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.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago

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.

[–] Tattorack@lemmy.world 3 points 11 hours 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.