What features do Elder Scrolls and Fallout games have that other open world games don't? Semi persistent item placement?
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The Controversy Over Bethesda's 'Game Engine' Is Misguided [Kotaku]
- Thread starter ToddBonzalez
- Start date
willing to bet you have little exposure to the BGS modding scene
I've made mods for Oblivion and Morrowind, and I doubt there have been major changes with G.E.C.K or Skyrims mod tools.
Things like Better Faces mods do exactly what I said - they reduce the customisation options available to presets that all look okay, likewise things like Deadly Reflex use precanned anims for things like finishing moves.
A lot of other mods that aim to do things like add uniqueness to areas so so much of the world feels less cut + pastey are a result of spending additional time tweaking areas that have already been built, which Bethesda could do themselves but inherently adds time and manpower to doing so.
Or you can fix all of these by using better solutions. A lot of other games have physics applied to objects and dead NPCs and those don't go haywire anywhere near as often as they do in Bethesda games. Likewise most games now handle movement speed in a dynamic fashion or by providing several different animations for different movement speeds. You can fix butterface characters with either better character artists and/or better tools for dynamic character creation. Memory should not be a huge limitation if you handle rendering only the immediate area while you can keep in store what happened in the world using a fairly small amount of data.
Other developers have improved so Bethesda should as well. GTA IV was notorious for despawning vehicles by just turning the camera while GTA V suffers from this far less and I haven't seen it happen in RDR2 at all. In similar fashion they have improved the variety of spawned NPCs etc when in IV you often got the same type of car you were driving spawn suspiciously often because they were trying to save memory. Some of the cars in GTA IV don't even spawn on the road at all by default and you needed mods to fix that.
Game development is difficult, but there are a lot of standard solution to many problems. Either Bethesda doesn't want/have time to implement them or it's difficult to do in their current engine. As much as they get laughed at for their engine breaking down in gameplay, they don't have a real incentive to severely overhaul it because it allows them to make their games at a fairly rapid pace and people buy them.
i'm referring to mods like unofficial patches or SMIM where they fix basic issues BGS have left behind
also, vanilla skyrim removed sliders for its character creator (and in fact mods added customization) so i'm not sure that's the best example to use
I'm not saying that issues unique to bethesda template games are entirely unfixable; I'm saying that with the three pillars of scope | time | polish, you can't have all three.
Time is unlikely to get mutable, because thats money. The longer you spend making, the less time you have selling, and the riskier the project becomes.
So its either scope or polish that gets the short straw. BSG titles generally go for scope over polish. If they went for polish, you inherently lose scope.
Time is unlikely to get mutable, because thats money. The longer you spend making, the less time you have selling, and the riskier the project becomes.
So its either scope or polish that gets the short straw. BSG titles generally go for scope over polish. If they went for polish, you inherently lose scope.
it will be overhauled but have exactly the same bugs as all of their other games, weirdly
Their engine has been "overhauled" at the start of every generation for 15 years and it still has issues as old as Morrowind.
its never going to be fixed.
I think many people know that. But we don't know what specific part of the engine is involved, and when a part of something is involved, it is technically not wrong to say that this something (engine) might causes the issues.
I think many people also know that. But I don't see it, I don't feel the changes in Fallout 76 – at least not for anything positive. Yeah, it might be constantly upgraded but that doesn't fix all the technical issues Bethesda's games have since... well, Morrowind (haven't played anything from them before). Even Fallout New Vegas has the same issues, and that wasn't even developed by Bethesda. And Bethesda are not the only developers of games with that level of world interaction.
I don't know, I've read the article and yeah, he's right in what he writes and he can express himself well, but I think he was kind of misguided interpretating the issue people have with this engine. I mean, people didn't blame the engine for the (artistic) look of Fallout 76. Who actually did? that it needs to be mentioned in his article? Again, yeah, he's right in saying that the engine is not responsible for the looks of the game (that it could have the same graphics/look if it were a different one), and he could have written this article as a general, informative article about engines, but using people's discontent with the engine and refering to them don't look too good.
Man, those comments roasting the article:
And they're all right.
Schreier's only response appears to be "I want to debunk the articles claiming the engines in Starfield and TESVI are the same as FO4 and FO76." Why does the gaming press so consistently come to the defense of these mega corporations? It's just so... transparent and gross.
I understand that an engine is a collection of software that can, under the hood, look way different in 2018 than its 2011 iteration. I also understand what an article means when it says "TESVI will run on the same engine as TESV." And if my fifteen year old nephew isn't aware of the distinction between the engines under the hood, but we both recognize that the end result is crappy, buggy, and performs poorly, does the distinction make that much of a difference?
So many developers have created bigger, better, and more polished worlds than Bethesda, and every year we get a Witcher 3, Breath of the Wild, or Red Dead Redemption 2 that doesn't perform like shit or crash consistently, Bethesda looks more and more like a stubborn bunch of old fools that refuse progress of any sort. Is there a single Bethesda game, save for Fallout 76 because it was just released, that DOESN'T have a fan-made patch in the form of a mod, that nearly all PC player recommend, even if you want to play that particular game vanilla?
It's fucking absurd. If you're on PC, use third party fan patches to correct issues that shouldn't exist, and won't be fixed by the actual developer, and if you're on console, eat shit. Thanks for the cash.
They're fucking snake oil salesmen. I legit wanted to pick up FO76 on console, and intentionally waited for DF's analysis, and 15fps on an Xbox One X is a rock hard pass.
ariavivace said:
neocitron said:
neocitron said:
And they're all right.
Schreier's only response appears to be "I want to debunk the articles claiming the engines in Starfield and TESVI are the same as FO4 and FO76." Why does the gaming press so consistently come to the defense of these mega corporations? It's just so... transparent and gross.
I understand that an engine is a collection of software that can, under the hood, look way different in 2018 than its 2011 iteration. I also understand what an article means when it says "TESVI will run on the same engine as TESV." And if my fifteen year old nephew isn't aware of the distinction between the engines under the hood, but we both recognize that the end result is crappy, buggy, and performs poorly, does the distinction make that much of a difference?
So many developers have created bigger, better, and more polished worlds than Bethesda, and every year we get a Witcher 3, Breath of the Wild, or Red Dead Redemption 2 that doesn't perform like shit or crash consistently, Bethesda looks more and more like a stubborn bunch of old fools that refuse progress of any sort. Is there a single Bethesda game, save for Fallout 76 because it was just released, that DOESN'T have a fan-made patch in the form of a mod, that nearly all PC player recommend, even if you want to play that particular game vanilla?
It's fucking absurd. If you're on PC, use third party fan patches to correct issues that shouldn't exist, and won't be fixed by the actual developer, and if you're on console, eat shit. Thanks for the cash.
They're fucking snake oil salesmen. I legit wanted to pick up FO76 on console, and intentionally waited for DF's analysis, and 15fps on an Xbox One X is a rock hard pass.
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What's misleading is this article. Completely contradict all your statements. There's an underlying problem with w/e Bethesda added back way back then that is still casing issues in their games today. Changing to a new engine would hopefully allow them to spot and update to better code. Of course they won't though. That would cost them too much money.
I want nothing more than to sink 100s of hours into Starfield and TES6.
However, if Bethesda is dead-set on using the 'same' engine with making drastic and obvious changes to it (performance, server, animation, etc) then they will lose a Bethesda fan who has played everything back to Morrowind on OGXbox.
The engine simply has not improved to an acceptable level. I thought they would have learned their lesson when Skyrim crashed on PS3 due to the split memory poll. Or Oblivion's faces. Since they haven't, I don't think they will learn anything from the pathetic state of Fallout 76 either.
They must have more money than almost any other developer since Skyrim is a massive seller on almost every platform available. Give the consumers what they are asking for. More over to a new engine. They don't even need to build one from the ground up.
Once a new engine is being considered, we can also address Bethesd's lack of evolution in gameplay as well.
However, if Bethesda is dead-set on using the 'same' engine with making drastic and obvious changes to it (performance, server, animation, etc) then they will lose a Bethesda fan who has played everything back to Morrowind on OGXbox.
The engine simply has not improved to an acceptable level. I thought they would have learned their lesson when Skyrim crashed on PS3 due to the split memory poll. Or Oblivion's faces. Since they haven't, I don't think they will learn anything from the pathetic state of Fallout 76 either.
They must have more money than almost any other developer since Skyrim is a massive seller on almost every platform available. Give the consumers what they are asking for. More over to a new engine. They don't even need to build one from the ground up.
Once a new engine is being considered, we can also address Bethesd's lack of evolution in gameplay as well.