There’s also a discussion currently circulating suggesting that Bethesda should abandon their current proprietary game engine in favour of one of the commercially available ones. Both Unreal and Unity have been suggested. If this is an example of a Bethesda game scenario rendered in Unreal Engine, I’m far from convinced. The makers have had to cut an awful lot of corners to get it to work.
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Could be right. I think Bethesda just reported almost half their team is still working in Starfield with a DLC coming soon. So they believe work on the next Elder Scrolls has not really begun. Now would be the time for them to make a change. Honestly, in 6 more years, there is no way the current engine will be acceptable.
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Anyone suggesting Bethesda move to Unity is out of their mnd (or more likely has no idea what they’re talking about).
Starfield though… yeah, I’m not sure how smart it was to put starfield on that in-house engine either.
Nah, they should just completely overhaul their engine already. The darn thing was developed for oblivion, and still incorporated the general architecture from morrowind. They really should spend the money to modernize. They have it, for crying out loud!
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I quite agree. I think Bethesda are probably sticking with their old engine as long as they can for compatibility reasons. They know it works with older equipment, and the various modding communities (who now form a large and influential part of their user base) are familiar with it, and have developed a lot of tools to use with it.
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There is a lot of value in mature code. But then, there’s mature code and code that has simply not been further developed. I’m not sure how much they worked on their face engine since oblivion, for example (same as bioware since the first mass-effect, quite frankly), and it starts to show quite hard…
The tooling is a good point, though. That’s why in the end 3rd party engines will mostly win. All these things are getting so complex and expensive that it just simply doesn’t pay anymore to have an engine that gets used by only one studio for a game every couple years…
Unreal or Cryengine would in my opinion be feasible candidates. But unity is definitely not up for AAA-games. If the engine cannot run C++ natively, you can pretty much forget about high-performance games.
Here’s hoping that some crazy-mad-insane studio develops a competitive engine in RUST, so high-end game development can finally start profitting from a more modern language that is designed not to let you shoot yourself in the foot at every step. Game stability would profit sooooo much from it 
Though it would probably take at least two decades for studios to move away from their legacy code…
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Dust 514 was one of the most played games on my PlayStation 3.
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Ohhhh. So that’s why Starfield runs on my old PC that is below their minimum spec. 
(Mind you, it stalls every minute for 5 sec, the graphic quality has been tuned down to the level of the original Deus Ex, and when I fast-travel or go through a door, I have time to go refill my drink 
– but I expected it to not even start!)
I kinda understand their choice, but also expect them to be working on a new engine already, did they never say anything about such plans?
Speaking of Deus Ex (which was also based on a predecessor of Unity…?), how did they make full new games in less than 5 years in the late nineties? 
I mean, what is slowing down development today? I’m sure people said, “use a game engine, it will save you so much time!” But the better game engines get, the longer it takes to release a game, kinda ironic. I assume engines make it easier every year to add more features and people now expect them (shiny graphics and physics and fully voiced audio and accessibility and localisation etc.), does dev time needed increase exponentially?
PS: Oooh, and what became of CryEngine? It’s also only used for its own franchise, I don’t see many other games using it. Last thing I heard was that Amazon forked something off it and released Lumberjack and then there was a bit of confusion where Star Citizen either had to prove it was paying for a CryEngine license or prove that what they were using was actually Lumberjack. 
I watched a few recordings of CitizenCon and they’re still as half-finished as they were then. 
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CryEngine was very innovative in its day - but it was also extremely demanding. Lots of people with fairly high-end PCs couldn’t play Crysis. The problem was so well recognised that people started using Crysis as benchmarking software, because it pushed ordinary PCs well beyond their limits.
Ultimately, I don’t think this reputation did CryEngine any good in the marketplace. Who wants to risk their 5-year development on a software platform that only 10% of computer owners can actually use?
Of course, since then, both computers and CryEngine have improved - but once you’ve got a reputation for causing problems, it’s hard to change people’s perception.
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It’s good to know that the existential threat posed by AI is balanced by equally positive benefits to humanity.
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