this shuts down rumors that bethesda will move to unreal engine for ES6
i have appropriately low expectations.
If history repeats itself, ES6 will be a completely different game to Skyrim
Everything complained about will he cut, nothing new will be added
Translation: it’s the same shitty gamebryo they’re always using.
Not content to look outdated in 2015 or 2023, now they’re going to look outdated in 2030.
2015? that codebase started in morrowind. and say what you want about that game but it is not a looker. it launched the same year as metroid prime.
Morrowind is definitely a looker, that art style is something Beth has never been able to approach again.
But hard agree on the VFX.
yeah it does have style, but it’s pretty low fidelity compared to its contemporaries. the scope is also a lot larger though.
I didn’t think Skyrim was too outclassed compared to its peers in 2011, given that it was so much larger and doing so much more than a lot of them under the hood. But Fallout 4 came out alongside The Witcher 3, and the difference between the two was night and day. Then of course Baldur’s Gate 3 next to Starfield, and I have to scratch my head wondering what the hell Bethesda is doing still running this tech stack.
Todd Howard doesn’t know how to make games any other way.
It’s not entirely out of question that they’ll use Unreal for graphics while retaining Gamebryo for gameplay. That’s kinda how the Oblivion remaster works. And might be best of both worlds if they manage to make Unreal not suck in terms of performance and don’t fall for the photorealism trap
I think graphics are pretty low on my list of priorities for how those games need to modernize. Starfield looks pretty alright in sheer fidelity, but the faces don’t animate well, the conversation system is dated even compared to The Outer Worlds doing basically the same thing, and the engine seems (for some reason) incapable of putting together a proper cut-scene.
Ah to be fair I haven’t played Starfield or even watched too many videos. I also didn’t like FO4 much so I was pretty much running with the assumption that they hadn’t changed much since 2011
Still, they may not need as many engine programmers if they reduce what their in-house engine needs to do. Could free up finances to hire more people to work on the meat and bones of the game. Or they could just pocket the difference and not give a fuck about making a good game, that seems quite likely too.
I fucking hope not. Unreals’s graphics engine looks terrible
It doesn’t if you disable TAA and shit, but by default it’s horrible
Bugs, bugs, always the same bugs.
And Unreal Engine started on 1995. This argument always shows people’s ignorance of software development. When the first pieces of the engine were built is not why it’s shitty. It’s because they haven’t invested money into it where it matters. (Unreal Engine also has some serious issues. It just looks prettier.)
i mean, a 23 year old codebase is bound to have some tech debt.
They rebuild the engine to be 64-bit (instead of 32-bit) for Fallout 4, and that version is what Skyrim Special Edition is running on
that’s not a complete rewrite. hell, depending on how it was architected it may just be a recompile
I think Gamebryo (neé NetImmerse) is even a bit older than Morrowind.
yeah it’s not bethesda’s engine. but my point was about where the codebase for the creation engine comes from, and that’s the morrowind code.
By that logic source 2 is just the quake 2 engine.
I love how the Gamebryo site is still up. I thought it was funny it was still up like 10 years ago when I looked last, and it’s still up now without any changes.
rip, you killed it
What do you mean?
site doesnt load for me, says site account suspended
Works fine for me on mobile and desktop.
It’s broken for me too, account suspended. Something about not being supported in the user’s environment.
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It’s 2026, and you are literally eleven 're’s short of the current number of rereleases.
I love this story because it’s obvious your son asked this during the several minute long loading screen. No matter what year it is, Bethesda games take at least a minute to load.
No matter what year it is, Bethesda games take at least a minute to load.
There’s and SKSE plugin that fixes that
this must be a pc problem that im too console coded to understand
I laughed 3 times!
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shiny metal knee 🦿
Hey, what’s your middle name?
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That isn’t really saying that much. It could still be a creation engine that has a UE5 renderer on top. Like the Oblivion remaster.
New version = old version + ai?
You’re hired!
Loading screen after loading screen after loading screen, but hey you can put a cheese wheel in funny places.
They should steal the old trick from Diablo II where it pre-loads nearby areas.
Of course, because we have infinite RAM during the RAM crisis. /s
This is actually a good news and I am glad creation Engine will be used, The best part of Bethesda games are the modability creation engine and its predecessor provide. Unreal engine is not moddable and is not even beginner friendly, while someone like me can fire up Geck or creation kit and do a full fledged quest mod.
We need more diversity in game engines, not less, so I’m fine with this
Well, you’ll be glad to hear that Toyota, yes, that Toyota, announced a new open source game engine, with deep integration of Blender 3D.
That browser game engine for car play stuff?
No, like a legit game engine that is advertised as “console ready”.
Listen I hate the unreal engine with a passion. But I also hate their engine with a passion. This amount of tech debt that thing has is incredible, and that’s not a good thing.
Unless they’ve started over from scratch but just kept the name I expected to be a piece of crap.
This may be unpopular, but I think this is great news.
Skyrim became one of the best-sellign games of all time in part BECAUSE of how great it is to see your character get ragdolled into the lithosphere by a giant, or to watch the chaos of spawning thousands of wheels of cheese on top of the throat of the world and watching them roll down.
An Elder Scrolls game that was built around having realistic physics, or being restricted to more cinematic movement and knteractions, would lose a key essence of what made the earlier games great.
I don’t want engaging combat in Elder Scrolls. If I want combat that I have to pay attention to, I’ll go play a Souls game or a fighting game or one of the thousands of games that have tried to be “Skyrim with better combat” that have languished in obscurity because they miss the point.
Also the reason skyrim is still popular is because their engine is way easier to mod compared to unreal. I don’t even know any unreal game that has even 10% of modding capability of creation engine. Granted it’s outdated, but it’s still the reason their games are popular. Hell even starfield recently got a star wars overhaul mod which wouldn’t be feasible with unreal. As much as people like to shit on fallout 4, it’s modding scene is still one of the most active one. And starfield’s failure was more because of scale of the world (and poor writing which has been a staple since skyrim). I’m still skeptical but also somewhat hopeful as long as they build upon the previous es formula.
What you described as enjoyable isn’t “Skyrim” that’s just the Gamebryo engine. The Companions don’t figure into a physics glitch that rockets you up to kiss the twin moons. Nocturne and the Nightingales aren’t relevant to a horse glued at an 85° angle to a mountain face. You’re just describing mucking around in a less interactive GMod. But people did like the mage who pancaked himself with a jump spell, the woman who is absolutely a necrophiliac, and Glarthir’s deranged quest. Actual components of those games that were done well. We all want them to make the game better so we actually want to experience all the bits that are well done and funny.
The Elder Scrolls isn’t popular because of the shitty engine. It’s memed because of the engine, but the games are generally fun enough to keep playing through the more benign bugs. And, like shared trauma, we all laugh about the bad bits in hindsight.
That’s fair, I’m someone who didn’t particularly like Skyrim and am hoping for better writing and better combat because I liked the overall idea of Skyrim but honestly I’m assuming it’ll be more to what you’re hoping for especially if Starfield is anything to go off of. Man was that game disappointing.
Ok and does it run optimized on old hardware and Linux? I’ll easily skip it if it doesn’t. 😜
does it run optimized
it’s 2026, so obviously not.
You might have to upgrade your PC for this one (/s)
If it works on Windows, it works on Linux. (God I love Proton)
Not always true. And sometimes there’s caveats.
Less and less these days.
In fact, some old Windows games ran better for me on Linux than new Windows.
It’s true. But again, it depends
Anyone who believed that they would switch to Unreal Engine is delusional.
Maybe for the better. Sandfall Interactive seems the be the only company that could use it without performance issues.
Borderlands 4, Kill the Justice League, Immortals of Aveum, etc. are performance nightmares without tweaking and patches.
Coffeestain have done a good job with satisfactory but I can’t think of any other studio.
oh no i have just lost $623 on poly market
- someone, i bet
Bethesda…Bethesda never changes.
this shuts down rumors that bethesda will move to unreal engine for ES6
It shuts down rumors that Bethesda will move to pure Unreal Engine for ES6, though I never believed that to be the case.
I see the Oblivion remaster as a bit of a proof of concept of sorts - the potential to have the world, scripts, logic, and physics running on the Creation Engine that devs (and modders!) are intimately familiar with while running the visuals on a separate Unreal Engine layer.
Shedding the need to do extra work on fancy lighting and graphical effects so they can focus on optimizing the bones / structure seems logical to me, but then again this is the diluted Microsoft-era Bethesda we’re talking about so who knows.
Shedding the need to do extra work on fancy lighting and graphical effects so they can focus on optimizing the bones / structure seems logical to me
I don’t think that’s as big of a problem as you think. Community Shaders exists alongside a ton of additional plugins, all of which are open source and just work in Slyrim.
Also, Unreal’s graphics engine looks awful
My unpopular take- I’m glad of this, the best part of the Elder Scrolls games are the ridiculous physics bugs. If a mount giant can’t send me to Jupiter in one hit I don’t want to play
I believe physics is still mostly Havok, so it’s not them. They are just that… amazing at using it.
The annoying part about the “creation engine” is that it’s still just the corpse of the gamebryo engine that they keep reanimating with their own crap on top of it. With its shitty proprietary netimmerse format that basically only exist for them at that point.
With time, people have developed tools to create content for it, but it’s yet another area where they went, fuck it, people are going to make our games better, and we don’t even need to do anything to make their life easier while they do.
At the same time, unreal games seem to have much less moddability, to your point, the ecosystem around the existing engine for Beth games means its much easier to get in and do modding.
The annoying part about the “creation engine” is that it’s still just the corpse of the gamebryo engine that they keep reanimating with their own crap on top of it.
This is literally every commercial game engine, including Unreal and Unity
