this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
411 points (95.0% liked)
Games
32671 readers
872 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Weekly Threads:
Rules:
-
Submissions have to be related to games
-
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
-
No excessive self-promotion
-
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
-
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
-
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You realise custom engines are built for specific game types right? iD Tech is great for creating high fedelity FPS games with linear levels and little environment interactivity. That's not what Bethesda make though.
They could do everything they usually do but better if they used Unreal. They don't need a custom engine. They just need an engine that isn't over 2 decades old with a bunch of shit taped to it to make it look modern. Not to mention, ID already did make a custom built engine that handles much of what Bethesda RPGs do when they made RAGE. They could have used that, with the only issue being learning it. Not sure what their turnover rate is like... maybe they're just too used to GameBryo/Creation to be able to switch now. It might take too long to learn anything new. Plus it would have to be able to have a toolset. If they didn't release those easy to use modding tools, there could be rioting in the streets.
As far as I know, Bethesda are unusual in modern Devs in that they have a small team for the size of game they make, but they have strong retention of staff so have huge amounts of institutional knowledge about how they do things. Shifting to a new engine would basically mean starting from scratch on a company level. Unlike Ubisoft or Activison, they can't just throw several thousend Devs at a game to brute force the development either.
But that's their biggest problem. There's no reason for them to have a small unchanging team. It's very very obvious that they never get an influx of new ideas. Starfield feels like it was made in 2016 and the optimization effort is comically bad. The writing is still mostly boring, campy and naive like it was written by a 15 year old Mormon. The facial animations are incrementally better than fallout but still noticeably worse than much older games like Witcher 3. I could go on.
It's not a bad game at all but it could've been so much better if Bethesda execs weren't greedy cheapasses and the dev team was open to changing their process.
This why Bethesda needs to be criticized instead of constantly getting fellated by fanboys. ES6 will be an outdated mess because Bethesda never sees any feedback except over the top praise for half-assing their games.
Fanboys downvote you but you are right, even if I love the fallout franchise, the same gameplay loop, the same engines, potato faces in 2023, outdated animations... etc, right now I would prefer Microsoft to force obsidian to take care of the next fallout, and ban Todd Howard for ever putting one foot in the dev took, even in the building. He can go fuck himself and his shit engine.