I think graphics are pretty low on my list of priorities for how those games need to modernize. Starfield looks pretty alright in sheer fidelity, but the faces don't animate well, the conversation system is dated even compared to The Outer Worlds doing basically the same thing, and the engine seems (for some reason) incapable of putting together a proper cut-scene.

Loading screen after loading screen after loading screen, but hey you can put a cheese wheel in funny places.

Ah to be fair I haven't played Starfield or even watched too many videos. I also didn't like FO4 much so I was pretty much running with the assumption that they hadn't changed much since 2011

Still, they may not need as many engine programmers if they reduce what their in-house engine needs to do. Could free up finances to hire more people to work on the meat and bones of the game. Or they could just pocket the difference and not give a fuck about making a good game, that seems quite likely too.

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

Sooooo more flipping carts and horses?

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.

It will probably be fine, but it's very unlikely to be especially good.

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.

Fully agree. TES with UE would not be the same.

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 had that, its called Morrowind.

Bethesda...Bethesda never changes.

They should steal the old trick from Diablo II where it pre-loads nearby areas.

Hey, what's your middle name?

Good, I take loading screens than unreal slop

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.

Of course, because we have infinite RAM during the RAM crisis. /s

This is magnificent.

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.

And Unreal Engine started on 1995. This argument always shows people's ignorance of software development. When the first pieces of the engine were built is not why it's shitty. It's because they haven't invested money into it where it matters. (Unreal Engine also has some serious issues. It just looks prettier.)

Yup. As I said, it's better combat than Skyrim.

Shit, haven't got much time left to finally play through Skyrim.

Unfortunately no. Gamers were always riding the hype vave. Spent money on Star Citizen and blue gun skin. Gamers are idiots.

Ok and does it run optimized on old hardware and Linux? I'll easily skip it if it doesn't. 😜

I mean, it's a new version, you'd hope they'd fix at least some issues - me, massively coping

i mean, a 23 year old codebase is bound to have some tech debt.

It's broken for me too, account suspended. Something about not being supported in the user's environment.

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?

Very probably yes, but it will also have an extensive feature set and stable, mature functions that work well after 20+ years of development.

A mature codebase is often a double edged sword I agree. But it's not always a good idea to just throw away all that progress.

in bethesdas case though?

a similar thing happened with arma reforger a few years ago, it was supposed to be a tech demonstrator for a new engine but it turned out to still be the same codebase as operation flashpoint from 1995. the engine is solid but it's super annoying to program for, they have this custom scripting language that's completely batshit insane because everything is infix by default, and an ui toolkit that is written as c++ classes meaning the actual game has a compiler in it for a subset of c++. so the scripts can be edited at runtime but if there is an error in the ui the game crashes at startup. people were hoping they'd finally switch to something that made sense but no.

Even if it wasn't owned by Microslop I don't have any confidence BGS could make a good TES game. They've been sitting on their laurels for far too long.

You might have to upgrade your PC for this one (/s)

Bugs, bugs, always the same bugs.

oh no i have just lost $623 on poly market
- someone, i bet

If it works on Windows, it works on Linux. (God I love Proton)

does it run optimized

it's 2026, so obviously not.

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.

They don't work well anymore though, that's the whole point. Bethesda's codebase is past "mature", it's just straight up old and outdated now. Has been for a decade at the very least. Their games have looked and performed noticeably worse than their contemporaries for a good while now.

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

No matter what year it is, Bethesda games take at least a minute to load.

There's and SKSE plugin that fixes that

They rebuild the engine to be 64-bit (instead of 32-bit) for Fallout 4, and that version is what Skyrim Special Edition is running on

I fucking hope not. Unreals's graphics engine looks terrible

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

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

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's not a complete rewrite. hell, depending on how it was architected it may just be a recompile

We need more diversity in game engines, not less, so I'm fine with this