Elder Scrolls 6 Is Powered By New Version Of Creation Engine
this shuts down rumors that bethesda will move to unreal engine for ES6
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Comments131https://kotaku.com/elder-scrolls-6-is-powered-by-new-version-of-creation-engine-starfield-classic-rpg-2000670744Open linkView original on piefed.social
Translation: it's the same shitty gamebryo they're always using.
Not content to look outdated in 2015 or 2023, now they're going to look outdated in 2030.
2015? that codebase started in morrowind. and say what you want about that game but it is not a looker. it launched the same year as metroid prime.
I didn't think Skyrim was too outclassed compared to its peers in 2011, given that it was so much larger and doing so much more than a lot of them under the hood. But Fallout 4 came out alongside The Witcher 3, and the difference between the two was night and day. Then of course Baldur's Gate 3 next to Starfield, and I have to scratch my head wondering what the hell Bethesda is doing still running this tech stack.
Todd Howard doesn't know how to make games any other way.
It's not entirely out of question that they'll use Unreal for graphics while retaining Gamebryo for gameplay. That's kinda how the Oblivion remaster works. And might be best of both worlds if they manage to make Unreal not suck in terms of performance and don't fall for the photorealism trap
I think graphics are pretty low on my list of priorities for how those games need to modernize. Starfield looks pretty alright in sheer fidelity, but the faces don't animate well, the conversation system is dated even compared to The Outer Worlds doing basically the same thing, and the engine seems (for some reason) incapable of putting together a proper cut-scene.
Ah to be fair I haven't played Starfield or even watched too many videos. I also didn't like FO4 much so I was pretty much running with the assumption that they hadn't changed much since 2011
Still, they may not need as many engine programmers if they reduce what their in-house engine needs to do. Could free up finances to hire more people to work on the meat and bones of the game. Or they could just pocket the difference and not give a fuck about making a good game, that seems quite likely too.
Bugs, bugs, always the same bugs.
I fucking hope not. Unreals's graphics engine looks terrible
It doesn't if you disable TAA and shit, but by default it's horrible
Morrowind? Gamebryo is the continuation of the NetImmerse engine. Development started in 1997 with the first game released in 1999.
yeah morrowind used netimmerse, first time bethesda used it.
I think Gamebryo (neé NetImmerse) is even a bit older than Morrowind.
yeah it's not bethesda's engine. but my point was about where the codebase for the creation engine comes from, and that's the morrowind code.
And Unreal Engine started on 1995. This argument always shows people's ignorance of software development. When the first pieces of the engine were built is not why it's shitty. It's because they haven't invested money into it where it matters. (Unreal Engine also has some serious issues. It just looks prettier.)
i mean, a 23 year old codebase is bound to have some tech debt.
Very probably yes, but it will also have an extensive feature set and stable, mature functions that work well after 20+ years of development.
A mature codebase is often a double edged sword I agree. But it's not always a good idea to just throw away all that progress.
in bethesdas case though?
a similar thing happened with arma reforger a few years ago, it was supposed to be a tech demonstrator for a new engine but it turned out to still be the same codebase as operation flashpoint from 1995. the engine is solid but it's super annoying to program for, they have this custom scripting language that's completely batshit insane because everything is infix by default, and an ui toolkit that is written as c++ classes meaning the actual game has a compiler in it for a subset of c++. so the scripts can be edited at runtime but if there is an error in the ui the game crashes at startup. people were hoping they'd finally switch to something that made sense but no.
They don't work well anymore though, that's the whole point. Bethesda's codebase is past "mature", it's just straight up old and outdated now. Has been for a decade at the very least. Their games have looked and performed noticeably worse than their contemporaries for a good while now.
They rebuild the engine to be 64-bit (instead of 32-bit) for Fallout 4, and that version is what Skyrim Special Edition is running on
that's not a complete rewrite. hell, depending on how it was architected it may just be a recompile
Morrowind is definitely a looker, that art style is something Beth has never been able to approach again.
But hard agree on the VFX.
yeah it does have style, but it's pretty low fidelity compared to its contemporaries. the scope is also a lot larger though.
I love how the Gamebryo site is still up. I thought it was funny it was still up like 10 years ago when I looked last, and it's still up now without any changes.
www.gamebryo.com
rip, you killed it
What do you mean?
site doesnt load for me, says site account suspended
Works fine for me on mobile and desktop.
It's broken for me too, account suspended. Something about not being supported in the user's environment.
By that logic source 2 is just the quake 2 engine.
Yes, and the Quake 2 engine is one of the greatest software creations of its generation.
The Gamebryo/Creation engine is hot garbage in comparison.
It's 2026, and you are literally eleven 're's short of the current number of rereleases.
I love this story because it's obvious your son asked this during the several minute long loading screen. No matter what year it is, Bethesda games take at least a minute to load.
There's and SKSE plugin that fixes that
this must be a pc problem that im too console coded to understand
I laughed 3 times!
shiny metal knee 🦿
Hey, what's your middle name?
I love the Elder Scrolls series, but I'm not convinced that 6 will be good. Owned by Microsoft in this age of AI shit.
If ES6 isn't Skyrim with better writing and better combat, it will fail.
We had that, its called Morrowind.
This is magnificent.
Yup. As I said, it's better combat than Skyrim.
Unfortunately no. Gamers were always riding the hype vave. Spent money on Star Citizen and blue gun skin. Gamers are idiots.
Even if it wasn't owned by Microslop I don't have any confidence BGS could make a good TES game. They've been sitting on their laurels for far too long.
It will probably be fine, but it's very unlikely to be especially good.
New version = old version + ai?
You’re hired!
Anyone who believed that they would switch to Unreal Engine is delusional.
Maybe for the better. Sandfall Interactive seems the be the only company that could use it without performance issues.
Borderlands 4, Kill the Justice League, Immortals of Aveum, etc. are performance nightmares without tweaking and patches.
Coffeestain have done a good job with satisfactory but I can't think of any other studio.
oh no i have just lost $623 on poly market
- someone, i bet
This may be unpopular, but I think this is great news.
Skyrim became one of the best-sellign games of all time in part BECAUSE of how great it is to see your character get ragdolled into the lithosphere by a giant, or to watch the chaos of spawning thousands of wheels of cheese on top of the throat of the world and watching them roll down.
An Elder Scrolls game that was built around having realistic physics, or being restricted to more cinematic movement and knteractions, would lose a key essence of what made the earlier games great.
I don't want engaging combat in Elder Scrolls. If I want combat that I have to pay attention to, I'll go play a Souls game or a fighting game or one of the thousands of games that have tried to be "Skyrim with better combat" that have languished in obscurity because they miss the point.
Also the reason skyrim is still popular is because their engine is way easier to mod compared to unreal. I don't even know any unreal game that has even 10% of modding capability of creation engine. Granted it's outdated, but it's still the reason their games are popular. Hell even starfield recently got a star wars overhaul mod which wouldn't be feasible with unreal. As much as people like to shit on fallout 4, it's modding scene is still one of the most active one. And starfield's failure was more because of scale of the world (and poor writing which has been a staple since skyrim). I'm still skeptical but also somewhat hopeful as long as they build upon the previous es formula.
Fully agree. TES with UE would not be the same.
That’s fair, I’m someone who didn’t particularly like Skyrim and am hoping for better writing and better combat because I liked the overall idea of Skyrim but honestly I’m assuming it’ll be more to what you’re hoping for especially if Starfield is anything to go off of. Man was that game disappointing.
What you described as enjoyable isn't "Skyrim" that's just the Gamebryo engine. The Companions don't figure into a physics glitch that rockets you up to kiss the twin moons. Nocturne and the Nightingales aren't relevant to a horse glued at an 85° angle to a mountain face. You're just describing mucking around in a less interactive GMod. But people did like the mage who pancaked himself with a jump spell, the woman who is absolutely a necrophiliac, and Glarthir's deranged quest. Actual components of those games that were done well. We all want them to make the game better so we actually want to experience all the bits that are well done and funny.
The Elder Scrolls isn't popular because of the shitty engine. It's memed because of the engine, but the games are generally fun enough to keep playing through the more benign bugs. And, like shared trauma, we all laugh about the bad bits in hindsight.
Loading screen after loading screen after loading screen, but hey you can put a cheese wheel in funny places.
They should steal the old trick from Diablo II where it pre-loads nearby areas.
Of course, because we have infinite RAM during the RAM crisis. /s
Now we need to change that to
A: Don't you have NVMe SSD(s)?
B: Don't you have SSDs?
This is actually a good news and I am glad creation Engine will be used, The best part of Bethesda games are the modability creation engine and its predecessor provide. Unreal engine is not moddable and is not even beginner friendly, while someone like me can fire up Geck or creation kit and do a full fledged quest mod.
I guess you've never had to reconcile the disaster that ensues when multiple CE mods update different parts of a game's .esp data.
If they touch properties that happen to be near each other, the mods that try to preserve properties that don't concern them end up stomping all over one other, leaving the player in a horribly broken land of conflicts and sadness. The mods can't help it, because the engine's modding system and data structures are fundamentally too coarse to allow touching only what's needed, and too stupid to make reliable conflict resolution possible. The endless quest to work around this flaw is why Skyrim has uncountable patch mods, which shouldn't be necessary in the first place. It's a bloody awful design.
I get that you love the possibilities afforded by modding. We all do. But please don't glorify Creation Engine in this area. What's under the covers is embarrassing, and particularly bad when more than a few mods are used at the same time. Players and modders deserve something better, and a competent engine developer absolutely could deliver it.
As someone who has spent too many hours dealing with its fallout, I wish Creation Engine would die.
I mean, it's a new version, you'd hope they'd fix at least some issues - me, massively coping
It's mostly a tooling issue, so they really could, but I still doubt it.
I remember installing conflicting mods with Fallout 3, and you just had to run a tool to examine the mods and merge the changes together (and warn you if they genuinely conflicted). It was like a 1 click process and I'm amazed it hasn't been moved into the engine itself.
This is also available for the more recent Elder Scrolls games, like Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind
Yet still its one of the most modded engine of all times. Most games dont have any kind of mod support and they just stop working completelly if you do anything beond texture change.
Bashing creation engines modding is like yelling in a desert about how the water in the oasis would be better with ice cubes. You are not wrong, but it seems really nitpicky.
And leaded gasoline was one of the most widely used fuels of all time. That doesn't mean we should still be using it.
Ah, yes... the dismissive opinion of someone who hasn't had to do the work to clean up messes caused by the broken design. I'll be sure to keep that in mind when looking back upon the time I've spent helping people in your position.
Well go mod something else then. Ill manage just fine without your help.
It sounds nitpicky because there are only like handfull of games that let people mod the game as much as skyrim does. The vast majority of the games just soils them selfs if you touch the files. Its not perfect, but its better than most.
I haven't had any issues that I couldn't eventually patch, while I used to play skyrim I had 220+ mods plus few of my own mods. I am not saying that it's easy enough but if you really know what you are doing and spent the time learning what a mod does how it does then you can work around the problematic part and modify those mods itself to work together.I have had multiple mods people said that couldn't work together to work together. I understand the process is tedious and hours of manually patching is horrible but I don't think we would get anything as close to this level of moddability for other engine. I have tried modding unreal but it's just too terrible and hard to get into it and I can't do anything meaningful beyond texture mods, maybe it's my skill issue.
Funny that you mentioned fallout, I am now in the process of ironing out my new mod for fallout 3, the engine it uses game bryo is even more dated than the CE of skyrim and there are times that I wanted to smash my computer due to every single one of those time GECK crashed when I was in the middle of something important. But still considering Fallout 3 a game that was released in 2008 can still be modded easily than what's a possible for a game from the time, I just love it.
Also as a person who spent hours dealing with fallout and Skyrim, I love their engine for what it is despite all the issues with it. And I hope that we get a new version of Creation Engine that can iron out the issue its having now, but Bethesda being Bethesda that's probably gonna stay a dream lol, but anyway I have hope for my fellow modders.
It shuts down rumors that Bethesda will move to pure Unreal Engine for ES6, though I never believed that to be the case.
I see the Oblivion remaster as a bit of a proof of concept of sorts - the potential to have the world, scripts, logic, and physics running on the Creation Engine that devs (and modders!) are intimately familiar with while running the visuals on a separate Unreal Engine layer.
Shedding the need to do extra work on fancy lighting and graphical effects so they can focus on optimizing the bones / structure seems logical to me, but then again this is the diluted Microsoft-era Bethesda we’re talking about so who knows.
I don't think that's as big of a problem as you think. Community Shaders exists alongside a ton of additional plugins, all of which are open source and just work in Slyrim.
Also, Unreal's graphics engine looks awful
My unpopular take- I’m glad of this, the best part of the Elder Scrolls games are the ridiculous physics bugs. If a mount giant can’t send me to Jupiter in one hit I don’t want to play
I believe physics is still mostly Havok, so it's not them. They are just that... amazing at using it.
The annoying part about the "creation engine" is that it's still just the corpse of the gamebryo engine that they keep reanimating with their own crap on top of it. With its shitty proprietary netimmerse format that basically only exist for them at that point.
With time, people have developed tools to create content for it, but it's yet another area where they went, fuck it, people are going to make our games better, and we don't even need to do anything to make their life easier while they do.
At the same time, unreal games seem to have much less moddability, to your point, the ecosystem around the existing engine for Beth games means its much easier to get in and do modding.
This is literally every commercial game engine, including Unreal and Unity
I have a feeling Bethesda thought they were going to have a hit with Starfield, and when it was came out to painfully average reviews, they really had to think about their design philosophies. Or they didn't think about them at all and ES6 will be just as painfully average. We'll see.
From the reviews I saw it didn't help that starfield looked and played like a skyrim sci-fi mod that leaned into the Bethesda loading screen meme on purpose.
It was more like Fallout with a space theme and significantly less style in gameplay.
The biggest issue imo was scope. It was too big of a universe to do a lot of the environmental storytelling that BGS is famous for. And the more traditional storytelling was stretched too far over that expansive world. Sure, there were concentrations in cities, but that made the empty space in between more noticable.
That being said, the setup for Starfield's setting could have been great for modders as there was tons of area to serve as a blank canvas. Unfortunately there seems to be a minimum threshold for content density for modders to jump on that, and it looks like BGS fell short
Apparently the big problem is that Todd Howard is the creative director for all 3 franchises. While he's good at that role, he's constantly getting pulled between the 3 series, limiting his ability to maintain a cohesive vision for any 1 game.
Plus there's way more people in the studio, so while coworkers talked to each other a lot in the past (even on lunch breaks) there's simply too may people to have that close of a relationsip with anymore
Unpopular opinion: The gamebryo/creation engine itself isn't that terrible considering almost every item is physics based. I love the engine for something like Fallout. Starfield... There are things they could have done with it to make it better. But Starfield did show that as proof of concept, vehicular traversal is doable.
The issue with Bethesda isn't the janky ass engine. The issue with Bethesda is Emil and his shitty writing.
Plus Todd Howard is wearing too many hats as creative director for all 3 franchises, and the company has gotten too big for teams to really know each other.
I feel like BGS needs to internally split up between multiple teams. 3 teams dedicated to a single franchise each, with Todd Howard acting as creative director for only one of them and 2 more creative directors promoted from experienced team members. Then an (engine) development team for continual tech improvements. And a 5th team for finishing games by filling out the worlds via clutter, minor quests, etc. based on guidelines and assets set by the 3 primary teams
Agreed. Todd needs to stick with what knows. Elder Scrolls.
Pay Tim Cain whatever he wants, but have him oversee Fallout.
And just let Starfield die...
Starfield has a lot of good bones to work with. BGS mainly needed to spend another year on the game filling out systems and adding more content.
That being said, delaying ES6 to work on Starfield was a horrible decision. They had enough people hired after Skyrim to split into multiple teams
If history repeats itself, ES6 will be a completely different game to Skyrim
Everything complained about will he cut, nothing new will be added
I'm sure they're well aware that the biggest knock on Starfield are its forgettable plot and universe and too much loading screens. It'll be less of a problem in an Elder Scrolls game as it's building on a great lore foundation and it's a region rather than a bunch of planets. I'm sure in the 7+ years later I expect to actually play the game, loading screens won't be much of a problem. Improved graphics will be a given. It won't set the world on fire but it'll look firmly like it belongs in the PS5 generation which is good enough for me
Surely no one is surprised by this?
I'm not surprised, but I am disappointed.
Bethesda...Bethesda never changes.
Ok and does it run optimized on old hardware and Linux? I'll easily skip it if it doesn't. 😜
it's 2026, so obviously not.
You might have to upgrade your PC for this one (/s)
If it works on Windows, it works on Linux. (God I love Proton)
Not always true. And sometimes there's caveats.
Less and less these days.
In fact, some old Windows games ran better for me on Linux than new Windows.
It's true. But again, it depends
Skyrim ruins better on Linux in my experience, so probably yes
That isn't really saying that much. It could still be a creation engine that has a UE5 renderer on top. Like the Oblivion remaster.
If they go for a small-ish hand-crafted world, this is probably the best tool for the job. I don't really care for loading screens when I enter/exit buildings..., I care for a compelling narrative within an amazing world, something I haven't seen since Morrowind.
Also please revamp your animation system
We are not talking about a scenario where they only had 2 years to pump out new content so they had to work with what they had. That they didn’t manage to build a new tech stack in the absurd amount of time since Skyrim is just embarrassing.
1: They were making games in that time, just not Elder Scrolls
2: Completely switching engines would make all the tools the modding community has built over the years useless, potentially killing that community for the new games
3: Every other game engine is also just as old as Creation Engine if you only look at when the code was first made, like you're doing right now
I feel like we go through this every time Bethesda releases a game. Yes, every other engine is just as old. I'm sure there's some ut99 code still in unreal, and maybe some quake code in source 2. The difference is those other engines already work pretty well, and have improved over time. The creation engine is still somehow just as janky every time, and somehow still has bugs dating back to skyrim or oblivion. I want to believe they can fix it, but their track record does not inspire confidence.
As someone who's played all of their mainline games since Skyrim, this is an outright lie.
They updated the Creation Engine from 32-bit to 64-bit for Fallout 4, and since they used Skyrim as a test bed for development, all they had to do was a bit more work to make Skyrim Special Edition.
SSE is significantly more stable than LE, especially if you're modding. And Starfield actually held to their claims of being their leadt buggy release to date.
It's pretty clear that all you know about what's going on with Creation Engine is just parroting the memes.
Yeah, one of them being Starfield. Which wonderfully highlighted how much they limit their own creativity. They had to shove their ideas into the severe limitations of their stack making the game the mess it is.
Could be they simply didn’t give a fuck, but I doubt it. They likely invested a lot of time into bending the engine and it still doesn’t bulge nearly enough.
If their engine has so much cruft that even with multiple years of development they can’t make it do what they want, it’s apparently a tech debt nightmare and should be reworked completely.
At this point there is nothing that they could do to make Creation Engine feel "new". I don't understand why they keep beating that dead horse.
A couple of months ago, I had some extra money, so I bought Starfield because I had an itch to go back into my Crimson Fleet character.
The problem was that a couple of weeks before that, I had also purchased a game that I had wanted for years, but could never justify spending the high price of new games on, Red Dead Redemption 2. In comparison, Starfield just felt so....lazy... in ways both big and small, beyond the common issues like repetitive dungeons, barren worlds, loading screens, etc...
The biggest thing I noticed immediately was the effect of bumping into people as you're walking. If you compare a Rockstar Game (Or even an assassin's creed game), where npcs will make a comment, will move out of the way, get upset, etc... Whereas in Bethesda can't be bothered to do anything except slide you to the right when bumping into a character, who doesn't react or flinch in any way.
I started noticing those little things fucking everywhere. And I have to believe that little limitations like that are because it's running on an engine that is older than dirt.
Nah. They are detecting the collision in order to push the player, so the engine is doing the work already. They could easily add an on_collision_player event in the NPC controller that fires at that point to handle NPC reaction.
The age of the engine impacts things like loading screens, poor use of modern hardware, etc. The 2004-era NPC handling is simply a reluctance to do any more than the bare minimum.
There are already plenty of mods that handle this. It's not a limitation of the engine. It's just budget and time constraints
We need more diversity in game engines, not less, so I'm fine with this
Well, you'll be glad to hear that Toyota, yes, that Toyota, announced a new open source game engine, with deep integration of Blender 3D.
That browser game engine for car play stuff?
No, like a legit game engine that is advertised as "console ready".
Listen I hate the unreal engine with a passion. But I also hate their engine with a passion. This amount of tech debt that thing has is incredible, and that's not a good thing.
Unless they've started over from scratch but just kept the name I expected to be a piece of crap.
So they aren't using OpenMW ...
For all the hate we've given Creation Engine over the years... I think we can all agree it's still infinitely better than Unreal will ever be.
Good, I take loading screens than unreal slop
Ugh... and I am not even surprised if they lean on the modding community to fix the damn game... AGAIN. Don't get me wrong, the fan community has done some phenomenal strides, but maybe... like for example with Project Zomboid, despite being a much smaller dev team, has a HUGE modding community, and they then hire them on to expand their team. Sure Beth does that too, but you'd think they'd improve or switch engines to something with gusto. And seeing the lukewarm reaction to Oblivion Remastered, throwing a layer of Unreal over top a very dated engine doesn't fix things.
I look forward to it being released and rereleased for the next 15 years...
ES6 is powered by shutting up and going away
Sooooo more flipping carts and horses?
I swear I remember looking this up a year ago and hearing this. Was that just a rumor then?
Surprised it's not creation bones with UE5 skin like Oblivion's remake. But also not surprised it is using Creation (which is just GameBryo).
Obviously. And it'll be just as broken. Show it's technical age even more.
Shit, haven't got much time left to finally play through Skyrim.
Of course it is...
Sounds like what they do with every game, just keep adding shit on top of the Creation Engine, which was just shit piled on top of the Gamebryo engine.
You clearly don't understand software development.
If you're a programmer, you rarely rewrite a program from scratch if you can avoid it, especially if you're just making a version update. Do you seriously Epic threw out all their code from UE3 to code UE4 from scratch?
And honestly, Bestesda has done lots of work going through and fixing/updating existing code. Fallout 4 and Skyrim Special Edition are 64-bit programs. Skyrim Legendary Edition and Fallout 3/New Vegas are 32-bit programs.
Updating the Creation Engine to do that requires a ton of changing existing code, but you thankfully don't need to rewrite everything.
And their work actually makes its way to the players. Skyrim Special Edition is significantly more stable than Legendary Edition, and allows over 10x more plugin files for modders. And Starfield actually held up to the claims that it would be Bethesda's least buggy release to date
You went off on a tangent that had nothing to do with what I said. All I'm saying is there's nothing new about this. Its the same fucking janky engine they've been using for decades. They may have done a lot of work on it but its still janky as fuck.
Everything I said was relevant to your comment.
Not my fault your reading comprehension is on par with your knowledge of programming