The problem with Unreal Engine is (and always has been) that Epic makes the engine to make the game they’re currently working on. So right now it is a Fortnite engine. Previously it was a Gears of War engine. (Maybe throw Paragon in between.) It started out as the engine for Unreal Tournament.
So if you want to take that engine and start making a different type of game, it’s not necessarily going to have the tools you need. It’s not necessarily even going to do what you need it to do at the base engine level. Not that it couldn’t, but Epic doesn’t give a shit. So they give you all the source code and support for building your own version of the engine so you can add the features you need.
You want to make a vast, persistent, open world with vast dungeons you can enter and explore? Yeah you’re going to have to build support for that in the engine yourself. You want to do it without loading screens? Better get deep into that engine code. You want to have vehicles or mounts? NPCs, companions, AI enemies? When they hadn’t added them to Fortnite yet, totally up to you to figure out, and probably through modifying the engine. Need to make major rendering improvements? Better dig in. Problems with the art pipeline lacking features you need
Every time you touch engine code, that’s new tech debt. If a new version of the engine comes out, you have to integrate the changes. The longer the project goes on, the harder that becomes. Then Epic finally comes out with the feature you built yourself (say vehicles) but its only partly the way you did it. Now you’re fucked and you have to decide right there: strip out your changes, switch to theirs and redo most of your work, or, stop taking engine upgrades and integrate new features piecemeal. Now you’re in tech debt hell.
Almost every developer starts off with saying, “we’ll use the engine as is, no engine changes allowed!” Three months later the cynical director is having a high level meeting about allowing a major feature get implemented in engine code. But it will be alright, they tell themselves. 3-5 years later they’re up to their eyeballs in tech debt of engine changes, and realizing Amazing Game 2 either needs to be built using the old version of the engine they’re stuck on from 2-4 years ago, or built from the ground up on a new version of the engine.
I’d be thinking long and hard before switching to UE5 if I were Bethesda. And they have the advantage of having access to some of the best Unreal Engine developers in the world (Obsidian, The Coalition) now that they’re part of Microsoft. They’re also probably getting a bunch of pressure to make the change as the studios create a corps of experts.
If I were them I would be very tempted to make the necessary changes to Creation Engine, and stay far, far away from Unreal. Sacrifice a year or two and your top engine devs to overhaul the pain points of Creation Engine, keep full control of your pipelines and versioning, and make the game you want to make, not the one Epic wants you to make. You can even make awesome DLC or a smaller sequel game on the old branched engine while the overhaul takes place, and just have a small core team working out the kinks on the new system.
I guess my point is, tech debt is not the point, because there will always be tech debt. It’s a much bigger decision than that.
They don’t make the engine to make that game. They make the game to prove out that they didn’t miss something egregious in building the engine; or, “eat their own dog food”. It has gained features over a long period of time that would fit common use cases from other developers, regardless of what Epic has built.
Meanwhile, nothing will convince me that Bethesda’s tech stack is worth keeping.
The overall point still stands though. No off the shelf engine will have all the features a game needs unless the game is staying within the bounds of what the engine already covers.
At this point, switching engines means a hell of a lot of work only to eventually end up exactly where they are now again.
It’s a legitmate question without an easy anwser, as to whether that work is better spent moving to a new engine or improving the existing one.
Unfortunately the path Bethesda is seeming to go with is to do neither. I can’t imagine making a game like Starfield and not at least trying to find a way to make more of those loading moments “invisible” to the player rather than full on “yank you out” loading screens.
If that’s the overall point, it was nested in several worse points. The problem is that they’re still using the same tech, and switching to Unreal is the fastest path between two points in time that anyone can propose. Really, they should have been working on a new engine after reviews criticized them for it in Fallout 4 back in 2015.
In terms of the overall point, I was talking about Unreal specifically. If it makes you understand better that all engines are geared toward specific game features, great, read it that way. However, you still don’t seem to understand that UE5 isn’t the right engine out-of-the-box for every game. So even if I buried that, and now it’s clear, you’re still in denial.
You keep saying it, but at the scale of games Bethesda makes it isn’t simply a fact that switching engines will be faster or easier. Even switching a code base from UE3 to UE4, or UE4 to UE5 wasn’t/isn’t a simple task (I’ve done it, I know.) Completely switching engines means you’re losing almost everything. You simply don’t seem to understand the scale of work entailed with moving major features from one engine to another. Or for maintaining features in an engine you don’t have full control of. I’ve done that too.
You’ve already said that you can’t be convinced otherwise though, so clearly you think you’re smarter than them, despite their deep knowledge of what they’re making.
I’m not saying they made all the best choices (or that they will going forward), but being flippant about the obviousness of the choice, and saying it is simply faster to switch engines demonstrates serious lack of knowledge and experience in the matter.
You’re arguing points that I haven’t made. I haven’t said that Unreal is best out of the box for every game. I haven’t said that switching engines is easy. It’s hard. They should have bitten the bullet and done the hard thing by now. It doesn’t have to be Unreal, but for the sake of the quality of their future titles, it can’t be what they’re using now. Given that they still haven’t made the switch yet, it means we’ve all got an incredibly long wait until we can expect them to put out a game that has a level of quality we’d expect from other modern games.
They don’t make the engine to make that game.
They shouldn’t, if they’re going to be an engine company. But anything that isn’t for keeping Fortnite pulling in billions of dollars is secondary.
It has gained features over a long period of time that would fit common use cases from other developers, regardless of what Epic has built.
Gained and lost. Very basic things necessary to make all the new features work with anything “not Fortnite” were missing when UE5 was released. It absolutely released as an engine for making Fortnite type games and everything else was/is an afterthought. You either had to make atrocious work arounds, engine changes, or wait for stuff to be fixed/added, delaying your project.
Meanwhile, nothing will convince me that Bethesda’s tech stack is worth keeping.
Do you have inside knowledge? UE5 isn’t the be-all end-all of game engines. Not everyone should switch to it. And frankly, as gamers and devs, we desperately need a good competitor to show up soon. Epic is gaining way too much control over our experiences.
They were an engine company for two decades before Fortnite, and it has tons of features that game never uses.
I have used Unreal but not Gamebryo/Creation, and I don’t think I need inside knowledge to see how far behind the best output of the latter engine is from its peers. Unreal is not the end-all, but it allows a company to switch to a new engine more quickly than building one themselves, and in this case, their sister company, Obsidian, has already built an imitation of Bethesda style RPGs in Unreal.
With any luck, REX will be that competitor. But also, quite frankly, so few companies can afford to make a game that pushes graphical boundaries and the latest technology that I’d rather champion Godot.
We have yet to see the modding capabilities of Obsidian games, but Outer Worlds had nothing.
It is a great game don’t get me wrong, but Bethesda’s writing has been subpar since Oblivion, so losing mods would be horrible for them.
I’m hoping Godot becomes a serious competitor but I’m also thinking CryEngine 6 might be a true UE5 competitor. It’s basically the WIP engine for Hunt Showdown and Crysis 4.
Agree. Unreal engine use in BG3?
Baldur’s Gate 3 is built on the Divinity Engine.
Oh thank you.
You just reminded me of the plague that was UE3 for MMOs in the 10s, they couldn’t have many players on screen, and so much texture streaming it’s unreal (heh).
Have you done game dev? Have you ever used Ue5?
Yes. AA/AAA dev with UE3, UE4, UE5 and several proprietary engines. I’ve even contributed to Unreal Engine code with bug fixes.
But arguing over whether or not you should use this engine or that engine, the engine is in service to the game. Is the game good? I don’t care what the engine is. The game’s good! Let’s play the game.
That’s the problem, the games aren’t good anymore!
Yeah they can focus more time on making the game good, if they don’t have to focus their energy on a bad engine.
That engine terrifies me at this point. I’ll admit I don’t have any knowledge on the inner workings of a game engine, but it feels like it has to be held together with band-aids and gum
That understates the importance of a studio having respect for the customers. Yes being a good game is the most important thing but if ES 6 released tomorrow on the same engine as they’ve been using, there would a community uproar.
But why? As the lead designer in the article states, if the game is good who cares what engine they’re using. The creation engine isn’t holding Bethesda back. Just imagine if Starfield had released on Unreal instead of Creation engine? Would fewer loading screens and better facial animations have saved Starfield? I don’t think so. The engine was not the issue with Starfield, the piss poor game design was the issue. Unreal engine isn’t going to solve boring perks, boring quests and a bland world.
If TES6 comes out on creation engine 2 or 3 or whatever, and it’s the next big thing like Skyrim, nobody is going to give a shit that it’s the same engine. People might actually be angry if it’s not on the Creation engine because that would mean modding is going to take a huge hit. Every current Bethesda game modder would have to learn how to mod Unreal engine and I can near guarantee it’s going to be a lot harder than modding Creation engine.
How long are they planning to be hamstrung by the tech debt they’ve accrued? Sooner or later they’re going to have to do something about it, surely?
Their games all look the same, in that it’s always obvious that it’s a Bethesda-engine game (whatever they’re calling it this week). They’re always janky, usually at least a console generation behind their contemporaries, and they always feel held together with duct tape and prayers.
Playing their games is an exercise in sighing and trying to ignore the jank. Everything always feels like it’s wheezing along and trying to do anything beyond the obviously intended actions is likely to cause instability in the quest scripting.
I’m reminded of how Deus Ex players would try something only to find that the game was built to take that into account and allow for it. It’s the opposite of how it feels playing Bethesda’s games.
I wonder how much ship-of-theseus work can be done. I doubt they made things terribly modular but hopefully certain functions and groups of them are replaceable for some improvement. But, yeah, not ideal at all.
If CEOs only knew how much time and money they lose to tech debt, they would dedicate their careers to fighting it.
That sounds like a problem for next year’s CEO.
Long-term tech debt is also really just part of the problem, the same thing occurs in shorter time intervals too when you e.g. push fixing a bug from the time before release to the time after or even just from the time when one developer is working on that particular feature to after the time when it is merged into the shared code base.
If I can’t put a skull in a basket and balance it on a cheese wheel, then trick an NPC to walk on it, thus yeeting them into the stratosphere, is it even really a Bethesda game?
Watch Bethesda miraculously over performs the unfathomable hype around next elder scrolls game. Puts out what is unanimously considered the perfect performing and engineered video game that all peoples of the internet love. Give it one week after creation kit is released for it and someone will have made a mod that injects all the old physics bugs/features into the perfect game and will be the #1 downloaded mod for the rest of its existence 🤣
And gain new tech debt in the process!
Tech debt accumulates over time. Starting fresh is the opposite of that
There’s no way Unreal is completely free of inherent tech debt. But at the same time, there’s no way it doesn’t have way less baggage than the creation engine. Epic actually work on it, for a start.
Their tech debt for the most part isn’t going to be because of the engine. Certainly some of it is. But starting back over and reimagining most of the code base affords them the time and ability to fix problems that make features problematic. As the spiffing Brit likes to point out every one of their titles is absolutely riddled with game breaking bugs. Doing an engine change has the kind of depth required to let them head those kind of problems off before they happen.
Of course with an entire staff of short timers they’ll quickly just a mess new tech debt as they misgauge things.
Starting fresh also leaves you with nothing
Chances are, you start fresh, start copying/ adapting existing code. Leaving you with much the same issues as you were trying to get away from
Unreal Engine was released in 1998, Creation Engine is derived from Gamebryo which was released in 1997.
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JFC UE5 is not the same tech. It has had major changes over the years. Gambryo is in no way a modern engine. I have used both of these technologies. Have you?
Not another one, unreal is so bad for mods, please just overhaul your own engine, take the time, another year for Fallout 5 is nothing.
Fallout 5? We already had two fallout games since the last TES game. Drag wants TES!
fallout 5 is most likely gonna be todd howard’s last game ever. it wont come until after TES 6
It’s cute that you think changing engine weight only add one year to a project
Do you think Total War will need 2 years to fix their engine then? They are also doing that after it finally caught up with them in Pharaoh.
It better be a major point, their current engine is preventing their games from meaningfully competing now. Their 20 year old engine, makes 20 year old games with a mediocre coat of paint.
Their engine is not hamstringing them. Plenty of good games have shipped with Gamebryo/Creation engine, without massive numbers of bugs.
The problem is that Bethesda doesn’t give a shit about fixing anything - they ship bugs that have been in previous games, that users have outright identified and fixed for said previous games. They apply the exact same we-don’t-give-a-shit attitude to their engine.
Also every engine is “20 years old”, Source2 has some code from GoldSrc and Quake Engine, because if the code works perfectly then you don’t just rewrite it for no reason. You rewrite parts of the engine - the parts that are holding you back in some way. And Bethesda has been modifying and extending their engine.
But, ignoring all of that, suppose the engine really was the issue: it takes 5ish years to write an engine from scratch. Starfield was in development for 8 years. Skyrim released 13 years ago. Skyrim also released 2 years ago, and a couple of times in between those periods too. Bethesda could have rewritten their entire engine from scratch if they wanted to, in that time.
The problem is that Bethesda just doesn’t give a shit about quality, they chose their engine development choice by development choice. The problem is that Bethesda.
The engine AND Bethesda lack of care are both problems
If Bethesda started giving a shit, they’d just overhaul+bugfix their existing engine, rather than switching. Switching engine is entirely unnecessary, because it’s not the problem.
Gambryo is ancient and patently incapable of fullfilling some of their designs (see Starfield). The engine is not their only problem, but it is very definitely a problem
I know it would have the same issues as the Unreal Engine - all the training, engine building, and systems integration it’d take to get a game released, but I think it’d be cool if Bethesda were to make an Elder Scrolls game on their ID Tech engine. That codebase is pretty celebrated.
I would have absolutely zero interest in an Unreal Elder Scrolls or Fallout game.
There’s already hundreds, maybe thousands of indie games trying to be that very thing available on steam today and they all suck.
Is the game good? I don’t care what the engine is. The game’s good! Let’s play the game. Well, that’s the issue Bruce, isn’t it? The games are not as good as you think they are.
Nesmith explained that the studio can’t focus on the needs of modders when creating a core game. Maybe you should wonder why so many of those mods are corrections, bug fixes and extensions to the engine though. Maybe that’s a hint?
Dont they fucking own IDTech?
I mean they already own the Quake engine, or ID Tech 8 or whatever, just do it on that.
I’m gonna assume that this is because they are Microsoft now. They use a ton contractors on everything these days instead of actual employees but the catch is contractor can only stay there for 18 months and then have to leave or get hired so any experience on the project gets thrown away. Moving to unreal allows them to bring on a wider group of dev contractors so hopefully the ramp up isn’t as long. This is just a theory but the same thing happened to Halo since that’s moving to unreal to. If they just retained actual talent this wouldn’t be a problem and the games wouldnt suck as much even if engine was less advanced.
I hope they don’t go with unreal, the level of broken-ness of every game on UE5 really worries me
I don’t know anything about UE5, but many game developers seem to be putting out unfinished shit right now. I have to wonder if it’s the engine or just the studios.
