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

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

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?

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

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.

Perfectly tuned to churn out mediocre crap. Checks out.

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?

the tech debt effect is hilarious

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 my bubbley ass bro

Just give this over two decades old crypt of an engine up already

Bethesda, my hand is perfectly tuned for my dick.

That doesn't mean it's preferable to a moist orifice.

I get that.

My wallet is perfectly tuned to buy games from other studios.

Permanently Deleted

Perfectly tuned is not the right environment for creativity.