There are plenty of old engines that have scaled better than Bethesda’s. If they can’t get it to modern standards after all this time, it’s time to toss the engine.
i think that is a bit unfair to bethesda’s engine. all those other engines have achieved their scalability at the cost of extensibility and easy to work with game systems. this manifests most visibly in how mod support works for bethesda games versus games built on other more “optimized” engines, but it affects the core game design as well.
even if id software released their internal tooling to the public, it wouldn’t be all that useful for making the kinds of mods people make for bethesda games, because their engine isn’t built for all the systems-driven game design that bethesda’s is. that moddability is born out of how bethesda has designed their engine, the gameplay systems they built in it, and the tooling that supports all of this.
it’s truly insane just what you can do with bethesda’s engine with relatively little work. and it shows when you compare to games that try to imitate their game design on other engines. the outer worlds felt really static compared to fallout new vegas and skyrim, because it was missing so many of these systems.
bethesda games have a lot of problems, but ditching their engine for something like unreal or id tech would most likely destroy most of what makes their games unique.
Sounds logical, but seeing how barren cities in Starfield are makes me think it was a design decision rather than a technical limitation.
It’s very much a technical limitation since Bethesda still uses an engine that goes back all the way to 1997.
There are plenty of old engines that have scaled better than Bethesda’s. If they can’t get it to modern standards after all this time, it’s time to toss the engine.
By all accounts it’s been also maintained terribly over the years.
i think that is a bit unfair to bethesda’s engine. all those other engines have achieved their scalability at the cost of extensibility and easy to work with game systems. this manifests most visibly in how mod support works for bethesda games versus games built on other more “optimized” engines, but it affects the core game design as well.
even if id software released their internal tooling to the public, it wouldn’t be all that useful for making the kinds of mods people make for bethesda games, because their engine isn’t built for all the systems-driven game design that bethesda’s is. that moddability is born out of how bethesda has designed their engine, the gameplay systems they built in it, and the tooling that supports all of this.
it’s truly insane just what you can do with bethesda’s engine with relatively little work. and it shows when you compare to games that try to imitate their game design on other engines. the outer worlds felt really static compared to fallout new vegas and skyrim, because it was missing so many of these systems.
bethesda games have a lot of problems, but ditching their engine for something like unreal or id tech would most likely destroy most of what makes their games unique.
The same can be said about Unreal Engine and Id’s engine…