, is a patch work of decades of additions and fixes, and ultimately limits/slows down production.
As long as Bethesda continues to be completely creatively destitute, there's no game engine magic that can save them from putting out mediocre to bad games. Starfield in UE5 would have still been a boring slog of proc gen garbage and bad writing.
Sure, but Starfield in UE5 wouldn't have all the loading screen and would make seamless transitions from flying to landing possible. The main difference as I see it is that Bethesda tries to use the Creation Engine in a way it was never designed for, whereas the Unreal Engine just suffers from bad optimization. Optimization is relatively easy to fix, whereas trying to make the Creation Engine do what it never was designed to do is very hard if not impossible and it will never come even close to what the Unreal Engine can do.
Yes but the main reason they refuse to leave the garbage ass creation engine is because they wouldn't be able to just copy and paste a fuck ton of code from one game to another. Their entire engine is fucking trash and needs to be trashed.
Agreed. Captains Macks' starfield reviews perfectly demonstrate that the game design philosophy fundementals are broken over there, not just the engine.
@@tjroelsma They could have done all that without loading screens. Their engine isn't a binary blob they can't modify either, they do have the source code of the creation engine and could basically expand it and rewrite part of it to make it pretty much anything, but they have been complacent with it for a looong time, barely upgrading things. Also, the main issue isn't their engine, but their creativity and sure, they could do with -a bit- *a LOT* more investment in their engine, but switching to something else wouldn't fix how bad their games are designed, how terrible their writing is, and how shallow their RPG element became, etc. And let's not forget that they would lose most of their modding community that rely on the same tools since forever.
The only reasons to switch from a proprietary engine to something else is if you really don't have the money to keep investing in your in house tools, have limited personnel to work on it that are needed on other projects, or the new hires takes too long to get familiar with it and you're trying to expand your team fast. Everything else is just stupid trend chasing that will cost a lot of time and money.
Bingo. The engine isn't even in the top 10 of Starfield's issues.
the engine is the last problem they have, they need to make the game interesting
The engine may not help if they're spending all their time just making the game *work*. That's how you get quotes like that Starfield is their biggest achievement, when it's actually boring.
yeah, but limitations of the engine are also infuencing game design. some things are just impossible to implement, even if you're creative enough to come up with it
@@llamatronian101 True, but with more interesting premise, better writing, with more dengerous planets and more hand made surroundings of the major cities, the game would be way, way better. Even in this engine and million loading screens.
So true. After 400 hours playtime I can't remember any location in the world that is interesting or any quest that is exciting to play. The best moments were created by accident by me timing the main quest drama or by game engine creating some funny events. I restarted Skyrim again and the magic is still there. Someone wise enough could explain why Starfield does not have it. It is not the loading screens that are ruining the game. Or the engine - they have succeeded with it before. For me Starfield is at it's best with the dialogue... that's it. Lately I've been thinking about role of music and I must say Starfield does not shine with that either. Shattered Space tried more open world approach and fails again to make the game more interesting - why in this game even exploring fails.The very aspect that usually is the the best thing in Bethesda games.
@@512TheWolf512 Limitations of the game engine? I'm not gonna lie they haven't even used the game engine to 100% capacity xD they've added a ton of things into the engine and haven't even used it xD
It’s not the engine it’s how you use it. RDR2 was made on a heavily modified version of the R.A.G.E engine that originally was used for Rockstar’s table tennis in 2006. Bethesda just clearly doesn’t have a good vision or know how to use their engine properly. GTA6 is using the RAGE engine again so it’s clear Bethesda just has a skill issue.
Does that mean, you could make Bethesda's engine as good as UE4/5 or RAGE just by much more skillful changes?
Recoding a ton of the engine is what Bethesda doesn't want to do because it would cost a lot of money and they are griddy bastards.
That's incorrect. The Creation engine and the ancient tools they use for it go back to Morrowind when it was called Gamebryo. This engine has had the same core design failures back when we expected much less from hardware. It's "load node" design is a core function on how games are created. They can frankenstein it (as they have been doing for decades), but they cannot fix it with a "vision". Its failures are in how it actually works and the tools are designed around this.
Thats what happens when you fire all the talent that help build the older engines the new employees have no idea how to work on those old engines
You’re making it sound like the RAGE engine was made for Table Tennis, and then, wow, look what they’re doing with it now.
The RAGE engine was made for Grand Theft Auto, (EA had bought Criterion Games a couple years before, who made the RenderWare engine Rockstar North used to make GTA, and didn’t trust EA with the information they’d have access to about GTA development) Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis was just a thing Rockstar San Diego made to test the engine they were making, it’s an internal test that got released.
The not trusting EA because of how huge they were bit is kind of funny now given how large Epic has become in recent years, and how almost everyone seems to be using Unreal like it’s the old 360 days again.
No, not UE5 but a customized idTech engine would make a lot more sense. Have the engine wizards at id on it.
I've been saying this since Fallout 4.
They're making first-person shooters. They own _THE_ first-person shooter company.
Just give Id the requirements for some new tools and let them do their job.
As a modder quite proficient with the creation Kit for all their games, all this talk about the "bad" engine is quite misguided tbh. Not saying I don't understand the distaste given Bethesda's recent releases, lol.
But without the creation engine, the actual feel of the games themselves just won't be there. The engine is what allows for every mechanic that makes a bgs game a bgs game. Genuinely. Good and bad.
The problem is the design of the game in accordance with the engine. Not to mention just God awful writing.
Yes there is also the fact that the engine is only a tool, what matters more is how you use it, Bethesda could had definitely improved the asset streaming performance so that we had less loading screens on starfield, but it seems like it was never one of their main focus/priority for the game, which unfortunately shows a bad design choice and lack of understanding of how a space game should feel on the transversal mechanics.
They need to remake their engine
one of the best and worst experiences playing mods is in FO4 playing Kinggaths mod SS2, i both love and hate that mod, i love the story and the concept, however the mechanics just aren't there because the limitations of the engine cause significant issues to the mod, sadly Kinggath created this mod around the mechanics that cause issues in the mod overall.
again i love the concept of these mechanics for his mod, but they are simply too limited due to the creation engines limitations, so it's really frustrating playing through that mod only for the script lag to catch up and suddenly nothing in the mod or outside of the mod work properly because the mod messes with the scripts too much, his mod also causes significant save bloat that makes saving your game take it's damn time, there is a fix for that, but it's still uneasy because the bloat is saved in the save, even if it's a hard save.
BGS's greatest strengths were the game's modding potential, but now they wait until most of their players have moved on to release the creation kit. It'd be a shame in many ways but I think a move to UE would be a net good.
I agree. I was on a spiel many moons ago about how Creation isn't really fit for a game of the scope and scale of Starfield, the devs and modders quickly ran into the ceiling of capability that the Engine has. Skyrim is Perfect for it, Fallout games can be phenomenal, big ole giant playground with stuff in it and questlines to do.
Luke Stephens eats pasta with his feet, pass it on.
I thought he ate feet with his pasta?
That's OK as long as he uses Toddsta Sauce.
@@kolfe2a Toddka sauce*
Those are rumors, don't spread fake news.
i literally saw it happen
as a unreal dev, I can guarantee one thing, unreal engine is not capable of managing so many physics, they would have to build their own sub engine within unreal engine for this to work. bypassing all of unreal engines UObject based render system. fun fact, CDProject Red is actually doing this. their lecture talk about it was "Decoupling in unreal"
Luke I noticed u showed the motion matching from unreal. That wouldn't be possible for Starfield. It would take up too much of the performance. its not optimized at all. maybe it would work if they are able to switch between standard animations and motion matching. but it is not a quick fix.
I disagree with the opinion that the physics aren't what is important for Bethesda games. It wouldn't be a Bethesda game without the physics. being able to see every item as a separate entity/ being able to interact with them separately, that is a great plus to me. Most other games fake clutter by combining multiple unique items into a single mesh. even the latest mega lights unreal trailers are doing this method. These combined meshes can never be separated.
Except.. what am I gonna do with all those physics in a game about slaying dragons or in a space shooter? It would be a great concept to keep with VR but with a controller or mouse/keyboard? Complete immersion breaking as you don’t even pick them up physically they just float in front of you cause the game engine would probably melt trying to render hand holding animations. And what can you even do when picking them up? Dropping it back down? lol I remember trying to organize a book shelf at my house in skyrim and all I could do is drop and hope it lands upright. Or the classic case full of shards? Watch them all fly out the case every time I load into the house. These physics have been the bane of my skyrim characters existence and that’s just the tip of the iceberg with how annoying everything else in Bethesda games are. Don’t even get me started on their rabbit hole of a bugfest involving mannequins and weapon holders 🤦🏻♂️
Those physics would probably work amazing if someone like cd project ever worked on it. But Bethesdas physics involves walking into your house and watching all your books or placed objects just shake uncontrollably while they’re ACTUALLY just supposed to be sitting there on the shelf. Or better yet find every object you carefully placed ended up falling onto the floor because Bethesdas primordial engine couldn’t handle having so many objects in a single area for them to sit still. Like I can’t tell if it’s just shitty game design in general or if Bethesda couldn’t pull their own weight if their life depended on it.
Idk id just really hope a ‘Bethesda game’ would be known for something more than just a ‘game where I can store 10 000 hot dogs inside a room for no reason 😃’.
I would much rather some games stay true to their own engines rather than the entire market be even more flush with UE5 games
have you played Starfield aka loading screen fest?
@@alexdoan273they could, crazy idea, work within the limitations (and strengths!) of their engine instead of just try to retro fit it to every game. Wild concept I know.
@@elvickRULESyup, 4 highly detailed, content rich planets should've been a no brainer.
I don't understand how Todd looked at the released game and thought "yh, this is fun."
1000s planets in an engine that isn't designed for seamless space travel is a wild choice.
@@alexdoan273 guess what? with unreal5 you will also have loading screens if you have to jump from world to world, loading and unloading assets
@@Foxtrop13 world to world loading screens is not comparable from ROOM TO ROOM loading screen.
year 5 of me saying its not the engine and anyone who claims it is has no clue what theyre talking about
they would still make shitty games that run like ass, but this time with the UE5 logo
yh this is kinda the problem, it's not the engine causing bad writing and characters, it's BGS.
I agree. Even if Starfield was in UE, there’s no good bones there. But they continue to double down and defend their shitty design, shitty writing, boring copy-paste companions. We will probably see a similar situation with new Elder Scrolls
I cant wait for gaming in the next ten years when all developers are using Unreal because they can't be bothered to create their own engines anymore
At least they'll have zero excuses to not be optimised and work day one.
And Madden will still use Frostbite
You forgot that will all feel like generic slop
Dark days.
They will make their own engine INSIDE unreal 5
Have two problems with this. First off swapping to UE5 doesn’t solve your problems. A well built custom engine will do far better that slapping it in Unreal.
2nd issue, is people didn’t like starfield, not because it looks bad, but because it was a bad game. If it was made in Unreal, it still would be bad.
If Bethesda ditched the creation engine all we would hear for elder scrolls 6 is how so many of Skyrim's features were missing and how it wasn't nearly as mod-friendly
There already doing that
That will without a doubt probably happen either way
@@jeb791 Not at this level because the creation engine and kit is designed for modding now.
They will never switch to Unreal Engine and thank god.
@@FirstLast-yc9lq Completely agree!
I'll never forget the removal of athletics and acrobatics from the elder scrolls series, the birth of non-stop ridiculous fast travel compared too actual exploration and being rewarded for it, if they switch that engine what else will we lose now?
Look, I get it especially since Fallout 4, the normies have just gotten upset with their games, and that's okay but it doesn't mean we should ruin the whole experience for everyone else that likes it. You know what I do when I want to go back to the good ol days? I play the older games, and mod them, it takes time, that is far better than Bethesda having to completely keep having to change the design of their games. Unreal Engine 5 will ruin the whole experience, its even worse than what Bethesda uses at the moment, huge step in the wrong direction.
Creation engine isn't the problem. Bethesda is the problem
Creation engine and Bethesda are the problem.
People are the problem. Starfield was a really good game that people shit on because it wasn't skyrim.
@@harty3113ur so dumb
Nope, you're all wrong. Mismanagement due to rapid growth is the problem.
@@harty3113 Ha ha ha....That's good. Really funny........wait, you ARE joking, right?
From what I've seen, modders LOVE the Creation Engine. It's what they know how to use. Bethesda, being as small as it is compared to CDPR or Rockstar, ends up leaning very heavily on its modding community for what is essentially free labor. From bug fixes to full questlines, modders are a core component of Bethesda’s business model now. They’re even integrated into it through Creation Club. It even acts as a hiring pipeline. They seem to have decided that falling behind industry standards is worth it if they can keep leaning hard on their modding community instead of ramping up staffing or cutting the project scope.
TBH, if BGS games just had better writing, acting, and animations, it would almost be forgivable.
From everything I can find, they had more employees in 2023-2024 than CDPR. But about 1000 less than Rockstar. Dont forget that subsidiaries count too. "Bethesda Games" is just the name on the building writing the checks. Zenimax was 65% of the workforce.
They're not a small studio.
Did you know that Blackrock and other investment companies are not allowing good writing anymore? I can't even blame Bethesda here, Starfield has terrible writing, but it's all over when you get in the actual gameplay which I forgave it, if it was a movie game I would've gave up on it.
Because we all like stutters on our open worlds, right!
The "creation engine" is a licence of gamebrayo with a new rendering api. Gamebrayo hasn't been updated since 2012.
The Creation Engine was not the root of their issue. The root of the issue is that Starfield’s fundamental design was not compelling even on a conceptual level. Also the writing is dogshit and there wasn’t an interesting conversation or bit of worldbuilding in the game. It felt like it was dreamed up by a 17 year old who thinks NASA is cool and has never read a book longer than Goosebumps.
Exactly! Engine can't fix the problem that made Starfield boring and uninteresting game.
@@KintablI completely agree and found the gameplay loop of Starfield boring... But gotta admit if the load screens weren't so excessive I may have tolerated the game a lot more.
They don't need to switch the game engine, they just have to figure out a way to make an open world game without loading screen behind the doors.
solution: switch to a different engine
@@christopherallard1693 so no mod support
@@arielshligman2146 They could make a UE5 SDK like other games have.
@lennysmileyface ue5 sucks bro
@@arielshligman2146 UE5 is a great, if bloated, engine used by lazy devs. And as the other guy said, it supports mods.
Paul Tassi writes whatever he thinks will garner clicks. He literally wrote an article attacking Star Wars Theory and other youtubers who are critical of Disney Star Wars, then wrote his own "Star Wars Sucks Now" article expressing their exact talking points. He's a two-faced shill, that's why people don't like him.
Hahahahahahahahahaha waaaahhh he said bad words about star wars theory waaaahhh
@@FullMetalB Female response
One thing going for Creation engine is the mod support, but then, Bethesda mod community is shadow of what it used to be compared to Skyrim era so maybe no point.
Modding community is only as good as its game 🤷🏻♂️
Cyberpunk modding tools was dogwater but the community grew and built their own tools and scripts.
You only get that if people genuinely like and want to invest in a game.
Starfield has official tools yet don't have as many advanced mods due to lack of interest.
BGS can say modding is important but if the base game sucks then they might as well drop support
Fallout:London would like to have a word with you
@@mrplayfulshade Except Fallout 4 was an actually good game, and a decade old.
Skyrim is still getting more mods everyday compared to Starfield, Fallout 4, and even Fallout 3 & New Vegas combined.
@@danielbetancur1250 I agree, 4, 76, london. I actually hate Fallout 3 it's easily the worst imo
This again? The engine isn't the issue the framework, management and higher ups are the issue, no amount of Emil/Todd hate will change that there is people higher than them making the decisions for people saying "But the loading screens" bro, not only are UE5 games unoptimised 80-90% of the time and I think UE makes devs lazy with optimisation the creation engine isn't as bad as people make out, if it was that bad how did it produce 2 games? Thats something an outdated engine couldn't do.
The loading screens ain't a thing that just exists in a game engine thats something you have to setup, they could do without 80% of the loading screens if they took their time optimising the game on top of just taking their time in general, I feel like the team wasn't delegated well enough nor had a decent work flow as half the things are still being worked into the new engine from what I have heard.
Todd just can't admit that he's in too deep to course correct, so he has to charisma check constantly.
Creation Engine is what makes Bethesda RPGs unique and gives it the feel of their world
"Had we moved yo Unreal engine things would have been better" really don't think that UE5 is the solution to every problem bro. If everyone changes to UE5 we will have aestheticly similar games with bare bone physics. And UE5 looks pretty but also looks generic af.
Exactly. And then there is the problem of being a hostage of Epic Games. UE is not free. It is proprietary with Epic Games having a tight grip on the direction and featureset.
i really dont want to see more people switching to UE5, most of those games are a bit of a mess
If they switch engines, say goodbye to modding a Bethesda game as you know it; say goodbye to every single item in the game having a placeable model with physics. Say goodbye to NPC schedules. Say goodbye to Bethesda Game Studio.
Exactly
Were there even NPCs with schedules in Starfield?
@Notivarg no idea i didnt play it
Switching engines wouldn't necessarily be a "goodbye" to npc schedules. Npc schedules are not just a creation engine feature. Other games with different engines had it, too, such as gothic 1 and 2.
Because at this point they should just hire their modders and have them actually make a good game for them. If they refuse to figure out their creation engine (which their modders already did for them over a decade ago) then what’s the point in making half-assed slop where nowadays the writing doesn’t even hold it up? Halfassing games so your modders can finish them for you is some next level scum move and these frauds shouldn’t get any shred of our money or attention especially with how they backhand their own fans for so many years 🤦🏻♂️.
Luke says no one cares about persistent items, but he's wrong. Fans do care. It's part of what makes their games feel alive.
@@onabiv I disagree, in fact I think it is one of the things responsible for making them feel more dead. The endless numbers of persistent items coupled with the terrible scripting system is what makes their engine incapable of having, for instance, cities with reasonable number of citizens. Keeping track of every last apple and plate contributes to the inability to have a nightclub with an actual crowd, or a bustling market with more than a dozen NPCs in it. As someone who loves environments with life, I would much rather have crowded streets and smoothly animated people than the ability to pick up 126 plates or 350 sandwiches.
Luke is throwing a lot of cheap statements on this video.
@@SolCrown80 100% huge disagree. Interactables make the world feel alive, not dead. Every game that has elaborate set dressing you can't interact with feel dead. It feels like the plastic grapes on a movie set. Majority of games feel dead because of this.
@@Billy-bc8pk Eh. They're a nice-to-have, maybe, but the point is that with the CE they come at the cost of too many other more important things. It's not simply having them vs not, it's a tradeoff, and I just don't understand the view that immovable clutter makes a world feel dead but a pathetically unpopulated supposed capital city doesn't. Especially when the movable clutter doesn't even behave like real objects. Food and dishes go flying across the room because you bumped into a table -- that doesn't happen in real life. The physics is awful, and it actually calls even more attention to how extremely FAKE the objects are. It makes the apples seem MORE like plastic fruit. And that's the thing I'm getting in exchange for the ability to have the game run well and have a reasonable number of NPCs on screen? Sad. I'd go further and suggest that if people are paying so much attention to cheese wheels and forks because they're the thing that makes the world feel most "alive" then the game has a lot more fundamental issues, but I digress. I suppose everything has its fan base. I hope you're enjoying collecting your cheese wheels, or kicking them, or whatever one does with all those painfully unrealistic random objects. I still think more, better, less glitchy NPCs with better animation would be preferable, but to each their own.
@@SolCrown80You’re clearly not representative of people who like Bethesda games if you think cities in Bethesda games should have realistic amount of characters.
What people like about Bethesda is how their cities are smaller but have more interior access and more named NPC that you can interact with, nobody want Bethesda to make cities like Witcher 3 where 99% of the NPC are uninteractive and 90% of interiors are either procedural or not accessible.
Nobody care about having a nightclub with an actual crowd if the nightclub has more unique NPC with unique dialogue and interactions.
Market in Bethesda games aren’t realistic but you can have dialogue with all vendors, markets in CDPR games are very realistic but the vast majority of vendors are unarmed and do not have any dialogue.
You’re basically asking for Bethesda to completely change the design philosophy behind Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3/4 and Starfield to do something more like CDPR.
« As someone who love environment with life » go play CDPR games for that, Bethesda games have always prioritized smaller scale and less realistic environnement with a higher concentration of handcrafted content.
Bethesda is suffering from a severe case of toxic positivity, and until that ends, their games will never be good again.
They don't need to switch the engine, they just have to figure out a way to make an open world game without loading screen behind the doors.
Classic Bethesda dev. I don't think ppl realize that it's more than just an engine issue, actual good Writing and Game design? Hellooo??? these bethesda devs need to be ashamed, the stuff that their modding community has done ON THE SAME ENGINE mind you is honestly impressive, and makes the whole UE5 argument seem like they're barking up the wrong tree.
I'm not sure I'm really with you. Bethesda's biggest problem isn't an outdated engine, they have a very serious quest design and writing problem. Second, I think the biggest boon for them is their still unbeaten modding support. You change engines and you lose the best thing they have going for them and solve what's only a minor problem.
Iv been in the BGS modding community since 2017, and you are spot on, its really not an engine issue. If the animations look bad to you, its because they made bad animations not because the engine took a good animation and made it bad. Also the CK does have animation blending, not sure what he's talking about, every engine has animation blending, folks really need to stop talking about things they don't know anything about. Losing the ability to mod at the level the CK allows would be a disaster for BGS as BGS games get substantially better after a few years of mod support.
From Creation engine to Unreal engine. So out of the frying pan, into the fire?
It won’t matter. Bethesda doesn’t know how to use their engines properly and refuse to take criticism so their games feel a decade old.
More like: from and engine that tries to do what it's never been designed to do to an engine that at least has the capabilities but needs to be optimized.
@@tjroelsmakinda the opposite actually.
UE5 is designed for Fortnite. A cartoonish looking game with complex lighting systems and a fully dynamic environment with very large draw distances.
The Creation Engine (& GameBryo) was made for games exactly like the one they have been re-releasing since Oblivion.
Gun Oblivion. Western Oblivion. Oblivion II. Gun Oblivion II.
Space Oblivion.
It is used for the exact type of games that it was designed for.
They just don't know how to use it. Neither on a technical level, nor in a creative direction
@@hundvd_7 The Creation Engine has never been designed for large gaming worlds, as it uses the so-called fishbowl type of worlds rendering. Those micro-stutters and endless loading screens so many people are complaining about, are caused by the Creation Engine having to completely re-render the world whenever the player runs into the limit of the fishbowl. It literally has to create a new fishbowl. That becomes painfully clear in Starfield when you go from flying your spaceship to landing and disembarking on a planet: it's loading screen followed by loading screen followed by loading screen.
But on top of that, the Creation Engine is getting quite long in the teeth and Bethesda's traditional strategy of simply tacking on sub-engines to the main engine to add functionality just creates the buggy mess that Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 were notorious for. Sure, Bethesda/Howard finally saw the light and put in some effort to integrate all the sub-engines into the main engine, but that doesn't really upgrade the engine; it only makes it less buggy. There simply is NO getting around the fishbowl type rendering, as that is core engine behaviour. The Creation Engine will therefore never be able to render seamless game worlds or get rid of the many loading screens. Now that isn't a huge problem when you use the engine to create small and tight game worlds, like games that mostly play indoors, if the game developer makes clever use of cutscenes to camouflage the re-rendering of the fishbowl. However, the problem is huge when the player is just running in one direction in an open world and therefore runs into the outer limit of the fishbowl over and over again.
True. Bethesda has proven themselves to be incompetent. I do not trust them to do with any engine, even if Jesus and Buddha themselves wrote it.
Ah yes, because every UE5 game is running like a dream...
Because they don't optimize for shi.. Any engine can have that problem if you have lazy development. Back in the day devs cared about that way more since HW was slow af.
To be fair, UE4 didn't fair much better in its early days and near the end of its life we have gotten some of the best results we could have never imagined with the engine. Just imagine years from now when UE6 is dropping, the quality of games we will be getting near the end of 5's life.
UE4 is pretty good. Dead Island 2 runs well and looks great!
@@IlikebeatzzzUE5 has some fundamental optimisation problems baked into the engine tbf.
@@IlikebeatzzzAnd you think Bethesda, out of all game publishers gonna do better job with UE5, The Bethesda that don't even care optimizing their own engine and let modders fix it for them, yeah nope.
I'd rather they invest on a new proprietary engine than start using UE5. One of the biggest appeals of Bethesda games is how moddable they are and how the community engages with them, which is primarily a thing on PC. Unreal Engine was never all that good on PC, but I feel since UE4, things keep getting worse, Bethesda games going UE5 is just trying to put out a fire with gasoline.
As a long-time Star Citizen backer I can tell you that if Bethesda were to start today on a brand new engine that can do everything they use Creation Engine to do, they'd be able to _start_ making the next Bethesda 3D adventure (whether that's TES6, TES7, or what) in like four or five years at the earliest. Then they'd actually have to make the game while suffering most of the same problems of switching to UE when it comes to things like tools and dev training. Unreal Engine at least already exists so they would have a big leg up on at least beginning the process of switching over if they dropped Creation for something else.
I'd rather wait a decade than have the next Elder Scrolls be another UE stutter fest on PC. That being said, I know no business would choose that route over any other that would net them revenue faster, which is why there are so many UE stutter fests on PC nowadays.
Unreal Engine's ubiquitousnes in this industry already feels tiresome enough as it is, any development initiative that goes a different route feels like a breath of fresh air.
The last thing Bethesda needs is paying royalties to Epic.
Microsoft can afford it, I think.
The engine is not the issue, Bethesda just doesn't have any talent anymore, I used to think that the engine was the problem but there are so many mods out there disproving this there's even animation blending mods they even added animation blending to Morrowind for gods sake so yeah no it's not the engine it's just the developers.
A game engine doesn’t make a good game. Only talent does.
After Starfield, I can’t say I’ll touch another new game of theirs
Games on UE5 look shit. For the next 10 years games will look worse than 10 years ago. All games now look blurry, especially details like hair/trees and especially while moving. Seriously pause a UE5 game in motion, it looks way worse than a UE3 game
UE5 almost looks cel shaded
TAA has unironically ruined gaming
Dont know if there is just an unreal5-thing with the look, but there is a lot of slop-tools in use these days that makes everything blurry/smeary. DLSS, framegent, TAA etc.
The optimization on the other hand really seems to be terrible every single time that leads to heavy use of said smear-tools
You are correct, Unreal 5 also runs bad on every system. Its feels like its made more for movies then games.
Nope streamers and UA-camrs have by continuing to push for 4k and 60fps trash games needed to be 1000 hrs long so they can make content so if anyone blame content creators
Animation blending exists in all engines, it is the most basic way of transitioning from one animation to another. Motion matching is an advanced tool that selects and blends animations based on player input. The game that does it really really well is For Honor.
Motion matching just pick right animation for your trajectory. Meaning direction of movement. Notice the line at the bottom where character moves.
Animation blending is just transitioning from one animation to another in a smooth way. You find keyframes where limbs are closest to each other, then you move them from one to another and you switch animations. Is just a normal thing.
There is also animation layering that do similar things but allows you to apply animations to specific bones. This way you can for example make lower body play walking animation while upper body have shooting animation. That means you can walk and shoot in game.
Also not everything is "simulated". First of all it's not a simulation. It's just that items have psychical properties. And other engines not only do it too but do it better. Also not everything have those properties so often you can move cup on a shelf but you can't move shelf.
And when it comes to dialogue system - I can just use a plugin and then all I really need is to adjust GUI. And writing from scratch dialogue system Bethesda style would take like afternoon. At least as long as you have localization in place.
Finally main reason why companies switch to UE5 is due to growth. They want to grow and hire people and not train everyone how to use their own engine and how to do stuff their own way. It's easier to just hire people that already know the engine.
Blaming the game engine while the core problem is the story and world building itself.
The most important point is the one that's not really been mentioned - I can walk around a stunning Skyrim in VR and literally chat to ChatGPT AI NPC's who know more about their own characters and the world of the Elder Scrolls than I do, and they roleplay all that accordingly, all in a gaming world so rich with content that there's no other gaming experience that can even come close. That's all down to the Creation Engine + modding community, and that combination is the only reason why Bethesda and Todd have the cult status they do today. Leaving a large section of that behind for what might be some rather underwhelming improvements to animations and graphics is quite the gamble, and I'm not sure if BGS have the talent to go it alone without their dedicated modding community.
For CDProjectRed to justfy abandoning the tech to focus on the creative side makes some sense. They have been shown to be good at one and not so much with the other. But starfield is not bad because of the engine. it's a creatively bankrupt game. If Bethesda were to abandon something, it would make more sense to invest in the uniqueness of the creation engine and license de IPs to some other studio.
Exactly! They could do a much better game with a little more imagination, better writting and hand made maps on that same engine.
CDPR switched to UE for financial reasons. They lost many experienced devs that worked on the Red Engine. As they are the only studio using this engine, they could not replace these people with (cheap) new hires. A own custom engine needs in house experts to update and improve its features. UE is used by a order of magnitude higher number of devs, free courses lower the entry barrier and you can easily find cheap workforce that has basic experience in UE and works for lower salaries. It is all about money.
Bethesdas problem are dysfunctional management and inefficient team structure. Its not a engine problem. I recommend watching Will Shens (Starfield developer) talk at GDC2024 where he speaks about the problems during development, the inefficient communication, problems with leadership like noticing they had no final quest in the lage stage of development. There were also challenges with relying on several support studios around the globe working on the same project. The different teams worked in their own bubbles which contributed to the disjoint feeling of the gameplay systems. It looks like they do the bare minimum to keep their biggest asset - CE - in a working state. Same for their live service game FO76 which is held back by bugs (cancellation of the christmas event, caravans being stuck, exploits in the new raid).
"Creation Engine, Creation Engine never changes" Todd Howard - BGS 😅
*Gamebryo engine
If everyone builds games off UE5 creativity and game feel will die every game on UE feels the exact same
Bethesda, like so many others, are past the event horizon. I don't see any avenue they can take to regain their reputation.
Just played a game with myself... I drank every time you said "creation club" instead of "Creation engine". I'm hammered.
I'm going to lie. I LOVE STARFIELD!
They save alot of money by using their own engine. How is this not your first point.
Do they, though? Using your own engine means you need to dedicate people to maintaining and updating it to improve graphics, optimization, implement new tech that might be needed (like procedural generation in Starfield), as well as keep up with new hardware and software and deal with all tech issues that pop up.
UE is not really Mod friendly and making it so would be a major undertaking. Witcher 4 will be the first massive open world game in UE5... and CD Projekt have literally spent over a year optimising their own version of it for open world and integrating their own engine's features. The most important thing for Bethesda is to make a compelling game. People are much more forgiving over engine quality when the game is fun.
Stalker 2 in on UE5
Im one of those people who need to pick up every pencil. At least if the game calls for settlements or creating a home. Thats one of the main reason I like bethesda games is all the junk is meaningful.
I hope elder scrolls 6 ditches the cardboard cutout npcs and broken games aren't cute anymore.
He didn't said that, he actually said that he would like the Creation Engine to be upgraded
when they said, new engine new technology, there was no such thing.
they just updated the engine with new feature, or what we call *Software Update* .
Hear me out, the creation engine seems perfect for vr titles and could be used exclusively for those experiences
Focusing on the engine issue: Red engine can do a full seamless open world with interiors and exteriors, multiple tuned vehicles, large random-gen npc crowds, MULTIPLE animated ads and VIDEOS (actual videos on tv screens) on screen at the same time, & top notch character & face anims. And it can do all of the above at the same time.
The creation engine is FAR off from being able to do even a single one of those. Make a world space too big: lag. Too many characters on screen: lag. Add multiple vehicles: lag. Too many texture animated objects: lag. And so on. It is so lacking that, aside from rudimentary gameplay, we will never see anything more impressive or innovative. Being able to dynamically move over or around objects (like AC style climbing or parkour), or having more dramatic meaningful combat, and the like. Hell, being able to clamber or climb up chest high walls would be a HUGE step up for BGS, but has been solved in other games for the last 2 generations. The best we can do in the creation engine is janky, canned animations with interaction markers.
The engine is very easy to mod (once we are given the creation kit tools) and that is it's only saving grace. But even the modding scene won't save Starfield. And now that CDPR has given us real modding tools for Cyberpunk, this point may actually be moot.
What are they stupid? The Doom engine is right there!
Doom Engine is great for FPS games, open world RPGs need an engine for wider range of tools.
But Microsoft Said they are switching to Unreal 5 for their FPS like halo. Which is wild because they Own Bethesda/Doom
I feel like BGS is on a different scale as a dev than the industry as a whole. The needle can move as high on that scale and the scale can be as large as you want, but ultimately, the impressiveness of one BGS game is measured against other BGS games, and they never mix with the industry. I had this realization when seeing something in Starfield that I've seen in countless games since countless years ago, but it seemed impressive for a BGS game. How sad is that. Granted, I love the essence of a BGS game of adventure, looting and exploration and that BGS way of doing it, but they're falling farther and farther behind the rest of the devs (at least among the ones I play) that they've become the equivalent of "guilty pleasure" movies, especially considering team leaders like Emil Pegliarulo doesn't seem to take his job seriously and Todd doesn't look to weigh his options thuroughly.
If they work within the creation engine's constraints, they *could* pull it off... It also has a lot to do with their ambitions, the engine was made to do thinks it wasn't ment for in Starfield, that's where the majority of my gripes lie.
At least it’s a former dev.
maybe todd will switch after working on indiana jones if they switched to ID tech 7 they could keep mod support and customize the engine as they please
Thinking about how "grate" Bethesda is at optimize there games in there own engine a switch to UE5 would meen runing at 1080p at a 20 to 30 fps with stutters on a 4090. This is not even a joke
Switch off Todd Howard, give the man a break!
*On a more serious note, I don't think changing engines will solve all of BGS problems.
I can't be the only one realizing that Bethesda has ID Tech 7 next door right?
I don't think switching to UE5 is quite the no-brainer that people seem to think it is. Visually, the engine is top notche, but increasingly, we're seeing that it has a lot of issues in terms of performance.
When it comes to Creation Engine, it's complicated. We know it's buggy and outdated in many ways. But, arguably, the biggest strength of Bethesda titles has been the modding communities around them. Creation Engine is very easy to mod, with a huge global community of modders who already understand the engine and know how to make it do exactly what they want it to do. I'm not sure we want to lose that.
What we do need is for Bethesda to return to their true strength, which is to craft compelling handcrafted worlds that players want to spend time in. They didn't do that with Starfield.
The engine isn't as much the problem, it's that they can no longer write and their game design in the last few games have been fundamentally bad. Also I do actually think having immovable objects in the game world makes it less immersive.
They are going to use vanilla UE5... And that will be a disaster!
They do need to do something about their archaic loading screen simulator game engine.
However Unreal Engine 5 has a lot of issues too. But UE5 Version 5.5 is a game changer. Example Lumen megalights has a 50% performance improvement over current Lumen and looks better. Not mention the streamlined loading so there would not need to be as many loading screens. The engine makes better use of current hardware such as ray traced lighting and direct storage. Natively supports ultrawide and larger FOV.
To this date. Starfield is literally one of the only big 1st party Xbox titles that does not support new tech like ray tracing etc. They had to patch in proper ultrawide support without the UI being cut off and FOV slider 😂😅
Every studio can’t be like rockstar an naughty dog those are the goat of making great polish game
Everyone always forgets about id Software....
Idk Luke ive heard pauls take on dragon age veilguard. I can 100% understand why people think he should shut his mouth
It's crazy to think that Cyberpunk came out first and is still leaps and bounds a graphical powerhouse next to Starfield. I'd say it was still better looking than Starfield even when it first released with all the bug issues. Then they release Phantom Liberty which can be an entirely separate game on its own.
Imagine fewer loading screens 😱
And fewer fps too
@ThePindar fewer then 30fps average on launch on reccomended requirements/settings? No unreal 5 game has done that
@@ThePindar don't defend starfield. It isn't worth it
Load screens were never an issue until Starfield. Sounds like a game design error to me.
@@Mandrew343 you speak as if unreal 5 is perfect and the performance has no problems, you billionaire company d riders are hilarious
Cap: Motion Matching is not the same as animation blending, animation blending is closer to what Luke talked about here where multiple animations are blended together based on the current state of the player movement, meaning that if you go from walking to running, or strafing left to backing up, it will blend the animation values together from a blend tree in order to smooth the transition or create "dynamic" hybrid animations when for for example not running at full speed, but still faster than walking, so it takes the averages between the two and adjusts the movement (usually based on a multiplier from the input value (0 - 1).
Motion Matching on the other hand isn't just blending between multiple different animation clipos, it is inteligently picking the next pose (per frame) the character will have for a (usually) very large library of possible poses, all with animation data on them that indicate what type of use that animation pose has (sharp bank to the left, etc). As Luke mentioned it looks really smooth and dynamic, but there is actually a good reason some games choose not to use motion matching, mostly related to control responsiveness as motion matching adds some additional delay between input and a cooresponding animation sequence playing, it also adds limited but certainly not insignificant computational overhead.
10:30 he did all of that and there's no comprehensive mod support, so no, bethesda shouldn't leave their engine behind until UE can have mod support as good as their engine.
Having so many non-static objects really peaked in Fo4, due to the nature of scrap and settlements.
They dialed it back quite a lot in Fo76, and though I didn't play Starfield nearly as much, I don't remember it really being a thing there at all.
If they're not making games that lean into the strengths of their engine, then tying themselves to it seems increasingly pointless.
Dude! Quit fumbling around your mic or get a shock guard. Your face doesn't need to be right in front of the mic at all times. This is a podcaster 101 level concept.
Going to Unreal Engine would be one of the biggest mistakes Bethesda could make. One of the biggest advantages BGS has is the longevity of their games. People are still buying and playing Fallout 3 and New Vegas; people are buying Fallout 4 again for Fallout London. They are doing this because the games are not only easy to mod, but because they enable a wide range of mods. Look at Skyrim and Fallout 4. Modders can add fully voiced companions, quests, and new areas to the game. Unreal Engine just doesn't work that way, and that kind of a switch would kill Bethesda games as we know them.
Todd being 85 when Fallout 5 releases is so real, I was 12 when Skyrim came out, I’ll almost be 30 when ES VI releases….
19:20 "is there anyway ES6 will outdo Witcher 4 in anything?"
well Luke... seeing how all the actually talented, skilled and experienced people are leaving CDPR in droves to start their own companies. I'm expecting W4 to be a whole lot worse than the previous games CDPR has made. while Bethesda will follow their same path of the same old thing, but with less than their previous game. resulting in a safe and consistent 6 or 7 out of 10 game that the mod community needs to spend 8 years on to make it a really good game.
On CDPR using the Unreal Engine. I believe Bellular News talked about this, and the reason CDPR went this route, according to them, is it lets CDPR work on two projects simultaneously using two engines. The reason for this is trying to make improvements upon one engine to share between two projects at the same time is a big headache, apparently. I might be misremembering a couple details, but that's the gist of what I understood.
To be fair, if they changed now to another engine, how many YEARS would that add to the game being launched since this is Besthesda?
8:15 thats how Bethesda created the creation engine in the first place when they made Skyrim. They renamed Gamebryo engine to Creation engine.
First I want to see if the Oblivion remaster rumors turn out to be true: graphics are handled by UE5, while the rest of the game is still Creation Engine.
If such a thing is possible, and modders get their hands on the Oblivion remaster (possibly only a few months from now) and find it easy to work with, that could have huge implications for Elder Scrolls 6, Fallout 5, etc.
I hope Capcom can keep strong and consistent with their own RE Engine for all their upcoming games
After playing Stalker 2, I realized making it so you can literally pick up everything and check every drawer all the time wastes so much time instead of actually adventuring. It's tedious and rewards addictive behavior.
The technical issues of their engine wouldn't be quite as grating on their fans if they just made worlds worth exploring and brought their writing up to merely serviceable. I wouldn't have cared about loading screens in Starfield if they gave me worlds worth checking out.
The problems with Bethesda's last few releases are narrative based, not engine related.
I'm just astonished, how good the physics are in starfield. It was magnificent to see location in zero gravity. The visuals.... Are amazing and I do care about them. Body ragdoll in 0g is awesome. But it feels like they don't use it.
Another aspect of the engine problem is the people. Will a talented dev want to go work for Bethesda and become an expert with tools that no other studio uses? Or would they rather go work for a studio that uses UE5 so they can keep their skills current for when the inevitable layoffs happen?
Absolutely not, after dealing with the nonstop issues with Stalker 2 caused by the game being on UE5, not in a million years would i want bethesda games to move to Unreal.
Bethesda's problem is Bethesda themselves, not the engine and people need to stop implying otherwise.
There is some weirdly common idea that Creation Engine is what makes Bethesda's games what they are, but I'm yet to hear what specific features it has that make their games unique that are impossible with other engines. Skyrim is a great game because of it's interesting handcrafted locations and quests. Things that have nothing to do with CE. Everything in it that is related to mechanics and graphics is decent at best, and subpar more often than not
I don't know if this is true since they haven't announced it, but I think Epic should create a special version of Unreal Engine 5 for any game studio that wants to transition to it. I believe if something like this was announced, studios like FromSoftware might switch to it, along with other studios that might find Unreal Engine more efficient. With this special version, any studio would be able to redesign the engine according to their vision, and the engine's features would certainly help with that
It doesn't matter what engine is used if what they do with it doesn't work. Switching away from the Creation engine doesn't make their games better if the design decisions and quality control remains the same. If a developer is constantly improving the engine and including that as part of the development cycle a specific engine is not a problem.
The primary advantage of switching to a UE5 engine is that it allows hiring and training to be done quicker which in theory cuts some development costs. But since the games industry has an issue with firing not hiring while also throwing around obscene amounts of money that it probably not a big enough incentive for them to switch over.
I'd also say that Luke saying that they just threw the "2" on the end of the Creation Engine without there being anything meaningful is irresponsible and based on very little actual information. Engines like all software are version/revision controlled. The people that built it decided that whatever updates that had been made warranted a version control update, same thing Unreal do. Unless you know the engine inside and out, know the differences between versions and know the reasoning why they went to a V2, stating it hasn't made a difference or fixed anything is just an uninformed opinion.
Dude. If CDPR dropped the freaking REDEngine for UE5, then I think it's clear that work has been done to allow it to create that type of game.
It's freaking ridiculous that there's no new Elder Scrolls yet.
No excuse.
The irony being CDPR is moving from RED Engine to UE5 after the massive success of Cyberpunk and Bethesda is keeping to Creation Engine when they were lambasted by millions for how objectively dated that engine is yet refuse to MOVE to a more current engine like UE5.
UE5 is the industry standard. LOTS of people know the environment and can be hired from the outside. Their current proprietary monster requires lots of inside knowledge, is a patch work of decades of additions and fixes, and ultimately limits/slows down production.