this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2025
105 points (95.7% liked)
PC Gaming
12673 readers
860 users here now
For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules:
- Be Respectful.
- No Spam or Porn.
- No Advertising.
- No Memes.
- No Tech Support.
- No questions about buying/building computers.
- No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
- No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
- No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
- Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
To plagiarise myself from an earlier post:
The fact they’re going to use the same fucking engine until the end of time is enough for me to tap out, regardless of whether the game is 'good'
The whatever engine is the same tech stack thats been duct-taped since Morrowind. It's built on code from the early 2000s, and there are things that just can't be fixed without scrapping the whole foundation.
You want to decouple physics from frame rate? Fuck you, the physics tick still runs off the render loop.
You want multithreaded logic? Fuck you, the scripting and AI all run on the main thread.
You want proper world streaming instead of 3×3 cell loading? Fuck you, the world still freezes beyond your bubble.
You want reliable saves that don’t implode when a mod changes a record? Fuck you, it’s all still FormIDs tied to giant serialized blobs.
You want modern animation blending? Fuck you, it's still a Havok skeleton from the Oblivion era with duct-taped IK.
Every 'new engine' is just another layer of duct tape. They can slap PBR on it, tweak lighting, and call it Creation Engine 2, but under the hood it’s the same brittle mess that’s been dragging bugs forward for twenty years.
I’m done funding experiments built on bones that should’ve been buried a decade ago.
I get you - kinda. Engines are big. Take a look at some of the other “havers of game engines” and see how often threw a whole, working engine away, to recreate one from scratch?
Valve's Source Engine was first used for a release in 2004, but it wasn't really a new engine either, as it was just a continuation of GoldSrc, first used for Half-Life, released in 1998. And GoldSrc? Well it was based off of the Quake Engine, later known as id Tech 2, which was the engine of the namesake game from 1996.
Is Valve's engine a decrepit relic, not suitable for modern games? I haven't been keeping up, but as far as I know, that's not really a common refrain. And I know that it has at several points in time been an engine hailed for bringing innovative technology to the table - despite quite literally been a direct continuation of the engine of one the very first mainstream games to sport true 3D rendered graphics.
Without having checked, I'm willing to bet each new version of the Unreal Engine has simple been based off of the former, too, all the way back to 1998's Unreal. It doesn't make sense to throw away parts that work just fine, for the sake of it, when you're dealing with something as big as an engine, as you're likely to just end up rewriting parts of it 1:1.
But fuck if the Creation Engine isn't a janky ass mess, and if that hasn't always been the case! Morrowind was helluva janky too, but we excused it because it was able to deliver something unprecedented. By Oblivion in 2006, that was no longer the case.
Most other havers of engines have done a more or less good job of continually innovating, upgrading, expanding and replacing parts of their engines, whereas it seems Bethesda has always done the bare minimum, to the point that over 50% of the engine must be composed of duct tape at this point, with actual.code presumably on second place somewhere further down.
Bethesda needs to either spend all this excessive development on properly reworking and upgrading their engine, or they should throw it away forever and just license something like Unreal Engine.
I think this is the big difference. For the really successful companies, their proprietary engine is their baby, and they have teams spending dozens of hours every week trying to improve its performance, squashing out bugs, doing refactoring, etc. I'm thinking of companies like GrindingGearGames and DigitalExtremes who've been on their engines for over a decade and continually push improvements with every major update.
I simply don't believe that work is being done at Bethesda. I'd be shocked if it was. It feels like they treat maintenance of their engine as some kinda punishment they make junior devs go through or something. At this point, they've accumulated such a mountain of technical debt that it might honestly be more efficient for them to start from scratch, which is a pretty damning statement.
Bethesda has been known for lacking any decent capacity for engine handling since the days of Daggerfall.
Yeah the engine is so horrible I wonder how they can afford to continue using it. I don’t even know how modders put up with this bullshit.
I get wanting to make the game you love better but there’s gotta be a limit.
Tried my hand at Starfield modding and omg the editor crashes constantly. Makes me wonder if this is a practical joke or the devs really work like this.
Because it is the most cookie cutter of cookie cutter of development kits. Other development kits require devs to keep track of lower level engine issues.