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Ah, the yearly ritual continues. Bethesda makes a game that needs bug fixing, let’s the players fix it with mods, then B tries getting players to pay for the mods in the hopes they can finally charge money for mods that are needed to fix the game.
Classic Todd. Can’t wait until he quits making games. Bethesda might actually use a new game engine besides the Creation Engine.
The Creation Engine is not bad. It’s very purpose built for RPGs and has all the frameworks for worlds, NPC AI behaviour, quests, dialogue trees etc already in it.
It also has in-built support for creating addons, which is why the modding scene is so robust.
You should install the Creation Kit on Steam to check it out.
Imo it’s not about having a new engine, it’s that they don’t make enough changes to it and it’s very apparent. On launch, their games are some of the most lackluster games visually. I remember the update from Skyrim to fallout was just that they added god rays to the engine, that was basically the only difference.
Then Fallout 76 came out and not only was it extremely ill equipped for multiplayer and online, but graphically the game suffered.
Then we talk about the quest systems in the engine, and that’s great and all, but the quest systems haven’t been fundamentally updated since Oblivion came out. Go play any other RPG, they’re running circles around Bethesda in quest design.
What’s worse is that Starfield was met with mixed reviews and showcased their inability to modernize their engine with the loading screen problem. So ES6 is set up to make or break Bethesda.
What you described are game design issues. The art is always only as good as the artist who makes it and the Bethesda game design team are not very good (or perhaps Todd is a mediocre director since he is directly responsible for almost all aspects of the game).
If you see how ENB and Sweetfx enhance the visuals you know that the engine is capable of much more. There is a mod called Enderal which is a total conversion of Skyrim that uses the same engine but improves the visual in almost all aspects: better models, better post processing, new game mechanics, etc. There is also a team working on porting Vampire The Masquerade Redemption to the Skyrim engine with all new assets (guns, etc).
So basically Bethesda games being mediocre is due to a mediocre team and direction. Even if they start using Unreal their games will still be mediocre.
Edit: Before someone points it out, I know that ENB is not a part of the Creation Engine, but an external postprocessor that hooks into the DirectX API and modifies the rendered output. I was just saying that Bethesda could use something like this to enhance the lacklustre visuals but they deliberately chose not to perhaps due to their artistic vision for the game.
This is sort’ve true but post processing isn’t where the game struggles per se. Both Skyrim and Fallout 4 lacked LOD lighting and featured prominent Z-fighting of many textures, that’s an inherent way that the LODs are calculated in the engine.
So most of what I’m talking about like lackluster quest design and poor visuals aren’t unfixable by the engine, but they’re direct results of developing using it. The quest structures are mostly the same as they have been for decades.
And yes, they could easily code something like an ENB mod but they just don’t. They’re so bad at this in fact that they can’t even get proper anti-aliasing working. If I remember right, Fallout used TAA and it was so awful that I preferred a 3rd party FXAA to their solution.
Also to be fair, ENB is similar to other graphics injectors which aren’t new on the block but you dont really want to use an injector so they’d have to code something like an ENB into their DLL and that would affect the engine so they don’t do it. It needs a big update to add stuff like that and this will be the third game they haven’t bothered to significantly change it.
Makes sense. Though I would still rather they not abandon the Creation Engine and improve its underlying technical features. The modding community has more than a decade of experience with its underlying subsystems and what actually contributes to the robust modding scene of Bethesda’s games.
Hi, Bugthesda employee! Poppa Todd forced you to expand the totes-not-publicity to the fediverse, did he?
No, I’m saying from having used the Creation Kit and I modding Skyrim and Fallout.
I’m not defending the games or Bethesda. It’s their game design and narrative team’s fault, not the engine’s.
Modders have been familiar with Bethesda’s engines since Morrowind (Netimmerse and then Gamebryo, which form the basis of the Creation Kit), which is why the modders are able to make mods pretty quickly for these games. I’d rather still have the community use this experience with future Bethesda titles for modding than use something like Unreal that does not have the same level of customisation and tools.
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.
The best part is that the free mods will end up being better anyway.
A-fucking-gain?
Did the shitstorm that happened last time teach Bethesda nothing?
What am I saying, no, of course it didn’t.
To be fair, it’s a pretty common play. Company makes unpopular decision, walks it back, tries again a little later once the novelty has worn off and the MSM doesn’t care to pick it up again.
I think this particular move is pretty ballsy with how egregious it is (especially considering that starfield didn’t do anything particularly outstanding to overshadow it), but I don’t doubt they’ll try it again. If people keep buying their games, where’s the risk? At worst they’ll still get a few dollars from those who, for whatever reason, buy it, and then it’s forgotten by the next time a game comes out.
They definitely did learn. They learned that they could charge for mods and people, sadly, will pay. They’ve learned that they can make more money by paywalling what should be essential patches and bugfixes. They learned that the average gamer is willing to be fleeced. They learned that they can run an IP into the ground and still extract maximum cash from it.
They’ve learned. They just didn’t learn the lesson that we here on Lemmy wanted them to learn. That’s a sad fact of being part of a minority community.
Feels ritualistic at this point.
Bethesda does the thing; gamers and modders do the thing. Bethesda says, “Whoops!” We all laugh.
Only difference this time is it feels like 76 has been out longer than when they usually try this.
Did someone make paid horse armor yet? Lol
And here we go again. Who had ‘paid mods’ on their bingo card this time?
I mean, this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone considering they’ve been doing the whole paid mod thing for a good while now with Skyrim and FO4.
I know. Don’t go forgetting Oblivion now 😉 Luckily, I’m not one of the people stupid enough to buy their defective shovelware anymore.
What I’ve learned from this thread is that bingo spot must be the FREE spot in the middle of every board lol
