I very much agree with what you are saying. If the engine changes we will lose mods, or at the very least there will be significantly fewer. I don’t make a habit of playing many games from 2012… except for Skyrim. I also dont play many games from 2001, except for Morrowind. I will spend hours or even days setting up a modding environment. Please let me have that for future Bethesda titles.
Also people calling us folks that like user-made mods shills, when they are trying to force a shift to the very much corporate owned Unreal Engine is funny.
You very much missed the point of my comment. After the “professional” response the public got when leaving very justified negative feedback on Starfield, I now don’t trust any comment supporting Gamebryo to not be a Bethesda employee. Nor was I advocating for shifting to Unreal, it was the next person who brought up a different engine which I said I’d prefer since it’s reliable. I don’t really care what engine the next Fallout is made with, for example, so long as it isn’t made in Gamebryo by a bunch of hacks.
The architectural decisions are at the engine level and that stuff has a massive influence on the likelihood of bugs in the code running in that engine.
For example, traditional Unity (not ECS) runs all game code (so the code provided by those coding the game) in a single thread, which avoids A TON of multi threading bugs (as that’s one of the hardest parts in programming to master) but is very bad for performance in multi-core CPUs. Game programmers can fire up separate threads using the standard libraries of the programming language itself and manage them, but everything in the development framework that’s part of the engine pushes them to use that single-threaded model, so only advanced devs bother and only for very specific things.
Also the choice of programming language forced by the engine itself has a huge impact in the likelihood of bugs, but since I don’t want to start a Holy War I’m not going to star pointing fingers at specific languages and criticizing them ;)
True, resolving bugs depends on how effective debugging tools available to the developers are.
But there is no perfect game engine. All have quirks and bugginess of a game usually just comes down to how willing the team is to find and squash them. That’s why all games need patches after launch.
Language is not really an issue here since the Creation Engine uses Papyrus for all game logic, which is good enough for what it does.
I’d rather have the easily moddable engine it’s on now than turn their games into cut and paste UE5 clones with no mods.
I very much agree with what you are saying. If the engine changes we will lose mods, or at the very least there will be significantly fewer. I don’t make a habit of playing many games from 2012… except for Skyrim. I also dont play many games from 2001, except for Morrowind. I will spend hours or even days setting up a modding environment. Please let me have that for future Bethesda titles.
Also people calling us folks that like user-made mods shills, when they are trying to force a shift to the very much corporate owned Unreal Engine is funny.
You very much missed the point of my comment. After the “professional” response the public got when leaving very justified negative feedback on Starfield, I now don’t trust any comment supporting Gamebryo to not be a Bethesda employee. Nor was I advocating for shifting to Unreal, it was the next person who brought up a different engine which I said I’d prefer since it’s reliable. I don’t really care what engine the next Fallout is made with, for example, so long as it isn’t made in Gamebryo by a bunch of hacks.
Personally, I’d rather have games that “just work” like the ones on UE5. I guess I’m weird that way.
Whether a game is buggy or not depends on the competency of the developers building the game, not the engine.
The engine is just a platform, like a canvas to an artist. How effectively it is used depends on the skill of the person using it.
It’s both.
The architectural decisions are at the engine level and that stuff has a massive influence on the likelihood of bugs in the code running in that engine.
For example, traditional Unity (not ECS) runs all game code (so the code provided by those coding the game) in a single thread, which avoids A TON of multi threading bugs (as that’s one of the hardest parts in programming to master) but is very bad for performance in multi-core CPUs. Game programmers can fire up separate threads using the standard libraries of the programming language itself and manage them, but everything in the development framework that’s part of the engine pushes them to use that single-threaded model, so only advanced devs bother and only for very specific things.
Also the choice of programming language forced by the engine itself has a huge impact in the likelihood of bugs, but since I don’t want to start a Holy War I’m not going to star pointing fingers at specific languages and criticizing them ;)
True, resolving bugs depends on how effective debugging tools available to the developers are.
But there is no perfect game engine. All have quirks and bugginess of a game usually just comes down to how willing the team is to find and squash them. That’s why all games need patches after launch.
Language is not really an issue here since the Creation Engine uses Papyrus for all game logic, which is good enough for what it does.