this shuts down rumors that bethesda will move to unreal engine for ES6
i have appropriately low expectations.
If history repeats itself, ES6 will be a completely different game to Skyrim
Everything complained about will he cut, nothing new will be added
Obviously. And it’ll be just as broken. Show it’s technical age even more.
Surprised it’s not creation bones with UE5 skin like Oblivion’s remake. But also not surprised it is using Creation (which is just GameBryo).
That isn’t really saying that much. It could still be a creation engine that has a UE5 renderer on top. Like the Oblivion remaster.
We need more diversity in game engines, not less, so I’m fine with this
Well, you’ll be glad to hear that Toyota, yes, that Toyota, announced a new open source game engine, with deep integration of Blender 3D.
That browser game engine for car play stuff?
No, like a legit game engine that is advertised as “console ready”.
Listen I hate the unreal engine with a passion. But I also hate their engine with a passion. This amount of tech debt that thing has is incredible, and that’s not a good thing.
Unless they’ve started over from scratch but just kept the name I expected to be a piece of crap.
Ok and does it run optimized on old hardware and Linux? I’ll easily skip it if it doesn’t. 😜
does it run optimized
it’s 2026, so obviously not.
Skyrim ruins better on Linux in my experience, so probably yes
You might have to upgrade your PC for this one (/s)
If it works on Windows, it works on Linux. (God I love Proton)
Not always true. And sometimes there’s caveats.
Translation: it’s the same shitty gamebryo they’re always using.
By that logic source 2 is just the quake 2 engine.
Yes, and the Quake 2 engine is one of the greatest software creations of its generation.
The Gamebryo/Creation engine is hot garbage in comparison.
Not content to look outdated in 2015 or 2023, now they’re going to look outdated in 2030.
2015? that codebase started in morrowind. and say what you want about that game but it is not a looker. it launched the same year as metroid prime.
And Unreal Engine started on 1995. This argument always shows people’s ignorance of software development. When the first pieces of the engine were built is not why it’s shitty. It’s because they haven’t invested money into it where it matters. (Unreal Engine also has some serious issues. It just looks prettier.)
i mean, a 23 year old codebase is bound to have some tech debt.
Very probably yes, but it will also have an extensive feature set and stable, mature functions that work well after 20+ years of development.
A mature codebase is often a double edged sword I agree. But it’s not always a good to just throw away all that progress.
in bethesdas case though?
a similar thing happened with arma reforger a few years ago, it was supposed to be a tech demonstrator for a new engine but it turned out to still be the same codebase as operation flashpoint from 1995. the engine is solid but it’s super annoying to program for, they have this custom scripting language that’s completely batshit insane because everything is infix by default, and an ui toolkit that is written as c++ classes meaning the actual game has a compiler in it for a subset of c++. so the scripts can be edited at runtime but if there is an error in the ui the game crashes at startup. people were hoping they’d finally switch to something that made sense but no.
They don’t work well anymore though, that’s the whole point. Bethesda’s codebase is past “mature”, it’s just straight up old and outdated now. Has been for a decade at the very least. Their games have looked and performed noticeably worse than their contemporaries for a good while now.
They rebuild the engine to be 64-bit (instead of 32-bit) for Fallout 4, and that version is what Skyrim Special Edition is running on
that’s not a complete rewrite. hell, depending on how it was architected it may just be a recompile
I didn’t think Skyrim was too outclassed compared to its peers in 2011, given that it was so much larger and doing so much more than a lot of them under the hood. But Fallout 4 came out alongside The Witcher 3, and the difference between the two was night and day. Then of course Baldur’s Gate 3 next to Starfield, and I have to scratch my head wondering what the hell Bethesda is doing still running this tech stack.
Todd Howard doesn’t know how to make games any other way.
It’s not entirely out of question that they’ll use Unreal for graphics while retaining Gamebryo for gameplay. That’s kinda how the Oblivion remaster works. And might be best of both worlds if they manage to make Unreal not suck in terms of performance and don’t fall for the photorealism trap
I fucking hope not. Unreals’s graphics engine looks terrible
It doesn’t if you disable TAA and shit, but by default it’s horrible
Bugs, bugs, always the same bugs.
I think graphics are pretty low on my list of priorities for how those games need to modernize. Starfield looks pretty alright in sheer fidelity, but the faces don’t animate well, the conversation system is dated even compared to The Outer Worlds doing basically the same thing, and the engine seems (for some reason) incapable of putting together a proper cut-scene.
Ah to be fair I haven’t played Starfield or even watched too many videos. I also didn’t like FO4 much so I was pretty much running with the assumption that they hadn’t changed much since 2011
Still, they may not need as many engine programmers if they reduce what their in-house engine needs to do. Could free up finances to hire more people to work on the meat and bones of the game. Or they could just pocket the difference and not give a fuck about making a good game, that seems quite likely too.
Morrowind? Gamebryo is the continuation of the NetImmerse engine. Development started in 1997 with the first game released in 1999.
yeah morrowind used netimmerse, first time bethesda used it.
I think Gamebryo (neé NetImmerse) is even a bit older than Morrowind.
yeah it’s not bethesda’s engine. but my point was about where the codebase for the creation engine comes from, and that’s the morrowind code.
I love how the Gamebryo site is still up. I thought it was funny it was still up like 10 years ago when I looked last, and it’s still up now without any changes.
rip, you killed it
What do you mean?
site doesnt load for me, says site account suspended
Works fine for me on mobile and desktop.
It’s broken for me too, account suspended. Something about not being supported in the user’s environment.
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It’s 2026, and you are literally eleven 're’s short of the current number of rereleases.
I love this story because it’s obvious your son asked this during the several minute long loading screen. No matter what year it is, Bethesda games take at least a minute to load.
No matter what year it is, Bethesda games take at least a minute to load.
There’s and SKSE plugin that fixes that
this must be a pc problem that im too console coded to understand
I laughed 3 times!
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Hey, what’s your middle name?
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shiny metal knee
I love the Elder Scrolls series, but I’m not convinced that 6 will be good. Owned by Microsoft in this age of AI shit.
Even if it wasn’t owned by Microslop I don’t have any confidence BGS could make a good TES game. They’ve been sitting on their laurels for far too long.
If ES6 isn’t Skyrim with better writing and better combat, it will fail.
We had that, its called Morrowind.
This is magnificent.
Yup. As I said, it’s better combat than Skyrim.
Unfortunately no. Gamers were always riding the hype vave. Spent money on Star Citizen and blue gun skin. Gamers are idiots.
It will probably be fine, but it’s very unlikely to be especially good.
This is actually a good news and I am glad creation Engine will be used, The best part of Bethesda games are the modability creation engine and its predecessor provide. Unreal engine is not moddable and is not even beginner friendly, while someone like me can fire up Geck or creation kit and do a full fledged quest mod.
I guess you’ve never had to reconcile the disaster that ensues when multiple CE mods update different parts of a game’s .esp data.
If they touch properties that happen to be near each other, the mods that try to preserve properties that don’t concern them end up stomping all over one other, leaving the player in a horribly broken land of conflicts and sadness. The mods can’t help it, because the engine’s modding system and data structures are fundamentally too stupid to make reliable conflict resolution possible. The endless quest to work around this flaw is why Skyrim has uncountable patch mods, which shouldn’t be necessary in the first place. It’s a bloody awful design.
I get that you love the possibilities afforded by modding. We all do. But please don’t glorify Creation Engine in this area. What’s under the covers is embarrassing, and particularly bad when more than a few mods are used at the same time. Players and modders deserve something better, and a competent engine developer absolutely could deliver it.
As someone who has spent too many hours manually cleaning up its fallout, I wish Creation Engine would die.
I haven’t had any issues that I couldn’t eventually patch, while I used to play skyrim I had 220+ mods plus few of my own mods. I am not saying that it’s easy enough but if you really know what you are doing and spent the time learning what a mod does how it does then you can work around the problematic part and modify those mods itself to work together.I have had multiple mods people said that couldn’t work together to work together. I understand the process is tedious and hours of manually patching is horrible but I don’t think we would get anything as close to this level of moddability for other engine. I have tried modding unreal but it’s just too terrible and hard to get into it and I can’t do anything meaningful beyond texture mods, maybe it’s my skill issue.
Funny that you mentioned fallout, I am now in the process of ironing out my new mod for fallout 3, the engine it uses game bryo is even more dated than the CE of skyrim and there are times that I wanted to smash my computer due to every single one of those time GECK crashed when I was in the middle of something important. But still considering Fallout 3 a game that was released in 2008 can still be modded easily than what’s a possible for a game from the time, I just love it.
Also as a person who spent hours dealing with fallout and Skyrim, I love their engine for what it is despite all the issues with it. And I hope that we get a new version of Creation Engine that can iron out the issue its having now, but Bethesda being Bethesda that’s probably gonna stay a dream lol, but anyway I have hope for my fellow modders.
Yet still its one of the most modded engine of all times. Most games dont have any kind of mod support and they just stop working completelly if you do anything beond texture change.
Bashing creation engines modding is like yelling in a desert about how the water in the oasis would be better with ice cubes. You are not wrong, but it seems really nitpicky.
Yet still its one of the most modded engine of all times.
And leaded gasoline was one of the most widely used fuels of all time. That doesn’t mean we should still be using it.
You are not wrong, but it seems really nitpicky.
Ah, yes… the dismissive opinion of someone who hasn’t had to do the work to clean up messes caused by the broken design. I’ll be sure to keep that in mind when looking back upon the time I’ve spent helping people in your position.
Well go mod something else then. Ill manage just fine without your help.
It sounds nitpicky because there are only like handfull of games that let people mod the game as much as skyrim does. The vast majority of the games just soils them selfs if you touch the files. Its not perfect, but its better than most.
I mean, it’s a new version, you’d hope they’d fix at least some issues - me, massively coping
It’s mostly a tooling issue, so they really could, but I still doubt it.
I remember installing conflicting mods with Fallout 3, and you just had to run a tool to examine the mods and merge the changes together (and warn you if they genuinely conflicted). It was like a 1 click process and I’m amazed it hasn’t been moved into the engine itself.
This is also available for the more recent Elder Scrolls games, like Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind
Loading screen after loading screen after loading screen, but hey you can put a cheese wheel in funny places.
They should steal the old trick from Diablo II where it pre-loads nearby areas.
Of course, because we have infinite RAM during the RAM crisis. /s
New version = old version + ai?
You’re hired!
Bethesda…Bethesda never changes.
Anyone who believed that they would switch to Unreal Engine is delusional.
oh no i have just lost $623 on poly market
- someone, i betMaybe for the better. Sandfall Interactive seems the be the only company that could use it without performance issues.
Borderlands 4, Kill the Justice League, Immortals of Aveum, etc. are performance nightmares without tweaking and patches.
Coffeestain have done a good job with satisfactory but I can’t think of any other studio.
