this shuts down rumors that bethesda will move to unreal engine for ES6
i have appropriately low expectations.
Loading screen after loading screen after loading screen, but hey you can put a cheese wheel in funny places.
They should steal the old trick from Diablo II where it pre-loads nearby areas.
Of course, because we have infinite RAM during the RAM crisis. /s
Don’t you have phones?
Now we need to change that to
A: Don’t you have NVMe SSD(s)?
B: Don’t you have SSDs?
This may be unpopular, but I think this is great news.
Skyrim became one of the best-sellign games of all time in part BECAUSE of how great it is to see your character get ragdolled into the lithosphere by a giant, or to watch the chaos of spawning thousands of wheels of cheese on top of the throat of the world and watching them roll down.
An Elder Scrolls game that was built around having realistic physics, or being restricted to more cinematic movement and knteractions, would lose a key essence of what made the earlier games great.
I don’t want engaging combat in Elder Scrolls. If I want combat that I have to pay attention to, I’ll go play a Souls game or a fighting game or one of the thousands of games that have tried to be “Skyrim with better combat” that have languished in obscurity because they miss the point.
Also the reason skyrim is still popular is because their engine is way easier to mod compared to unreal. I don’t even know any unreal game that has even 10% of modding capability of creation engine. Granted it’s outdated, but it’s still the reason their games are popular. Hell even starfield recently got a star wars overhaul mod which wouldn’t be feasible with unreal. As much as people like to shit on fallout 4, it’s modding scene is still one of the most active one. And starfield’s failure was more because of scale of the world (and poor writing which has been a staple since skyrim). I’m still skeptical but also somewhat hopeful as long as they build upon the previous es formula.
Fully agree. TES with UE would not be the same.
What you described as enjoyable isn’t “Skyrim” that’s just the Gamebryo engine. The Companions don’t figure into a physics glitch that rockets you up to kiss the twin moons. Nocturne and the Nightingales aren’t relevant to a horse glued at an 85° angle to a mountain face. You’re just describing mucking around in a less interactive GMod. But people did like the mage who pancaked himself with a jump spell, the woman who is absolutely a necrophiliac, and Glarthir’s deranged quest. Actual components of those games that were done well. We all want them to make the game better so we actually want to experience all the bits that are well done and funny.
The Elder Scrolls isn’t popular because of the shitty engine. It’s memed because of the engine, but the games are generally fun enough to keep playing through the more benign bugs. And, like shared trauma, we all laugh about the bad bits in hindsight.
That’s fair, I’m someone who didn’t particularly like Skyrim and am hoping for better writing and better combat because I liked the overall idea of Skyrim but honestly I’m assuming it’ll be more to what you’re hoping for especially if Starfield is anything to go off of. Man was that game disappointing.
If history repeats itself, ES6 will be a completely different game to Skyrim
Everything complained about will he cut, nothing new will be added
This is actually a good news and I am glad creation Engine will be used, The best part of Bethesda games are the modability creation engine and its predecessor provide. Unreal engine is not moddable and is not even beginner friendly, while someone like me can fire up Geck or creation kit and do a full fledged quest mod.
I guess you’ve never had to reconcile the disaster that ensues when multiple CE mods update different parts of a game’s .esp data.
If they touch properties that happen to be near each other, the mods that try to preserve properties that don’t concern them end up stomping all over one other, leaving the player in a horribly broken land of conflicts and sadness. The mods can’t help it, because the engine’s modding system and data structures are fundamentally too coarse to allow touching only what’s needed, and too stupid to make reliable conflict resolution possible. The endless quest to work around this flaw is why Skyrim has uncountable patch mods, which shouldn’t be necessary in the first place. It’s a bloody awful design.
I get that you love the possibilities afforded by modding. We all do. But please don’t glorify Creation Engine in this area. What’s under the covers is embarrassing, and particularly bad when more than a few mods are used at the same time. Players and modders deserve something better, and a competent engine developer absolutely could deliver it.
As someone who has spent too many hours dealing with its fallout, I wish Creation Engine would die.
I mean, it’s a new version, you’d hope they’d fix at least some issues - me, massively coping
It’s mostly a tooling issue, so they really could, but I still doubt it.
I remember installing conflicting mods with Fallout 3, and you just had to run a tool to examine the mods and merge the changes together (and warn you if they genuinely conflicted). It was like a 1 click process and I’m amazed it hasn’t been moved into the engine itself.
This is also available for the more recent Elder Scrolls games, like Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind
I haven’t had any issues that I couldn’t eventually patch, while I used to play skyrim I had 220+ mods plus few of my own mods. I am not saying that it’s easy enough but if you really know what you are doing and spent the time learning what a mod does how it does then you can work around the problematic part and modify those mods itself to work together.I have had multiple mods people said that couldn’t work together to work together. I understand the process is tedious and hours of manually patching is horrible but I don’t think we would get anything as close to this level of moddability for other engine. I have tried modding unreal but it’s just too terrible and hard to get into it and I can’t do anything meaningful beyond texture mods, maybe it’s my skill issue.
Funny that you mentioned fallout, I am now in the process of ironing out my new mod for fallout 3, the engine it uses game bryo is even more dated than the CE of skyrim and there are times that I wanted to smash my computer due to every single one of those time GECK crashed when I was in the middle of something important. But still considering Fallout 3 a game that was released in 2008 can still be modded easily than what’s a possible for a game from the time, I just love it.
Also as a person who spent hours dealing with fallout and Skyrim, I love their engine for what it is despite all the issues with it. And I hope that we get a new version of Creation Engine that can iron out the issue its having now, but Bethesda being Bethesda that’s probably gonna stay a dream lol, but anyway I have hope for my fellow modders.
Yet still its one of the most modded engine of all times. Most games dont have any kind of mod support and they just stop working completelly if you do anything beond texture change.
Bashing creation engines modding is like yelling in a desert about how the water in the oasis would be better with ice cubes. You are not wrong, but it seems really nitpicky.
Yet still its one of the most modded engine of all times.
And leaded gasoline was one of the most widely used fuels of all time. That doesn’t mean we should still be using it.
You are not wrong, but it seems really nitpicky.
Ah, yes… the dismissive opinion of someone who hasn’t had to do the work to clean up messes caused by the broken design. I’ll be sure to keep that in mind when looking back upon the time I’ve spent helping people in your position.
Well go mod something else then. Ill manage just fine without your help.
It sounds nitpicky because there are only like handfull of games that let people mod the game as much as skyrim does. The vast majority of the games just soils them selfs if you touch the files. Its not perfect, but its better than most.
this shuts down rumors that bethesda will move to unreal engine for ES6
It shuts down rumors that Bethesda will move to pure Unreal Engine for ES6, though I never believed that to be the case.
I see the Oblivion remaster as a bit of a proof of concept of sorts - the potential to have the world, scripts, logic, and physics running on the Creation Engine that devs (and modders!) are intimately familiar with while running the visuals on a separate Unreal Engine layer.
Shedding the need to do extra work on fancy lighting and graphical effects so they can focus on optimizing the bones / structure seems logical to me, but then again this is the diluted Microsoft-era Bethesda we’re talking about so who knows.
Shedding the need to do extra work on fancy lighting and graphical effects so they can focus on optimizing the bones / structure seems logical to me
I don’t think that’s as big of a problem as you think. Community Shaders exists alongside a ton of additional plugins, all of which are open source and just work in Slyrim.
Also, Unreal’s graphics engine looks awful
My unpopular take- I’m glad of this, the best part of the Elder Scrolls games are the ridiculous physics bugs. If a mount giant can’t send me to Jupiter in one hit I don’t want to play
I believe physics is still mostly Havok, so it’s not them. They are just that… amazing at using it.
The annoying part about the “creation engine” is that it’s still just the corpse of the gamebryo engine that they keep reanimating with their own crap on top of it. With its shitty proprietary netimmerse format that basically only exist for them at that point.
With time, people have developed tools to create content for it, but it’s yet another area where they went, fuck it, people are going to make our games better, and we don’t even need to do anything to make their life easier while they do.
At the same time, unreal games seem to have much less moddability, to your point, the ecosystem around the existing engine for Beth games means its much easier to get in and do modding.
The annoying part about the “creation engine” is that it’s still just the corpse of the gamebryo engine that they keep reanimating with their own crap on top of it.
This is literally every commercial game engine, including Unreal and Unity
That isn’t really saying that much. It could still be a creation engine that has a UE5 renderer on top. Like the Oblivion remaster.
Unpopular opinion: The gamebryo/creation engine itself isn’t that terrible considering almost every item is physics based. I love the engine for something like Fallout. Starfield… There are things they could have done with it to make it better. But Starfield did show that as proof of concept, vehicular traversal is doable.
The issue with Bethesda isn’t the janky ass engine. The issue with Bethesda is Emil and his shitty writing.
The issue with Bethesda is Emil and his shitty writing.
Plus Todd Howard is wearing too many hats as creative director for all 3 franchises, and the company has gotten too big for teams to really know each other.
I feel like BGS needs to internally split up between multiple teams. 3 teams dedicated to a single franchise each, with Todd Howard acting as creative director for only one of them and 2 more creative directors promoted from experienced team members. Then an (engine) development team for continual tech improvements. And a 5th team for finishing games by filling out the worlds via clutter, minor quests, etc. based on guidelines and assets set by the 3 primary teams
Agreed. Todd needs to stick with what knows. Elder Scrolls.
Pay Tim Cain whatever he wants, but have him oversee Fallout.
And just let Starfield die…
And just let Starfield die…
Starfield has a lot of good bones to work with. BGS mainly needed to spend another year on the game filling out systems and adding more content.
That being said, delaying ES6 to work on Starfield was a horrible decision. They had enough people hired after Skyrim to split into multiple teams
Ok and does it run optimized on old hardware and Linux? I’ll easily skip it if it doesn’t. 😜
does it run optimized
it’s 2026, so obviously not.
You might have to upgrade your PC for this one (/s)
If it works on Windows, it works on Linux. (God I love Proton)
Not always true. And sometimes there’s caveats.
Less and less these days.
In fact, some old Windows games ran better for me on Linux than new Windows.
It’s true. But again, it depends
Skyrim ruins better on Linux in my experience, so probably yes
I’m sure they’re well aware that the biggest knock on Starfield are its forgettable plot and universe and too much loading screens. It’ll be less of a problem in an Elder Scrolls game as it’s building on a great lore foundation and it’s a region rather than a bunch of planets. I’m sure in the 7+ years later I expect to actually play the game, loading screens won’t be much of a problem. Improved graphics will be a given. It won’t set the world on fire but it’ll look firmly like it belongs in the PS5 generation which is good enough for me
Bethesda…Bethesda never changes.
We need more diversity in game engines, not less, so I’m fine with this
Well, you’ll be glad to hear that Toyota, yes, that Toyota, announced a new open source game engine, with deep integration of Blender 3D.
That browser game engine for car play stuff?
No, like a legit game engine that is advertised as “console ready”.
Listen I hate the unreal engine with a passion. But I also hate their engine with a passion. This amount of tech debt that thing has is incredible, and that’s not a good thing.
Unless they’ve started over from scratch but just kept the name I expected to be a piece of crap.
If they go for a small-ish hand-crafted world, this is probably the best tool for the job. I don’t really care for loading screens when I enter/exit buildings…, I care for a compelling narrative within an amazing world, something I haven’t seen since Morrowind.
Also please revamp your animation system
We are not talking about a scenario where they only had 2 years to pump out new content so they had to work with what they had. That they didn’t manage to build a new tech stack in the absurd amount of time since Skyrim is just embarrassing.
That they didn’t manage to build a new tech stack in the absurd amount of time since Skyrim is just embarrassing.
1: They were making games in that time, just not Elder Scrolls
2: Completely switching engines would make all the tools the modding community has built over the years useless, potentially killing that community for the new games
3: Every other game engine is also just as old as Creation Engine if you only look at when the code was first made, like you’re doing right now
I feel like we go through this every time Bethesda releases a game. Yes, every other engine is just as old. I’m sure there’s some ut99 code still in unreal, and maybe some quake code in source 2. The difference is those other engines already work pretty well, and have improved over time. The creation engine is still somehow just as janky every time, and somehow still has bugs dating back to skyrim or oblivion. I want to believe they can fix it, but their track record does not inspire confidence.
The creation engine is still somehow just as janky every time
As someone who’s played all of their mainline games since Skyrim, this is an outright lie.
They updated the Creation Engine from 32-bit to 64-bit for Fallout 4, and since they used Skyrim as a test bed for development, all they had to do was a bit more work to make Skyrim Special Edition.
SSE is significantly more stable than LE, especially if you’re modding. And Starfield actually held to their claims of being their leadt buggy release to date.
It’s pretty clear that all you know about what’s going on with Creation Engine is just parroting the memes.
They were making games in that time, just not Elder Scrolls
Yeah, one of them being Starfield. Which wonderfully highlighted how much they limit their own creativity. They had to shove their ideas into the severe limitations of their stack making the game the mess it is.
Could be they simply didn’t give a fuck, but I doubt it. They likely invested a lot of time into bending the engine and it still doesn’t bulge nearly enough.
If their engine has so much cruft that even with multiple years of development they can’t make it do what they want, it’s apparently a tech debt nightmare and should be reworked completely.
Good, I take loading screens than unreal slop
