Bethesda General Discussion Thread

[Oracsbox]

Toddy on why they will use the same game engine forever


Howard said, first and foremost, that their engine is constantly evolving, talking about how Bethesda uses a variety of technologies to piece together their engine for each of their games. He then went on to explain that Fallout 76 is going to have a large number of significant improvements on that front, which will only keep getting better and better with all subsequent games, such as Starfield, and the subsequent The Elder Scrolls 6.

“I think a lot of people, who are not making games don’t understand what the word “engine” stands for,” Howard said. “They think the engine is this one thing, we view it as technology. There’s a lot of different pieces and for every game, parts of that change. For example the renderer, the AI, the animations, the script language and so on. Some people talk about Gamebryo but we haven’t used that in a decade. A lot of our engine contains a lot of middleware like Havoc.”

“For Fallout 76 we have changed a lot,” he continued. “The game uses a new renderer, a new lighting system and a new system for the landscape generation. For Starfield even more of it changes. And for The Elder Scrolls 6, out there on the horizon even more. We like our editor. It allows us to create worlds really fast and the modders know it really well. There are some elementary ways we create our games and that will continue because that lets us be efficient and we think it works best.”

 

[unfairlight]

He's not wrong at all. Retarded people think that engines create games. They don't. Titanfall 1 and 2 are both made on Source engine. Good looking games with decent optimization. Call of Duty games are made on id Tech 3. Again, depending on what studio makes them they usually look great and have good optimization. You can modify game engines to lengths where the original barely even exists, that's what happened in the case of Titanfall and Call of Duty. If they modify Creation Engine/Gamebryo enough they can make it look good and run good, but it would require nearly a full rewrite because they have really spaghetti-coded it up since Skyrim.

 

[Oracsbox]

He's not wrong at all. Retarded people think that engines create games. They don't. Titanfall 1 and 2 are both made on Source engine. Good looking games with decent optimization. Call of Duty games are made on id Tech 3. Again, depending on what studio makes them they usually look great and have good optimization. You can modify game engines to lengths where the original barely even exists, that's what happened in the case of Titanfall and Call of Duty. If they modify Creation Engine/Gamebryo enough they can make it look good and run good, but it would require nearly a full rewrite because they have really spaghetti-coded it up since Skyrim.

Yep but there comes a time when it needs to be taken out in a back alley and shot a bit like Pete Hines.

 

[RNGsus]

Shut up and buy Skyrim VI degenerates!

 

[TheImplodingVoice]

Just Pre-Order Fallout 76. If there are problems we'll fix it. Don't be a degenerate! Pre-Order now!!!

 

[Santander02]

Fallout 76 is going to have a large number of significant improvements on that front, which will only keep getting better and better
...
“For Fallout 76 we have changed a lot,”

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAH

ahhhhh

HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAJAJAJAJAJAJAJA

 

[Oracsbox]

Fallout 76 is going to have a large number of significant improvements on that front, which will only keep getting better and better
...
“For Fallout 76 we have changed a lot,”

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAH

ahhhhh

HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAJAJAJAJAJAJAJA

Todd Howard is utterly delusional or a pathological liar either way he's an annoying cunt who's hero like status with some people completely baffles me.

 

[The Wall]

Todd Howard is utterly delusional or a pathological liar either way he's an annoying cunt who's hero like status with some people completely baffles me.

He's the living epitome of it's not so much what you do but how you do it.

He lies without blinking, overpromises more then regular politician and is more lazy then laziest sloth yet he does all of that with such charm (his charisma is always 10 in every live Fallout demo) that his charm gives a spin and boost to all his bad traits and they make full circle and he ends up in people's eyes as cool, alpha dev, who like Rance goes around and pillages and rapes but people's wallets only* (*and ES and Fallout lore) but with such charm and style that people couldn't get enough of it.

Emphasize on coudln't as - can't and won't any more. Or at least less and less as competition in his field finally arrives!

Otherwise seems like a cool dude. Fuck, that 10 cha. IS powerful!

 

[Oracsbox]

I don't see any charisma, to me he just looks like a creepy fucking midget talking shit.

 

[Santander02]

Todd Howard is utterly delusional or a pathological liar

He lies !

he just looks like a creepy fucking midget talking shit.

I know This song has been quoted a million times regarding toddlers, bit it will fit every single time

Spoiler

Who's laughing now???...Yeah I was in the chess club

 

[Athos]

He always uses the Bethesda marketing tactic, unchanged since Oblivion: promise big things with vague words to start the hype avalanche, show the usual polished vertical slice and then retreat carefully behind excuses until the launch day, confident that people will see only what they want to see. Gamers will be dazzled by the game for the first weeks and will not sabotage sales. This time the buggy early access fucked the tactic.

 

[moon knight]

So, they actually took down the original Tell me lies video of Crowbcat.

 

[Makabb]

So, they actually took down the original Tell me lies video of Crowbcat.

but they cannot take down the song



The comments are all about Bethesda lol

 

[Oracsbox]

 

[The Wall]

I don't see any charisma, to me he just looks like a creepy fucking midget talking shit.

Sadly many don't have as developed BS penetration and perception as you, mate

 

[Oracsbox]

I don't see any charisma, to me he just looks like a creepy fucking midget talking shit.

Sadly many don't have as developed BS penetration and perception as you, mate

Hopefully the Fallout 76 saga and the consistent downward spiral of Bethesda games will make people a bit more cognizant of Toddy's innate bullshittery and midgetary.

Of course when the trailers start dropping for Elder Scrolls 6 everyone will go batshit crazy for it and worship at the altar of Todd again.

 

[moon knight]

IT'S BACK

 

[TemplarGR]

He's not wrong at all. Retarded people think that engines create games. They don't. Titanfall 1 and 2 are both made on Source engine. Good looking games with decent optimization. Call of Duty games are made on id Tech 3. Again, depending on what studio makes them they usually look great and have good optimization. You can modify game engines to lengths where the original barely even exists, that's what happened in the case of Titanfall and Call of Duty. If they modify Creation Engine/Gamebryo enough they can make it look good and run good, but it would require nearly a full rewrite because they have really spaghetti-coded it up since Skyrim.

There are too many retards in the world who think "i can play video games therefor i know how to make them". It is like a moron saying "i can cook like the best of them because i know how to eat". Imbeciles, imbeciles everywhere...

Anytime i read about anyone claiming Bethesda's issue is the engine, i cringe. I am a software engineer, i should know a thing or two, no?

But don't believe me, see what modders have achieved with Skyrim on DirectX9.0. See how a few mods that don't change the executable, just the assets and/or shader injection through ENB/reshade, can make Skyrim on DX9 look like a Playstation 5 gen game... And they can also fix most if not all bugs, again, without changing the engine, and they can also improve controls, UI, AI, physics, everything... All without changing the fucking engine... They can even freaking OPTIMIZE THE GAME, without changing the engine...

The issue with Bethesda was never gamebryo. Their engine is fine, their management sucks... They rush games to meet deadlines without caring for QA, and they don't polish their games enough, relying on modders to do the dirty work for free. That is the issue of bethesda, not the engine...

 

[unfairlight]

Anytime i read about anyone claiming Bethesda's issue is the engine, i cringe. I am a software engineer, i should know a thing or two, no?

But don't believe me, see what modders have achieved with Skyrim on DirectX9.0. See how a few mods that don't change the executable, just the assets and/or shader injection through ENB/reshade, can make Skyrim on DX9 look like a Playstation 5 gen game... And they can also fix most if not all bugs, again, without changing the engine, and they can also improve controls, UI, AI, physics, everything... All without changing the fucking engine... They can even freaking OPTIMIZE THE GAME, without changing the engine...

The issue with Bethesda was never gamebryo. Their engine is fine, their management sucks... They rush games to meet deadlines without caring for QA, and they don't polish their games enough, relying on modders to do the dirty work for free. That is the issue of bethesda, not the engine...

That's where I disagree with you. No, the engine definitely does have a variety of issues itself. Lighting indoors being god awful, poor lighting in general, not supporting modern graphics APIs like DX12 and Vulkan, game speed and physics being tied to FPS, no support for ultrawide and not being able to support seamless worlds without loading screens for entering buildings like everyone else today can. I could probably go on but I can't be bothered.
My point was more about the fact that they COULD fix it entirely, they just haven't put in the work to do so and they would basically have to rewrite everything they have done since 2006 and the engine is spaghetti code piled on top of spaghetti code nowadays.

 

[TemplarGR]

That's where I disagree with you. No, the engine definitely does have a variety of issues itself. Lighting indoors being god awful, poor lighting in general, not supporting modern graphics APIs like DX12 and Vulkan, game speed and physics being tied to FPS, no support for ultrawide and not being able to support seamless worlds without loading screens for entering buildings like everyone else today can. I could probably go on but I can't be bothered.
My point was more about the fact that they COULD fix it entirely, they just haven't put in the work to do so and they would basically have to rewrite everything they have done since 2006 and the engine is spaghetti code piled on top of spaghetti code nowadays.

All the things you mentioned don't need a brand new engine in order to get fixed. That is a common misconception. Game engines are modular anyway, it is very easy to swap parts of the engine.

As for "spaghetti code", you keep using that word, i don't think you know what it means. There is no "spaghetti code" in modern game engines, because they are all object-based. It is impossible to "spaghetti code". Spaghetti code was an old concept back when procedural coding was mainstream.

Yes, you got the part "they need to work on it" right. Obviously replacing parts of their engine takes a lot of work. And they have the additional trouble that their content creators need something to work on, and they have to work in parallel, so they don't get to make radical changes during development. They create immense gameworlds, so they don't have the luxury to wait for the engine to get replaced and THEN begin creating the world.

In the end, what Bethesda has to do is to change their development process. They should provide more time to their game engine developers, perhaps employ more devs, invest MORE on their game infastructure and QA. Bethesda and other AAA developers have this issue where their incomes have skyrocketed (Morrowind and Oblivion sold a tiny fraction of what Skyrim and Fallout 4 sold) while their development investing has not. They keep thinking they can maximize profit by keeping their development budgets intact and raking in more income for vastly more sales. This is not feasible. Especially since the rest of the industry have cought on the open world thing. We used to excuse Bethesda's earlier attempts because they were the only ones doing it back in the day, you could only experience openworlds in Bethesda and Gothic games. But now things have changed and they have lagged behind the times.

It is the same situation with Blizzard. Blizzard too thought they could keep development investment as low as in the 90s while making extreme profits from WoW and cash cows like Hearthstone. In the end profit=Income - investment, you can only get so much income from a fixed population, so if you want moar profit, you limit the investment...

You can realize shareholders are reluctant to authorize bigger investment for the same amount of sales. This would cut into their profits. They would rather bribe the IGNs, the Gamespots, the Pewdiepies and other influencers of the world in order to shill for their games, rather than increasing development budgets. After all, the shills cost less and result in more sales. You can pour incredible amounts of money into developing a game and get bad PR coverage, and you can spend peanuts on a mobile pay to win game like Heartsthone or a cash grab asset flip like Fallout 76 and become filthy rich. The choice is obvious...

 

[Makabb]

Todd does not even hide is making the same game over and over again, in one of the interviews he said it literally that he is working on the same game which is Morrowind.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Bethesda changing engines would be a disaster. A lot of effort has gone into the tooling for it and is the primary reason there's so many mods available for their games.

 

[Okagron]

My problem is not with Gamebryo itself, it's the fact Bethesda refuses to update the engine to at least looks like it's up to date to the current graphics capability. Fallout 4 even at release looked dated as shit, with several games around that time looking far better.

Then there's the issue with Bethesda not fixing bugs that are somehow still present in the current iteration and they have been since Morrowind. This just tells me Starfield and ES6 will have these bugs unless Bethesda decides to finally fix them.

 

[SlumLord]

Bethesda couldn't make a better game if they tried. They've had years with the same engine, and it's still a clunky buggy piece of shit.

Also, does no one ever wonder how such a huge company with so much money produces game assets of such crap quality? You could almost (maybe!) excuse their texture work since their engine is shit and they've always had problems with memory leaks and crashes and whatnot, but how do you excuse the absolutely abysmal animations? Or the hideously-proportioned models?

I've heard a bunch of normalfag friends shitting all over Dishonored 2 and Elex for 'dated graphics', but those same cretins then turn around and buy garbage like FO4 and 76.

It boggles the mind.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

The thing with engines is that you have to account for the amount of data that Bethesda games adds. Unreal engine or any other engine would have a harder time with being able to pick up every cup, plate, carrot, etc. that Beth games let you do. If they changed engines it would not be so easy to figure that out nor for other engines to handle it. I saw some people say "look at AC Origins! Bethesda should use that engine!", but games like that don't have nearly the amount of interactable stuff that Beth games do. It would be a totally different thing and maps would probably take an hour to load. So they have to use an engine that balances their graphics with the amount of data as well.