It’s not easy to change engines. But they could afford it, if they could justify it.
I think you overestimate how many people actually install or care about mods. Many people just seems to like what Bethesda does.
Oblivion was a smash hit on Xbox without mods. Since that the main sellers seems to be the console versions.
I’m sure that many people in the studio are having a bad time with how quick the internet discourse has gone into “Starfield Actually Bad” territory. It’s not easy refining that kind of feedback.
BUT. BUT. I’m not sure about the “until now” because Starfield has sold incredibly well, even for a game launched directly in game pass and not supporting PS5.
Even if internet gaming people don’t like the game, the market said it’s ok. BioWare survived a few blunders until destroying their brand, and Blizzard still goes strong.
They don’t want to. They have a formula, and the public and the market have spent decades saying that it’s good enough and want “Skyrim in Space”
If they want to change how inventory works they can, in whatever engine they are using. But why would they?
Also, I find pretty ironic to expect “Innovation” in a game with a number 6 attached to it, from a studio known for doing 3 franchises so similar to each other in gameplay and features that are used to describe each other. And to blame the tech for the lack of it.
I thing you are looking at this backwards.
They have the money and resources to change engine. They CHOSE not to. Because they can make the game they want to make faster and more efficiently on Creation Engine. If they could not make the game they want they would be forced to move to another game engine.
If their idea for Elder Scrolls 6 can be made in CE they won’t change engines. If it does not, they aren’t some indie studio, they have the resources to swap.
As I said Creation Engine did mot stop another studio from being creative.
They are not being hold back by Creation Engine in game design, they are stuck in a design philosophy and production strategy that until now has and got them lots of praise and sales.
They use the chest trick because saves reworking the inventory and container system. That would take time and left the game almost the same, so they don’t.
If they used Unreal engine they’d have to build a new inventory and container system from scratch, who knows if they would end up taking the hidden chest idea (it mostly works) and porting it?
The “Update your engine Bethesda” discussion is valid from many points of view, but most of the problems with current Bethesda releases are cultural. They don’t test nearly enough, they don’t have a “fun” game until a couple months before release, they don’t coordinate the content and mechanics production in any way, the quest writing is a free for all.
And until now things worked out. So they refuse to address those issues.
How would a engine change affect the game design philosophy of Bethesda?
Performance? Visuals? Alright. But game design?
Creation Engine powers Starfield and Fallout New Vegas. Quests can be complex, dynamic, with multiple endings, with lots of ways to approach them. Or they can be flat fetch quests. The tools allow both and everything in between.
Bethesda just chooses to use the current game design framework and would choose the same on any other engine.
They are actually updating their game design principles. They stopped using game design documents, they simplified the quests, they try to make sure every play through gets to see as much content as possible. Maybe they should stop updating.
Yeah, writing prompts it’s the long term goal, programming will be obsolete.
Nobody that can write a problem in a structured language, taking edge cases into account, will be able to write a prompt for a LLM.
Prompt writers will be the useful professionals, because NO big tech company is trying to make it obsolete making AI ubiquitous and transparent, aiming it to work for natural language requests made by normal users or simply from context clues. /s
Prompt engineering it’s the griftiest side of the latest AI summer. Look a who is selling the courses. The same people that sold crypto courses, metaverse courses, Amazon dropship store courses…
If the site breaks on Firefox, probably it only works in chrome based, so I’d say just use ungoogled-chromium.
Well, I have spent countless hours between Zachtronics games and Factorio, so…
Yes, I’d play that.
A tree can be seen as a formal language. Look into L-systems.
If you generalize what a symbol is (the rgb value of a pixel) you can write a grammar that ends producing a list of pixels. You can then place it in a 2d matrix and you have an image.
I guess a better approach would be wave function colapse, but seems to me like it could be formally described as a grammar (CS or CF, dunno, would have to look into it)
Didn’t you go into Turing machines and the Halting problem from that?
That was my intro into computation: regex, automatas, state machines, stack state machines, formal languages, grammars, Turing machines, Hanting Problem, P NP.
I’m really sceptic about that kind of metrics because many of them take carbon offsets into account, and carbon offsets are mostly greenwashing.
Power mix in the world right now is over 50% coal and gas, and only hydro is over a 10%. This is worldwide, so mix varies depending on where you are.
In the end EVs are no making a dent in power demand. They are increasing it. The percentage of fossil fuels is maybe going down but total fossil fuel consumption is increasing as our demand does. Green energy is only taking some of the slack from the increase.
EVs will be remembered as the thing we did to keep using cars and feeling good about it.
Are they? Because unless you live in some green energy paradise, most EV are charged using coal plants.
It’s funny how computers are almost the only human invention that for some reason must be able to be used without learning anything.
We don’t do that for almost anything else. We expect people to learn how to drive, how to fill taxes, how to buy things on the store, how to cook, how to play chess. It seems like the only cases when someone decides learning stuff is an inconvenience is when tech people get into another field and tries to disrupt it.
I am all about making things as simple as they can be, but not simpler. Intuitive is a super relative term that depends on your knowledge and life experience. People find Office intuitive after using it for twenty years, but for me is a nightmare where legacy features intermingle with weird cloud and AI shit, and most of the time I only need a markdown file. No interface is intuitive, they are only familiar, clear, accesible, discovereable, etc.
Interface Design goes in cycles of skeuomorphism and simplification because computer stuff is not Intuitive, you have to open the way with metaphors people can understand, and when they are part of everyday life you can make the app for the virtual credit cards not look like it’s made of leather.
So why would anyone hate Denuvo? Nobody is forcing you to play Denuvo-using games. It was your choice.
Wait, you think I’m defending them?
Making statements about why shitty games are not the fault of old technology is not a defense of said shitty games.
They always make the same game, they ship it broken and keep it broken. The best game in their franchises since at least since Morrowind was made by another studio. The lore is derivative and as deep as a puddle. They sell their games based on bullet points and features and not quality.
I don’t like their recent output at all. I find their design philosophy and quest design outdated and lacking, recent games feel older that previous ones.
But none of those things are the engine’s fault. They ship exactly the game they want to ship, and use the engine that lets them do it as efficiently as possible. If they are limited at all is in their production organization or lack thereof.
Are you denying that Skyrim, Fallour 3 and 4, or Starfield are commercial successes? Even Starfield was a critically acclaimed game for a while.
Most people are okay without mods because they can’t install them in their platform of choice so they don’t expect them. They have heard about them in articles and videos and find them an oddity of PC gaming, at most.
It is really easy to fall into an echo chamber and believing most of the people that buys Bethesda games are fixing them with mods. That’s an option only for a minority of players, and of those many won’t install them. They play 30~60 hours and won’t launch the game ever again.