this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2024

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Skyrim lead designer says Bethesda can't just switch engines because the current one is "perfectly tuned" to make the studio's RPGs (www.gamesradar.com)

submitted 4 days ago by alessandro@lemmy.ca to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca

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[–] Zink@programming.dev 21 points 3 days ago

Bethesda. Guys. Gather ‘round.

I really love your types of games. I admit I haven’t played through all of the most recent ones, but I’ve structured my PC builds around the Elder Scrolls series since Morrowind. I took 100 hours to play through Skyrim, then I took 200 hours to play through Skyrim VR. And you can tell business daddy that I even used a WMR headset to do it.

Your engine has enabled some great gaming experiences for me. I am not writing this comment to shit on your engine. Thank you for making it.

But we should all be clear with each other that to suggest it is “perfectly tuned” in any meaningful way makes you sound like you’ve lost touch with reality. I get that the dev tools and your process may be nice behind the scenes, but from the consumer side, damn no.

[–] callouscomic@lemm.ee 80 points 4 days ago (6 children)

Have they played their own games?

Bethesda RPGs are fun. But I'd say they are far from "perfectly tuned." Always found them to be wonky, clunky, bug-riddled.

When was the last RPG they released that didn't require tons of patching?

[–] Dippy@beehaw.org 19 points 3 days ago (2 children)

It was 10 years into playing Skyrim on my 4th medium of playing it that learned the courier wasn't supposed to be naked. I thought it was a comment on his poverty or something

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[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 15 points 3 days ago

I think he means “perfectly tuned to the way fans want it” which is to say “highly moddable.” Skyrim is kind of the first game in the series that sold really well on platforms other than the PC which strangely brought in a lot of fans who play the vanilla game. But as far as I can remember, the bulk of the longterm fanbase plays on PC and installs tons of mods for the game.

Sure, there are other games that fans like to mod (Minecraft being a big one) but I can’t think of any other game where fans stack dozens or even hundreds of mods by different authors all on the same game and actually expect it to work. The fact that it does work at all (and fans have created custom programs to merge mods and to carefully tune the loading order) is rather a miracle!

So this is what I think he means by “perfectly tuned.” A brand new engine would mean putting in a ton of work to support all the different forms of modding fans want to do and in all likelihood would be far less flexible and powerful, leading to modder community outcry.

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[–] SplashJackson@lemmy.ca 52 points 3 days ago

Perfectly tuned to only release one buggy-ass game a decade?

[–] Maggoty@lemmy.world 29 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Is that the same engine they used for Star Field? Because I can hear the creaking from here. It's absolutely time for a new engine.

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 16 points 3 days ago (4 children)

Yes, the same they've been using since Morrowind.

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[–] mojofrododojo@lemmy.world 29 points 3 days ago

the tech debt effect is hilarious

[–] geekwithsoul@lemm.ee 83 points 4 days ago

Sounds more like “We’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas!”

[–] Etterra@lemmy.world 17 points 3 days ago

If they lean any harder into the sunk cost fallacy they're going to be walking on the bottom of the ocean.

[–] Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Same game engine that had me spinning uncontrollably during the unskippable opening credits on a fresh install?

[–] Thcdenton@lemmy.world 16 points 3 days ago

[–] addie@feddit.uk 33 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Well; you could use that engine to produce something well-written, deep and interesting like New Vegas, but that still got dinged for being an absurdly bug-ridden release with serious performance issues. It was great despite the engine, not because.

There's some slightly-shonky open world engines that support some really impressive RPGs (eg. Baldur's Gate 3 on the Divinity engine - looks great but performance is arseholes) and some very impressive open-world engines that support some lightweight RPGs (eg. Horizon Forbidden West on the Decima engine - looks great and smooth as butter). And then you've got the Creation engine, which looks terrible and has terrible performance, and which runs bugs and glitches in a way that combines into (usually) very shallow RPGs.

[–] TriflingToad@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago

kenshi is also an awesome game on an old engine. Very excited for the sequel using unreal engine that's coming out in probably 10 years because the indie devs want to release a finished product

[–] MoonManKipper@lemmy.world 44 points 4 days ago (2 children)

The problem with the latest Bethesda games has not been the engine. It’s the writing and the design choices

[–] switchboard_pete@fedia.io 31 points 4 days ago (2 children)

the writing, yes

but if their engine is "perfectly tuned" then that means their engine is informing their design

they can't make good design choices because they have to work within the limitations of an over-fitted engine

[–] MoonManKipper@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I think that’s a reach - the difference between boring choices and interesting ones isn’t the engine - look at New Vegas and Daggerfall.

[–] switchboard_pete@fedia.io 9 points 3 days ago

e.g., starfield would've been a very different game had you been able to fly space -> surface, and had there been vehicles to do actual exploring with

it would've completely changed the way the game plays, and opened up new possibilities for design. it also would've removed many of the oft-criticized loading screens and made the whole experience flow better.

but they can't do any of that, because the engine isn't good enough to support it.

sometimes you can't make a choice because the engine says no

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[–] anonymous111@lemmy.world 20 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I think were seeing diminishing returns in graphics. Some games are almost photo realistic.

This means that any engine capable of these graphics will be largely future proof.

They should bite the bullet and build/move to a new engine. It likely won't need changing unless there is a major breakthrough.

[–] kerrigan778@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

People have been saying this since Half Life 2, possibly even longer, then everyone said it about Crysis. To be fair, Cryengine has some validity as a future proof engine. It was first made in 2002, just 5 years after Gamebryo and is still being used in heavily modified forms by a large number of studios. But even that is showing its age and is getting heavily refactored yet again for the Open 3D Engine that the Linux foundation is working on. With that said, the amount of active development and intensive refactoring that the Cryengine has gone through at this point eclipses what has been done for the Gamebryo engine. But it still seems like lack of respect for tech debt is the larger problem than "just switch engines"

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[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 30 points 3 days ago (3 children)

From experience I know I'll be downvoted but it is a pretty goddamned impressive engine. And yes that is even considering that Skyrim was buggy, what, 12 years ago?

[–] Hazzard@lemm.ee 23 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Agreed, the way they can preserve the position of any object, anywhere, with thousands of objects and an obscenely large world, is exceedingly impressive.

What I don't get is why the hell any of that is a priority. It's a neat party trick, but surely 99.9% of the gameplay value of arranging items for fun could be achieved on the player ship alone.

Like... it's neat that I can pick up, interact with, and sell every single pen and fork on every table. But is it useful, with a carry weight system deincentivizing that? Fussing with my inventory to find what random crap I accidentally picked up that's taking up my weight? Is that remarkably better than having a few key obvious and useful pickups? Is it worth giving up 60FPS on console, and having dedicated loading screens for nearly every door and ladder around?

Again, it's cool that they have this massive procedurally generated world, that a player could spend thousands of hours in. But when that area is boring, does it really beat a handcrafted interesting world and narrative? What good is thousands of hours of content when players are bored and gone before 10 hours?

So like... from a tech perspective, I respect what Starfield is, and it's very impressive, but as a game it feels like a waste of a lot of very talented work, suffering from a lack of good direction at the top.

[–] VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago

I could generally take or leave their clutter items, but persistent NPCs with dynamic schedules or the full stat and inventory systems of the PC are still extremely rare, never mind both. Most games simplify NPCs such that they don't actually have equipment or just have one item (typically an unlootable weapon) and reduce their stats to just HP and defense stats. By contrast, the only difference between an NPC and the PC in a Bethesda game is that the player has controll over the PC.

For me, if they moved to a new engine it would need those persistent fully-featured NPCs to feel like a Bethesda game. Ten years ago, there wasn't really anything else that did that. Now, there's got to be something they can make work. Hell, BG3 has all this stuff, it's just from a top-down perspective. And it can handle ladders, which Bethesda's engine still can't do.

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 6 points 3 days ago

See, that's one of the problems of using Creation Engine for Starfield. The game was supposed to be about exploration and space travel, but the big focus of the engine is clutter. All the things that made Skyrim and Fallout feel "lived in", like NPCs doing different stuff at specific times, were effectively disabled or removed in Starfield. Hell, NPCs' (complete lack of) reaction make them feel completely "dead"; pedestrians in GTA 4 feel more way more believable and "alive", despite serving the exact same purpose of filling the screen.

The proc-gen places also makes zero use of the engine's strengths, it doesn't create any "unique" places that could be filled with unimportant npcs and clutter. It's ironic that Daggerfall, more than 20 years ago, had better proc-gen

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[–] rickyrigatoni@lemm.ee 20 points 3 days ago (8 children)

It's still buggy after 13 years of patches and re-releases.

[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

People said that but I played the game I'm sure over 100 hours and bugs impacted maybe .2% of my playing time.

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[–] TrousersMcPants@lemmy.world 9 points 3 days ago (5 children)

Yeah I feel like people like to just bandwagon against Bethesda games, but no one makes games with as much detail as them. Hell, even Starfield has an insanely robust physics engine.

[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Exactly. As a developer, the complexity of that engine blows me away. It's a miracle they got as solid as they did honestly. If these critics are developers, they're either lacking in empathy or they're the kind of prodigy who cannot even comprehend the inability to think about such insanely complex systems with ease

[–] actually@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago

Also, having played hundreds of hours of their games, I would be content with the older game engine as long as there was a good story line, and decent mechanics ( not related to the op topic).

They can make bad games with this engine, for sure , but I do not want them switch out to photo realism to paint over problems .

It seems to my old self that games would be better if they were a bit ugly, and dangly, to not hide behind all that newness and flashy stuff

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[–] ARk@lemm.ee 31 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Perfectly tuned to churn out mediocre crap. Checks out.

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[–] switchboard_pete@fedia.io 27 points 4 days ago (1 children)

josh sawyer has said their engine has the best content creation pipeline he's worked with, which is probably why they're reluctant to give it up

but surely at this point they have to be doing something in the background to move to a different one. i seriously doubt they didn't try to get space-to-surface flight working, but evidently the engine didn't let them...which is more or less the same story as every other time they've tried to break out of the mold they've carved for themselves. it always ends up a janky mess.

whenever they build out actual new mechanics for the engine, like the settlement building in fo4, or the space flight in starfield, they're always just grafted on, rather than being interwoven with existing systems.

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[–] averyminya@beehaw.org 16 points 3 days ago

"we can't change engines because we've figured out how to copy and paste really well"

[–] Nuke_the_whales@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Ubisoft is worse. I swear, AC mirage has the same issues, glitches and bugs that it has had since the first game. Switch the engine and rebuild from the ground up already. Stop releasing the same game reskinned

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 days ago

We have seen how that ended on Halo Infinite...

[–] warm@kbin.earth 21 points 4 days ago (4 children)

They just dont want to invest the time to overhaul the engine or start from scratch. Even Call of Duty managed to do this.

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[–] Renacles@lemmy.world 19 points 4 days ago (1 children)

People really need to understand what an engine is before complaining about it.

[–] switchboard_pete@fedia.io 27 points 4 days ago (4 children)

counterpoint: if it isn't the engine holding them back, then everyone left is just fundamentally bad at designing games (i'm not counting "let's just copy what we designed last time" as design), and that's worse

[–] Caligvla@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 3 days ago (6 children)

then everyone left is just fundamentally bad at designing games

Obviously. The problem with Bethesda was never the damn engine, they've been consecutively dumbing down their games ever since Oblivion. The only anomaly was New Vegas made by Obsidian, which are actually competent at making RPGs and even with the dated FO3 engine at the time they managed to make one of the best games ever. The problem was never the engine, it's their game design philosophy.

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[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 17 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

I think they (and by that I mean management) just don't want to spend the time getting the developers themselves up to speed on a new system. They've used the current one for so damn long, they likely based all scheduling on the fact that most of the people working there know it inside and out.

They've probably also put considerable work into the next project already and don't want to start over.

[–] switchboard_pete@fedia.io 29 points 4 days ago (3 children)

They've probably also put considerable work into the next project already

fallout 4 was 9 years ago, and people wanted them to switch to a new engine then

you're right, of course, but good lord have they had ample time to course correct since then

[–] shnizmuffin@lemmy.inbutts.lol 19 points 4 days ago (2 children)

The train in fallout 3 was just a guy with a train for a head running along a track

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[–] kaffiene@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago

OMFG can they not learn anything?

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