this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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Are they still using their twenty year old engine?
Unreal Engine is 26 years old. id Tech is 30 years old. What's your point?
But it's not made on UE 1, now, is it?
No, just like how the current Creation Engine version is not the same as the first one from 20 years ago.
That's the issue with the current creation engine; it kind of is. That is what's meant with "20 year old engine".
The updates the creation engine has been having over the years are more like bandaids. Meanwhile unreal gets damn-near rebuilt from the ground up fir every major version release.
UE doesn't get "near rebuilt from the ground up every major release", that would be an absurd waste of time and resources every time. It's being updated and iterated over, just like how CE is.
The problem here is that you don't like Bethesda games and jumped on the bandwagon of armchair developers using the engine as a scapegoat, ignoring the fact that many other mainstream game engines are just as old or more.
Creation Engine is the least of Bethesda's games problems, it's their game design that's the big issue and the reason why thinks are so bleak.
That engine is ancient and their game design needs an upgrade. A lot of the quests were so bland in Starfield that I watched the credits to see how many designers they had on them. It was like...6. Thousands of planets, 6 quest designers. If your quest is, "go here, push a button, and come back," just don't bother putting the quest in the game.
Likewise, Oblivion's conversation system probably looked immaculate compared to old Elder Scrolls games at the time, but Starfield is outclassed next to Mass Effect 1 from 2007, not to mention The Witcher 3 or Baldur's Gate 3. And for how much people like that their towns are filled with NPCs on a schedule, it would be nice if that system led to anything more sophisticated than the thieving tricks people used 20 years ago.
You have... No idea what you're talking about.
I don't like Bethesda games? The amount of time I've spent on Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 says otherwise. Hell, I'm right now doing yet another playthrough of Skyrim.
The best way to understand what's wrong with the creation engine, and how woefully out-dated it is, is to listen to what modders have to deal with constantly. The creation engine is hardly a serious upgrade of Gamebrio and BGE only puts in the minimal effort into actually updating it.
At its core, and the major reason why exploration is so stilted in Starfield, is that the creation engine just isn't capable of solving the floating point problems with seamless worlds, which other engines ARE capable of. Pathfinding generation and animation sorting hasn't been seriously updated since Oblivion, and the Papyrus script engine still has the same 200 limit it had since Morrowind, a limitation that was there because of hardware of that time, but forcing Papyrus to go over the 200 limit causes Bethesda games to become unstable.
Yes, it's BGE and their practices that are the problem, and it's reflected in how they maintain their engine too.
Noooo, creation engine 2 is new, it definitely not a ball of bandaids wrapped around the netimmerse engine that was released in 1997.
Twenty eight year old engine?
Leonardo DiCaprio would be mortified.
The thing is, the age of the engine doesn't say anything. The Unreal Engine started its development before 1998. But you do have to put in work to upgrade an engine over time and Bethesda doesn't have Fortnite money for that.
No, they have Skyrim money for that. Imagine making money off of a game for over a decade, while barely putting money towards rereleases/ports. Didn’t even need a team for patches or content updates.