As a 32-year-old senior citizen, I still remember what the state of internet discourse looked like around the time The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion came out. Most people liked the game, sure, but what was going on with that engine? Why were these animations so weird? The combat so floaty? Why is my character’s face carved out of a ham hock?
Now, of course, it’s very different: sometimes most people don’t like the game. They’re still complaining about Bethesda’s Creation Engine though, which remains based on that rickety, hilarious Oblivion engine from 2006 (itself based on the engine of games before it).
“I’m really worried that they’re gonna keep going with the Creation Engine,” said Carter. “I’m not just someone that’s going to sit there and lie and say it’s a terrible engine… but I do think it started to show its age.”
In particular, it sounds like Carter thinks Creation is holding Bethesda back in terms of what it’s technically possible for the studio to do in its games. “If they can overhaul it, then there’s no reason why they couldn’t push its limits and start adding things like drivable cars, maybe even metro systems like what we built in Fallout: London.”
You’ll probably recall, of course, that getting a pseudo-train into Fallout 3’s DLC required turning a carriage into a hat and putting it on the head of a hidden NPC, which might be an argument for keeping the old engine, now that I think of it.
But the big thing for Carter is that an engine upgrade (or change) could have a big impact on “Load screens and optimization.
“That was our biggest complaint, rightly so from the public, that our game wasn’t optimized, and that’s because it was far too late in development to be able to change it, and it was because we as gamers did not want load screens.” The Creation Engine just couldn’t really do the dense and wide environment the FOLON guys wanted to pull off. Hell, it wasn’t just a problem for them: famously, Obsidian had to cut up New Vegas’ strip into a load of distinct screens, separated by loads, to get it all working back in 2010.
“If they have to upgrade it, that’s what they need to solve: get rid of the load screens and allow better optimization,” says Carter. I’m no modder, and certainly not a game designer, but it sounds good to me.
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