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Creation Engine and others

polycounter lvl 14
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NAIMA polycounter lvl 14

I am just asking ut of curiosity , why do you think Bethesda Games Studios sticks with their Creation engine rather than move to something that seems better in graphics and else like Unreal or Unity ? What it has that Unreal or Unity cannot do or cannot reproduce well?

I am wondering if the fact that in a game like Skyrim or may be in next Starfield you will be able to touch every item and collect it even ? is may be something beyond the abilities of other modern engines?

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  • oglu
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    oglu polycount lvl 666

    The enigne isnt only what you see on screen. There are a lot of tools and workflows designed around the gameplay. Whats easy in one engine might be difficult on an other. All the Artists and coders in big studios are experts in the engine they use for years. Starting from nothing in a new engine isnt allways a good idea. Sometimes it is.

    If you go to your Team and ask them if they want a new engine and 80% say no. Im not sure if you get a game in the end if you force them todo so. Using new tech is a difficult decision to make. A lot of coders arnt interested in making games. They love to code engines.

    And on top if you know you will make millions with your game. Wyh should you pay someone else revenue for the engine.?

  • Benjammin
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    Benjammin greentooth

    What the creation engine has is plug-and-play modding. 😉

  • Joopson
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    Joopson quad damage

    I've heard a big part of it could be related to the fact that everything you move in the game world has to be remembered; if you drop a sword and it lands a certain way, it'll stay there forever, barring you or someone else moving it.


    Not sure if this is overplayed, or if it's true, but I remember back when Skyrim first came out, hearing something like this somewhere.


    You also have to realize this engine has been developed along side the style of game they tend to make; meaning it's very well suited to its purpose.

  • NAIMA
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    NAIMA polycounter lvl 14
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  • Neox
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    Neox godlike master sticky

    imagine having hundreds if not thousands of people working on your product in your engine. imagine you have built the tools, the pipeline, the documentation and all that that individual onboarding is somewhat quick and easy. now imagine switching those hundreds if not thousands of people over to a new engine. lets just pull up some random number, the average dev in that team makes 10000 USD, simple clean number and it takes them half a year to get into the engine, and be able to work with it, lets ignore the fact that all the pipeline is built around your engine and that you need to make new tools or at least prot your tools.

    thats 10000 USD x 6 Months x 100|0 Devs, that is 6 to 60 million USD


    how many individual devs can you bring into your engine and make them suffer for decisions you made many years ago for 6 - 60 million?


    a lot

    how much one could save to switching to a third party engine will be a lot harder to quantify. i mean sure there will be some numbers you could compare. I worked in productions where starting the engine took more than 10 minutes and it crashed plenty of times a day, thats some easy math to do. but switching a whole production, with all departments for something "unknown" is just quite the risk.

  • killnpc
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    killnpc polycounter

    a company will select what engine best serves the game features they envision, fits their budget, capabilities, and business strategy they have in place. licensing an engine certainly comes with a number of enticing production advantages at the cost of a piece of your pie. ownership of a game engine, its roadmap, and access to the engineers that created it as internal resources, are not in that list of advantages, but certainly requires a heavy investment cost upfront to compete with game engines built for widespread licensing that improve with each new partnership.

  • Benjammin
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    Benjammin greentooth

    Sure, but nowhere near the same degree or ease, and that ease is what keeps skyrim selling 10 years later.

  • NAIMA
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    NAIMA polycounter lvl 14

    Why Not? what makes CE better than Unreal on that aspect?


    If I remember well Bethesda softworks had like 100 employes when made Skyrim?


    Yes but to keep up with the competition they have to heavily invest in updating the tech of their engine, wouln't be just easier to switch to something more advanced and let others do that part of the job? I have read some complains online about the quality results of the Starfield images when compared with other AAA, I personally don't complain but if are beeing sidened to images produced in other AAA engines the difference is visible.

  • okidoki
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    okidoki greentooth

    Using what you already know very good and also developed yourself is always easier use or to make better than learning how to use something new. Especially if the new one also is in a very advanced state (new learning curve against current knowledge). It's cost-benefit calculation. -- The investment made in the engine and workflow.. just works. An new engine and workflow costs money and time and money (yes multiple amounts of) and if the results has bugs because the experience with the new is still small then it costs even more money.

    Or consider this: suppose you learn that french is a beautyfull language to speak.. would you learn it ? Just because it is more beautyfull? And will you be better suited to speak more beautyfull just because merde sounds better than s..t ?

  • Benjammin
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    Benjammin greentooth

    "What makes CE better than Unreal in that respect?"

    Source: Nexusmods.com

    The top 3 most modded games are Creation Engine titles, and the next two are GameByro (which CE is based on).

    "...to keep up with the competition they have to heavily invest in updating the tech of their engine, wouln't be just easier to switch to something more advanced and let others do that part of the job?"

    No, its not easy. Also, offloading the responsibility isn't always ideal.

    "I have read some complains online about the quality results of the Starfield images when compared with other AAA, I personally don't complain but if are beeing sidened to images produced in other AAA engines the difference is visible."

    Comparing renders from completely different games is meaningless - the entire art pipeline might be different, you have no idea of the artists involved, or their workflow, or what constraints they had.

    People who don't understand things like to complain on the internet - I wouldn't form any opinions from it.

  • Alex_J
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    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter

    "hell is other peoples code"

  • NAIMA
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    NAIMA polycounter lvl 14

    Ok s to speak , what do you thing could be the "weak points" Of the Creation engine compared to Unity or Unreal for example?

    The visible ones at least?

    By using that engine in the past, I do not know the actual one, I remember it had several problems with physics , dinamic lightning, textile simulations and rendering in general. It was also a little ankward to work with but I liked it in the end especially since it allowed to overdetail scenes with interactive elements, but I don't know if this is something special or just the way the Bethesda games are designed .

  • Alex_J
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    Alex_J grand marshal polycounter

    Just my speculations but I'd expect major differences in games made by any of the engines is more an outcome of myriad development problems. This would include quirks of the engine but I doubt it's more of a factor than stuff like deadlines, budgets, team composition and disposition, leadership changes and vision, acts of god, etc etc.

    In other words, if you trying to choose an engine for your own use, don't look so much at shiny features right off the bat but make sure you have compatibility with your target hardware, look at licensing and other money related considerations, look for toolsets that support the sort of work you'll be doing, look for what support is available, and after those big questions are answered then you can do the fun part of seeing what sort of rendering/performance stuff you can get away with.

    Judging engine by output games is like you trying to find a S.O. and you are looking at their hair and saying, "so silky smooth. He/she must have a fantastic personality."

  • Benjammin
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    Benjammin greentooth

    Its pretty hard to judge the state of Creation Engine since you only see the improvements when the next Elder Scrolls or Fallout game is released. We saw the GI and material systems change radically between Skyrim and FO4. Things like cloth simulation have been modded in.

    Every element being interactive is a Bethesda design choice.

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