On the one hand, I truly do not understand how anyone is surprised by Starfield being a buggy, incomplete cash grab mess. Bethesda is still using the same engine it had in Oblivion. The engine is over a decade old, and has just been being bandaid patched for that long, and this is obvious to anyone who has ever made a mod for any of their games, or just been alive and witnessing Fallout 76.
On the other hand, I realize that the video gamer demographic is apparently still largely made up of morons who have no idea how game development or programming work, how advertising works, or what workers rights are.
Then I go back to being baffled. The technical incompetence and propensity of Bethesda to release buggy, broken bullshit is legendary, but gamers /still/ gobble up their crap on day one.
Its basically gamer self flagellation, at this point.
…fuck Todd.
The thing about the engine is it’s just not what needs to be focused on, though I see it in every conversation. Unreal Engine 5, the one everyone fawns over, is the same engine Epic has been using and licensing out since 1998, just upgraded and overhauled. Gamebryo/creation engine could be upgraded to be fine, passable, good even, and in some respects, some specific features, it has. From Skyrim to FO4, SSE, FO76, and now Starfield, it’s certainly not exactly how it was in Morrowind, Oblivion or FO3 any more.
The actual issue is Bethesda. They don’t want to put the time into making it not duct taped together. If they have employees skilled enough to do so, Todd and the higher ups do not give them the command to. They only want whatever tiny hacky changes will fit each employee’s current goal. The company has not used a design document to make any of their games since Oblivion, or at best Fallout 3, and Emil Pagliurulo (fuck spelling his name) has openly admitted this a few times. No design document, no plan.
In fact, going past the engine issue into actual game design, Emil seems to just bounce ideas off Todd, like “what if this whole settlement and faction on this planet was wild west themed, they can have a police force called the Rangers”. And non-writer developers designing certain features or locations get to write entire quests by themselves without direction or oversight as long as Emil or Todd give a thumbs up. If they even get a chance to ask. In case they get no answer, best to play it safe with their quest or feature and not bother hooking it into any other sequence of the game, keep it totally optional, just in case Emil or Todd finally get back to them and tell them “no I don’t like this, take it all out”.
Bethesda is a big company that has deluded themselves into thinking they can keep winging it like they did with all of their other games since the late 90s and early 00s, when they really were small, and so was the rest of the industry. But they can’t, and all they’ve been doing for a decade is coasting off previous success and name brand. It’s just a matter of waiting for the general public to fully catch on to how little thought or care they put into their games any more (or, possibly ever, and the past was just a fluke all along). It was easier for people to see the cracks in a new IP, but starfield still sold well. We’ll see if their situation declines any further once they release TES6 in 8 years.
This is a great post and I entirely agree. I was kind of assuming the reader would know a lot of what you posted here, without actually explaining it.
Absolutely, the problem is not ‘per se’ that its the same engine. The problem is that ‘it is Bethesda’s shitty ancient engine that they have never done a total refactor of, because that would cut into profits, and idiot morons will keep buying our buggy crap forever according to market research.’
As you point out UE5 is also an evolved engine from earlier versions… but like it is actually a well made engine! Course a lot of that has to do with the whole business model of liscensing a video game engine to other dev teams… say what you will about this model but at least it produces an actual good engine.
The Source engine, I would argue, is also an example of a fucking ancient engine (literally has its roots going back to the earliest FPS engines), but theyve actually manages to upgrade and refactor it successfully. In general I would say that while harder to develop on or with than Unreal, it is WAY more scalable to older pc hardware: Some random UE4 or 5 asset dump game by novices will often not really look much, if at all better than many older source games on pc specs that are not cutting edge… oh and you will get far better framerate.
Me personally I am actually looking into making my own game, but basically i am completely broke, so I am learning more about Godot after Unity kind of just fucked everyone.
I would love to be able to make a game in Source 2… but i have no idea how to go about getting a liscense to develop with it, and afaik all the dev tools being used by modders often break and do not totally support linux… and i fucking hate microsoft, and will not be developing anything on windows.
Should have thought of that stuff during the EIGHT FUCKING YEARS IT TOOK TO MAKE THIS
