Link: https://kotaku.com/elder-scrolls-6-is-powered-by-new-version-of-creation-engine-starfield-classic-rpg-2000670744

this shuts down rumors that bethesda will move to unreal engine for ES6

Translation: it's the same shitty gamebryo they're always using.

Anyone who believed that they would switch to Unreal Engine is delusional.

Not content to look outdated in 2015 or 2023, now they're going to look outdated in 2030.

New version = old version + ai?

Surely no one is surprised by this?

2015? that codebase started in morrowind. and say what you want about that game but it is not a looker. it launched the same year as metroid prime.

I didn't think Skyrim was too outclassed compared to its peers in 2011, given that it was so much larger and doing so much more than a lot of them under the hood. But Fallout 4 came out alongside The Witcher 3, and the difference between the two was night and day. Then of course Baldur's Gate 3 next to Starfield, and I have to scratch my head wondering what the hell Bethesda is doing still running this tech stack.

I'm not surprised, but I am disappointed.

Morrowind? Gamebryo is the continuation of the NetImmerse engine. Development started in 1997 with the first game released in 1999.

yeah morrowind used netimmerse, first time bethesda used it.

Ugh... and I am not even surprised if they lean on the modding community to fix the damn game... AGAIN. Don't get me wrong, the fan community has done some phenomenal strides, but maybe... like for example with Project Zomboid, despite being a much smaller dev team, has a HUGE modding community, and they then hire them on to expand their team. Sure Beth does that too, but you'd think they'd improve or switch engines to something with gusto. And seeing the lukewarm reaction to Oblivion Remastered, throwing a layer of Unreal over top a very dated engine doesn't fix things.

ES6 is powered by shutting up and going away

we can assure you the game will look better than starfield and surely totally not in development hell at all

You’re hired!

I think Gamebryo (neé NetImmerse) is even a bit older than Morrowind.

I laughed 3 times!

shiny metal knee 🦿

I love how the Gamebryo site is still up. I thought it was funny it was still up like 10 years ago when I looked last, and it's still up now without any changes.

www.gamebryo.com

I look forward to it being released and rereleased for the next 15 years...

I have a feeling Bethesda thought they were going to have a hit with Starfield, and when it was came out to painfully average reviews, they really had to think about their design philosophies. Or they didn't think about them at all and ES6 will be just as painfully average. We'll see.

rip, you killed it

It's 2026, and you are literally eleven 're's short of the current number of rereleases.

What do you mean?

At this point there is nothing that they could do to make Creation Engine feel "new". I don't understand why they keep beating that dead horse.

A couple of months ago, I had some extra money, so I bought Starfield because I had an itch to go back into my Crimson Fleet character.

The problem was that a couple of weeks before that, I had also purchased a game that I had wanted for years, but could never justify spending the high price of new games on, Red Dead Redemption 2. In comparison, Starfield just felt so....lazy... in ways both big and small, beyond the common issues like repetitive dungeons, barren worlds, loading screens, etc...

The biggest thing I noticed immediately was the effect of bumping into people as you're walking. If you compare a Rockstar Game (Or even an assassin's creed game), where npcs will make a comment, will move out of the way, get upset, etc... Whereas in Bethesda can't be bothered to do anything except slide you to the right when bumping into a character, who doesn't react or flinch in any way.

I started noticing those little things fucking everywhere. And I have to believe that little limitations like that are because it's running on an engine that is older than dirt.

From the reviews I saw it didn't help that starfield looked and played like a skyrim sci-fi mod that leaned into the Bethesda loading screen meme on purpose.

I love this story because it's obvious your son asked this during the several minute long loading screen. No matter what year it is, Bethesda games take at least a minute to load.

Todd Howard doesn't know how to make games any other way.

Nah. They are detecting the collision in order to push the player, so the engine is doing the work already. They could easily add an on_collision_player event in the NPC controller that fires at that point to handle NPC reaction.

The age of the engine impacts things like loading screens, poor use of modern hardware, etc. The 2004-era NPC handling is simply a reluctance to do any more than the bare minimum.

site doesnt load for me, says site account suspended

Works fine for me on mobile and desktop.

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.

Maybe for the better. Sandfall Interactive seems the be the only company that could use it without performance issues.

Borderlands 4, Kill the Justice League, Immortals of Aveum, etc. are performance nightmares without tweaking and patches.

Sounds like what they do with every game, just keep adding shit on top of the Creation Engine, which was just shit piled on top of the Gamebryo engine.

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.

If ES6 isn't Skyrim with better writing and better combat, it will fail.

For all the hate we've given Creation Engine over the years... I think we can all agree it's still infinitely better than Unreal will ever be.

So they aren't using OpenMW ...

Coffeestain have done a good job with satisfactory but I can't think of any other studio.

this must be a pc problem that im too console coded to understand

Of course it is...

I swear I remember looking this up a year ago and hearing this. Was that just a rumor then?

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.

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

yeah it's not bethesda's engine. but my point was about where the codebase for the creation engine comes from, and that's the morrowind code.

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.

It's not entirely out of question that they'll use Unreal for graphics while retaining Gamebryo for gameplay. That's kinda how the Oblivion remaster works. And might be best of both worlds if they manage to make Unreal not suck in terms of performance and don't fall for the photorealism trap