this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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I think expectations were just really high because it was in development for 7 years. It's pretty clear it was made with some of the Fallout 4 bones though and that technology just advanced passed them in the time it took them to make it. The jump from Morrowind to Oblivion to Skyrim was pretty large in a lot of ways but its almost a Duke Nukem Forever situation except they wisely chose not to scrap the game 12 times to implement every new gimmick.
I think we were all expecting them to rebuild the engine sometime between fallout 4 and now instead of just duct tapping a flashlight (new lighting system) to it.
It's such a bad engine the Phil Spencer came out and said every QA tester at Microsoft is working on Starfield:
https://www.gamesradar.com/every-qa-tester-at-microsoft-is-working-on-starfield-according-to-phil-spencer/
is that because Microsoft doesn't have QA anymore?
Consumer Windows is just an endless Early Access release now.
The Creation Engine itself is just Gamebryo with a flashlight duct taped to it. IMO the engine is a huge part of what makes Bethesda games so fascinatingly unique.
The engine should be rebuilt from the ground up though. It's full of problems and it's fundamentally dated, for example one of the most obvious things a new version of the engine should include is making the world completely seamless - no more loading instances, no more loading screens entering interiors, etc etc. But all the other problems with the engine need addressing. And they can do a huge amount to make it better for the mod scene if they rebuild.
Continually slapping more and more fixes on this engine fundamentally ignores the fact it is impossible for it to get around several issues it has at its core without a rewrite.
This engine is already great for modding, but I suppose it can always be better. Do you know any technical details about why the worlds can't be made seamless? There were open cities mods for Oblivion & Skyrim, so it seems like it's probably technically possible. Seems like that may be more of a compromise related to memory allocation on consoles.
I dunno, I don't expect Bethesda to write a new engine from scratch, no one does that. They made New Atlantis seamless to an extent I haven't seen in previous Bethesda games, so as long as they keep making incremental improvements, I'll be satisfied.
I don't know the technical details but I know that when you attempt to add new map area to any existing map (for example the overworld) the physics engine does not engage for those spaces. You have to create new map areas for anything new.
There are also hardcoded limits to the number of entities that can be loaded in-engine at any one time. When you go over the alotted number of NPCs for example it starts spawning them in the sky, this causes the infamous flying horse bug everyone has seen in modded Skyrim when they've added too many new NPCs to zones. I think newer games have had some bandaids slapped on the engine to increase this but it's still there.
Open Cities works because the cell already exists, so they just took everything in the city zone and moved it into the existing world cell, which is identical in size. So there's no problem with this causing issues. This can't be done for a lot of buildings (to create interior/exterior) because of various issues such as NPCs not knowing where their house is unless it's a defined place you go through a loading screen on, so taking houses and slapping them into open world would completely break scripting for their daily routines, same for every building in the game. Some of them are tardis design too, bigger on the inside than the actual building is on the outside.
Well a lotta games are “in development”, doesn’t mean that they get developed in that time.