You could care less?
So you do care?

Oh, I don't mean crude as in bad, I mean as in it was quickly bolted on to the F3 engine. For example recipes and such in the GECK didn't have any icons, the new dialogue edtior was added seperately to the existing editor instead of replacing it and the UI of that new editor didn't match the rest of the GECK. The companion wheel was hardcoded in and wasn't even selectable in the GECK, that sort of thing. It's the best they could do with the time that they had.

If you compare the combat and running animations of Dragon's Dogma to those in Skyrim; it's no contest. Melee is still clumsy, jumping still looks silly. I remember the Comment GT had when they did their review ( I'm paraphrasing ) "If there's an argument for the next generation of console hardware to arrive, It's Skyrim."

I fully agree with this.

Oh, I see what you mean. The software itself seemed to be well-written, but the supporting bits not so much; hard to say if different teams were involved or, if like seems to be the case with Skyrim, they simply ran out of time before the impending release date.

They can't use Gamebryo forever. Eventually, they will need to move on to bigger and better things, but I'd rather they did so sooner so they could build up experience a lot quicker. I don't want the next TES game to be even buggier because they decided just then to switch to a newer engine.

They used Gamebryo for Morrowind, if I recall correctly. That was in 2002. They're professionals, and they should be updating to newer engines rather than making their older ones a little better with each new game. It might have been a little different if they actually improved it a great deal and prevented many of the bugs from one game carrying over into another.. but they aren't doing that. There are over 800 reports filed for the Unofficial Patch Project, for crying out loud. Sure, many of them aren't necessarily bugs, but that's still an absurdly large amount.

Skyrim graphics and animations are subpar comparing to most recent games. Nevertheless, the gameplay itself is the most attractive aspect of the game.

Was it dev laziness? Was it engine performance? Or perhaps they just want to make it as stable as possible for a vast environment like Skyrim? It would be nice if the graphics and animations could update to at least 2009 standards, but how much can be done to all these in just one year? Afterall, I'm not looking for a simulation experience in TES game, so graphics and animations are least of my concern.

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1317665-unofficial-buglist/, https://unofficialskyrimpatch.16bugs.com/projects/7078.

Skyrim has the best general animations of any game I have seen in a long time. Dragon's Dogma has better technical graphics, worse artistic and worse animations.

I'm quite sure they will be waiting for the next generation of consoles for FO4.


What recent game?

RAGE is one.

I hope so, otherwise their next game is going to run like crap on the PS3. Again.

Hopefully we'll be done with the PS3 and 360 before their next game, then we'll really be able to see some improvements in the graphics/engine.

compared to oblivion and fallout it's a huge step forward

Morrowind used the NetImmerse engine. GameBryo bought NetImmerse and added some bits from it to the GameBryo engine, which Oblivion used (albeit hugely modified by Bethesda). Each new game since except New Vegas has used a massively upgraded version of the previous games engine.

I'd consider Skyrim's engine to be so different from Oblivion's from a technical point of view that I'd call it a new engine. Just like Oblivion's is pretty much only a tiny bit similar to Morrowinds.

skyrim thunderbirds would be awesome

It's still the same engine. It doesn't matter how many times they upgrade it, especially when there are issues in Skyrim that were also present in Oblivion. They need to do more than just improve whatever pieces they feel like improving. They need to create, from scratch, a vastly superior engine that's optimized for the type of games Bethesda creates. Gamebryo itself was created in such a way that any type of game could be created with it. I'd rather see something that was created specifically to allow for multiple NPC's in the same area without a rather large FPS hit, so we could have far more populated cities and settlements. I'd also like to see an engine that's built around allowing completely dynamic magical effects, such as allowing lightning to become far more powerful when the target is wet, or for fire to be able to melt snow, or for ice to create surfaces upon which NPC's lose stability. I want to see an engine that's tailored specifically to running a next generation RPG, not just some recycled piece of trash that barely gets the job done, and only then at the cost of content -- in an RPG, which makes the entire thing completely absurd.

But the engine works. At the end of the day, it's more cost and time effective for them to upgrade an existing engine that works to what they want the game to be, as opposed to completely write a new one from scratch.

I dunno, there comes a point with any piece of software when it starts to become prohibitively difficult and expensive to maintain and starting afresh is the only realistic option; though the longer it's delayed, the more it hurts. I'd say Bethesda have already gone beyond the point where they should've really got a new engine together: I think it was just about holding together with the recent Fallouts, but IMHO a lot of elements of Skyrim actually look rather dated and the continuing presence of ancient bugs is really not good. With all the marketing hype about the "new" engine, it's at risk of being rather embarrassing. It'll be interesting to see what's the general perception of Skyrim later in the year, once the hype has died down.

The problem is that it doesn't work good enough. There are still plenty of problems with it, and Bethesda is likely forced to abandoned new ideas because the engine just isn't capable of handling them. It would turn out much better for them in the long run if they created their own engine that was capable of doing everything and anything they had it mind for it.

It's like they need a boat, but all they have is a car. So instead of scrapping the car and buying a boat, they glued about a million corks to it and called it a day. That is not a solution. It's a short-term "fix", and it likely won't last long. They'll need to keep gluing more corks on and replacing those that fall off. It simply isn't worth it, in my opinion.

It's hard to say really I mean look at Valve and how long they've used the HL2 engine. Having an engine you know inside and out makes it easy to maintain plus gives you the ability to experiment with it knowing the limitations. Even with an old engine there are some amazing things being done.

However the big con is the age of the technology when you compare it to the "shinier" games out there. Sadly there are people who are more interesting in graphics than the overall content of the game. This is what hurts the gaming industry but can be a driving force behind it with some games selling because of how they look. A problem with new technology is giving your coders time to understand its quirks plus developing tools necessary for level designers, modelers, sound people, etc... to use to make the game.

I would probably say in two or three more years Bethesday may switch to a newer engine along with companies like Valve. Love to see some DX11 stuff so we can move out of the DX9.0c era of gaming technology though that probably won't happen anytime soon. Think I read somewhere that there's like 1million PC's out there that are still running Windows XP not bothering to go to W7 (though I don't blame them not going to Vista).

Ahhhh, a PC elitist. That explains it all.

You guys do realize physics, graphics and animations are all covered by seperate engines, right?

I think Euphoria would be a good animation engine for Fallout and TES.

Physics, animations, graphics is the same old [censored] just a little bit upgraded. They can't even do lighting properly

Bugs are going to happen anyway no matter what engine is used. No developer can EVER make a game the size of Skyrim and make it be 100% free of all bugs. Hell, I'd wager that they couldn't even make it past 75% of all bugs gone at launch. It's impossible with the number of variables. Even with a different game engine, the bugs would still be there, albeit probably in a different form.

The unpaid people who make those unofficial patches do a pretty good job. You're saying Bethesda isn't as competent as modders without access to the source code?

No, I'm not. But just a heads up for you, fixing bugs can also introduce new ones to the mix. Even seemingly easy to fix glitches, like the one involving the dragons flying backwards one, can cause numerous other problems that may be much more subtle. As well, the modding community has a significant advantage: It's not their job. Studios have deadlines and budget limits and the like. The more time you put into the little things, the less time and money you have to develop the larger aspects of the game.

So as I said, bugs are going to exist, even after modders have had their way with the game. The only difference will be in the size and severity of the glitches.

It's a matter of degree, though: yes, bugs will always exist, but it's rather defeatist to say that they'll always exist in the scale we tend to see in Bethesda's games, which really is at a consistently appalling level. It's not like they aren't already infamous for it, and most games companies don't release such poorly tested software (or if they do, they tend to put in rather more effort to fixing it after release.) Some is bad QA, but a lot of the bugs are down to the old and creaky engine that's been hacked about for years and is probably virtually unmaintainable.