They do not get props for trying to recycle their engine for the 100th time, because Creation sucked when they used it for Oblivion and it sucked when they upgraded it for Skyrim and it continued to suck through Fallout 4 into Fallout 76 and is very clearly not an engine designed to support a large game in space. Same bugs all the way through like five consecutive games.
Starfield was the least rocky release probably in Bethesda history in terms of bugs, but that’s only because MS took literally the entire QA team from Xbox and assigned them to Starfield and brute forced a lot of the initial bugs out of the launch. A good engine doesn’t need an entire megacorp’s fucking quality assurance department to get ironed out.
Ultimately it feels like the same engine, despite having been improved to 64 bit for SKSE, upgraded even further for FO4, and then slapped with netcode for FO76 - it’s still not good. It’s unbelievable that we can have games with life-scale cities and zero loading screens, while Bethesda still needed to cut Neon in half and instance basically everything behind a billion loading screens.
Believe me, I really don’t care to defend Bethesda. I’m not saying their engine is incredibly good.
I’m mostly saying, I feel like their games would be different and even more AAA-generic, if they built it on top of Unreal or Unity. And I’m giving them mild props for not just buying into the duopoly.
But I’m also just saying that, as a result of building their own engine, Bethesda can’t just quickly prototype something. To see what the final game looks/feels like, they have to invest years into engine development.
They do not get props for trying to recycle their engine for the 100th time, because Creation sucked when they used it for Oblivion and it sucked when they upgraded it for Skyrim and it continued to suck through Fallout 4 into Fallout 76 and is very clearly not an engine designed to support a large game in space. Same bugs all the way through like five consecutive games.
Starfield was the least rocky release probably in Bethesda history in terms of bugs, but that’s only because MS took literally the entire QA team from Xbox and assigned them to Starfield and brute forced a lot of the initial bugs out of the launch. A good engine doesn’t need an entire megacorp’s fucking quality assurance department to get ironed out.
Ultimately it feels like the same engine, despite having been improved to 64 bit for SKSE, upgraded even further for FO4, and then slapped with netcode for FO76 - it’s still not good. It’s unbelievable that we can have games with life-scale cities and zero loading screens, while Bethesda still needed to cut Neon in half and instance basically everything behind a billion loading screens.
Believe me, I really don’t care to defend Bethesda. I’m not saying their engine is incredibly good.
I’m mostly saying, I feel like their games would be different and even more AAA-generic, if they built it on top of Unreal or Unity. And I’m giving them mild props for not just buying into the duopoly.
But I’m also just saying that, as a result of building their own engine, Bethesda can’t just quickly prototype something. To see what the final game looks/feels like, they have to invest years into engine development.