this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2024
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They don't make the engine to make that game. They make the game to prove out that they didn't miss something egregious in building the engine; or, "eat their own dog food". It has gained features over a long period of time that would fit common use cases from other developers, regardless of what Epic has built.
Meanwhile, nothing will convince me that Bethesda's tech stack is worth keeping.
The overall point still stands though. No off the shelf engine will have all the features a game needs unless the game is staying within the bounds of what the engine already covers.
At this point, switching engines means a hell of a lot of work only to eventually end up exactly where they are now again.
It's a legitmate question without an easy anwser, as to whether that work is better spent moving to a new engine or improving the existing one.
Unfortunately the path Bethesda is seeming to go with is to do neither. I can't imagine making a game like Starfield and not at least trying to find a way to make more of those loading moments "invisible" to the player rather than full on "yank you out" loading screens.
If that's the overall point, it was nested in several worse points. The problem is that they're still using the same tech, and switching to Unreal is the fastest path between two points in time that anyone can propose. Really, they should have been working on a new engine after reviews criticized them for it in Fallout 4 back in 2015.
In terms of the overall point, I was talking about Unreal specifically. If it makes you understand better that all engines are geared toward specific game features, great, read it that way. However, you still don't seem to understand that UE5 isn't the right engine out-of-the-box for every game. So even if I buried that, and now it's clear, you're still in denial.
You keep saying it, but at the scale of games Bethesda makes it isn't simply a fact that switching engines will be faster or easier. Even switching a code base from UE3 to UE4, or UE4 to UE5 wasn't/isn't a simple task (I've done it, I know.) Completely switching engines means you're losing almost everything. You simply don't seem to understand the scale of work entailed with moving major features from one engine to another. Or for maintaining features in an engine you don't have full control of. I've done that too.
You've already said that you can't be convinced otherwise though, so clearly you think you're smarter than them, despite their deep knowledge of what they're making.
I'm not saying they made all the best choices (or that they will going forward), but being flippant about the obviousness of the choice, and saying it is simply faster to switch engines demonstrates serious lack of knowledge and experience in the matter.
You're arguing points that I haven't made. I haven't said that Unreal is best out of the box for every game. I haven't said that switching engines is easy. It's hard. They should have bitten the bullet and done the hard thing by now. It doesn't have to be Unreal, but for the sake of the quality of their future titles, it can't be what they're using now. Given that they still haven't made the switch yet, it means we've all got an incredibly long wait until we can expect them to put out a game that has a level of quality we'd expect from other modern games.