• Well; you could use that engine to produce something well-written, deep and interesting like New Vegas, but that still got dinged for being an absurdly bug-ridden release with serious performance issues. It was great despite the engine, not because.

    There’s some slightly-shonky open world engines that support some really impressive RPGs (eg. Baldur’s Gate 3 on the Divinity engine - looks great but performance is arseholes) and some very impressive open-world engines that support some lightweight RPGs (eg. Horizon Forbidden West on the Decima engine - looks great and smooth as butter). And then you’ve got the Creation engine, which looks terrible and has terrible performance, and which runs bugs and glitches in a way that combines into (usually) very shallow RPGs.

  • Have they played their own games?

    Bethesda RPGs are fun. But I’d say they are far from “perfectly tuned.” Always found them to be wonky, clunky, bug-riddled.

    When was the last RPG they released that didn’t require tons of patching?

  • I think they (and by that I mean management) just don’t want to spend the time getting the developers themselves up to speed on a new system. They’ve used the current one for so damn long, they likely based all scheduling on the fact that most of the people working there know it inside and out.

    They’ve probably also put considerable work into the next project already and don’t want to start over.

  • josh sawyer has said their engine has the best content creation pipeline he’s worked with, which is probably why they’re reluctant to give it up

    but surely at this point they have to be doing something in the background to move to a different one. i seriously doubt they didn’t try to get space-to-surface flight working, but evidently the engine didn’t let them…which is more or less the same story as every other time they’ve tried to break out of the mold they’ve carved for themselves. it always ends up a janky mess.

    whenever they build out actual new mechanics for the engine, like the settlement building in fo4, or the space flight in starfield, they’re always just grafted on, rather than being interwoven with existing systems.