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Sounds more like “We’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas!”
Have they played their own games?
Bethesda RPGs are fun. But I’d say they are far from “perfectly tuned.” Always found them to be wonky, clunky, bug-riddled.
When was the last RPG they released that didn’t require tons of patching?
It was 10 years into playing Skyrim on my 4th medium of playing it that learned the courier wasn’t supposed to be naked. I thought it was a comment on his poverty or something
Got something to deliver. Your hands only.
Man, this sounds wildly different picturing him naked.
I think he means “perfectly tuned to the way fans want it” which is to say “highly moddable.” Skyrim is kind of the first game in the series that sold really well on platforms other than the PC which strangely brought in a lot of fans who play the vanilla game. But as far as I can remember, the bulk of the longterm fanbase plays on PC and installs tons of mods for the game.
Sure, there are other games that fans like to mod (Minecraft being a big one) but I can’t think of any other game where fans stack dozens or even hundreds of mods by different authors all on the same game and actually expect it to work. The fact that it does work at all (and fans have created custom programs to merge mods and to carefully tune the loading order) is rather a miracle!
So this is what I think he means by “perfectly tuned.” A brand new engine would mean putting in a ton of work to support all the different forms of modding fans want to do and in all likelihood would be far less flexible and powerful, leading to modder community outcry.
When was the last RPG they released that didn’t require tons of patching?
I would have said “that terminator game they made in the early 90s” but that is hardly an RPG :)
I don’t recall Arena having many patches, but since there wasn’t a great way to distribute patches back then, they probably had no choice but to get their shit at least mostly stable before shipping.
“Memory list blown” was my constant companion 😫
Starfield…?
Perfectly tuned to only release one buggy-ass game a decade?
The problem with the latest Bethesda games has not been the engine. It’s the writing and the design choices
the writing, yes
but if their engine is “perfectly tuned” then that means their engine is informing their design
they can’t make good design choices because they have to work within the limitations of an over-fitted engine
they can’t make good design choices because they have to work within the limitations of an over-fitted engine
Maybe that’s why Starfield has become a 50% game, 50% loading screen.
I think that’s a reach - the difference between boring choices and interesting ones isn’t the engine - look at New Vegas and Daggerfall.
e.g., starfield would’ve been a very different game had you been able to fly space -> surface, and had there been vehicles to do actual exploring with
it would’ve completely changed the way the game plays, and opened up new possibilities for design. it also would’ve removed many of the oft-criticized loading screens and made the whole experience flow better.
but they can’t do any of that, because the engine isn’t good enough to support it.
sometimes you can’t make a choice because the engine says no
It’s the writing and the design choices
I blame Emil Pagliarulo first and foremost. “Design docs? HAHA, that’s for losers!” He’s also the lead writer and no doubt the asshole behind space magic in the game, since he couldn’t put radiation witches in FO4.
Well; you could use that engine to produce something well-written, deep and interesting like New Vegas, but that still got dinged for being an absurdly bug-ridden release with serious performance issues. It was great despite the engine, not because.
There’s some slightly-shonky open world engines that support some really impressive RPGs (eg. Baldur’s Gate 3 on the Divinity engine - looks great but performance is arseholes) and some very impressive open-world engines that support some lightweight RPGs (eg. Horizon Forbidden West on the Decima engine - looks great and smooth as butter). And then you’ve got the Creation engine, which looks terrible and has terrible performance, and which runs bugs and glitches in a way that combines into (usually) very shallow RPGs.
kenshi is also an awesome game on an old engine. Very excited for the sequel using unreal engine that’s coming out in probably 10 years because the indie devs want to release a finished product
Perfectly tuned to churn out mediocre crap. Checks out.
Mediocre fun crap, please.
Are they, though? Starfield was so lifeless that I felt scammed even getting it for under $50 on release.
From experience I know I’ll be downvoted but it is a pretty goddamned impressive engine. And yes that is even considering that Skyrim was buggy, what, 12 years ago?
Agreed, the way they can preserve the position of any object, anywhere, with thousands of objects and an obscenely large world, is exceedingly impressive.
What I don’t get is why the hell any of that is a priority. It’s a neat party trick, but surely 99.9% of the gameplay value of arranging items for fun could be achieved on the player ship alone.
Like… it’s neat that I can pick up, interact with, and sell every single pen and fork on every table. But is it useful, with a carry weight system deincentivizing that? Fussing with my inventory to find what random crap I accidentally picked up that’s taking up my weight? Is that remarkably better than having a few key obvious and useful pickups? Is it worth giving up 60FPS on console, and having dedicated loading screens for nearly every door and ladder around?
Again, it’s cool that they have this massive procedurally generated world, that a player could spend thousands of hours in. But when that area is boring, does it really beat a handcrafted interesting world and narrative? What good is thousands of hours of content when players are bored and gone before 10 hours?
So like… from a tech perspective, I respect what Starfield is, and it’s very impressive, but as a game it feels like a waste of a lot of very talented work, suffering from a lack of good direction at the top.
I could generally take or leave their clutter items, but persistent NPCs with dynamic schedules or the full stat and inventory systems of the PC are still extremely rare, never mind both. Most games simplify NPCs such that they don’t actually have equipment or just have one item (typically an unlootable weapon) and reduce their stats to just HP and defense stats. By contrast, the only difference between an NPC and the PC in a Bethesda game is that the player has controll over the PC.
For me, if they moved to a new engine it would need those persistent fully-featured NPCs to feel like a Bethesda game. Ten years ago, there wasn’t really anything else that did that. Now, there’s got to be something they can make work. Hell, BG3 has all this stuff, it’s just from a top-down perspective. And it can handle ladders, which Bethesda’s engine still can’t do.
See, that’s one of the problems of using Creation Engine for Starfield. The game was supposed to be about exploration and space travel, but the big focus of the engine is clutter. All the things that made Skyrim and Fallout feel “lived in”, like NPCs doing different stuff at specific times, were effectively disabled or removed in Starfield. Hell, NPCs’ (complete lack of) reaction make them feel completely “dead”; pedestrians in GTA 4 feel more way more believable and “alive”, despite serving the exact same purpose of filling the screen.
The proc-gen places also makes zero use of the engine’s strengths, it doesn’t create any “unique” places that could be filled with unimportant npcs and clutter. It’s ironic that Daggerfall, more than 20 years ago, had better proc-gen
Btw, Gothic (2? 3 at least) had already holes without loading screens.
It’s still buggy after 13 years of patches and re-releases.
People said that but I played the game I’m sure over 100 hours and bugs impacted maybe .2% of my playing time.
People remember Skyrim bugs because they’re funny.
Because Bethesda didn’t focus on fixing script bugs in those re-releases, only engine ones. The game logic remains a tangled mess of bugs and the unofficial patches that actually fix things barely needed to change at all to support each new edition.
Bugs be bugs, home slice.
Right, and they should have fixed them - especially since people literally put together wiki pages documenting every known bug in the game. But all Bethesda did was upgrade the engine a bit (make it 64-bit, add some new graphical effects, implement support for microtransactions) and release the same broken game again and again. The engine upgrades fixed a few crashes, but for some reason Bethesda refuses to patch logic errors in their Papyrus scripts (the code that controls the actual game content) even though those are way easier to fix than engine bugs.
If asked, I’m sure they’d say it was to avoid breaking mod compatibility or something, which is kind of bullshit considering nearly every mod works with the unofficial patches that do what Bethesda refuses to. And they’ve been like this since the very beginning. Their studio is synonymous with bugs.
It’s mind-boggling how they get away with putting such little care into their multi-billion dollar franchises.
Well yeah, that’s what happens when you make enormous games with basically no player safely rails. With unrestricted freedom comes unpredictable interactions and inevitable bugs. Feel free to point out any other game that comes close to the scale of a Bethesda game without being full of bugs.
How quickly people forget how common it was to see Roach on rooftops in the Witcher 3.
GTAas an entire series has tons of reels of people doing ridiculous and hilarious things.
I’ve never understood the weird hate for Bethesda games in that regard.
No one forgets that—the artwork for Roach’s Gwent card has her ON A ROOF.
basically no player safely rails
Skyrim is full of safety rails in the form of essential NPCs and places that won’t unlock unless you’re at the right part of a specific quest. Newer bethesda games are even worse in those regards.
Zelda TOTK?
Admittedly haven’t played it yet, but BOTW was absolutely a masterpiece.
That said, the NPC scripting and interactions are way simpler than Bethesda games, and there’s very little in terms of even marginally open ended quests. It’s a great open world, but it’s pretty on rails story wise outside the order in which you tackled areas.
Elden Ring?
I love Elden Ring and From Soft games in general, but the way they work is completely different.
There are no dialog trees in Elden Ring, no skills outside of combat, rudimentary crafting mechanics, rudimentary “enchanting” through things like affinity or ashes of war in ER.
Blatantly put, the focus is on completely different mechanics/systems that are much more simple, meaning much easier to not run into lots of bugs.
It’s just not really a good comparison.
RDR2
Just look at the mod sites to see how many bugfixes are out there. It’s been improved in the years since it launched, but it’s far from a bug free game.
For all the complaints about Starfield, being Bethesda-buggy wasn’t really one of them. It was possibly their most polished release.
Are you not from the same reality as me?
Not saying there weren’t bugs, but the consensus seemed to be that it was the most polished, bug-free title they’ve ever launched.
Edit: …which is a pretty low bar, I know. But it seemed more inline with the bugs that most “AAA” games tend to have at launch.
Did you even play it, or are you just jumping on the hate bandwagon? It’s hardly perfect, but I literally didn’t find any significant bugs in over 20 hours of playtime. The game has plenty of fundamental issues certainly, but the bugs are more of a meme than anything.
I did play it, thank you, and it did have multiple bugs I’ve experienced in previous games.
Literally the first time I played it, the very first planet told me I wasn’t supposed to be seeing it.
And I waited a year to buy it.
Did that have any effect on your game? Minor UI issues are pretty common in plenty of games, I personally can’t see that as much of an issue. Certainly not the game-breaking bugs of launch Oblivion and Skyrim
Yes. It affected my enjoyment of the game.
On my first playthrough, once I got the quest to find the first space temple it bugged, with the quest marker pointing to a specific place in a planet, but no temple spawning there. I had to start a new game as I didn’t have any saves from before starting that quest. Not fun.
Yeah I feel like people like to just bandwagon against Bethesda games, but no one makes games with as much detail as them. Hell, even Starfield has an insanely robust physics engine.
Exactly. As a developer, the complexity of that engine blows me away. It’s a miracle they got as solid as they did honestly. If these critics are developers, they’re either lacking in empathy or they’re the kind of prodigy who cannot even comprehend the inability to think about such insanely complex systems with ease
Also, having played hundreds of hours of their games, I would be content with the older game engine as long as there was a good story line, and decent mechanics ( not related to the op topic).
They can make bad games with this engine, for sure , but I do not want them switch out to photo realism to paint over problems .
It seems to my old self that games would be better if they were a bit ugly, and dangly, to not hide behind all that newness and flashy stuff
I get that but as a gamer I’m forced to ask why? They went through all this trouble and now they’re unwilling to abandon it while other games are sprinting past them in tech, story, and graphics.
But! That’s cool for a game like KSP, where people craft rotating rings to drive circles in the artifical gravity. But in an RPG? Why do they need to track every spoons position? It just looks like they spent too much money on a too capable/complex engine and can’t really innovate because of it.
Play Skyrim and do fus to dah in a tavern or something, having all those physics objects feels amazing. Also being able to walk in a house and steal all the cutlery and junk just feels so immersive for being in the world imo. Not to mention the crafting systems in Fo4 and Starfield using those clutter objects for crafting systems.
Star Field does not use clutter for crafting. You just literally pick up crafting material. Most of your material comes from outposts growing or mining stuff.
That’s true, I forgot they changed it
Is that the same engine they used for Star Field? Because I can hear the creaking from here. It’s absolutely time for a new engine.
Yes, the same they’ve been using since Morrowind.
Yes, and the German city of Cologne is the same since it was built by the romans. Because when the name and the foundations are the same over the ages then everything is the same, no major changes are possible ever!
it literally has decades old bugs. stop. we know it’s “updated”. the problem is that each time it gets updated to the decade before. also there are hard limits. that’s why starfield was the least “open” world they had despite using the most “updated” engine. not to mention you have to go through an external loading screen everytime your character breathes too much air.
The philosophical argument is called Theseus’ Ship. Here is a better comparison for you: Unreal Engine. It’s “the same thing” since 1998 or so. There’s also idTech engines, which are “the same” since Quake. Either engine would better fit the Cologne analogy.
Your city comparison also misses the point because Creation 2.0 is still using the equivalent of roman aqueducts and plumbing in 2024. They might work, sure, but not for a city of 1 million people where every building and home has its own plumbing. A better comparison would be a city that has some road holes older than some of its own residents.
Yeah, the Unreal Engine comparison is what I normally do. But change is the spice of life 😁
the tech debt effect is hilarious
josh sawyer has said their engine has the best content creation pipeline he’s worked with, which is probably why they’re reluctant to give it up
but surely at this point they have to be doing something in the background to move to a different one. i seriously doubt they didn’t try to get space-to-surface flight working, but evidently the engine didn’t let them…which is more or less the same story as every other time they’ve tried to break out of the mold they’ve carved for themselves. it always ends up a janky mess.
whenever they build out actual new mechanics for the engine, like the settlement building in fo4, or the space flight in starfield, they’re always just grafted on, rather than being interwoven with existing systems.
The thing that gets me is having the interior of the ships. But that interior doesn’t matter. And if you try to actually RP in your RPG you inevitably get plopped on an airless planet without a suit because of the ship fast travel mechanic. The entire section of stuff there is a complete useless doodad that could be replaced with small cutscenes or static scenes to talk with onboard crew and use upgraded ship things like research stations.
Bethesda. Guys. Gather ‘round.
I really love your types of games. I admit I haven’t played through all of the most recent ones, but I’ve structured my PC builds around the Elder Scrolls series since Morrowind. I took 100 hours to play through Skyrim, then I took 200 hours to play through Skyrim VR. And you can tell business daddy that I even used a WMR headset to do it.
Your engine has enabled some great gaming experiences for me. I am not writing this comment to shit on your engine. Thank you for making it.
But we should all be clear with each other that to suggest it is “perfectly tuned” in any meaningful way makes you sound like you’ve lost touch with reality. I get that the dev tools and your process may be nice behind the scenes, but from the consumer side, damn no.
They just dont want to invest the time to overhaul the engine or start from scratch. Even Call of Duty managed to do this.
“Even one of the largest and most well funded game franchises in history did this”
Call of Duty is known for recycling as much as possible to pump out yearly games, I was actually surprised to hear they convinced management to give them time to rebuild the engine.
Besides, doesn’t Bethesda Game Studios have more employees than Infinity Ward?
Elder Scrolls probably fits this category as well - not as much as Call of Duty but Bethesda probably has amongst the best RPG sales of anyone. They sold a hilarious number of copies of Skyrim alone.
Yeah, because Microsoft/ZeniMax/Bethesda is such a small corporation and Fallout/The Elder Scrolls is such an inconsequential, low budget franchise.
I think were seeing diminishing returns in graphics. Some games are almost photo realistic.
This means that any engine capable of these graphics will be largely future proof.
They should bite the bullet and build/move to a new engine. It likely won’t need changing unless there is a major breakthrough.
People have been saying this since Half Life 2, possibly even longer, then everyone said it about Crysis. To be fair, Cryengine has some validity as a future proof engine. It was first made in 2002, just 5 years after Gamebryo and is still being used in heavily modified forms by a large number of studios. But even that is showing its age and is getting heavily refactored yet again for the Open 3D Engine that the Linux foundation is working on. With that said, the amount of active development and intensive refactoring that the Cryengine has gone through at this point eclipses what has been done for the Gamebryo engine. But it still seems like lack of respect for tech debt is the larger problem than “just switch engines”
I get your logic but Source was developed as a foundation engine and it had a road map to improve its performance and graphics. Example: HL2 vs Dear Ester.
Cry Engine again, designed to be perormant and push graphics. Opened up to multiple developers as a service.
Bethesda’s engine is tuned for RPG elements, fair enough. But there is apparently a limit to how graphically rich it can get.
Bethesda have pushed there engine as far as it’ll go. There ex dev is saying “it isnt the engines fault the RPG was bad.” These are 2x separate issues.
There will always be tech debt making large scale IT changes.
RE the point on Risk, I’d write it like this:
IF the engine is changed THEN there could be a delay to current projects. Mitigation: finish projects in flight. Start new projects on a new engine.
How about this risk:
IF the engine is not able to be modernized THEN there is a risk that Bethesda games fall beind their competition. Mitigation:
-
Better RPG elements (Dev says this didn’t work).
-
Migrate to a new engine in a rush when the next project doesn’t sell (cutting corners on the tech debt).
P.s. do you have a good definition of tech debt? Ive always used “Something we need fix in the future.” Quite loose but ive had lots of arguments about this lol
-
People really need to understand what an engine is before complaining about it.
counterpoint: if it isn’t the engine holding them back, then everyone left is just fundamentally bad at designing games (i’m not counting “let’s just copy what we designed last time” as design), and that’s worse
then everyone left is just fundamentally bad at designing games
Obviously. The problem with Bethesda was never the damn engine, they’ve been consecutively dumbing down their games ever since Oblivion. The only anomaly was New Vegas made by Obsidian, which are actually competent at making RPGs and even with the dated FO3 engine at the time they managed to make one of the best games ever. The problem was never the engine, it’s their game design philosophy.
the average player doesn’t care about crunchy rpg systems. they do care if the core gameplay would’ve been outdated in 2010.
bethesda doesn’t seem to be able to improve the core gameplay because the engine can’t cope.
even if you fixed the writing and tossed out the awful procedural generation in favor of hand-crafted environments, at it heart it’s still going to play like a stripped down borderlands 1
bethesda doesn’t seem to be able to improve the core gameplay because the engine can’t cope.
No, Bethesda can’t improve because they keep catering for the lowest common denominator, engine has never had anything to do with it, it never has. They don’t need a complex RPG system with a ton of flashy new things; New Vegas wasn’t complex, it was fairly streamlined as far as RPGs go, what they need is better writers and better game designers that know how make interesting worlds, quests, characters and gameplay mechanics.
even if you fixed the writing and tossed out the awful procedural generation in favor of hand-crafted environments, at it heart it’s still going to play like a stripped down borderlands 1
Because they’ve been dumbing down their games since forever, bring back more robust roleplay with more actions and consequences, fully fleshed out mechanics, get better writers. Just look at Fallout: London, despite the bugs everyone that has played it agrees it’s the best “Bethesda game” since New Vegas, another game that wasn’t actually made by Bethesda. I’ll repeat: the problem was never the engine.
Bethesda can’t improve because they keep catering for the lowest common denominator
even in your ideal world where they perfect the world, quests and characters, tes 6 is still going to suck if core gameplay plays the same as skyrim, which played the same as oblivion
they can’t improve that core gameplay without a better engine
new vegas and london are popular in the same way 1 and 2 are popular, which is “not mainstream enough to sustain a studio like bethesda”.
Starfields core gameplay is actually leagues more refined then prior games on the same engine, feels really good to play, where it lacks heavily is story, which is historically how they made up the difference between the lackluster gameplay.
To clarify a little, I mostly mean the FPS style gunplay.
which is historically how they made up the difference between the lackluster gameplay
you and i must have been playing different bethesda games, because none of them have been particularly interesting story-wise
Elder Scrolls lore is pretty cool, they’ve never been AMAZING stories, but there’s enough there to RP and make decisions and such that have some kind of impact.
I also don’t think it’s fair to blame the devs,I think they have a lack of direction.
Ever since Fallout 4, they’ve been trying to take their games in every direction possible at the same time.
Crafting? Check Vehicles? Check Skills? Check Online? Why not? Thousands of procedurally generated planets? Go for it Story? Anything goes, it doesn’t need to make sense
The gameplay loop in Skyrim made sense, quests took you to dungeons that gave you loot which took you back to towns and more quests.
Ugh the crafting is a drag. You need to level up, you need to build outposts for materials, and you need to create useless stuff as practice, and you have to deal with an inventory system from 2010. It’s like after the daggers in Skyrim they decided crafters in a single player game needed to be punished. Any one of those systems would have worked to provide a feeling of progression and keeping people from going too fast on crafting.
And it doesn’t even interact with anything else!
You can either get materials by setting up a bunch of outposts which is a complete drag or buying them at like one shop in Akila City.
It’s like they saw they had that in Fallout 4 and 76, ported it over and then remembered that you can’t scrap random junk to get the materials.
It’s not even used for ship upgrades. Why does it even exist???
“we can’t change engines because we’ve figured out how to copy and paste really well”
