I play modded Skyrim and from what I have seen the engine, after extensive tweaking, is quite robust. You can use high resolution assets and textures with open cities and good lighting if you are using ENB or community shaders. And of course SMP physics also work pretty well. Starfield although garbage has some improvments because of the Creation Engine 2 and if Elder Scrolls VI is going to improve the engine further, as long as they handcraft most locations and have a good story, the game should be pretty solid. Bethesda worlds are to be lost in and explore while learning the lore. Starfield lacked that wonder because it lacked depth and because it was in a fake cosmos the amount of loading screens made it seem far from seamless. Anyway you can write a book with what went wrong with starfield but the engine has potential.

As shitty as the Creation Engine is, but Unreal is not the answer to Bethesda’s problems. With BGS, it’s Todd Howard, it’s Emil Pagliarulo, it’s the uninspired, lazy devs on the team.

Ain’t Starfield creation engine free?

If microsoft could make the creation kit in xbox, with a neat UI, that would be a hit.

The Creation Engine is actual 🗑️

If they can make Creation Engine without all the loading screens then it’s fine and in many ways better than Unreal. You can’t have a fully dynamic world with all the simulations in Unreal. Just look at Avowed and how static it is with poor performance.

Lol. Imagine leave creation for the only engine that’s worse.

@KIWI: Modder here who has made mods in both Creation and Unreal. The “modding tools” for Unreal games is really just the Unreal Editor and studios that have “modding SDKs” usually just mean they have an automated packaging toolkit for the mods. Otherwise you’re mostly just using Unreal and what it does. Which means you can do a whole lot more things than in a BGS game, but the editor is way more open-ended (because it needs to be) than the Creation Kit. Gist is: Unreal has a higher skill floor to produce anything modestly complex.

Creation tools are easier to start off in, but they’re written to make one particular type of game, so they’re somewhat limiting in what you can achieve and how you can achieve it, sometimes forcing you to abuse engine functionality in creative ways. They’re more “robust” in that the community has hacked together supporting tools that allow for certain types of workflows otherwise impossible in the official toolkit. That’s generally just not how modding Unreal games work, though it of course depends on how the game is actually made. I mean, in theory you could create an app in Unreal that reads BGS data files (ESMs/ESPs) as game content and plays just like a BGS game.

tl;dr: The ecosystems are too different to say the tooling is more robust in Creation or Unreal. Jeremy is right though, it would be a monumental effort to reimplement all the necessary functionality for CE games in Unreal. You can’t just dump the CE source code into a magical conversion tool that gives you all the Blueprints and C++ classes that make up your game. That’s a multi-year project for a sizeable team of programmers.

Giving Epic a monopoly in the AAA engine space is a horrible thing for gaming.

As of recent the use of Unreal Engine seems to be big in marketing. It’s easy to market “Made with unreal engine” to both non-technical investors and consumers because.

There’s a lot of low level technical details most people have no concept of where they kind of just see an editor and a renderer and base their assumptions on those.

Unreal and Unity both feel like the “no-code” solutions with some scripting layered on top. They seem more or artist tools than developer tools.

I use to be one who would say “why wouldn’t everyone just use Unity or unreal, why ever make a game engine” but after years of diving into golang and C++ trying to use those engines feels more crippling than from scratch. I call unreal at this point the “tech demo” engine because that’s mostly what is marketed, tech demos.

When it comes to the renderer as far as i know Creation is using The Forge, which is open source. So anyone can make their own engine with this renderer.

All they had to do was to hire a couple of programmers to rip that engine back to skeleton and build it back up again. It could have easily be done with all the money they earned from Skyrim, but no. Apparently that wasn’t the priority. The entire ordeal would have taken up about two years or maybe three, but now the two last ES games have at least 15 years between them. Good luck with the tech gap there big brians at Bethesda. Resource management at it’s finest.

Unreal has always been visually appealing, and that’s is great, but if you’re game is based off of visuals the core mechanics suffer. I love unreal engine, its an amazing tool for development, but i choose creation kit because theres more richness in the content of BGS games that makes it exciting to build onto.

What about how badly optimized all the Unreal Engine games are? Because that’s the main issue, players don’t care about fancy dev features if the game can’t run at maximum on a 4090 rtx

it’s obvious Creation Engine has its limits and strengths, all engines do. Bethesda has always been able to work around that, at least until FO76 and especially Starfield. The engine may have been reworked but it’s still built on the same bones, with the same issues it had, yet a normal Bethesda game works around those and builds a fun, immersive world to explore and be lost into for years. Starfield, by design, was not a normal Bethesda game. Made with this engine, Starfield just could never deliver on its lofty ambitions. It’s a core game design issue, not an engine issue.

The best Bethesda games ever made are Prey which is cryengine and the rest of the best are on IdTech5 like dishonoured 2 and doom. The only “good’ creation engine is New Vegas which is a huge mess.

Stutter Engine 5

I’ve been playing Avowed and can’t help thinking it would be more immersive if it had been made using the Creation engine instead of Unreal.

My biggest issue with unreal engine is that it makes the games look so soulless and ever game starts looking too similar

nothing stutters like unreal that’s for sure

Bethesda should release Creation engine like it was RPG maker… with all their assets as stock assets.

If they did upgrade creation engine it they should upgrade it to be more like the frostbite engine with more destructive environments.

As a conumer it’s a weird situation for me. Most UE games that have come recently have been buggy and stuttery and still don’t have the interactivity of a BGS game. Only game that have come close is KCD 2 with CryEngine.

CDPR is switching to Unreal but they are having to make their own solutions to get good CPU utilization and are splitting the engine in two to handle all the non gameplay elements in their own custom struct.

I can’t imagine Bethesda doing that as well as throwing away their decades of custom tools.

Dan Vavra has talked about the limitations of UE before, and why they stayed with cryengine for KCD2. people don’t seem to understand that UE isn’t some magical engine that solves everyones problems. There’s a reason why so many of the top studios use their own.

Switching to UE is a bad idea.

Personally, I’d hate it. I can’t quite place it, but there’s an unmistakable “Unreal-like” quality to UE games where you can immediately tell it’s an UE game, even when heavily stylized, that just takes me out of the experience. It doesn’t help that dozens and dozens of UE games release every year, and we only get one CE game every 4 years or so.

Not to mention that further consolidating the market around UE can’t be good in the long term – nothing good comes out of market consolidation, and CD Projekt RED/Halo Studios already abandoned their proprietary engines in favour of UE5. Instead of more UE, I’d love to see more games using Cryengine and I’d love if Microsoft gave enough money to Bethesda for them to turn the CE into a sort of “internally developed third-party engine” that could be used by Bethesda Game Studios, Obsidian and inXile (kind of like id Software and Machine Games both use idTech).

I still believe that the engine was never really the problem. Flaws in BGS Games mostly come down to the design choices, writing, and mismanagement.
Creation Engin would work perfectly fine for games like Fallout and TES, not so much for Starfield because of the massive scale of that game and space travelling, constant loading screens made the whole experience really tedious, but in case of TES 6, we can at least explore the whole main land of hammerfell or highrock (or wherever the hell the next game is gonna take place) without any loading screen, as long as you’re not entering a main city, a house, or a cave or something; lol.

One thing that folks should realize is that if they did switch engines, the game would certainly feel a lot different than what we know as a Bethesda game.

Whether or not that’s a good thing I’ll leave up to the reader.

Right off the jump 0:35…THIS is the problem with modern developers…NO. YOU DONT USE HANDICAPS like Nanite, YOU OPTIMIZE YOUR GAME!!!!…people switch to Unreal because “its easy” yea, that should tell you all you need to know about that developer.

I love bethesda’s engine they just need to upgrade it

UE5 would suck for a BGS games, cause the modding isn’t as robust (basic prop replacement, and good luck trying to work a new system in it) and animations look floaty. This later bit in particular contributes significantly to the engine’s mediocre feel. I’d much prefer Unity 6 instead. Much better grounded animations and don’t need a high-end system to get good visuals and performance out of it.