Starfield - "space epic" from Bethesda Game Studios

That's a fair point I suppose, but it's a damning indictment on Bethesda that we're happier with a shitty franken-engine because we can mod it more easily.

 

There is a lot of shit missing in TOW compared to gamebryo Fallouts. But I don't know if its engine or devs or budget or whatever but they say engines are built to do some things better, consequently some things worse.

 

Well, slow day, anything makes the news.

That said I still hate big-ass-cockpit spaceship games. The only time I was in a cockpit in a space game was in a worthless fighter and shuttle from a dead Space MMO.

 

Both of these are fixed in fo76.

 

somehow i think both of those bugs will still be present in starfield and tes6...

 

Like what, for example?

And I'm seriously asking. What I see is the opposite, even basic things like "climbing stairs" that supposedly Gamebryo "couldn't do" (but was always able to do with mods) Obsidian did without problems. Shooting mechanics, slow time, interaction with objects in the scenery, it's all there. The things that aren't are things that, again, are not problems of the engine itself - like the size of the maps, which in other games you clearly see that it can be done, it was only Obsidian that decided to limit themselves. Probably for budget reasons.

 

you can't drop items on the ground, you can't pick up random clutter (like buckets for example), you can't put your items into containers, there is no day/night cycle, character creator is way simpler (i mean facegen, not chargen where you pick stats and skills), NPCs don't have player-like stats and player-like inventory, NPCs don't have schedules, NPCs don't physically walk between locations, etc.

 

I'd have to replay the game to check these things, because some of them sound false to me. But since I can't do that right now (and really, don't want to anyway), I'll just take your words on that.

But even then, as I said in the post, these are TOW limitations/restrictions, not the engine. You're not forgetting that Unreal includes games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, Vampyr, State of Decay 2, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Fortnite, and many others. Several of the things you quoted exist in other games on the same engine, and others (like the chargen being simpler) are so obviously limitations only of the game itself that I don't think anyone seriously will use that as an argument against any engine.

Let it be clear that I'm not defending TOW in any way, I couldn't care less. It's a "meh" game. I'm talking about Ureal Engine here, and several other engines. Sometimes it seems that Codex forgets that an engine is not restricted to what you see in a single game, you have Bloodstained, Tetris Effect, Tropico 6 and Tekken 7 running on Unreal, for fuck's sake. Engines are the base, you can easily implement mechans on top as needed.

 

right. But it's still massively easier to continue using same engine (complete with its powerful tools) while slowly modifying it, than creating a new engine from scratch or reimplementing all of those features and writing new tools for something licensed like UE. Not to mention that they'll have to pay a huge sum to Epic.

 

Pretty sure Obsidian said they'd love to have mods in Outer Worlds but there's no easy tools and they're not taking the time. If Bethesda switched to UE4, they'd say the same thing. Which is one reason they probably won't, on top of other missing things their fans would expect.

I'd be more likely to guess they're doing another "major" improvement to the engine, rather than using a whole different one.

 

Outer Worlds felt pretty static and artificial to me. KCD had the same problem (Crytek). One thing Gamebryo does well (whether this is built-in or custom by Bethesda, idk) is have all these physics-enabled objects the player can interact with in every room and scene. It may not affect gameplay much but being able to look over a table or shelf full of items and manipulate all of them (sorting out the treasure from the junk) is pretty immersive. Fallout had nice touches like dumping out crates and finding goodies hidden at the bottom like stims and skill books, underneath other junk.

I'm not saying Unreal couldn't do that but so far Bethesda's competitors haven't seen fit to copy that level of detail. In Outer Worlds there are about three different things to pick up in every room (ammo, drugs, gear) and they're all clearly highlighted with a yellow border, none of them move or jostle around, and everything else is just static scenery.

 

You are right, if you compare Unreal Engine and Unity to Gamebryo, they most likely provide everything that it does. However i'm being pedantic here because "Gamebryo" isn't what Bethesda uses, Gamebryo is a general purpose engine (or actually, an "engine creation kit" or framework of libraries) that can be used to build other more specialized engines - it does not provide much in terms of ready made tools. I saw an evaluation version briefly back in the mid-2000s and it had very barebones tools and i'm sure NetImmerse, the version that Bethesda's engine was based on when they started working on it during Morrowind's development, was even more basic in terms of tooling.

However you are right in the sense that Gamebryo does provide everything Unreal and most likely Unity do and just like these two, Gamebryo had been used as a basis for (according to their site) more than 400 games. Some can be seen in this video from 2014 and in this wikipedia page.

However what Gamebryo doesn't provide is anything associated with Bethesda's engine and what provides the actual game mechanics and most of their support systems. Those are made by Bethesda. Some examples, like how NPCs and PCs have stats, etc and the overall world interactivity were mentioned already by others.

However one thing that is important and these rely on is what is commonly called the world database - essentially how an engine tracks what is in the game world, how these items/entities/etc are placed, removed, etc. Engines differ a lot on how they handle this and Bethesda's engine is quite unique here.

Bethesda's engine has inherent support for seamless open worlds (what people often associate with "open world" nowadays, even though something like Fallout 1 is also an open world game despite not having a seamless world). Unreal Engine is not optimized for seamless world games even though you can create them. In Unreal Engine the support for seamless worlds was added as an ad-hoc solution on top of the existing level-based approach that the engine had ever since Unreal Engine 1 and relies on manually creating separate "sub levels" which will then be placed on top of a master level that the level designer has to explicitly script and/or create streaming volumes to instruct the engine when to load/unload them.

On the other hand Bethesda's engine, even in the original Morrowind version, relies on a grid system that loads and unloads individual cells dynamically as the player moves through the world automatically - there is no need for the designers to bother with setting up streaming (outside references but that is also something UE games need to do anyway).

It isn't just having a seamless open world, but also having persistent items, NPCs states, etc... others already mentioned those. In theory it isn't hard to implement those, but an engine's design can make it very hard to do it and many engines - especially general purpose engines that often focus more on static visual fidelity - have restrictions in place that do exactly that.

I do not remember where, but i remember reading a Morrowind postmortem where a Bethesda developer mentioned that they designed their engine from the ground up to be able to handle big persistent worlds. Them using NetImmerse (Gamebryo), which especially at the time was essentially a collection of libraries, helped to do that but using something like Unreal or Unity that comes as a complete package with its own ideas of how things should be done (which might not be bad for most of the games made with those engines) can actually work against this.

In general people overestimate the issues Bethesda's engines have. Now, i do not know *why* they are not solving them, but issues like framerate, animations or whatever are really things that can be solved. My guess isn't that their engine isn't capable of having those solved, but that their management isn't giving much of a priority to having these solved. As an example, AFAIK Skyrim VR runs at high framerate, which is essential for VR, which shows that they *can* make their engine run above 60fps, given enough incentive (and, according to a friend who has a VR headset, the game is still very shoddy which means that they didn't even have to spend much time doing it).

Yes, it is a very big job and chances are they'll end up with a worse product than what they originally had. Making Unreal (or most other general purpose engines) do what Bethesda's engine does means changing things at a fundamental level that would affect every single part of the engine itself, except perhaps the renderer. But the renderer is only a tiny part of an engine anyway (the size of a renderer in a game engine is something that many gamers greatly overestimate - and also something that marketers take into advantage - whenever you hear about a "new engine" or even new engine version, 99% of the time it is an existing engine with its renderer changed to look different from the previous one).

And it isn't just the mods, Bethesda themselves are using the same tools and having tools that are easy to work with also affects Bethesda's own designers and performance. The tools being easy to use was also something that Obsidian designers mentioned as a positive for the engine.

So there isn't really a good reason for Bethesda to change engines and use something like Unreal or Unity or CryEngine. They'd have to do almost as much work as they'd do to make a new one from scratch - but making a new one from scratch is a waste of time since they can fix their existing engine (that they also have full control over and have shown they can fix). The only reason they release game with issues is that their management simply does not allocate enough time (which implies they do not consider a priority) for their programmers to fix these issues.

(of course, their management could also decide for reasons only understood by managers - and perhaps marketers - to switch engines, but that wouldn't be a technical decision and that is another topic... i'm just pointing this out because i do not want to imply that Bethesda will never change their engine, but that the engine itself wont be the reason if they do)

 

Just wanted to point out that other than annoying occasional stuttering, FO76 runs way better than Skyrim or FO4.

 

Not very difficult to do that considering how buggy,instable fallout 4 and skyrim are .

 

If you ask me, there is no point in changing the engine if Bethesda holds the same attitude toward the game. As long as they are still lazy and incompetent, their game will be full of bugs and runs like shit. And on top of that the modding community will suffer.

 

What are yours expectations for Starfield? What your heart aches for?

 

The major thing missing is 3rd person view.

 

Skyrim in space, what else could it be.

I just want the mod community has something new to play with.

 

So is bethesda going to do mass effect

 

Might be cool honestly

Fuck rpgs

 

No. Several soy-dripping focus groups suggested that red, blue, green were too complicated for 2020 'general audiences.' It is recommended, considering the current political climate, to make a super-evil space dictator that looks like Trump and make the player have to kill him and return the forest to the cute Disney animals save the universe.

 

Bethesda(Games Studios) is one of the game companies that has managed to keep contemporary real-life politics out of their games though.

 

That's a given

I just mean like different species like mass effect

For instance in the mass effect version of elder scrolls you pick a turian and they have bonuses to perception but negative to personality

 

Or you choose to be Krogan and they have massive bonuses to strength and endurance but massive personality and maybe intelligence hit

 

Of course it wont have any attributes or skills and will be a linear action game