Skyrim lead designer says Bethesda can't just switch engines because the current one is "perfectly tuned" to make the studio's RPGs
Skyrim lead designer says Bethesda can't just switch engines because the current one is "perfectly tuned" to make the studio's RPGs
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?
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.
When was the last RPG they released that didn’t require tons of patching?
I would have said "that terminator game they made in the early 90s" but that is hardly an RPG :)
Starfield...?
Perfectly tuned to only release one buggy-ass game a decade?
The problem with the latest Bethesda games has not been the engine. It’s the writing and the design choices
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
they can’t make good design choices because they have to work within the limitations of an over-fitted engine
Maybe that's why Starfield has become a 50% game, 50% loading screen.
I think that’s a reach - the difference between boring choices and interesting ones isn’t the engine - look at New Vegas and Daggerfall.
It’s the writing and the design choices
I blame Emil Pagliarulo first and foremost. "Design docs? HAHA, that's for losers!" He's also the lead writer and no doubt the asshole behind space magic in the game, since he couldn't put radiation witches in FO4.
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.
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
Perfectly tuned to churn out mediocre crap. Checks out.
Mediocre fun crap, please.
Are they, though? Starfield was so lifeless that I felt scammed even getting it for under $50 on release.
the tech debt effect is hilarious
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
Btw, Gothic (2? 3 at least) had already holes without loading screens.
It's still buggy after 13 years of patches and re-releases.
People said that but I played the game I'm sure over 100 hours and bugs impacted maybe .2% of my playing time.
Well yeah, that's what happens when you make enormous games with basically no player safely rails. With unrestricted freedom comes unpredictable interactions and inevitable bugs. Feel free to point out any other game that comes close to the scale of a Bethesda game without being full of bugs.
Because Bethesda didn't focus on fixing script bugs in those re-releases, only engine ones. The game logic remains a tangled mess of bugs and the unofficial patches that actually fix things barely needed to change at all to support each new edition.
For all the complaints about Starfield, being Bethesda-buggy wasn't really one of them. It was possibly their most polished release.
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.
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
But! That's cool for a game like KSP, where people craft rotating rings to drive circles in the artifical gravity. But in an RPG? Why do they need to track every spoons position? It just looks like they spent too much money on a too capable/complex engine and can't really innovate because of it.
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.
The thing that gets me is having the interior of the ships. But that interior doesn't matter. And if you try to actually RP in your RPG you inevitably get plopped on an airless planet without a suit because of the ship fast travel mechanic. The entire section of stuff there is a complete useless doodad that could be replaced with small cutscenes or static scenes to talk with onboard crew and use upgraded ship things like research stations.
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.
They just dont want to invest the time to overhaul the engine or start from scratch. Even Call of Duty managed to do this.
“Even one of the largest and most well funded game franchises in history did this”
Call of Duty is known for recycling as much as possible to pump out yearly games, I was actually surprised to hear they convinced management to give them time to rebuild the engine.
Besides, doesn't Bethesda Game Studios have more employees than Infinity Ward?
Elder Scrolls probably fits this category as well - not as much as Call of Duty but Bethesda probably has amongst the best RPG sales of anyone. They sold a hilarious number of copies of Skyrim alone.
Yeah, because Microsoft/ZeniMax/Bethesda is such a small corporation and Fallout/The Elder Scrolls is such an inconsequential, low budget franchise.
People really need to understand what an engine is before complaining about it.
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
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.
I also don't think it's fair to blame the devs,I think they have a lack of direction.
Ever since Fallout 4, they've been trying to take their games in every direction possible at the same time.
Crafting? Check Vehicles? Check Skills? Check Online? Why not? Thousands of procedurally generated planets? Go for it Story? Anything goes, it doesn't need to make sense
The gameplay loop in Skyrim made sense, quests took you to dungeons that gave you loot which took you back to towns and more quests.
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.
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"
I get your logic but Source was developed as a foundation engine and it had a road map to improve its performance and graphics. Example: HL2 vs Dear Ester.
Cry Engine again, designed to be perormant and push graphics. Opened up to multiple developers as a service.
Bethesda's engine is tuned for RPG elements, fair enough. But there is apparently a limit to how graphically rich it can get.
Bethesda have pushed there engine as far as it'll go. There ex dev is saying "it isnt the engines fault the RPG was bad." These are 2x separate issues.
There will always be tech debt making large scale IT changes.
RE the point on Risk, I'd write it like this:
IF the engine is changed THEN there could be a delay to current projects. Mitigation: finish projects in flight. Start new projects on a new engine.
How about this risk:
IF the engine is not able to be modernized THEN there is a risk that Bethesda games fall beind their competition. Mitigation:
P.s. do you have a good definition of tech debt? Ive always used "Something we need fix in the future." Quite loose but ive had lots of arguments about this lol
If they lean any harder into the sunk cost fallacy they're going to be walking on the bottom of the ocean.
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.
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
"we can't change engines because we've figured out how to copy and paste really well"
Same game engine that had me spinning uncontrollably during the unskippable opening credits on a fresh install?
OMFG can they not learn anything?
It makes sense. It would be pretty costly to train everyone there on a new engine and tweak the new engine enough to play nice with the kind of games they want to make.
I mean it is, but it might be less costly than continuing on the proprietary engine. CD Projekt and Halo both cut their losses and moved to UE5 as a compromise moving forward .
If CD Projekt, creators of one of the best RPGs of the last 20 years, thinks they can benefit from an engine switch I’m inclined to think they might be right.
The problem with Halo is that 343 didn't keep a lot of the people that actually knew how to use the Blam/Slipspace engine. They didn't want Bungie employees working there. So of course they were going to switch to Unreal. Now Halo is going to have the same bad performance problems all the other games that use Unreal have been having lately.
A big benefit of using a proprietary game engine is that the development studio does not need to pay a yearly fee per person for a game engine license every year that a game is in development. That gets very expensive very quickly. Both 343 and CD Projekt have a lot more money behind them now than they did 10 years ago, so they must think the huge financial loss is somehow going to please investors. Because at the end of the day, for both companies its all about pleasing the investors, not gamers.
Skyrim is a better RPG than anything CDPR made, and Skyrim isn't a good RPG.
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
We have seen how that ended on Halo Infinite...
Bethesda, my hand is perfectly tuned for my dick.
That doesn't mean it's preferable to a moist orifice.
Perfectly tuned my bubbley ass bro
Just give this over two decades old crypt of an engine up already
I do think they have a point: there's not many other engines I can think of that are quite as 'tangible' as theirs. Every object has its physical place in the world and can be picked up, manipulated,... in a way that's unlike other engines where the world just feels more static.
Perfectly tuned is not the right environment for creativity.
"perfectly tuned" means their game engine is coupled to their game design, which yeah, more or less makes genuine creativity impossible
not to mention the psychological factors, like the hurdle of convincing higher ups to try something new when simply not doing that is 10x less work
Sounds more like “We’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas!”