It's not that you can't but rather that it is very inaccessible. The creation kit is a tool built out of the creation engine to give modders the rough tools that Bethesda's quest and world designers would have. It's incredibly easy and intuitive to use compared to UE. If Bethesda did switch the easiest choice to make would to just say Modders can use UE to make mods, and hopefully they would release all the code they wrote to manage the game, quests, NPCs, since UE doesn't have any of that by default. Without that code it would be very challenging to implement new quests or characters since your pretty much guessing as to what Bethesda might have done; which would mean modding would only be available to the expert programmers. And Bethesda would not want to release that code as it would be a legal nightmare to manage (considering people who would steal the code for their own projects, not just individuals but other big dev's). But releasing that code would also have some legal problems for Epic Games since some of that would likely include code written exclusively for UE, which contrary to popular belief is not Open Source. UE is Source Available which means you can look at it but you can take it or repurpose it without express permission. The harder option would be what they already did when they made morrowind which is create a completely independant tool like the creation kit, that they can hand out all they want without violating any license agreements or revealing any code that could be then stolen by outside parties, or be used for corporate espionage giving their competitors a leg up, which happens pretty much all the time.
@@micholitzia5726 Any engine can be easy to mod, it's all about whether the developers are willing to package and release their internal tools that they use to make the process easier. That's why it's far easier to mod Bethesda games than most, because they provide the tools. UE has quite decent tools as it is, the reason it's a bad choice is it's bad at open world games even with all the new stuff in 5. CryEngine otoh would be excellent because its a beast at open worlds and can handle tons of physics objects, and it's Sandbox is actually also a great editor that lets you test things live without compiling. Frankly the Creation Kit's tools are hardly improved over Gamebryo, mostly just better UI. They are nothing to write home about, it's just that people know them well.
Am I the only one who likes the radiant AI in Oblivion? I liked that people had random conversations instead of the same one over and over when you entered an area
i've played Skyrim recently and with in a few days i'm already tired of the convos they have and the same comments they make towards me as i walk past them. I got a disease and it's refreshing to hear them comment on something else for once lol
I always loved it myself. I didn't realize how much of a joke it was to fans until social media lol so for years I thought it was cool and normal then in the early 2010s noticed everyone thought of it as a joke. Don't get me wrong I love the memes but to me it's still cool and not as jokey as others think.
And I want Elder Scrolls 6. Like, now. ;:y not in 5 to 7 years! Now! So far, Starfield doesn't even seem to have interesting factions I'd like to learn more about, so thats probably not as entertaining to me as Fallout and the Elderscrolls are! Even though I love space ships and sci fi. But that generic shooting is boring to me.
For Bethesda to implement Radiant AI as originally intended they would need to redesign core game mechanics. Namely the game ecconomy and NPC injury and justice system. Give non trader NPCs the ability to buy and sell, have location damage like in fallout and have other things to manage via survival mechanic, Don't make stealing a crime instantly punishable by death for NPCs.
Well modding in Unreal is definitely possible. I think the biggest reason they don't do it is because A. It takes a long time to adjust their workflow to suit Unreal instead of Creation Engine and B. They would need to pay licensing fees to Epic Games, which they probably want to avoid in any way possible.
they would also need to build an entirely knew set of modding tools in order for it to be anywhere near as functional, whereas their engine is already built for it.
@@TheCantinaChannel Conan Exiles has modding tools (UE4) since it's beta. If they can do it I have no doubt that it would be relatively easy to implement.
@@looniper3551 yes. And it was not the same version of unreal engine that exists now. People are asking why Skyrim isn't made on Unreal engine because of how much better it looks, not realizing it's a version of unreal engine ten years newer than the game.
The Witcher 3’s engine was pretty fantastic as well, for the sake of how seamless and near glitchless the giant map and landscape was itself. It only loaded in what you were facing, which saved so much on rendering and whatnot. Even some games on Unreal still don’t look that good
@@clunky9072 they don't, most player don't play with mods and that applies not only to games from Bethesda but all other games from other developers, because most players follow the path of least resistance. And Bethesda itself reported that only 8% of Skyrim players have ever used a mod. So most people don't buy Bethesda games for modding.
Creation engine is super easy to use and convenient for anyone who tries. I've tried using other engines, and they're either not as good, way too complicated, or require actual programming still that I do not have
Creation Engine has mad potential to create massive open worlds or even metaverses.Only thing Bethesda has to do is to refine the engine and remove jank
I’m honestly remembering why I appreciate Bethesda games again. Out of the box they’re a bit clunky but I just installed 50 mods before I even started fallout 4 for the first time and it ran seamlessly lol
I've done and published mods for Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 / NV, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, Divinity Original Sin 2, Neverwinter Nights, Neverwinter Nights 2, Dragon Age Origins, Dragon Age Inquisition etc. And I can tell you that all the games I've tried modding, Unreal Engine games are among the hardest to mod, and I am someone with actual programming (JSX, Python, C++, C# etc.), 3D modeling (3Ds Max) and texturing experience. The issue is that when someone comes to modding scene, and they want to try it out, and eventually improve and become REALLY good at it, the initial threshold can not be too high, or it will kill all interest. The threshold of using Creation Kit is very low (I started out when I was 14yo with zero programming knowledge), the threshold of Using Unreal engine... you basically have to be an IT engineering student or programmer hobbyist with burning passion for deciphering someone else's code without designer notes.
That's a problem more with the studio's not issuing any documentation and not supporting development of modes, over the engine not doing so. Epic offers a endless sea of documentation as well as low level SDK that lets you functionally rewrite anything you want in the engine. I mean, that's one of the big hitching points with Creation Kit and modding with Bethesda titles and why we have to turn to code injection and rely on Script Extender teams, to do what high level kits like the Creation Kit cannot, that isn't documented anywhere. You're more benefitting from a long-term dedicated community than from the developers there.
If modders cannot use those Unreal tools with limited programming knowledge, that doesn't help. The reason SkyUI has been downloaded 24 million times is because it was available 5 weeks after release.
@@SylviusTheMad Semantically you don't need any programming knowledge to use Unreal 4 or 5. It's unadvised, but their visual script system is robust and making a UI wouldn't be too hard. I would also point out, Sky UI was not made by some noob modder just learning things, but a group with professional experience and programming skills. Still took them around a month.
The way I see it, Unreal itself is highly modifiable as designed by the engine devs, but is only 30% the way to a full game. Then when individual game developers using Unreal implement the remaining 70%, they are likely not paying attention to moddability, which ruins the foundation for any future modders looking to add on new functionality. Additionally, if you had the expertise to develop a moddable framework on Unreal, you would likely then sell that as a "Tool" asset on the UE Marketplace, which means any future modders will need to own that as well. Skyrim/Creation kit on the other hand is 100% of the game implemented, and moddability/DLCs were at the forefront of the dev's minds for the entire process, so the foundation is 100% solid for any additions. The game devs are creating those tools for their own benefit, and after they sell the game there's no serious profit motive in depriving the mod devs of those tools.
@@ShadoFXPerino I wouldn't say it was intentional entirely on Bethesda's part. A big thing that drives the moddability is the open pack/file structure, which is a byproduct of them adopting Gamebryo early on. Many older engines, even UE2, have more open file structures for reading/loading assets. That changed in part for security, and in part for more efficient storage and loading of assets on modern engines that archive most of their assets into often proprietary formats. Even Creation Engine does this, it's just that Bethesda allows people to read their archives through Creation Kit. Modders still end up building tools to actually access, unpack, and repack those files. Bethesda does not provide that functionality. Similarly modders have to force archive invalidation for using the loose file system. Bethesda stumbled it's way into having a big modding scene early on, but it did grow to support it.
Unreal engine doesn't make world items spaz out when you pick up another item near them. This makes The Bethesda engine ideal for immersing clumsy people into the game world.
Radiant AI is the only way to do Bethesda NPC’s they feel like real people in Oblivion. The lack of that in Skyrim was one of the first things I noticed when playing Skyrim where the dialogue was repetitive and stale
The ease of modding is the biggest strength of the creation engine. Even a person like myself with no programing experience can learn to do basic things in it that would not be possible for any other engine that I am aware of. It has been this way since Morrowind with very little change in that regard. I don't have to know how to program to add an item to an NPC or even add a whole other NPC. Which really opens modding to people that would never otherwise even try to mod a game. It also allows those that do know how to program and script things and other programming stuff I don't even know about work their magic on a 10 year old game and make it do things that the Bethesda probably never thought to do with it. Mods are a major reason why Bethesda games have a longevity to them rarely found in other games of this type. Modders have kept Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind and the Fallout series (Yes I'm including New Vegas it uses the engine and mods are a huge part of it to). A lot of people that complain about the engine do not realize how much the modding community would lose if they switched. Thank you for putting into words something I have thought for a long time.
Lots of games define stuff like items or NPCs in configuration files that you can change without programming with the right tools. It's hardly a special feature of the creation engine rather a common practice.
@@101Mant except there's no documentation and you need to know what you're doing because files and stats are named with numbers instead of descriptive names. You don't even need the guide offered by Bethesda to learn how to use their Creation Kit, (a guide is something that other games don't even have, why would they? They don't support modding) i learned it solely by clicking the items and seeing how everything works. It's THAT easy.
@@ghostwizard7597 same with blueprints in unreal engine. You're just clicking things and connecting lines. It's their visual scripting language. It's very easy to use
I've been playing Morrowind a lot recently and not gonna lie - I thought the footage from Skyrim in native engine was the UE5 content. It's amazing how your brain just accepts graphical fidelity for what it is after a while.
Although I've seen a lot of people criticize the Creation Engine, I actually like it because it's difficult to comprehend but is incredibly mod-friendly. I appreciate it when developers use their own engines to create their games.
It was fine until... New Vegas. Since then it has been enough behind the pack that it's hard to justify. And it isn't their own engine, its the Gamebryo, but on steroids. Much how Call of Duty still runs on a hotrodded Return to Castle Wolfenstein engine. As for being able to mod, that's mostly about the devs supplying the right tools more than anything.
@@thetowerfantasymusic the creation engine is very poorly written for what I have heard. It is unoptimized for modern hardware, was a cpu chugger when it released, and honestly without modding their games would be mid. Its that most game lack tools made by the developer to mod their games either because of licensing issues or more commonly they don't have the energy to do so. I look at operation harsh doorstop, a skeleton of a game and how they implemented tools to mod it from the start, wishing more developers would give us a good framework to build upon. That was why ARMA 2&3 was successful, why bethesda keeps people playing, and doom still has an active scene.
I feel like you forgot one of the biggest benefits for a game company to make their own engine and that is they don't need to pay a fee to Unreal. I mean a lot of these big companies want to maximize profits
Thats a much bigger part in the decision-making for a large developer than a small Indy team. Especially since Bethesda sells games for longer than a decade, and lots of different platforms.
@@smolpener7430 It actually is! You don't understand just how expensive licensing fees are. While keeping an employee with skills and experience is worth much more to you
They didn't make this engine, tho. It's the Gamebryo engine. They've been using it since Morrowind and just "improving" it since then. Does that mean lots of bugs? Yup. And they're perfectly content allowing the community to deal with that via unofficial patches and mods.
@@MrCobalt Bethy has done a poor job of engine design and updating for a long time. There are a ton of bugs, glitches and problems in the CE that have been solved - admittedly, Bethy has to give the dev's enough time (and enough dev's) to fix them but it's possible. That being said, they do own the old Gamebryo engine now and have made so many updates to it that it's like saying anything built on UE 5 is just the old UE 1 engine from, ya know, the game Unreal back in 1998. It's disingenuous. The newest Creation Engine is leagues ahead of the original Gamebryo engine. By the way, UE 5 has code that is as old as the original UE 1 engine from back in the day. Since UE 5 is an update to a 27 year old engine, essentially, it must be as much garbage as the Creation Engine, whose code base was founded 1 year prior to the original UE 1, right?
It's actually alot more simple. Money and experience. They got tons of experience with their own engine and they're not looking to pay royalties to Epic.
I understand why many developers use the Unreal Engine. That said, I applaud all the studios and publishers, included Bethesda, who are hell-bent on using their own. In fact, we need **more** studios building and using their own engines! We do not needs games technology monopolized under a single company and their one proprietary engine, which is what's happening more and more with every studio that caves and opts for the Unreal Engine for convenience's sake. I was so very sad to hear that CD Projekt Red was going to drop their RED Engine for Unreal Engine 5 moving forward. I understand the logic behind that choice, especially considering the fact that they had run off most of their senior devs who had helped to build and were intimately familiar with RED Engine, and that the majority of their workforce now is effectively new hires, probably fresh out of college and who only know Unreal Engine because their college coursework required it. Again, I get it. But I don't like it. And it still makes me sad.
i completely agree with you. About CDproject...well, looking at the absolute mess they made with cyberpunk i'd rather have a game made with UE5 at this point. The "photorealistic" look of cyberpunk can be achieved only with an ultra expensive pc. Even with a 3050ti it runs like crap.
@@astral_anomaly2250 Much of that is the fact that CDPR higher ups and their disastrous development philosophy/practice had and was continuing to run off much of their senior staff, i.e., the legacy developers who had developed TW2 and TW3 and consequently developed and knew the RED Engine best. This also means a lot of the features implemented in the Cyberpunk iteration of it are done so in a haphazard, "fast and loose" fashion, with little to no optimization. Their running philosophy seems to be to bludgeon the GPU into submission instead finessing frames out of it. And not only is this because most of the senior devs who know RED best are gone, but the green devs who were left behind also were crunching and trying to develop a game that moderately resembled what was shown in the "gameplay trailer" for the unrealistic launch date imposed upon them from their pathetic excuses for executives. My suspicion is that if development of the RED Engine was spun off to a seperate team of engineers whose sole responsibility was to clean up and optimize what's already there, to partner with dev teams to develop and integrate new features into it as needed, and otherwise to keep it updated and it properly maintained, RED Engine has the potential to be one of the best in the industry for those types of games. As a side note, I also would love to see them drop DirectX12 in favor of Vulkan and also drop Nvidia's various proprietary solutions for AMD's open source, vendor-agnostic counterparts. With both of these changes, there would be no "black box" potentially hindering performance of their games. The engineers always would have the freedom to dig into the source code and change whatever they needed to to gain more and better performance.
SORRY BRAINFARTS BUT ITS INT JUST FOR CONVINIENCE SAKE.LOEV ME ALL KNOWING KEYBOARD WARRIORS WHO SUDDENLY KNOW EEVRYTHING UNDER TEH SUN BUT I BET IF YOU WER EPLACE D TO RUN A COMPANY IT WOULD GO BANKRUPOT WITHIN A WEEK IF LUCKY!!!!!
@@HickoryDickory86 you DO understand that writing your own engine means supporting it on multiple platforms, constantly fixing a lot of bugs that can eventually create new ones. Checking whenever game running on Graphics API A looks the same as on the API B. Some times graphics drivers will try ruining your day. Or, even better thing, DX12/Vk both are messy, and you have to write your own graphics driver similar or better than DX11 did. Some times you'd have to fix small thing like - renaming some variables that are saved per material/scene - kaboom -> you have to migrate all of your projects right now (not really right now, it depends). Source: my experience at work So writing own engine comes with both advantages and quite strong disadvantages. But I think decision of choosing an engine depends on a kind of project you'll have, team size, money, game style, janre and lots of other factors. And I do think that it's a bit of a shame CDPR switching to UE5 instead of keeping their own.
Knowing Creation Engine ever since Oblivion and without even watching the video I'll say this: I'd take the thousands of mods that CE made possible over a mainstream fancy engine any day, thank you very much. No offense to unreal, but everyone and their mother uses it, it's awesome that people stick to proprietary engines that still work best for them.
Now try to make you own game and sell it with creation engine... You can't! The problem here is the oranges and apples. CE is great FOR MODDERS, not for someone trying to make their OWN GAMES. For someone who makes games UE isn't FANCY AT ALL, far from it, is actually the most accessible engine out there. So before you, Bethesda slaves start to shit on UE for the sake of stupid comparison? Why don't you guys go ask Todd if he would borrow to you his precious engine?
@@efxnews4776 he literally did borrow people the engine. It's literally how people are able to make mods lmao. And I'm not shitting on the UE, it's a great engine, it just wouldn't possibly be as moddable as CE is and the majority of Bethesda's player base enjoys creating and using mods in their games because it's so simple to do. And CE obviously is great for people trying to make games, as Bethesda has made several on that engine. There's just isn't open to use for people to make and sell things from (it's in the terms and conditions). No one here was shitting on UE. You just can't read. Why are you so butthurt that people like and watch BGS to keep using the engine?
@@efxnews4776 Everything Steven Seagal said AND the fact that a bunch of really talented mod teams DID, in essence, make their own games. Look up Nehrim, Enderal from SureAI and The Forgotten City which was originally a large mod, later also made into a standalone game on UE. Me saying UE is fancy doesn't mean it's bad, just mainstream. It is in fact more capable than CE on plenty of fields but it, like every other engine doesn't come close to CE's versatility when it comes to modding. CK is among the most (if not the most) versatile kits, period. Being able to make your own shit for a game is not slavery, it's consensual, creative and sure as shit better than not being able to at all.
Interesting video, but as an Unreal user I don't agree with a lot of the points made. When you sign up to use Unreal Engine you're given access to the source code of the engine in a private Git repo. It's not open source, that implies you can freely share the source, but you have access and can make custom versions of UE with what changes you want. This is the same codebase that the Epic team building Unreal work on themselves and so you're not artificially limited. If you hit a major problem, and if you have the skills, you can fix it yourself. You can even push the changes back to the engine and, if Epic accept the Git push, it'll be part of the core and you won't need to patch the same changes into future releases if you update- and if not then normally updating patches is a fairly quick task. It's this level of access you need if you're writing Borderlands and want to rewrite large parts of the rendering system, or writing Fortnite and need to rework the network system to handle more players- and, yes, Fortnite is by Epic but there's nothing in their changes that an external company couldn't have done too. As a specifc example if you want better mod coding support then add better mod coding support directly to the engine, or even as a plugin which links in. Get the runtime for Lua, JavaScript V8, AngelScript or similar and link it into the Unreal engine, there're plugins for this on the Marketplace and NCSoft did it with linking JavaScript support in for their games (now UnrealJS, a downloadable extension). It's tricky to get right and performant, moving data quickly between the managed scripting engine and the C++ UE is using is a challenge, but it's do-able. If you're a company on the scale of Bethesda then even contact Epic directly about getting access to their preview version of Verse, a scripting language they're working on which will make UE5 a lot more mod-friendly. From what little we've seen it looks a bit like Python but with massive support for co-routines and similar techniques to make it so you can focus on building the gameplay logic you're after without needing to worry about how it ties into the frame updates. It looks to be building on top of the SkookumScript technology (who Epic acquired) so if you want more info their 'Death to the Tick' article is good. You can also add support for loading models at runtime this way so modders can add content easily, I did this myself with a .obj importer years back (imported real-time captured and textured models at 25fps, was pretty nifty) and with UE5's Geometry Scripting it's now possible to import a mesh included as a full Nanite model so all the nice detail level and lighting we're seeing. Same with textures, audio and all the other asset types. If you decide to support it then you can even use UE as your modding environment. Let modders use Unreal as their level editor, and have an open API spec exposing your internal systems to them via Blueprint and/or C++. I've written a few small add-ons to Satisfactory because they use UE and I could add logic in C++, and I enjoyed the game. It is a different skill set and you risk losing modders who don't want to learn Unreal, but you also stand to gain modders who already know Unreal or want to learn as it's a more useful skill which will allow them to make their own games later on. There's also a lot more learning resources for how to use Unreal than there are for even the best supported custom modding systems so learning should be quicker. This isn't easy and will take time but this is not a solo dev working from their bedroom, this is a AAA development with massive budgets. Take a small fraction of the team working on maintaining and updating their own engine and move them to fixing issues and adding functionality to Unreal and you've got the benefits of the UE5 rendering (Lumen+Nanite is amazing for open world with the detail level and real-time dynamic global illumination, and is why the Matrix demo looked good) and a much more stable framework together with all of the company-specific special sauce that Bethesda could ever want. It will also increase the minimum spec but that's probably not as big an issue as people seem to think. Skyrim running on very low-spec PCs isn't because Skyrim was built to run on very low-spec PCs, it's because Skyrim is over a decade old. As the times Skyrim's requirements were the equivalent of a decent Unreal game nowadays, and I've run UE5 projects on a GeForce 1080 which, while high-end at release, is now a six year old card and two generations out of date. When Bethesda release their next game it won't be running comfortably on Skyrim-level hardware.
People also don't understand that UE is not really great at handling big dynamic complex open worlds that Bethesda games are known for. Sure, there are UE4 games with big levels, but even then they are no match to Beth open worlds. Obsidian tried to replicate the Fallout NV formula in UE4 through The Outer Worlds, and even though it's a good game, it's nowhere near the openness and complexity of Fallout NV which ran on Gamebryo. Funnily enough, in UE5, Epic remodified the engine to use CELL based area asset streaming/loading to support huge open worlds. A system which Bethesda has been using for the last 2 decades in both Gamebryo and Creation Engine. Sure, the graphics renderer, physics and animation engine in the Creation Engine is way out of date, but other than that, Bethesda did a lot of things with their engine which was way ahead of their time. In fact, it's these advance features (along with modding) which carried their games through decades instead of eye candy like graphics and photorealism which honestly doesn't matter much in the grand scale of game development. Creation Engine 2 (Starfield) is resolving a lot of those outdated systems and issues, like a completely new PBR pipeline, physics and animation system which will all improve the overall experience by a lot, and will bring the engine back to modern standards. Not to mention all the more awesome mods that can take advantage of these new systems.
It's not wacky to the "silent majority", it's just that it's so popular to bash them a smaller vocal group is all you hear - meanwhile the masses are racking up thousands of hours in Skyrim and Fo4....
I think the other problem is that UE4 isn't really suited to big open worlds... could be wrong but I don't think it's as capable as the CE at streaming textures/LODs etc. The only UE4 game that is kinda open world RPG I can think of is The Outer Worlds, and even then it's not truly open, more like an assemblage of large hub areas - and it doesn't really run all that well.
Finally a TH-camr that talks sense about the creation engine and doesn't just shit on it despite not taking into account any of the reasons they use their own in house engine
I love how your video easily explains how having a proprietary game engine allows devs to easily manage and tune their creation process. I mean id Tech is the most efficient and well optimised engine out there that allows a game to run on a Hierarchy or power levels and is a reason why Microsoft wants to expand its use and allow more of their in-house studios to implement it.
Okay, as much a meme as Unreal Engine is, and as good as Unreal Engine is at recreating small bits of gorgeous scenery from Skyrim, there’s an emphasis on the “small bits of scenery.” There’s a big difference between creating a town or a tower and actually creating the open world they’re contained in. Of course you can afford to be more detailed, (not to mention it’s an updated engine since 2011) and of course you can worry less about the amount of assets that take up memory to be loaded in, especially if you’re just recording the environments and not actively playing a character with the all options of customisation, the NPCs, the interactable terrain, while also rendering in the distant scenery like mountains from across the map. I imagine it might start to struggle under that load as well.
This is incorrect that unreal engine cannot handle large open world. Previous generation would have struggled, but ue5 is built with open world in mind. Witcher 4 is being built in ue5. The reason you stay with your own engine is because it is a specialist engine, meaning what you want is built into it. If you switch to a generalist engine, you would have to make the lacking features yourself. Also unreal engine is open source you can modify the source to suite your needs. I can assume its also a factor that there is a 5% royalty cut. Which may be greater than what it currently costs them to manage their engine.
@@asiseverything3404 Not certain any more on that last point, given Bethesda has a team of ~200 people working on the engine to try and push it's update for Starfield last I knew.
Sorry, but this is totally not true. Especially not in UE 5. The technology is kinda revolutionary even for large-scale maps, and actually allows far away horizons scenery that is otherwise often faked to be actually rendered cheaply. The last thing that was missing was nanite vegetation wind support, and it's coming out now. Unreal Engine 5 is actually with its latest technologies has overall lower FPS but pretty much constant and not that much dependable on objects in scenes and render distance in comparison to other engines. Just for the record, I'm Unity Freetime Fanguy, tried many different engines and we use CryEngine as a main in our company, but everyone here realizes every other engine is just miles behind and most likely won't recover for A-tier 3D games (which is kinda sad) on basically every level.
AND THERE IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HAVING RESEARCHED SOMETHING AND NOT RESEARCHING SOMETHING!!!!!! AND YOUY DEFFINETLY DIDNT RESEARCH ANYTHING ABOUT UE5 WHATSOEVER!!!!!!!! YOUR OWN COMMENT PROVES IT!!!!!!
Not entirely true about unreal being updated and ruining the game, you have an option to update or keep working on the game in the current version. There not being a feature or functionality for your game, that makes more sense but unreal allows you to write your own code, you can add on whatever you want. You really aren’t limited.
ya that's why I side you can't update it (unless I accidentally cut that part out). Also there's still limitations that you have to work around when writing your own code.
It's worth pointing out that most game studios that use Unreal (including Epic themselves, I think) don't use a release version of the engine. Rather, they have their own custom version of the engine with any type of tweaks that they need to make to the engine itself. Unreal Engine isn't *technically* open source (because of licensing agreements) but the engine's source code is available and anyone can modify it to build their own version of it. These custom versions will still need to be updated if they want the latest new features, but typically that's pretty easy to do as long as the custom changes aren't anything too crazy, and will ideally just be a git merge.
It’s not hard to port from unreal engine 4 to 5. Only issues I had with minor or major update is that some of my code needs rework but not much. If Epic deprecates part of API the code editor will tell you few updates before it happens so you have time to fix it before it would stop working and it does not happen a lot.
Using the wrong engine for a game is disastrous. BioWare were forced to use FrostBite, an engine designed for FPS multiplayer like BattleField in a singleplayer RPG in DA:I and ME:A. It didn't even have basic stuff like saving and loading.
Saving and Loading are things you actually write when developing a game. In UE, basic saving and loading system can be done in under an hour using BPs.
game dev here, they use their own proprietary engine so they don't have to pay any licensing fees as well as the fact that they are comfortable with it and can easily customize it to their liking. That's it
Unreal Engine is open source so developers can fix bugs by themself. Also, the unreal engine allows modding tools to create (like editing specific parts of code and all assets). Also, switching engines require reteaching most developers.
An in-house engine is always better in basically every way. Someone else's engine, especially one that's meant to be general-purpose, just gets in the way and requires a lot of work to get it to do what you want efficiently. Graphics means little because most have good capabilities in that regard- and it's more about assets, implementation, and constraints specific to the game when it comes to the end result.
Probably less about profits and more about handing code for proprietary tools over to Epic. Epic allows UE forking, but licensees who fork it have to share it with Epic. Bethesda likes to keep their tools proprietary
The engine is versioned, so if you use 4.27 you're golden. Updates that are released on that version will, for the most part, just fix bugs. Some bugs don't get addressed until a new version of the engine is updated and other bugs even much later than that. Also, the engine is for a large part open to developers to get into the deeper end of things. Large companies can use the engine as a base and build upon it themselves. And the engine is compartmentalized. Meaning you can take out the sound engine and replace it with something else. Same goes for physics, even the rendering if you'd want to go so far. Bethesda using their own engine means they won't have to pay any fees. As for the quest system, that's the major reason why. It's such a convoluted scripting system, it'd be a monstrous task to re-create it, same goes for the AI. Anything done in Bethesda's engine can be done in Unreal, seriously. But the time and money required is absurd. And then there's the pipeline(s). These would completely change everything. I'd be curious to see how much of the new engine is actually just updated from the old one. Like how will the AI behave in Starfield compared to Skyrim and Fallout. It'll be very interesting to see how many bugs Starfield will ship with. After seeing the gameplay trailer my excitement got deflated and then some. But too early to say anything really. Let's hope it'll be a good game but so much has changed since Skyrim and I truly wonder if Bethesda can still make something amazing. Fallout 4 was alright. We haven't seen anything huge like the leap from Morrowind to Oblicion to Skyrim from Bethesda in a long, long time. I hope Starfield can really show us something new and innovative. I have my doubts. But yeah, the incentive to pour money into UE4 to me is really why they probably won't. Not because it can't be done, because the amount of work required and the engine fees probably is the main reason. They have engine programmers and they have their established pipeline of how to get things done.
The problem you run into is with console SDKs. You may start a project on say 4.24 - but over a three year projec, the console SDKs change and at some point the XBox or Sony SDKs require support which is not present in 4.24 - so you either have to upgrade or backport the changes to your version of unreal.
@@zoeherriot That's very true. Right now I know about a project that started a few versions ago and they won't go beyond 4.26 because it's not worth it. They had to fix all the weird stuff that got broken or depricated during engine upgrades. I think the project got updated two or three times. At some point it's not worth it. But a ton of the custom code was for the large part working. The switch SDK got updated not so long ago, which was a headache. :P
@@joure.v Yeah - it's a pain - I had an issue once where we had to migrate to 4.24 - but in doing so it broke a bunch of anti-aliasing code on the PS4. Epic's response was - oh yeah, that's not implemented yet. You can try and port it yourself... that was a tough week. (Not ragging on Epic - it's just that's what happens...)
Honestly, ALL of the points mentioned can be done in UE just as well as in bethesda's own engine. They aren't REAL reasons to not use UE. But there aren't any real reasons why they SHOULD use UE either. Unreal Engine is open source, so you can change / add / remove / correct anything and everything. You can add the entire bethesda AI system to the unreal engine, either directly incorporated, or as plugin. You can add the quest system, or even complete DEV tools. The REAL reason why they should use their own engine is because they have decades of experience building and refining it. It does what they want it to do, and it costs minimal effort to change / correct anything for them. It's also THEYR code, so harder to hack / abuse than an open source engine like UE. AND, by using their own engine, they earn back quite a bit of the cost of developing it. Yes, using UE CAN mean less time programming the engine, more time for developing models, maps, quests etc. But is can also mean more time wasted on needless communication between the engine developers in a different company and the game developers. It all comes down to cost in the end. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE UE, and use it to build games myself. And I make Skyrim mods, so I work with TES creation kit quite a bit. The workflows can't be more different! And I enjoy both TBH :p
Not just modding man. It's the interactive environment. I.e. picking flowers mining minerals. Picking up plates, food etc. That takes a bunch of power. While Unreal engine looks fantastic, it doesn't allow as much interaction with the environment. Without being a pain. I for one prefer interaction vs graphic quality. Just me. You do you.
We would have had it by now if Bethesda let them use steam api, but hey, bethesda are the ones working with an engine older than I am for the sake of modders
Not really about modding, it's about tools. It would be a huge amount of Dev time to implement all the tooling needed for the designers to make a Bethesda game in ue5. Mod support is a nice byproduct of these designer friendly tools
Some huge miss conceptions. Unreal modding is superior than creation kit. Creation kit are a set of tools that help with mod creation but require an obscure specific workflow and other external tools. Meanwhile with Unreal engine modding, you use unreal engine itself to make mods. For example Ark, you can download a version of unreal engine with all the ark assets so that you can create any content. It takes crazy amounts of years to make a whole map for creation kit. Meanwhile for ark, multiple groups of modders make new huge maps every year and they make new dinos with ease. An open engine will always be better for modding then creation kit. Another miss conception is that studios need unreal engine to make updates for them. Unreal engine has it’s source code available to partners and partners can change the code and add code. In other words, they can update the engine to their needs and an added bonus, unreal has support teams for partners
You've also made an enormous misconception. You say "with Unreal engine modding, you use unreal engine itself to make mods." how is that not true with Creation Kit mods? The Creation Kit is the same set of tools Bethesda uses to make their games. Modders are still using the official dev tools, it's not like Halo Forge where it's some fancy legos the developers hand us.
@@ucm6397 I have made mods for both. Creation kit is not a game engine, it lets you read files and add files to the game but it’s not the game engine itself. They are tools made specifically for mods. The devs don’t use those tools, they use the actual game engine. It’s faster to use the actual game engine but creation engine is a private engine. When you sit down to make mods for creation kit, you have to use the limited set of tools they give you plus other community tools. And most importantly, modding requires a different work flow then actual game creation. Half the work is finding workarounds or using the community made workarounds. Fallout and Skyrim have amazing mods not because of Bethesda specifically, but because the community behind the modding create a lot of groundwork
How does everyone not realise that the unreal tech demos of Skyrim are just that tech demos. We see zero gameplay, all we see is a panning camera. People see one tech demo on a game that is ten years old, see the fancy graphics and particle effects and start crying. To turn that into a full game would take so much more work than what you it has already taken to create the demo. Bethesda won't use the unreal engine because all of their code is tied up in the creation engine. And that is not a bad thing. The reactions to these unreal demos are dumb. The demo is a fun exercise for the creator to load the assets into unreal and use that to demo skyrim in a new way. But that is all it is. If we can stop having a go at Bethesda for using the engine that they use. They have been doing this for a long time, they know what they are doing. For them to use unreal we wouldn't see ES6 until 2050.
@EXODST right?! Almost feel petty saying it, but it's just annoying. Everyone also has a go at Bethesda for their engine saying it's outdated, but that's also not an easy thing to understand since yeah sure it's older and perhaps not got all the modcons that an unreal engine game might have, but it works exactly as Bethesda wants it to, for the games they want to make. For good or bad right?! I mean if they release a game so bad that no one buys perhaps they'll go back to the drawing board move to a new engine and design everything from the ground up, but as long as people keep buying their games, that's not going to happen. The engineering challenge would be enormous
[Bookmark] 2:25 Specifically designed to make a Bethesda game. 2:31 Quests are far more simple and easy to build than it would be in UE. 2:52 Graphical fidelity, epic lighting, good rigging animations - it's all just not nearly as necessary for them.
I love how Bethesda keeps making sure that ancient old Bugs always make it into their next gen games that look like last gen games and also forcing their ancient engine to do things it was never designed to do, which results in insane optimization issues.
this arguement is like "we building cars like 1920 so everyone is able to fix it and tune it by itself" ..... the engine is outdated and there is no excuse for it
To provide a small correction you can improve Unreal yourself, but in the liscencing agreement you have to turn over that fix/improvement to Epic. So you are paying to advance their engine rather than your own.
YEAH BUT YOU GET SORCE CODE BASICLAY FOR FREE!!! YOU DONT NEED TO SPEND LITTERAL MILLIONS AND YEARS TO MAKE ONE!!!!!! PEOPEL TYHINK MAKING ENGINE IS EASYA ND CHEAP!!1 IST ONE OF THE MOST EXPENSIVE THINSG TO MAKE!!!!!!! ESPECIALY IF ITS FOR BIGGER GAMES/BIG STUDIO CALIBER GAMES. TEH RANGE IS LITETRALY SEVERAL MILLIONS JUST FOR MAKING AN ENGINE NOT EVEN ADDING THE COST OF EPLOYESE,BUILDING ASSETS,STORYBOARDING,SCRIPTING,ANIMATIONS........ MANY TIMES MOTS OF PRODUCTION BUDGET IS EATEN NOT BY GAVE DEVELOPMING BUT BY ENGINE CREATION ITSELF!!!!
God forbid we have a universal engine that has all of the tools, plugins etc. all in one single location, rather than needing to reinvent the wheel everytime
@@akaslowmoney You're never going to have a single engine that does everything equally well unless your standard for "well" is absolute dog shit or at least sub par. The issue is hardware limitations for any given set of expected hardware specs. Game developers are going to try to utilize what ever hardware performance they feel is reasonably expectable for players to have at the time that game is released. So there is always a resource budget that they need to keep in mind. So they need to decide what are the things they are going to cut corners on and what things are they going to go all out on in order to balance performance and FPS to total resource utilization. Those optimizations usually start by picking the correct engine for what you're trying to achieve and when a dev doesn't do that you get stuff like Star Citizen where they picked Cryengine and then realized that it is a really bad decision for a MMO then shifted to Lumberyard which was ok for an MMO but not so great for FPS and they've ended up rewriting most of the engine and are now basically on a scratch built engine because they relized there wasn't and engine that was good for what they were trying to do.
I'm curently trying to remake Skyrim in Unreal Engine 5.1, and... This my first ever post about this project on the internet, so let's see if people find my comment and share their opinion, but what a challenge to just find/create a heightmap of the whole Skyrim map for the landscape... Btw i'm a noob in Unreal so yeah, it's a challenge, so if anyone would like to help me in this project, i'll be super happy, and maybe one day, i'll create something as huge as Skyblivion ! To anyone reading this, have a lovely day !
The timing on this videos release was damn near perfect. Why Bethesda doesn't use Unreal Engine, not even 20 days after Bethesda announces they are moving to Unreal Engine.
I think your getting confused between studios that work under Bethesda and the Bethesda game studio, which is the studio that makes TES and Fallout, and has no intention of moving, especially since they just invested so much time and money into the creation engine. Those other studios however weren't using the creation engine to begin with.
@@TheCantinaChannel I enjoyed the video, it was well put together. Also thank you for providing me with better information on this. I only heard about it in passing so thank you for the correction.
Basic reason without even thinking; money. Easier to use your own stuff, easier to adapt said stuff to whichever platform you're releasing a game on, easier to fix issues on your own engine, versus something out of the company.
"Since they're making their own engine, if there is something completely fucked, they can just go in and make just enough of a change to make it work(...)" That's definately doesn't sounds like bethesda
This video was much needed to be honest, i see so many people spout off about engines and scripts and oh how Bethesda should totally move on from the old crappy one they got and i always just roll my eyes like, you have no clue what the hell you're on about lol. Having made mods myself and worked on bigger mods with other modders i can guarantee that none of us would even try to take apart a Bethesda game that wasn't built around the creation engine, there's a reason Bethesda modding is so big to begin with but plebs just don't get it.
The main Reason Why Developpers don't change their main technology so easily is inertia Developers at Bethesda are more familiar with Gamebrio/Creation engine, switching to a new and more modern engine has a learning curve which can cost a lot to the company If Bethesda want to use a new technology like Unreal, Unity or CryEngine they will start with a more modest project like any AA Game with few hours of gameplay and not a huge AAA game with hundred hours of gameplay like Skyrim or Fallout
Part of the reason that Bethesda's engine is so easy to mod is because modders have had nearly 25 years to learn how it works, and how to play with it. It came out around 1997 as the NetImmerse game engine, and was used for a number of projects, including Morrowind. Between 2003 and 2007, NetImmerse was retooled to become Gamebryo, but it was still so rooted in NetImmerse, a mod was created for Bethesda's games called Netimmerse Override, something some Bethesda fans should be familiar with. Now why would the Creation Engine- used in Skyrim and Fallout 4- need to override anything from NetImmerse if NetImmerse was replaced by Gamebryo, and Gamebryo was replaced by Creation? Because they're the same engine to the point that Creation is still using NetImmerse as a foundation, and some mods need to be able to override that NetImmerse engine code. The engine powering Starfield and most likely Hammerfell came out in 1997. Yeah, I'd HOPE modders know what they're doing with it by now.
the biggest win that Epic games ever had in terms of UE4 and 5 was making the casual user think that the engine is the be all end all of engine. and that anything thrown into it will always work in the best possible way for everyone. it just never works that way.
Well, I don't fall through the map and run faster when I look at the ground in fortnite, so unreal has that going for it too. They don't have to lock fps for it either.
Thank you thank you thank you it is so annoying to hear some other TH-camrs and even people shitposting and complaining about how buggy the creation engine is and wish that we had jumped to a different engine. But they clearly don't realize how big the modding Community is and if they switched over it would destroy the community and careers of people. The best moments in gaming that I have ever had was modding Skyrim. It has always fun and this is the longest I have ever stuck with a game and usually I only last for a game until I complete every thing on many others. there's not really much else to do after beating everything in a game and I've never really last it even over at least two to three months, until I started playing Skyrim and got into modding. Also it has taught me quite a lot on how games work and Scripts. and gained quite a lot of interest in game development because of it. I spend hours on end messing around with mods adding removing, creating, merging, patching. I would have been so devastated if they had it changed to a different engine I am so glad they're sticking to their engine.
I played Outer Worlds recently, which is the closest we have to a Bethesda RPG on unreal, and made me appreciate the Creation Engine more. The NPCs felt less alive, there was far less interactable clutter, there's barely any mods for it, and it just didn't feel right. There's nothing like a Bethesda RPG, cause the secret sauce is the engine. It might suck, or have issues at times, but it has such a unique feel! Which is so hard to capture on another engine! Outer Worlds is definitely a fun game, I can easily see myself replaying it some time, but it just doesn't hit the same as a Bethesda game.
The Creation Engine is incredibly versatile, and it can evolve and it has evolved really damn well. Bethesda focuses on design rather than visual quality, like particles and lighting, look at any of the guns or robots of Fallout 4 and that's obvious, I mean look how goddamn intricate those things are. But above all else, because it's so versatile, they're able to change it and get it to look good, improving visual quality without sacrificing utility, it makes it easier for them to construct things as it's all right there. When TES 6 comes out, I wonder just how much they'll improve the Creation Engine, and especially what the Creation Kit will be like in the future. How versatile and useable it'll be. Modding is a Bethesda staple as they're all about supporting it and it even has lead to them finding employees to hire through this medium. Say what you want, but I'll fucking admit it, I'm a Bethesda fan, at least when it comes to TES.
Betheadas engine is also incredibly modular and modable. With unreal bethesda would have to provide their engine source files etc. Eg the ark mod kit is like 200+ gb big because its literally their source files. And you need to grab unreal which is addintional 30gb. With a beth game you just download the creation kit and the game itself becomes the source and everything is directly modifiable .
And, this also means that the OpemMW project may one day be able to run Fallout games and Skyrim and Oblivion. It can already run parts of thier maps do to many things just being the same as in 2002.
i mean creation engine is made so everything is a moveable object without lagging down the whole system. im not sure if unreal is as far on this as creation is. as creation engine has been pretty much the only real engine for this stuff for many years, summoing and moving around in 500 cheese wheeels is a prime example of how it can handle alot of objects.
And not only it's able to move 500 cheese wheels. It's also able to persist them in your save, so anything you change in the game world is there forever, a permanent mark in the world. Other than minecraft and it's clones, no other games let you modify the game worlds as much as Creation Engine games do.
@kyzantia8884 You can have mods on Console lol unless your a PS player then you might as well not have any because of how stingy Sony is about external assets.
Disclaimer: I love Skyrim and most Bethesda things. That being said " they use their own engine to early squash bugs" doesn't really make sense when their games are notoriously buggy...
Another thing I want to point out is Bethesda's engine has feature of making every ingame objects interactable, not sure if Unreal can do that yet, but this was the given reason why Fallout 4 runs on Creation Engine, and not id tech 6 that used to power DOOM 2016, even though it's better looking and from the same company, id tech 6 just isn't built for open world RPG.
Seem to be linking to this game a lot here (it's a good example of a moddable Unreal game, as well as being good fun and worthy of better recognition- but do get the "Smart!" mod if you want to play at a good speed) but here's some footage of a megafactory built inside Satisfactory- th-cam.com/video/-hu5bRhcPtU/w-d-xo.html What you're looking started as an open world wilderness and the player built the factory themselves- so now it's all dynamic objects with dynamic lighting, nothing prebuilt and baked. Every machine is actively working to make things ("The factory must expand to meet the growing needs of the factory's expansion") with potentially different settings for each, and can be interacted with to adjust them, and even the floors and walls can be recoloured and similar, and this can cover a good sized map with factory. The items zooming along on the conveyor belts are actual game objects too and you can walk up to take them or drop others on as you want. This is also Unreal Engine 4, not Unreal Engine 5. Add Nanite and Lumen to this and it'd look a lot better with more detail on the machines, and really impressive real-time lighting effects. Most of the objects don't have physics enabled, but most things in Skyrim don't either- I can't push over the stalls in Whiterun. That's not really a problem though, Unreal has had PhysX physics engine support for years so can do many watermelons, and now has their new Chaos engine which is built to be more performant and capable of being network replicated better which matters for multiplayer.
Okay here is the thing, we don't want witcher 3 or zelda in unreal because those games work perfectly fine in their native engines, however Bethesda games are notoriously broken using their native engines to the point that they directly conflict with game development for how hard and frustrating it is to work with
A short answer: Because engines don't make good games. When someone says something like "Why do they just use Unreal 5!" It only confirms that the person knows absolutely nothing about programming or game dev. Nice video BTW!
People talk about radiant quests as if they're some god-tier technical accomplishment that would be a nightmare to reimplement when it seems like it's a glorified random number generator. Like, so instead of explicitly scripting "I would like you to go out and fetch me 14 boar asses", the radiant quest system generates "I would like you to get {random number} of {random loot item}"? It seems like something that their marketing team made up, rather than some arcane, proprietary system that their devs spent years perfecting.
They could have the manpower and skill to make their own engine go with time, but the games still sells like hot butter, so why try harder, right? They botched magic, because they can't have to large cities to traverse and made them separate interior cells, so you can't jump or levitate around. We see the same with Starfield. It's cells separate by loading screens. Their corporate logic doesn't demand anything more advanced.
The creation engine will need eventually a bigger overhaul if it wants to stay competitive with other AAA big boys in the long run, there is a limit of how much duct tape can be used to hide engine problems.
You need to consider what is unique with Bethesda's video games to see how far ahead the creation engine is ahead of other AAA video games in terms of creating an interactive world.
Lets see, facial animations are janky, bugs accumulated from previous titles (since morrowind) appear inside new ones, vehicles like for example trains are not separate entities but npcs with the head a train, it cannot create a seamless transition between caves and the outer world (gothic could do it and that game its eurojank), ladder climbing is impossible unless its a level transition), unfixed memory leaks (experienced a couple in fallout new vegas), im no modder but this is my experience with Bethesda games from morrowind through skyrim.
Finally a clear and objective video on the pros and cons of UE5 and the Creation Engine. People see UE5 demo videos on TH-cam, but look no further and don't understand what is involved. Having different engines for different types of games is a good thing, we don't want all games to play the same, and have the same mechanics. It will be interesting to see what happens with the Witcher 4, now that they are using Unreal Engine 5. Will they change the Unreal Engine to suit their game (they're working in partnership with Epic), or will they change their game to suit the Unreal Engine? I'm hoping the former, but fear it will inevitably be the latter.
Because mods :l Can't release a dev tool for an engine you don't own. It would never be as good as creation kit. They don't have to worry about licensing since they own all the assets. People shit on Bethesda a lot but I do appreciate their dedication to supporting mods and the creation engine is a big part of that whether you like it or not. I think people need to understand that modding is a core pillar of Bethesda's design philosophy, it's the way they want you to play their games.
The only real point made here that is actually valid is: Their own engine is especially good at making a 'bethesda game'. Because they make engine and tools necessary to create the specific games they wish to make, so they can bake in reusable features for their games directly into the engine itself which makes releasing more titles easier. However because of points I'll make below this can be both a double edged sword, and not something that is exclusive to inhouse engines (It's perfectly possibly to bake this into Unreal yourself or create packages/modules/plugins for reusable tools and code) Look at Final Fantasy 15. The game suffered so many technical issues during development because the executives insisted on using an inhouse engine but they wanted new features and snazzy next-gen graphics. If you look at some of the interviews with the developers you'll find the game took so long simply because the developers spent so long on updating their existing inhouse engine and working out bugs that they barely got time to work on the actual game, and then by the time they released almost every other engine they could've used was leaps and bounds ahead in technology. The main reason a lot of studios use inhouse engines is simple, money. Unreal Engine, Unity and any other BIG well funded and well developed engine is often free to a point for indie developers but for big titles that gross past a certain amount, the engine developers start taking a cut of the profits. In the case of Unreal this is 5% of gross revenue after the product has earned more than $1million in lifetime gross revenue. For some studios this is acceptable, but for others it's not and a lot of executives who don't understand the development process are usually the ones who decide this and they see an existing inhouse engine and usually don't see any need to pay for another one either upfront or as profit sharing. The reason your point about updates breaking development is moot is because of both the first point I made as well as the fact, Unreal itself, is open-source. So a studio could quite easily fork the repo and build the version of the engine they want to stick with for development, if there are specific fixes or features they wish to add, they can pull from original repo onto their fork and merge it into a branch to test if it breaks anything before deciding if they should use the new changes.
The title probably isn't a 100% serious question but it got me thinking and I had to chime in. When Skyrim came out let alone before that when it was in development the version of UE that was around then couldn't do open world. It was focused on more detailed an enclosed areas and would have required more memory and processing power than the software was designed for (consoles wouldn't be able to handle it so they were never going to design it that way even if they could). I was just recently watching a video about how 00s shooters that used UE COULD NOT handle 90s style fps levels that were wide open, fully loaded or explored freely because of this very reason. It couldn't load up an entire sprawling level with multiple routes, it could only do a section at a time in linear chunks. When EA adapted cryengine for open world stuff it really struggled for similar (but also some other) reasons.
When people watch all those "THIS IS WHAT _______ LOOKS LIKE IN UNREAL ENGINE" they tend to forget all the money and manpower and planning that goes into existing development and why it may actually not be the best idea for devs to replicate what's going on in those fan demo vids.
@@mezzb I'm pretty sure smash ultimate actually does that with unreal Though Nintendo programmers are wizards so there's probably not really anyone else that would do that
Isn’t the main reason is because in house engines can be more versatile and customizable for the games the developers want to make vs the unreal engine which is very good looking and useful for making games but it’s more limited in scope
2:26 - 2:28 there you go, this is like the entire reason lol. The one-size-fits-all suit may look newer, but Bethesda has a tailored suit they've spent decades sewing pockets into and filling with spaghetti
the memory leaks alone on another engine that they don't have control over would make their games unplayable and put them out of business is the real answer.
If anyone chats shit about the Skyrim engine graphics, I would recommend downloading/playing a mod called 'Voyage to the Dreambourne Isles' - I've played thousands of video games in my life, but never had I spend hours just in awe of the beauty of the scenery until I played that mod. It's like taking a trip into the imagination of a genius artist who dropped some LSD after reading a high-fantasy novel - with all the buggyness, weirdness and downright wonder that such an idea entails.
The one and only simple anwser...well four actually : 1. It's annoying to learn a completely new engine. 2. They wanna use their own. 3. Fees 4. Needing to make new modding tools.
It would be nice if they used unreal engine with reading AI probably there can be a reskin and elder scrolls and maybe in the skyrim game they released
So the reason Bethesda doesn't use unreal reads something like this: Tod Howard doesn't have the best talent in the graphics department anymore but the current dudes are the ones that have done such great work for the company they have tenure. That means all technology is based on what those guys know best and they're just too darned proud of their code to go do anything else.
Why can’t you mod a game created with ue 5?
It's not that you can't but rather that it is very inaccessible. The creation kit is a tool built out of the creation engine to give modders the rough tools that Bethesda's quest and world designers would have. It's incredibly easy and intuitive to use compared to UE. If Bethesda did switch the easiest choice to make would to just say Modders can use UE to make mods, and hopefully they would release all the code they wrote to manage the game, quests, NPCs, since UE doesn't have any of that by default. Without that code it would be very challenging to implement new quests or characters since your pretty much guessing as to what Bethesda might have done; which would mean modding would only be available to the expert programmers. And Bethesda would not want to release that code as it would be a legal nightmare to manage (considering people who would steal the code for their own projects, not just individuals but other big dev's). But releasing that code would also have some legal problems for Epic Games since some of that would likely include code written exclusively for UE, which contrary to popular belief is not Open Source. UE is Source Available which means you can look at it but you can take it or repurpose it without express permission.
The harder option would be what they already did when they made morrowind which is create a completely independant tool like the creation kit, that they can hand out all they want without violating any license agreements or revealing any code that could be then stolen by outside parties, or be used for corporate espionage giving their competitors a leg up, which happens pretty much all the time.
I see, thanks for the explanation. So in a way it’s easier to create a new game in UE than to mod one?
@@micholitzia5726 Any engine can be easy to mod, it's all about whether the developers are willing to package and release their internal tools that they use to make the process easier. That's why it's far easier to mod Bethesda games than most, because they provide the tools. UE has quite decent tools as it is, the reason it's a bad choice is it's bad at open world games even with all the new stuff in 5. CryEngine otoh would be excellent because its a beast at open worlds and can handle tons of physics objects, and it's Sandbox is actually also a great editor that lets you test things live without compiling. Frankly the Creation Kit's tools are hardly improved over Gamebryo, mostly just better UI. They are nothing to write home about, it's just that people know them well.
You can, but it's a spectacular pain in the ass.
@LogmanBenson We don't speak Orcish
Am I the only one who likes the radiant AI in Oblivion? I liked that people had random conversations instead of the same one over and over when you entered an area
I enjoy it.
i've played Skyrim recently and with in a few days i'm already tired of the convos they have and the same comments they make towards me as i walk past them. I got a disease and it's refreshing to hear them comment on something else for once lol
No, it’s quite enjoyable! I love listening to them.
I've heard others say the same.
I always loved it myself. I didn't realize how much of a joke it was to fans until social media lol so for years I thought it was cool and normal then in the early 2010s noticed everyone thought of it as a joke. Don't get me wrong I love the memes but to me it's still cool and not as jokey as others think.
I want elder scrolls 6 to have more advanced version of radiant ai
same
And I want Elder Scrolls 6. Like, now. ;:y not in 5 to 7 years! Now! So far, Starfield doesn't even seem to have interesting factions I'd like to learn more about, so thats probably not as entertaining to me as Fallout and the Elderscrolls are! Even though I love space ships and sci fi. But that generic shooting is boring to me.
For Bethesda to implement Radiant AI as originally intended they would need to redesign core game mechanics. Namely the game ecconomy and NPC injury and justice system. Give non trader NPCs the ability to buy and sell, have location damage like in fallout and have other things to manage via survival mechanic, Don't make stealing a crime instantly punishable by death for NPCs.
@@gordyrroy it will probably take about 5 years of modding to get good so the sooner it's out the sooner modders can fix the bugs and improve it.
And I'd like it to play on my laptop because most of us who play on computers don't have nor could afford fancy gamer computers.
Well modding in Unreal is definitely possible. I think the biggest reason they don't do it is because A. It takes a long time to adjust their workflow to suit Unreal instead of Creation Engine and B. They would need to pay licensing fees to Epic Games, which they probably want to avoid in any way possible.
they would also need to build an entirely knew set of modding tools in order for it to be anywhere near as functional, whereas their engine is already built for it.
Unreal engine isn't suited to create the type of open world games BGS is creating
@@t.t6294 That's absolute nonsense.
@@TheCantinaChannel Conan Exiles has modding tools (UE4) since it's beta. If they can do it I have no doubt that it would be relatively easy to implement.
@@Blaise815 Conan Textiles is a game about selling Conan's used loincloths.
I love that this question really amounts to "why didn't Bethesda use Unreal Engine from 2022 for a game they started making in 2006"
They made fallout 4 and 76 since then, get your head out of Howard's crotch
Yeah. The entire video is complete nonsense.
Unreal Engine has been around since 1998.
@@looniper3551 yes. And it was not the same version of unreal engine that exists now. People are asking why Skyrim isn't made on Unreal engine because of how much better it looks, not realizing it's a version of unreal engine ten years newer than the game.
@@looniper3551 Yeah, be the Unreal Engine 4 and 5 didn't existed in 1998.
The Witcher 3’s engine was pretty fantastic as well, for the sake of how seamless and near glitchless the giant map and landscape was itself. It only loaded in what you were facing, which saved so much on rendering and whatnot. Even some games on Unreal still don’t look that good
Cyberpunk 2077: Hold my beer.
I still remember being stuck in that swamp in a witcher 3.
Um no, you probably noticed how lame the in-game npcs are, they are basically static objects, only interactive with the world through cutscenes.
That's not how it works. Glitches, bugs etc are all dependent on how good of a polishing job the devs do. W3 and cyberpunk run on the same engine.
The engine was good for Witcher but terrible for Cyberpunk 2077
Modding the creation engine is usually easy to mod and its one of the main reasons people buy bethesda rpgs
The vast majority of people who play those games do not make mods
@@striker8961 majority of them use the mods though...
Edit: on the pc at least
@@striker8961 no but they play the mods. How many other games do you know that have mods like beyond skyrim.
@@clunky9072 they don't, most player don't play with mods and that applies not only to games from Bethesda but all other games from other developers, because most players follow the path of least resistance.
And Bethesda itself reported that only 8% of Skyrim players have ever used a mod. So most people don't buy Bethesda games for modding.
@@LordHerek most people who play Skyrim on pc for longer than 50 hours use mods.
Creation engine is super easy to use and convenient for anyone who tries. I've tried using other engines, and they're either not as good, way too complicated, or require actual programming still that I do not have
that's because Creation Engine is aimed only at one type of games - Bethesda open world RPGs, not because other engines would be bad.
Creation Engine has mad potential to create massive open worlds or even metaverses.Only thing Bethesda has to do is to refine the engine and remove jank
@@Mike-wb3oc "Refinement" and "removing jank" are not in Bethesda's purview.
I’m honestly remembering why I appreciate Bethesda games again. Out of the box they’re a bit clunky but I just installed 50 mods before I even started fallout 4 for the first time and it ran seamlessly lol
You gotta PRACTICE bruh to get better, cant just pick up a violin and master it bruh
I've done and published mods for Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 / NV, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, Divinity Original Sin 2, Neverwinter Nights, Neverwinter Nights 2, Dragon Age Origins, Dragon Age Inquisition etc.
And I can tell you that all the games I've tried modding, Unreal Engine games are among the hardest to mod, and I am someone with actual programming (JSX, Python, C++, C# etc.), 3D modeling (3Ds Max) and texturing experience.
The issue is that when someone comes to modding scene, and they want to try it out, and eventually improve and become REALLY good at it, the initial threshold can not be too high, or it will kill all interest.
The threshold of using Creation Kit is very low (I started out when I was 14yo with zero programming knowledge), the threshold of Using Unreal engine... you basically have to be an IT engineering student or programmer hobbyist with burning passion for deciphering someone else's code without designer notes.
That's a problem more with the studio's not issuing any documentation and not supporting development of modes, over the engine not doing so. Epic offers a endless sea of documentation as well as low level SDK that lets you functionally rewrite anything you want in the engine.
I mean, that's one of the big hitching points with Creation Kit and modding with Bethesda titles and why we have to turn to code injection and rely on Script Extender teams, to do what high level kits like the Creation Kit cannot, that isn't documented anywhere. You're more benefitting from a long-term dedicated community than from the developers there.
If modders cannot use those Unreal tools with limited programming knowledge, that doesn't help.
The reason SkyUI has been downloaded 24 million times is because it was available 5 weeks after release.
@@SylviusTheMad Semantically you don't need any programming knowledge to use Unreal 4 or 5. It's unadvised, but their visual script system is robust and making a UI wouldn't be too hard.
I would also point out, Sky UI was not made by some noob modder just learning things, but a group with professional experience and programming skills. Still took them around a month.
The way I see it, Unreal itself is highly modifiable as designed by the engine devs, but is only 30% the way to a full game. Then when individual game developers using Unreal implement the remaining 70%, they are likely not paying attention to moddability, which ruins the foundation for any future modders looking to add on new functionality. Additionally, if you had the expertise to develop a moddable framework on Unreal, you would likely then sell that as a "Tool" asset on the UE Marketplace, which means any future modders will need to own that as well.
Skyrim/Creation kit on the other hand is 100% of the game implemented, and moddability/DLCs were at the forefront of the dev's minds for the entire process, so the foundation is 100% solid for any additions. The game devs are creating those tools for their own benefit, and after they sell the game there's no serious profit motive in depriving the mod devs of those tools.
@@ShadoFXPerino I wouldn't say it was intentional entirely on Bethesda's part. A big thing that drives the moddability is the open pack/file structure, which is a byproduct of them adopting Gamebryo early on. Many older engines, even UE2, have more open file structures for reading/loading assets.
That changed in part for security, and in part for more efficient storage and loading of assets on modern engines that archive most of their assets into often proprietary formats.
Even Creation Engine does this, it's just that Bethesda allows people to read their archives through Creation Kit. Modders still end up building tools to actually access, unpack, and repack those files. Bethesda does not provide that functionality. Similarly modders have to force archive invalidation for using the loose file system.
Bethesda stumbled it's way into having a big modding scene early on, but it did grow to support it.
Unreal engine doesn't make world items spaz out when you pick up another item near them. This makes The Bethesda engine ideal for immersing clumsy people into the game world.
Bro..unreal engine is a game engine..you can make any feature u want..dontt know what u r talking about.
OP has no idea what he is even talking about and got 30+ likes. Think about that
@@jackstack2136 this guy couldn't detect the obvious cheekiness in OP. Think about that.
@@jackstack2136 It's a joke, not a dick.
You absolute nerd, it’s a joke. Put the pocket protector down and laugh, you rodent.
Radiant AI is the only way to do Bethesda NPC’s they feel like real people in Oblivion. The lack of that in Skyrim was one of the first things I noticed when playing Skyrim where the dialogue was repetitive and stale
The ease of modding is the biggest strength of the creation engine. Even a person like myself with no programing experience can learn to do basic things in it that would not be possible for any other engine that I am aware of. It has been this way since Morrowind with very little change in that regard. I don't have to know how to program to add an item to an NPC or even add a whole other NPC. Which really opens modding to people that would never otherwise even try to mod a game. It also allows those that do know how to program and script things and other programming stuff I don't even know about work their magic on a 10 year old game and make it do things that the Bethesda probably never thought to do with it. Mods are a major reason why Bethesda games have a longevity to them rarely found in other games of this type. Modders have kept Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind and the Fallout series (Yes I'm including New Vegas it uses the engine and mods are a huge part of it to). A lot of people that complain about the engine do not realize how much the modding community would lose if they switched. Thank you for putting into words something I have thought for a long time.
so you make new modding tools for the new engine
Lots of games define stuff like items or NPCs in configuration files that you can change without programming with the right tools. It's hardly a special feature of the creation engine rather a common practice.
@@101Mant except there's no documentation and you need to know what you're doing because files and stats are named with numbers instead of descriptive names. You don't even need the guide offered by Bethesda to learn how to use their Creation Kit, (a guide is something that other games don't even have, why would they? They don't support modding) i learned it solely by clicking the items and seeing how everything works.
It's THAT easy.
@@hoesmad8626 It's not that easy. Changes have to made to make a game moddable.
@@ghostwizard7597 same with blueprints in unreal engine. You're just clicking things and connecting lines. It's their visual scripting language. It's very easy to use
I've been playing Morrowind a lot recently and not gonna lie - I thought the footage from Skyrim in native engine was the UE5 content. It's amazing how your brain just accepts graphical fidelity for what it is after a while.
What a grand and intoxicating innocence... how could you be so naïve?
@@baronvonbeandip Lol, I play on a CRT with less that 900p, enjoy a bleeding wallet for your modern graphics.
Exactly, graphics in gaming never really bothered me (although except the DOS Era and SNES)
@@ammagon4519 Some of those games are still worth playing tho
@@ammagon4519 what? those graphics were golden
Although I've seen a lot of people criticize the Creation Engine, I actually like it because it's difficult to comprehend but is incredibly mod-friendly. I appreciate it when developers use their own engines to create their games.
Warframe's Evolution engine is also proprietary, and that game runs on Integ graphics, and soon, mobile!
It was fine until... New Vegas. Since then it has been enough behind the pack that it's hard to justify. And it isn't their own engine, its the Gamebryo, but on steroids. Much how Call of Duty still runs on a hotrodded Return to Castle Wolfenstein engine. As for being able to mod, that's mostly about the devs supplying the right tools more than anything.
Ok but it's just a way worse engine overall. Starfield is garbage already. Get with the times!
@@thetowerfantasymusic Dude came in a comment from a year ago to lie to himself lol
@@thetowerfantasymusic the creation engine is very poorly written for what I have heard. It is unoptimized for modern hardware, was a cpu chugger when it released, and honestly without modding their games would be mid. Its that most game lack tools made by the developer to mod their games either because of licensing issues or more commonly they don't have the energy to do so. I look at operation harsh doorstop, a skeleton of a game and how they implemented tools to mod it from the start, wishing more developers would give us a good framework to build upon. That was why ARMA 2&3 was successful, why bethesda keeps people playing, and doom still has an active scene.
I feel like you forgot one of the biggest benefits for a game company to make their own engine and that is they don't need to pay a fee to Unreal.
I mean a lot of these big companies want to maximize profits
Thats a much bigger part in the decision-making for a large developer than a small Indy team. Especially since Bethesda sells games for longer than a decade, and lots of different platforms.
Yeah, they just have the keep dozens of specialized employees on the payroll indefinitely, that's way cheaper.
@@smolpener7430 It actually is! You don't understand just how expensive licensing fees are. While keeping an employee with skills and experience is worth much more to you
They didn't make this engine, tho. It's the Gamebryo engine. They've been using it since Morrowind and just "improving" it since then. Does that mean lots of bugs? Yup. And they're perfectly content allowing the community to deal with that via unofficial patches and mods.
@@MrCobalt Bethy has done a poor job of engine design and updating for a long time. There are a ton of bugs, glitches and problems in the CE that have been solved - admittedly, Bethy has to give the dev's enough time (and enough dev's) to fix them but it's possible.
That being said, they do own the old Gamebryo engine now and have made so many updates to it that it's like saying anything built on UE 5 is just the old UE 1 engine from, ya know, the game Unreal back in 1998. It's disingenuous. The newest Creation Engine is leagues ahead of the original Gamebryo engine.
By the way, UE 5 has code that is as old as the original UE 1 engine from back in the day. Since UE 5 is an update to a 27 year old engine, essentially, it must be as much garbage as the Creation Engine, whose code base was founded 1 year prior to the original UE 1, right?
It's actually alot more simple. Money and experience. They got tons of experience with their own engine and they're not looking to pay royalties to Epic.
Unlike the totally *wrong* reasons given in the presentation, these are actual valid reasons.
I understand why many developers use the Unreal Engine. That said, I applaud all the studios and publishers, included Bethesda, who are hell-bent on using their own. In fact, we need **more** studios building and using their own engines! We do not needs games technology monopolized under a single company and their one proprietary engine, which is what's happening more and more with every studio that caves and opts for the Unreal Engine for convenience's sake.
I was so very sad to hear that CD Projekt Red was going to drop their RED Engine for Unreal Engine 5 moving forward. I understand the logic behind that choice, especially considering the fact that they had run off most of their senior devs who had helped to build and were intimately familiar with RED Engine, and that the majority of their workforce now is effectively new hires, probably fresh out of college and who only know Unreal Engine because their college coursework required it. Again, I get it. But I don't like it. And it still makes me sad.
i completely agree with you. About CDproject...well, looking at the absolute mess they made with cyberpunk i'd rather have a game made with UE5 at this point. The "photorealistic" look of cyberpunk can be achieved only with an ultra expensive pc. Even with a 3050ti it runs like crap.
@@astral_anomaly2250 Much of that is the fact that CDPR higher ups and their disastrous development philosophy/practice had and was continuing to run off much of their senior staff, i.e., the legacy developers who had developed TW2 and TW3 and consequently developed and knew the RED Engine best. This also means a lot of the features implemented in the Cyberpunk iteration of it are done so in a haphazard, "fast and loose" fashion, with little to no optimization. Their running philosophy seems to be to bludgeon the GPU into submission instead finessing frames out of it. And not only is this because most of the senior devs who know RED best are gone, but the green devs who were left behind also were crunching and trying to develop a game that moderately resembled what was shown in the "gameplay trailer" for the unrealistic launch date imposed upon them from their pathetic excuses for executives.
My suspicion is that if development of the RED Engine was spun off to a seperate team of engineers whose sole responsibility was to clean up and optimize what's already there, to partner with dev teams to develop and integrate new features into it as needed, and otherwise to keep it updated and it properly maintained, RED Engine has the potential to be one of the best in the industry for those types of games.
As a side note, I also would love to see them drop DirectX12 in favor of Vulkan and also drop Nvidia's various proprietary solutions for AMD's open source, vendor-agnostic counterparts. With both of these changes, there would be no "black box" potentially hindering performance of their games. The engineers always would have the freedom to dig into the source code and change whatever they needed to to gain more and better performance.
SORRY BRAINFARTS BUT ITS INT JUST FOR CONVINIENCE SAKE.LOEV ME ALL KNOWING KEYBOARD WARRIORS WHO SUDDENLY KNOW EEVRYTHING UNDER TEH SUN BUT I BET IF YOU WER EPLACE D TO RUN A COMPANY IT WOULD GO BANKRUPOT WITHIN A WEEK IF LUCKY!!!!!
@@goranstojanov1160 Try writing that again, but this time without all caps and using proper English. Thank you.
@@HickoryDickory86 you DO understand that writing your own engine means supporting it on multiple platforms, constantly fixing a lot of bugs that can eventually create new ones. Checking whenever game running on Graphics API A looks the same as on the API B. Some times graphics drivers will try ruining your day. Or, even better thing, DX12/Vk both are messy, and you have to write your own graphics driver similar or better than DX11 did.
Some times you'd have to fix small thing like - renaming some variables that are saved per material/scene - kaboom -> you have to migrate all of your projects right now (not really right now, it depends).
Source: my experience at work
So writing own engine comes with both advantages and quite strong disadvantages.
But I think decision of choosing an engine depends on a kind of project you'll have, team size, money, game style, janre and lots of other factors.
And I do think that it's a bit of a shame CDPR switching to UE5 instead of keeping their own.
Knowing Creation Engine ever since Oblivion and without even watching the video I'll say this: I'd take the thousands of mods that CE made possible over a mainstream fancy engine any day, thank you very much.
No offense to unreal, but everyone and their mother uses it, it's awesome that people stick to proprietary engines that still work best for them.
People don't seem to realize that with the CE, Elder Scrolls and Fallout titles wouldn't be nearly as moddable.
@@stevenseagal5950 yeah.. should bethesda one day uses UE... they will bitch about why there're no more mods for the games
Now try to make you own game and sell it with creation engine...
You can't!
The problem here is the oranges and apples.
CE is great FOR MODDERS, not for someone trying to make their OWN GAMES.
For someone who makes games UE isn't FANCY AT ALL, far from it, is actually the most accessible engine out there.
So before you, Bethesda slaves start to shit on UE for the sake of stupid comparison? Why don't you guys go ask Todd if he would borrow to you his precious engine?
@@efxnews4776 he literally did borrow people the engine. It's literally how people are able to make mods lmao.
And I'm not shitting on the UE, it's a great engine, it just wouldn't possibly be as moddable as CE is and the majority of Bethesda's player base enjoys creating and using mods in their games because it's so simple to do.
And CE obviously is great for people trying to make games, as Bethesda has made several on that engine. There's just isn't open to use for people to make and sell things from (it's in the terms and conditions).
No one here was shitting on UE. You just can't read.
Why are you so butthurt that people like and watch BGS to keep using the engine?
@@efxnews4776 Everything Steven Seagal said AND the fact that a bunch of really talented mod teams DID, in essence, make their own games. Look up Nehrim, Enderal from SureAI and The Forgotten City which was originally a large mod, later also made into a standalone game on UE.
Me saying UE is fancy doesn't mean it's bad, just mainstream. It is in fact more capable than CE on plenty of fields but it, like every other engine doesn't come close to CE's versatility when it comes to modding. CK is among the most (if not the most) versatile kits, period. Being able to make your own shit for a game is not slavery, it's consensual, creative and sure as shit better than not being able to at all.
Interesting video, but as an Unreal user I don't agree with a lot of the points made.
When you sign up to use Unreal Engine you're given access to the source code of the engine in a private Git repo. It's not open source, that implies you can freely share the source, but you have access and can make custom versions of UE with what changes you want. This is the same codebase that the Epic team building Unreal work on themselves and so you're not artificially limited.
If you hit a major problem, and if you have the skills, you can fix it yourself. You can even push the changes back to the engine and, if Epic accept the Git push, it'll be part of the core and you won't need to patch the same changes into future releases if you update- and if not then normally updating patches is a fairly quick task. It's this level of access you need if you're writing Borderlands and want to rewrite large parts of the rendering system, or writing Fortnite and need to rework the network system to handle more players- and, yes, Fortnite is by Epic but there's nothing in their changes that an external company couldn't have done too.
As a specifc example if you want better mod coding support then add better mod coding support directly to the engine, or even as a plugin which links in. Get the runtime for Lua, JavaScript V8, AngelScript or similar and link it into the Unreal engine, there're plugins for this on the Marketplace and NCSoft did it with linking JavaScript support in for their games (now UnrealJS, a downloadable extension). It's tricky to get right and performant, moving data quickly between the managed scripting engine and the C++ UE is using is a challenge, but it's do-able.
If you're a company on the scale of Bethesda then even contact Epic directly about getting access to their preview version of Verse, a scripting language they're working on which will make UE5 a lot more mod-friendly. From what little we've seen it looks a bit like Python but with massive support for co-routines and similar techniques to make it so you can focus on building the gameplay logic you're after without needing to worry about how it ties into the frame updates. It looks to be building on top of the SkookumScript technology (who Epic acquired) so if you want more info their 'Death to the Tick' article is good.
You can also add support for loading models at runtime this way so modders can add content easily, I did this myself with a .obj importer years back (imported real-time captured and textured models at 25fps, was pretty nifty) and with UE5's Geometry Scripting it's now possible to import a mesh included as a full Nanite model so all the nice detail level and lighting we're seeing. Same with textures, audio and all the other asset types.
If you decide to support it then you can even use UE as your modding environment. Let modders use Unreal as their level editor, and have an open API spec exposing your internal systems to them via Blueprint and/or C++. I've written a few small add-ons to Satisfactory because they use UE and I could add logic in C++, and I enjoyed the game. It is a different skill set and you risk losing modders who don't want to learn Unreal, but you also stand to gain modders who already know Unreal or want to learn as it's a more useful skill which will allow them to make their own games later on. There's also a lot more learning resources for how to use Unreal than there are for even the best supported custom modding systems so learning should be quicker.
This isn't easy and will take time but this is not a solo dev working from their bedroom, this is a AAA development with massive budgets. Take a small fraction of the team working on maintaining and updating their own engine and move them to fixing issues and adding functionality to Unreal and you've got the benefits of the UE5 rendering (Lumen+Nanite is amazing for open world with the detail level and real-time dynamic global illumination, and is why the Matrix demo looked good) and a much more stable framework together with all of the company-specific special sauce that Bethesda could ever want.
It will also increase the minimum spec but that's probably not as big an issue as people seem to think. Skyrim running on very low-spec PCs isn't because Skyrim was built to run on very low-spec PCs, it's because Skyrim is over a decade old. As the times Skyrim's requirements were the equivalent of a decent Unreal game nowadays, and I've run UE5 projects on a GeForce 1080 which, while high-end at release, is now a six year old card and two generations out of date. When Bethesda release their next game it won't be running comfortably on Skyrim-level hardware.
I liked the mismatched water tiles at the end. Modding a Bethesda game is soo much fun...
there is also the fact that the devs just have years of experience on Creation and not on unreal.
If you knew what Bethesdas turnover was you wouldn't be saying that shit
People also don't understand that UE is not really great at handling big dynamic complex open worlds that Bethesda games are known for. Sure, there are UE4 games with big levels, but even then they are no match to Beth open worlds. Obsidian tried to replicate the Fallout NV formula in UE4 through The Outer Worlds, and even though it's a good game, it's nowhere near the openness and complexity of Fallout NV which ran on Gamebryo.
Funnily enough, in UE5, Epic remodified the engine to use CELL based area asset streaming/loading to support huge open worlds. A system which Bethesda has been using for the last 2 decades in both Gamebryo and Creation Engine. Sure, the graphics renderer, physics and animation engine in the Creation Engine is way out of date, but other than that, Bethesda did a lot of things with their engine which was way ahead of their time. In fact, it's these advance features (along with modding) which carried their games through decades instead of eye candy like graphics and photorealism which honestly doesn't matter much in the grand scale of game development.
Creation Engine 2 (Starfield) is resolving a lot of those outdated systems and issues, like a completely new PBR pipeline, physics and animation system which will all improve the overall experience by a lot, and will bring the engine back to modern standards. Not to mention all the more awesome mods that can take advantage of these new systems.
No way unreal could handle diamond city, shit had like, 30 npcs in it.
@@smolpener7430 and how does it handle information of every npc, alot of npc are loaded all the time like caravans.
It doesn't matter. Being bits of code built on top of Gamebryo means that it will be a buggy mess.
@@night_fiend6 UE 5.3 still have lines of code from UE1
@@Khannah69 UE was a good engine to begin with.
Gamebryo doesn't handle large worlds well and is best for rhythm games and simple plat formers.
my hottest, wackiest take is that bethesda's engine is good and I understand why they are hesitant to drop it like everyone seems to want them to
It's not wacky to the "silent majority", it's just that it's so popular to bash them a smaller vocal group is all you hear - meanwhile the masses are racking up thousands of hours in Skyrim and Fo4....
I think the other problem is that UE4 isn't really suited to big open worlds... could be wrong but I don't think it's as capable as the CE at streaming textures/LODs etc. The only UE4 game that is kinda open world RPG I can think of is The Outer Worlds, and even then it's not truly open, more like an assemblage of large hub areas - and it doesn't really run all that well.
Finally a TH-camr that talks sense about the creation engine and doesn't just shit on it despite not taking into account any of the reasons they use their own in house engine
I love how your video easily explains how having a proprietary game engine allows devs to easily manage and tune their creation process. I mean id Tech is the most efficient and well optimised engine out there that allows a game to run on a Hierarchy or power levels and is a reason why Microsoft wants to expand its use and allow more of their in-house studios to implement it.
Okay, as much a meme as Unreal Engine is, and as good as Unreal Engine is at recreating small bits of gorgeous scenery from Skyrim, there’s an emphasis on the “small bits of scenery.”
There’s a big difference between creating a town or a tower and actually creating the open world they’re contained in. Of course you can afford to be more detailed, (not to mention it’s an updated engine since 2011) and of course you can worry less about the amount of assets that take up memory to be loaded in, especially if you’re just recording the environments and not actively playing a character with the all options of customisation, the NPCs, the interactable terrain, while also rendering in the distant scenery like mountains from across the map. I imagine it might start to struggle under that load as well.
not to mention none of these ever show off npcs or anything also
This is incorrect that unreal engine cannot handle large open world. Previous generation would have struggled, but ue5 is built with open world in mind.
Witcher 4 is being built in ue5.
The reason you stay with your own engine is because it is a specialist engine, meaning what you want is built into it. If you switch to a generalist engine, you would have to make the lacking features yourself.
Also unreal engine is open source you can modify the source to suite your needs.
I can assume its also a factor that there is a 5% royalty cut. Which may be greater than what it currently costs them to manage their engine.
@@asiseverything3404 Not certain any more on that last point, given Bethesda has a team of ~200 people working on the engine to try and push it's update for Starfield last I knew.
Sorry, but this is totally not true. Especially not in UE 5. The technology is kinda revolutionary even for large-scale maps, and actually allows far away horizons scenery that is otherwise often faked to be actually rendered cheaply. The last thing that was missing was nanite vegetation wind support, and it's coming out now.
Unreal Engine 5 is actually with its latest technologies has overall lower FPS but pretty much constant and not that much dependable on objects in scenes and render distance in comparison to other engines.
Just for the record, I'm Unity Freetime Fanguy, tried many different engines and we use CryEngine as a main in our company, but everyone here realizes every other engine is just miles behind and most likely won't recover for A-tier 3D games (which is kinda sad) on basically every level.
AND THERE IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HAVING RESEARCHED SOMETHING AND NOT RESEARCHING SOMETHING!!!!!! AND YOUY DEFFINETLY DIDNT RESEARCH ANYTHING ABOUT UE5 WHATSOEVER!!!!!!!! YOUR OWN COMMENT PROVES IT!!!!!!
In Mr. Krabs Voice: Money!
Not entirely true about unreal being updated and ruining the game, you have an option to update or keep working on the game in the current version.
There not being a feature or functionality for your game, that makes more sense but unreal allows you to write your own code, you can add on whatever you want. You really aren’t limited.
ya that's why I side you can't update it (unless I accidentally cut that part out). Also there's still limitations that you have to work around when writing your own code.
@@TheCantinaChannel I also feel like it wouldn’t have that Bethesda feel to it
Thank you for not dragging out the video for the sake of TH-cam bucks. Other TH-camrs would have made this a 10 minute video minimum.
It's worth pointing out that most game studios that use Unreal (including Epic themselves, I think) don't use a release version of the engine. Rather, they have their own custom version of the engine with any type of tweaks that they need to make to the engine itself. Unreal Engine isn't *technically* open source (because of licensing agreements) but the engine's source code is available and anyone can modify it to build their own version of it. These custom versions will still need to be updated if they want the latest new features, but typically that's pretty easy to do as long as the custom changes aren't anything too crazy, and will ideally just be a git merge.
It’s not hard to port from unreal engine 4 to 5. Only issues I had with minor or major update is that some of my code needs rework but not much. If Epic deprecates part of API the code editor will tell you few updates before it happens so you have time to fix it before it would stop working and it does not happen a lot.
Using the wrong engine for a game is disastrous.
BioWare were forced to use FrostBite, an engine designed for FPS multiplayer like BattleField in a singleplayer RPG in DA:I and ME:A. It didn't even have basic stuff like saving and loading.
Saving and Loading are things you actually write when developing a game. In UE, basic saving and loading system can be done in under an hour using BPs.
game dev here, they use their own proprietary engine so they don't have to pay any licensing fees as well as the fact that they are comfortable with it and can easily customize it to their liking. That's it
Unreal Engine is open source so developers can fix bugs by themself. Also, the unreal engine allows modding tools to create (like editing specific parts of code and all assets). Also, switching engines require reteaching most developers.
An in-house engine is always better in basically every way. Someone else's engine, especially one that's meant to be general-purpose, just gets in the way and requires a lot of work to get it to do what you want efficiently. Graphics means little because most have good capabilities in that regard- and it's more about assets, implementation, and constraints specific to the game when it comes to the end result.
Question not asked, question answered, thank you very much.
Much love.
Yours truly,
Nereguar.
This video is basically;
Tell me you have no clue about game engines without telling me
You forgot one of the biggest problems with using a premade engine. Being forced to hand over a percentage of profits to Epic.
Probably less about profits and more about handing code for proprietary tools over to Epic. Epic allows UE forking, but licensees who fork it have to share it with Epic. Bethesda likes to keep their tools proprietary
I’m granting you the title of defender of Bethesda.
Who made you the jarl?
The engine is versioned, so if you use 4.27 you're golden. Updates that are released on that version will, for the most part, just fix bugs. Some bugs don't get addressed until a new version of the engine is updated and other bugs even much later than that.
Also, the engine is for a large part open to developers to get into the deeper end of things. Large companies can use the engine as a base and build upon it themselves. And the engine is compartmentalized. Meaning you can take out the sound engine and replace it with something else. Same goes for physics, even the rendering if you'd want to go so far.
Bethesda using their own engine means they won't have to pay any fees.
As for the quest system, that's the major reason why. It's such a convoluted scripting system, it'd be a monstrous task to re-create it, same goes for the AI.
Anything done in Bethesda's engine can be done in Unreal, seriously. But the time and money required is absurd. And then there's the pipeline(s). These would completely change everything. I'd be curious to see how much of the new engine is actually just updated from the old one. Like how will the AI behave in Starfield compared to Skyrim and Fallout. It'll be very interesting to see how many bugs Starfield will ship with. After seeing the gameplay trailer my excitement got deflated and then some.
But too early to say anything really. Let's hope it'll be a good game but so much has changed since Skyrim and I truly wonder if Bethesda can still make something amazing. Fallout 4 was alright. We haven't seen anything huge like the leap from Morrowind to Oblicion to Skyrim from Bethesda in a long, long time. I hope Starfield can really show us something new and innovative. I have my doubts.
But yeah, the incentive to pour money into UE4 to me is really why they probably won't. Not because it can't be done, because the amount of work required and the engine fees probably is the main reason. They have engine programmers and they have their established pipeline of how to get things done.
The problem you run into is with console SDKs. You may start a project on say 4.24 - but over a three year projec, the console SDKs change and at some point the XBox or Sony SDKs require support which is not present in 4.24 - so you either have to upgrade or backport the changes to your version of unreal.
@@zoeherriot That's very true. Right now I know about a project that started a few versions ago and they won't go beyond 4.26 because it's not worth it.
They had to fix all the weird stuff that got broken or depricated during engine upgrades. I think the project got updated two or three times.
At some point it's not worth it. But a ton of the custom code was for the large part working.
The switch SDK got updated not so long ago, which was a headache. :P
@@joure.v Yeah - it's a pain - I had an issue once where we had to migrate to 4.24 - but in doing so it broke a bunch of anti-aliasing code on the PS4. Epic's response was - oh yeah, that's not implemented yet. You can try and port it yourself... that was a tough week.
(Not ragging on Epic - it's just that's what happens...)
Honestly, ALL of the points mentioned can be done in UE just as well as in bethesda's own engine. They aren't REAL reasons to not use UE. But there aren't any real reasons why they SHOULD use UE either. Unreal Engine is open source, so you can change / add / remove / correct anything and everything. You can add the entire bethesda AI system to the unreal engine, either directly incorporated, or as plugin. You can add the quest system, or even complete DEV tools.
The REAL reason why they should use their own engine is because they have decades of experience building and refining it. It does what they want it to do, and it costs minimal effort to change / correct anything for them. It's also THEYR code, so harder to hack / abuse than an open source engine like UE. AND, by using their own engine, they earn back quite a bit of the cost of developing it. Yes, using UE CAN mean less time programming the engine, more time for developing models, maps, quests etc. But is can also mean more time wasted on needless communication between the engine developers in a different company and the game developers. It all comes down to cost in the end.
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE UE, and use it to build games myself. And I make Skyrim mods, so I work with TES creation kit quite a bit. The workflows can't be more different! And I enjoy both TBH :p
Let’s be honest, nobody would want a game made by Bethesda using someone else’s software. Would immediately kill the vibe of the game.
Not just modding man. It's the interactive environment. I.e. picking flowers mining minerals. Picking up plates, food etc. That takes a bunch of power. While Unreal engine looks fantastic, it doesn't allow as much interaction with the environment. Without being a pain. I for one prefer interaction vs graphic quality. Just me. You do you.
I love that coop is going to be possible. It's like a dream that died years ago came back to life.
We would have had it by now if Bethesda let them use steam api, but hey, bethesda are the ones working with an engine older than I am for the sake of modders
@@smolpener7430 Hopefully there's a Creations 3
Not really about modding, it's about tools. It would be a huge amount of Dev time to implement all the tooling needed for the designers to make a Bethesda game in ue5. Mod support is a nice byproduct of these designer friendly tools
I appreciate them using their own engine and not using the lifeless unreal engine
That's funny because you can actually do realistic facial expressions in unreal.
Some huge miss conceptions. Unreal modding is superior than creation kit. Creation kit are a set of tools that help with mod creation but require an obscure specific workflow and other external tools. Meanwhile with Unreal engine modding, you use unreal engine itself to make mods. For example Ark, you can download a version of unreal engine with all the ark assets so that you can create any content. It takes crazy amounts of years to make a whole map for creation kit. Meanwhile for ark, multiple groups of modders make new huge maps every year and they make new dinos with ease. An open engine will always be better for modding then creation kit. Another miss conception is that studios need unreal engine to make updates for them. Unreal engine has it’s source code available to partners and partners can change the code and add code. In other words, they can update the engine to their needs and an added bonus, unreal has support teams for partners
exactly...
You've also made an enormous misconception. You say "with Unreal engine modding, you use unreal engine itself to make mods." how is that not true with Creation Kit mods? The Creation Kit is the same set of tools Bethesda uses to make their games. Modders are still using the official dev tools, it's not like Halo Forge where it's some fancy legos the developers hand us.
@@ucm6397 I have made mods for both. Creation kit is not a game engine, it lets you read files and add files to the game but it’s not the game engine itself. They are tools made specifically for mods. The devs don’t use those tools, they use the actual game engine. It’s faster to use the actual game engine but creation engine is a private engine. When you sit down to make mods for creation kit, you have to use the limited set of tools they give you plus other community tools. And most importantly, modding requires a different work flow then actual game creation. Half the work is finding workarounds or using the community made workarounds. Fallout and Skyrim have amazing mods not because of Bethesda specifically, but because the community behind the modding create a lot of groundwork
How does everyone not realise that the unreal tech demos of Skyrim are just that tech demos. We see zero gameplay, all we see is a panning camera. People see one tech demo on a game that is ten years old, see the fancy graphics and particle effects and start crying. To turn that into a full game would take so much more work than what you it has already taken to create the demo. Bethesda won't use the unreal engine because all of their code is tied up in the creation engine. And that is not a bad thing. The reactions to these unreal demos are dumb. The demo is a fun exercise for the creator to load the assets into unreal and use that to demo skyrim in a new way. But that is all it is. If we can stop having a go at Bethesda for using the engine that they use. They have been doing this for a long time, they know what they are doing. For them to use unreal we wouldn't see ES6 until 2050.
@EXODST right?! Almost feel petty saying it, but it's just annoying. Everyone also has a go at Bethesda for their engine saying it's outdated, but that's also not an easy thing to understand since yeah sure it's older and perhaps not got all the modcons that an unreal engine game might have, but it works exactly as Bethesda wants it to, for the games they want to make. For good or bad right?! I mean if they release a game so bad that no one buys perhaps they'll go back to the drawing board move to a new engine and design everything from the ground up, but as long as people keep buying their games, that's not going to happen. The engineering challenge would be enormous
[Bookmark] 2:25 Specifically designed to make a Bethesda game. 2:31 Quests are far more simple and easy to build than it would be in UE. 2:52 Graphical fidelity, epic lighting, good rigging animations - it's all just not nearly as necessary for them.
You missed on other reason: money.
They don't have to share their profits with Epic Games.
“And you need those mods for the game to run”
-my girlfriend
because modding might get limited
ya lmao
I love that people are willing to defend a game engine that is over 24 years old at this point and is being held together by glue and nails.
I know, when is the unreal engine going to get an actual replacement
I love how Bethesda keeps making sure that ancient old Bugs always make it into their next gen games that look like last gen games and also forcing their ancient engine to do things it was never designed to do, which results in insane optimization issues.
Bethesda should just hire modders to make ESVI
that actually did some of that for skyrim
and I don't mean the creation club
They hire modders all the time
this arguement is like "we building cars like 1920 so everyone is able to fix it and tune it by itself" ..... the engine is outdated and there is no excuse for it
To provide a small correction you can improve Unreal yourself, but in the liscencing agreement you have to turn over that fix/improvement to Epic. So you are paying to advance their engine rather than your own.
YEAH BUT YOU GET SORCE CODE BASICLAY FOR FREE!!! YOU DONT NEED TO SPEND LITTERAL MILLIONS AND YEARS TO MAKE ONE!!!!!! PEOPEL TYHINK MAKING ENGINE IS EASYA ND CHEAP!!1 IST ONE OF THE MOST EXPENSIVE THINSG TO MAKE!!!!!!! ESPECIALY IF ITS FOR BIGGER GAMES/BIG STUDIO CALIBER GAMES. TEH RANGE IS LITETRALY SEVERAL MILLIONS JUST FOR MAKING AN ENGINE NOT EVEN ADDING THE COST OF EPLOYESE,BUILDING ASSETS,STORYBOARDING,SCRIPTING,ANIMATIONS........
MANY TIMES MOTS OF PRODUCTION BUDGET IS EATEN NOT BY GAVE DEVELOPMING BUT BY ENGINE CREATION ITSELF!!!!
God forbid we have a universal engine that has all of the tools, plugins etc. all in one single location, rather than needing to reinvent the wheel everytime
What? You literally don't lmao. You can do anything you want to their engine and you dont have to tell them shit about it.
@@akaslowmoney my notes say that's a monopoly lets have a tech monopoly
@@akaslowmoney You're never going to have a single engine that does everything equally well unless your standard for "well" is absolute dog shit or at least sub par. The issue is hardware limitations for any given set of expected hardware specs. Game developers are going to try to utilize what ever hardware performance they feel is reasonably expectable for players to have at the time that game is released. So there is always a resource budget that they need to keep in mind. So they need to decide what are the things they are going to cut corners on and what things are they going to go all out on in order to balance performance and FPS to total resource utilization. Those optimizations usually start by picking the correct engine for what you're trying to achieve and when a dev doesn't do that you get stuff like Star Citizen where they picked Cryengine and then realized that it is a really bad decision for a MMO then shifted to Lumberyard which was ok for an MMO but not so great for FPS and they've ended up rewriting most of the engine and are now basically on a scratch built engine because they relized there wasn't and engine that was good for what they were trying to do.
I'm curently trying to remake Skyrim in Unreal Engine 5.1, and... This my first ever post about this project on the internet, so let's see if people find my comment and share their opinion, but what a challenge to just find/create a heightmap of the whole Skyrim map for the landscape... Btw i'm a noob in Unreal so yeah, it's a challenge, so if anyone would like to help me in this project, i'll be super happy, and maybe one day, i'll create something as huge as Skyblivion ! To anyone reading this, have a lovely day !
The timing on this videos release was damn near perfect. Why Bethesda doesn't use Unreal Engine, not even 20 days after Bethesda announces they are moving to Unreal Engine.
I think your getting confused between studios that work under Bethesda and the Bethesda game studio, which is the studio that makes TES and Fallout, and has no intention of moving, especially since they just invested so much time and money into the creation engine. Those other studios however weren't using the creation engine to begin with.
@@TheCantinaChannel I enjoyed the video, it was well put together. Also thank you for providing me with better information on this. I only heard about it in passing so thank you for the correction.
Basic reason without even thinking; money. Easier to use your own stuff, easier to adapt said stuff to whichever platform you're releasing a game on, easier to fix issues on your own engine, versus something out of the company.
Unreal Engine is open source, Bethesda could change the source code.
"Since they're making their own engine, if there is something completely fucked, they can just go in and make just enough of a change to make it work(...)"
That's definately doesn't sounds like bethesda
This video was much needed to be honest, i see so many people spout off about engines and scripts and oh how Bethesda should totally move on from the old crappy one they got and i always just roll my eyes like, you have no clue what the hell you're on about lol. Having made mods myself and worked on bigger mods with other modders i can guarantee that none of us would even try to take apart a Bethesda game that wasn't built around the creation engine, there's a reason Bethesda modding is so big to begin with but plebs just don't get it.
they are uneducated in the matter
technically speaking anyone not in the 1% is a plebian.
Welp, you are one of the plebs if you just can see things from your pov without the ability to see things from the perspective of others.
@@ypsilondaone I can see things from their perspective, and i deemed them wrong based on technicalities. Get outta my face with your dog shit.
The main Reason Why Developpers don't change their main technology so easily is inertia
Developers at Bethesda are more familiar with Gamebrio/Creation engine, switching to a new and more modern engine has a learning curve which can cost a lot to the company
If Bethesda want to use a new technology like Unreal, Unity or CryEngine they will start with a more modest project like any AA Game with few hours of gameplay and not a huge AAA game with hundred hours of gameplay like Skyrim or Fallout
Part of the reason that Bethesda's engine is so easy to mod is because modders have had nearly 25 years to learn how it works, and how to play with it. It came out around 1997 as the NetImmerse game engine, and was used for a number of projects, including Morrowind. Between 2003 and 2007, NetImmerse was retooled to become Gamebryo, but it was still so rooted in NetImmerse, a mod was created for Bethesda's games called Netimmerse Override, something some Bethesda fans should be familiar with. Now why would the Creation Engine- used in Skyrim and Fallout 4- need to override anything from NetImmerse if NetImmerse was replaced by Gamebryo, and Gamebryo was replaced by Creation? Because they're the same engine to the point that Creation is still using NetImmerse as a foundation, and some mods need to be able to override that NetImmerse engine code. The engine powering Starfield and most likely Hammerfell came out in 1997. Yeah, I'd HOPE modders know what they're doing with it by now.
the biggest win that Epic games ever had in terms of UE4 and 5 was making the casual user think that the engine is the be all end all of engine. and that anything thrown into it will always work in the best possible way for everyone. it just never works that way.
Well, I don't fall through the map and run faster when I look at the ground in fortnite, so unreal has that going for it too. They don't have to lock fps for it either.
@@smolpener7430 and Yet there are UE4 games where that does indeed happen, so its not just being in Unreal that fixes those problems
Thank you thank you thank you it is so annoying to hear some other TH-camrs and even people shitposting and complaining about how buggy the creation engine is and wish that we had jumped to a different engine.
But they clearly don't realize how big the modding Community is and if they switched over it would destroy the community and careers of people.
The best moments in gaming that I have ever had was modding Skyrim. It has always fun and this is the longest I have ever stuck with a game and usually I only last for a game until I complete every thing on many others.
there's not really much else to do after beating everything in a game and I've never really last it even over at least two to three months, until I started playing Skyrim and got into modding.
Also it has taught me quite a lot on how games work and Scripts. and gained quite a lot of interest in game development because of it.
I spend hours on end messing around with mods adding removing, creating, merging, patching. I would have been so devastated if they had it changed to a different engine I am so glad they're sticking to their engine.
I played Outer Worlds recently, which is the closest we have to a Bethesda RPG on unreal, and made me appreciate the Creation Engine more.
The NPCs felt less alive, there was far less interactable clutter, there's barely any mods for it, and it just didn't feel right.
There's nothing like a Bethesda RPG, cause the secret sauce is the engine. It might suck, or have issues at times, but it has such a unique feel! Which is so hard to capture on another engine!
Outer Worlds is definitely a fun game, I can easily see myself replaying it some time, but it just doesn't hit the same as a Bethesda game.
The Creation Engine is incredibly versatile, and it can evolve and it has evolved really damn well. Bethesda focuses on design rather than visual quality, like particles and lighting, look at any of the guns or robots of Fallout 4 and that's obvious, I mean look how goddamn intricate those things are. But above all else, because it's so versatile, they're able to change it and get it to look good, improving visual quality without sacrificing utility, it makes it easier for them to construct things as it's all right there.
When TES 6 comes out, I wonder just how much they'll improve the Creation Engine, and especially what the Creation Kit will be like in the future. How versatile and useable it'll be. Modding is a Bethesda staple as they're all about supporting it and it even has lead to them finding employees to hire through this medium. Say what you want, but I'll fucking admit it, I'm a Bethesda fan, at least when it comes to TES.
Betheadas engine is also incredibly modular and modable. With unreal bethesda would have to provide their engine source files etc.
Eg the ark mod kit is like 200+ gb big because its literally their source files. And you need to grab unreal which is addintional 30gb. With a beth game you just download the creation kit and the game itself becomes the source and everything is directly modifiable .
And, this also means that the OpemMW project may one day be able to run Fallout games and Skyrim and Oblivion. It can already run parts of thier maps do to many things just being the same as in 2002.
i mean creation engine is made so everything is a moveable object without lagging down the whole system. im not sure if unreal is as far on this as creation is. as creation engine has been pretty much the only real engine for this stuff for many years, summoing and moving around in 500 cheese wheeels is a prime example of how it can handle alot of objects.
And not only it's able to move 500 cheese wheels. It's also able to persist them in your save, so anything you change in the game world is there forever, a permanent mark in the world. Other than minecraft and it's clones, no other games let you modify the game worlds as much as Creation Engine games do.
I think that Bethesda rely on the creation engine cause they want modders to fix and more content to their barebone games
most Skyrim players are console players that don't have mods, you can not like the game but calling it barebone is stupid.
@@kyzantia8884 sorry it's boring after a while
@kyzantia8884 You can have mods on Console lol unless your a PS player then you might as well not have any because of how stingy Sony is about external assets.
Disclaimer: I love Skyrim and most Bethesda things. That being said " they use their own engine to early squash bugs" doesn't really make sense when their games are notoriously buggy...
"If a jet engine is powerful enough to lift a plane, why don't I have one in my motorcycle?"
Another thing I want to point out is Bethesda's engine has feature of making every ingame objects interactable, not sure if Unreal can do that yet, but this was the given reason why Fallout 4 runs on Creation Engine, and not id tech 6 that used to power DOOM 2016, even though it's better looking and from the same company, id tech 6 just isn't built for open world RPG.
Seem to be linking to this game a lot here (it's a good example of a moddable Unreal game, as well as being good fun and worthy of better recognition- but do get the "Smart!" mod if you want to play at a good speed) but here's some footage of a megafactory built inside Satisfactory- th-cam.com/video/-hu5bRhcPtU/w-d-xo.html
What you're looking started as an open world wilderness and the player built the factory themselves- so now it's all dynamic objects with dynamic lighting, nothing prebuilt and baked. Every machine is actively working to make things ("The factory must expand to meet the growing needs of the factory's expansion") with potentially different settings for each, and can be interacted with to adjust them, and even the floors and walls can be recoloured and similar, and this can cover a good sized map with factory. The items zooming along on the conveyor belts are actual game objects too and you can walk up to take them or drop others on as you want.
This is also Unreal Engine 4, not Unreal Engine 5. Add Nanite and Lumen to this and it'd look a lot better with more detail on the machines, and really impressive real-time lighting effects.
Most of the objects don't have physics enabled, but most things in Skyrim don't either- I can't push over the stalls in Whiterun. That's not really a problem though, Unreal has had PhysX physics engine support for years so can do many watermelons, and now has their new Chaos engine which is built to be more performant and capable of being network replicated better which matters for multiplayer.
Okay here is the thing, we don't want witcher 3 or zelda in unreal because those games work perfectly fine in their native engines, however Bethesda games are notoriously broken using their native engines to the point that they directly conflict with game development for how hard and frustrating it is to work with
A short answer:
Because engines don't make good games. When someone says something like "Why do they just use Unreal 5!" It only confirms that the person knows absolutely nothing about programming or game dev.
Nice video BTW!
People talk about radiant quests as if they're some god-tier technical accomplishment that would be a nightmare to reimplement when it seems like it's a glorified random number generator. Like, so instead of explicitly scripting "I would like you to go out and fetch me 14 boar asses", the radiant quest system generates "I would like you to get {random number} of {random loot item}"? It seems like something that their marketing team made up, rather than some arcane, proprietary system that their devs spent years perfecting.
So in short because they wanna stick to launching games 5-10y outdated on release and keep the ease for modders to bridge the gap for them. Got it.
They could have the manpower and skill to make their own engine go with time, but the games still sells like hot butter, so why try harder, right?
They botched magic, because they can't have to large cities to traverse and made them separate interior cells, so you can't jump or levitate around. We see the same with Starfield. It's cells separate by loading screens. Their corporate logic doesn't demand anything more advanced.
The creation engine will need eventually a bigger overhaul if it wants to stay competitive with other AAA big boys in the long run, there is a limit of how much duct tape can be used to hide engine problems.
can you name those engine problems ?
You need to consider what is unique with Bethesda's video games to see how far ahead the creation engine is ahead of other AAA video games in terms of creating an interactive world.
Lets see, facial animations are janky, bugs accumulated from previous titles (since morrowind) appear inside new ones, vehicles like for example trains are not separate entities but npcs with the head a train, it cannot create a seamless transition between caves and the outer world (gothic could do it and that game its eurojank), ladder climbing is impossible unless its a level transition), unfixed memory leaks (experienced a couple in fallout new vegas), im no modder but this is my experience with Bethesda games from morrowind through skyrim.
Finally a clear and objective video on the pros and cons of UE5 and the Creation Engine. People see UE5 demo videos on TH-cam, but look no further and don't understand what is involved. Having different engines for different types of games is a good thing, we don't want all games to play the same, and have the same mechanics. It will be interesting to see what happens with the Witcher 4, now that they are using Unreal Engine 5. Will they change the Unreal Engine to suit their game (they're working in partnership with Epic), or will they change their game to suit the Unreal Engine? I'm hoping the former, but fear it will inevitably be the latter.
Because mods :l Can't release a dev tool for an engine you don't own. It would never be as good as creation kit. They don't have to worry about licensing since they own all the assets. People shit on Bethesda a lot but I do appreciate their dedication to supporting mods and the creation engine is a big part of that whether you like it or not. I think people need to understand that modding is a core pillar of Bethesda's design philosophy, it's the way they want you to play their games.
The only real point made here that is actually valid is: Their own engine is especially good at making a 'bethesda game'. Because they make engine and tools necessary to create the specific games they wish to make, so they can bake in reusable features for their games directly into the engine itself which makes releasing more titles easier. However because of points I'll make below this can be both a double edged sword, and not something that is exclusive to inhouse engines (It's perfectly possibly to bake this into Unreal yourself or create packages/modules/plugins for reusable tools and code)
Look at Final Fantasy 15. The game suffered so many technical issues during development because the executives insisted on using an inhouse engine but they wanted new features and snazzy next-gen graphics. If you look at some of the interviews with the developers you'll find the game took so long simply because the developers spent so long on updating their existing inhouse engine and working out bugs that they barely got time to work on the actual game, and then by the time they released almost every other engine they could've used was leaps and bounds ahead in technology.
The main reason a lot of studios use inhouse engines is simple, money. Unreal Engine, Unity and any other BIG well funded and well developed engine is often free to a point for indie developers but for big titles that gross past a certain amount, the engine developers start taking a cut of the profits. In the case of Unreal this is 5% of gross revenue after the product has earned more than $1million in lifetime gross revenue.
For some studios this is acceptable, but for others it's not and a lot of executives who don't understand the development process are usually the ones who decide this and they see an existing inhouse engine and usually don't see any need to pay for another one either upfront or as profit sharing.
The reason your point about updates breaking development is moot is because of both the first point I made as well as the fact, Unreal itself, is open-source. So a studio could quite easily fork the repo and build the version of the engine they want to stick with for development, if there are specific fixes or features they wish to add, they can pull from original repo onto their fork and merge it into a branch to test if it breaks anything before deciding if they should use the new changes.
This would make more sense if Bethesda's in house engine wasn't complete crap. Not to mention they are too greedy to pay a licensing fee.
The title probably isn't a 100% serious question but it got me thinking and I had to chime in. When Skyrim came out let alone before that when it was in development the version of UE that was around then couldn't do open world. It was focused on more detailed an enclosed areas and would have required more memory and processing power than the software was designed for (consoles wouldn't be able to handle it so they were never going to design it that way even if they could). I was just recently watching a video about how 00s shooters that used UE COULD NOT handle 90s style fps levels that were wide open, fully loaded or explored freely because of this very reason. It couldn't load up an entire sprawling level with multiple routes, it could only do a section at a time in linear chunks.
When EA adapted cryengine for open world stuff it really struggled for similar (but also some other) reasons.
better question,
why does EA force their DEVs to use Frostbite Engine
even when it is not FPS games
There is excellent radiant AI quest ability in Unreal Engine...
The real question's why Bethesda recycles the same engine over decades.
When people watch all those "THIS IS WHAT _______ LOOKS LIKE IN UNREAL ENGINE" they tend to forget all the money and manpower and planning that goes into existing development and why it may actually not be the best idea for devs to replicate what's going on in those fan demo vids.
@@mezzb I'm pretty sure smash ultimate actually does that with unreal
Though Nintendo programmers are wizards so there's probably not really anyone else that would do that
Isn’t the main reason is because in house engines can be more versatile and customizable for the games the developers want to make vs the unreal engine which is very good looking and useful for making games but it’s more limited in scope
2:26 - 2:28
there you go, this is like the entire reason lol. The one-size-fits-all suit may look newer, but Bethesda has a tailored suit they've spent decades sewing pockets into and filling with spaghetti
the memory leaks alone on another engine that they don't have control over would make their games unplayable and put them out of business is the real answer.
If anyone chats shit about the Skyrim engine graphics, I would recommend downloading/playing a mod called 'Voyage to the Dreambourne Isles' - I've played thousands of video games in my life, but never had I spend hours just in awe of the beauty of the scenery until I played that mod. It's like taking a trip into the imagination of a genius artist who dropped some LSD after reading a high-fantasy novel - with all the buggyness, weirdness and downright wonder that such an idea entails.
The one and only simple anwser...well four actually :
1. It's annoying to learn a completely new engine.
2. They wanna use their own.
3. Fees
4. Needing to make new modding tools.
Keep in mind that Unreal Development Kit came out in 2009. It is very likely that Skyrim was already in production at the time.
Then explain fallout 4 and 76.
Skyrim isn't the only Bethesda game.
@@smolpener7430 They already had a game engine?
Elder Scrolls in Fallout might be the most special games ever for exactly that reason
It would be nice if they used unreal engine with reading AI probably there can be a reskin and elder scrolls and maybe in the skyrim game they released
So the reason Bethesda doesn't use unreal reads something like this:
Tod Howard doesn't have the best talent in the graphics department anymore but the current dudes are the ones that have done such great work for the company they have tenure. That means all technology is based on what those guys know best and they're just too darned proud of their code to go do anything else.