The thing is, the age of the engine doesn’t say anything. The Unreal Engine started its development before 1998. But you do have to put in work to upgrade an engine over time and Bethesda doesn’t have Fortnite money for that.
No, they have Skyrim money for that. Imagine making money off of a game for over a decade, while barely putting money towards rereleases/ports. Didn’t even need a team for patches or content updates.
That’s the issue with the current creation engine; it kind of is. That is what’s meant with “20 year old engine”.
The updates the creation engine has been having over the years are more like bandaids. Meanwhile unreal gets damn-near rebuilt from the ground up fir every major version release.
UE doesn't get "near rebuilt from the ground up every major release", that would be an absurd waste of time and resources every time. It's being updated and iterated over, just like how CE is.
The problem here is that you don't like Bethesda games and jumped on the bandwagon of armchair developers using the engine as a scapegoat, ignoring the fact that many other mainstream game engines are just as old or more.
Creation Engine is the least of Bethesda's games problems, it's their game design that's the big issue and the reason why thinks are so bleak.
I don’t like Bethesda games? The amount of time I’ve spent on Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 says otherwise. Hell, I’m right now doing yet another playthrough of Skyrim.
The best way to understand what’s wrong with the creation engine, and how woefully out-dated it is, is to listen to what modders have to deal with constantly. The creation engine is hardly a serious upgrade of Gamebrio and BGE only puts in the minimal effort into actually updating it.
At its core, and the major reason why exploration is so stilted in Starfield, is that the creation engine just isn’t capable of solving the floating point problems with seamless worlds, which other engines ARE capable of. Pathfinding generation and animation sorting hasn’t been seriously updated since Oblivion, and the Papyrus script engine still has the same 200 limit it had since Morrowind, a limitation that was there because of hardware of that time, but forcing Papyrus to go over the 200 limit causes Bethesda games to become unstable.
Yes, it’s BGE and their practices that are the problem, and it’s reflected in how they maintain their engine too.
That engine is ancient and their game design needs an upgrade. A lot of the quests were so bland in Starfield that I watched the credits to see how many designers they had on them. It was like…6. Thousands of planets, 6 quest designers. If your quest is, “go here, push a button, and come back,” just don’t bother putting the quest in the game.
Likewise, Oblivion’s conversation system probably looked immaculate compared to old Elder Scrolls games at the time, but Starfield is outclassed next to Mass Effect 1 from 2007, not to mention The Witcher 3 or Baldur’s Gate 3. And for how much people like that their towns are filled with NPCs on a schedule, it would be nice if that system led to anything more sophisticated than the thieving tricks people used 20 years ago.
Unless they switch to one of the current Gen engines available, they will keep using the one they have, they just updated it’s now the creation engine 2… and that was for starfield and ES6. And it seemed like the same engine for starfield.
Well, I mainly mean that they’d need to put in quite a lot of work to make the existing Oblivion mods work with it or to develop a new modding API. I doubt, they’d put that much work in for a cash grab remaster/remake.
I mean, I have heard of some weird constructs before, where games used their own engine for physics and whatnot, and only used Unreal for rendering. If that makes sense for them to do, that would preserve support for most mods.
Gotcha. Yeah, I’d expect minimum mod support for this one, but if the next Bethesda game switches to Unreal along with this one, I’d expect normal support for modding that they usually provide.
That’s exciting. I wanted to play this again recently. I wanted specifically to play with a controller comfortably on a couch. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. My best bet was going to be getting the Xbox 360s digital version.
If the promotion of mtx.is jarring or overwhelming then even limiting to cosmetics sucks. If something ends and there are multiple click through screens encouraging players to by mtx and other ads within the game to buy the mtx it can become a chore to ignore. Even if gameplay itself is not impacted, the things that happen outside of gameplay can deag down the whole experience.
An example would be those stupid unskippable season pass screens where the bar goes up slowly and it reminds you of what you didn’t get becsuse tou didn’t buy the season pass. A few seconds each time, sure, but it adds up and is clearly trying to goad you into spending money. That shit sucks even if it limited to cosmetics.
I would rather pay $60 to own and be able to fully play the game. However, my response came from my perception of surprise and doom-and-gloom by the community when we already knew it would be free-to-play.
If a game is going to have mtx, they shouldn’t be charging for it during a prerelease. They have multiple ethical ways to handle it that would garner better feedback.
Leave it out entirely and focus on the gameplay. That is what should be selling the game anyway.
Have the mtx but without a way to pay real money. Give the players the option to ‘purchase’ in game currency and give them a running total.
The latter would be reset at release, but would gather feedback on what people want to spend and if the promo process is well implemented.
Both would run counter to the actual purpose of the vast majority of mtx which is fleecing whales and this is EA.
The most ethical implementation of mtx that I know of is actually for a paid game, Helldivers 2. The in game promo stuff is minimal and does not negatively impact the menus or interacting with the ship. The option to buy stuff doesn’t use dark patterns, but it is easily available. When they did set prices too high for a collaboration thing they apologized due to feedback and gave the other half of the stuff that would have been for sale to every single player. It is basically the exact opposite of Call of Duty’s mtx.
My guess is that there is only one skate park and simple character creation that is free for everyone. Everything else is behind paywall. Want pink shorts and green hair? want to skate around the city or in new park? want a new deck? open the wallet.
I recently saw a documentary that talked about conditions at EA even back in the 90’s turns out I never cared for an EA game ever. I cared about the studios making them despite the fact that EA made ridiculously stupid choices.
I guess it depends a lot on your background. I thought it felt simple compared to the old X-Wing series but not necessarily dumbed down, they did a decent job streamlining it for a modern take.
I guess that means some people can find it too slow and intricate and others too arcadey. I imagine the Skate guys are having to make a lot of those same decisions for a lot of those same reasons.
I don’t play skater games, but like whats so wrong with all the old ones? Didn’t they just remake Tony Hawk? How can these games be so different? I get playing ‘new’ games in your favorite genre, but I feel like you can only do so much with this formula, kind of like guitar hero.
New environments, new tricks, higher quality graphics, fixed bugs, runs on the current console (since backwards compatibility isn’t always a thing). Multiplayer, if Skate 3 didn’t have it already.
I haven’t tried it in awhile, but tried it a few times over the years and always preferred Skater XL (just felt more like Skate to me), but I need to see how Session has progressed.
One of my favorite Skater XL mods is the ability to go into slow-mo whenever you start a trick. Really cool/fun. Also really satisfying to make your own skateboards in the game.
I was debating between the two when I was first looking at them. I guess Session is supposed to be the more “realistic” one, and it’s pretty tough actually. Each stick controls each foot (left stick for left foot, right stick for right foot) but you can of course change the settings to be as arcadey as you want. There’s even a control setting to make it play exactly like Skate 2/3. There aren’t many maps to play in, but the maps that are there are pretty good.
When I first got the game in 2021 or '22, the maps didn’t even have cars or other pedestrians, but they added those in one of the updates in the last couple years (tells you how much I play it lol).
I’ll also say that the music is kinda lacking in the game. Like there are two or three “stations” you can listen to based on genres, and there are only a few songs in each, but the classic “turn the game’s music volume all the way down and pull up a playlist on YouTube/Spotify” move always works.
That’s the same feeling I had. Session just felt more incomplete/rough around the edges. To those points, Skater XL basically uses the Skate control scheme, which I find the right balance of skill-based/fun. I think the soundtrack is pretty great with the likes of Modest Mouse, Interpol, Band of Horses, etc. But also pretty limited. As for levels, the site I linked above also has 1,056mod maps you can add, so that’s definitely not an issue.
ign.com
Aktywne