Apparently the big problem is that Todd Howard is the creative director for all 3 franchises. While he's good at that role, he's constantly getting pulled between the 3 series, limiting his ability to maintain a cohesive vision for any 1 game.

Plus there's way more people in the studio, so while coworkers talked to each other a lot in the past (even on lunch breaks) there's simply too may people to have that close of a relationsip with anymore

It was more like Fallout with a space theme and significantly less style in gameplay.

The biggest issue imo was scope. It was too big of a universe to do a lot of the environmental storytelling that BGS is famous for. And the more traditional storytelling was stretched too far over that expansive world. Sure, there were concentrations in cities, but that made the empty space in between more noticable.

That being said, the setup for Starfield's setting could have been great for modders as there was tons of area to serve as a blank canvas. Unfortunately there seems to be a minimum threshold for content density for modders to jump on that, and it looks like BGS fell short

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

There are already plenty of mods that handle this. It's not a limitation of the engine. It's just budget and time constraints

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.

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...

It doesn't if you disable TAA and shit, but by default it's horrible

You clearly don't understand software development.

If you're a programmer, you rarely rewrite a program from scratch if you can avoid it, especially if you're just making a version update. Do you seriously Epic threw out all their code from UE3 to code UE4 from scratch?

And honestly, Bestesda has done lots of work going through and fixing/updating existing code. Fallout 4 and Skyrim Special Edition are 64-bit programs. Skyrim Legendary Edition and Fallout 3/New Vegas are 32-bit programs.

Updating the Creation Engine to do that requires a ton of changing existing code, but you thankfully don't need to rewrite everything.

And their work actually makes its way to the players. Skyrim Special Edition is significantly more stable than Legendary Edition, and allows over 10x more plugin files for modders. And Starfield actually held up to the claims that it would be Bethesda's least buggy release to date

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

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.

If history repeats itself, ES6 will be a completely different game to Skyrim

Everything complained about will he cut, nothing new will be added

Obviously. And it'll be just as broken. Show it's technical age even more.

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.

You went off on a tangent that had nothing to do with what I said. All I'm saying is there's nothing new about this. Its the same fucking janky engine they've been using for decades. They may have done a lot of work on it but its still janky as fuck.

By that logic source 2 is just the quake 2 engine.

Surprised it's not creation bones with UE5 skin like Oblivion's remake. But also not surprised it is using Creation (which is just GameBryo).

Skyrim ruins better on Linux in my experience, so probably yes

Yes, and the Quake 2 engine is one of the greatest software creations of its generation.

The Gamebryo/Creation engine is hot garbage in comparison.

Not always true. And sometimes there's caveats.

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.

That browser game engine for car play stuff?

No, like a legit game engine that is advertised as "console ready".

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.

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.

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.

Everything I said was relevant to your comment.

Not my fault your reading comprehension is on par with your knowledge of programming

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.

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.

Less and less these days.

In fact, some old Windows games ran better for me on Linux than new Windows.

Morrowind is definitely a looker, that art style is something Beth has never been able to approach again.

But hard agree on the VFX.

It's true. But again, it depends

yeah it does have style, but it's pretty low fidelity compared to its contemporaries. the scope is also a lot larger though.