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Fallout 76 Has Me Worried For The Next Elder Scrolls

    • 743 posts
    November 14, 2018 1:34 PM EST

    With the launch of Fallout 76 and my admittedly limited play time, I can already say that this game has me worried about the future of Bethesda, and the next Elder Scrolls especially. From what I've read and minimally experienced on my time with 76, it's obvious that the game is riddled with bugs and performance issues. Bethesda's general attitude has been one of apology. Not to demean them entirely, as I still think they're one of the greatest dev teams out there with fresh and fun ideas. But they've been handling the reception to 76 in a defeated fashion.

    It's just the execution that's so.... bad. To me, and many I've spoken with, Fallout 76 was an awesome concept on paper. But the final product is held back by the ancient engine that Bethesda has been using since the last generation of consoles. It's been used since Skyrim in 2011. A seven-year-old engine is unacceptable when used by a team that has previously stated current technology isn't good enough for their next titles. The fiasco of 76 honestly has me worried that Bethesda will attempt to reuse the Creation Engine (which I know will be modified to hell, but modding can only do so much, as proven by 76) for Starfield and TES6. The use of this engine in the next gen will kill the potential of these games by such an unimaginable margin. Fortunately, I believe that due to the very reason of Bethesda waiting for the new consoles, that the Creation Engine will die with Fallout 76. But if not, I'm not going to get myself too hyped for these upcoming games. 

    What do you guys think? Am I just paranoid and irrational? Do you think that Bethesda would seriously try to recycle 2 generation old technology?

    • 197 posts
    November 14, 2018 2:29 PM EST

    I don’t know much about game development and engines and all that, so I can’t comment on that specific question other than to say I hope they don’t. 

     

    But something’s really struck me lately, seeing all the responses to Fallout. I remember in the summer, listening to the E3 conference and being, quite frankly, in awe of the confidence and raw excitement Bethesda seemed to have in all their upcoming projects. Comparing it to what’s happening now, it just seems strange. I mean, they’ve got to sell themselves, I get that, and maybe I was naive for assuming the confidence was real. And I don’t play Fallout, but I expected them to just knock this out of the park. I mean, they were just bubbling over with excitement and anticipation, it makes me wonder if everyone there was fooling themselves or if all the last-minute things that went wrong just caught them off guard. 

    • 700 posts
    November 14, 2018 2:56 PM EST

    Rogue said:

    The fiasco of 76 honestly has me worried that Bethesda will attempt to reuse the Creation Engine (which I know will be modified to hell, but modding can only do so much, as proven by 76) for Starfield and TES6.

    From Todd himself:

    “For Fallout 76 we have changed a lot,” Todd Howard told Gamestar this year. “The game uses a new renderer, a new lighting system and a new system for the landscape generation. For Starfield even more of it changes. And for The Elder Scrolls 6, out there on the horizon even more. We like our editor. It allows us to create worlds really fast and the modders know it really well. There are some elementary ways we create our games and that will continue because that lets us be efficient and we think it works best.”

    Links

    Apparently Todd now thinks the Creation Engine can be upgraded and pushed far enough to support ES6.


    This post was edited by Legion at November 14, 2018 3:01 PM EST
    • 277 posts
    November 14, 2018 4:09 PM EST

    What's wrong with the creation engine? Don't you like riding your horse at a steep 90 degrees angle?

    • 167 posts
    November 14, 2018 6:23 PM EST

    @Rogue - You 're not alone in this one there many others thinking the same thing me included. I get that their engine gives them some freedom regarding a few aspects when creating the game and to be honest I could come to like a game created with this engine BUT ONLY AFTER I have it patched and optimized with mods to fix thousands of mistakes / bugs / textures / animations etc, which is what they should fix when they will upgrade their engine for the next games.

    Do not expect a new engine or anything they will just upgrade the existing one. That being said if they sit down and the "ones above" give them the time / resources to fix their engine the end product could be a pretty good game without all the bugs and bad optimization we have in Skyrim. If modders can do it I don't think Bethesda wouldn't be able to do it and fix all these bugs and add what is needed to be added so we won't have to download a bunch of bug fixing, optimization mods. Their engine can become a pretty ok tool but they have to sit down and remove all the shit we get in skyrim and FO76 and most of the work is out there by modders just go to USLEEP and see the topic with the description of how many things it is fixing... I just hope since they will have to put in a lot of work with FO76 that this will also help them to improve in the next games they will make. 

    Regarding FO76 it is not a good example to look at for their future games yet, at least not for a few months until some patches/updates roll in, hopefully... I will wait and see for a few months because it came out rushed and it was also poorly ported to PC from console which was the focus of the game at first due to xbone marketing etc. If they had left the game more time in development after the BETA where they heard all the complaints and problems people had, the game would come out in a much better state but sadly they had to make the release before the end of this year due to "reasons". So since this game will have no modding for a year at least from what they said it might be a good thing since they will have to fix many things themselves and you cannot have a game with FO76's technical issues in 2018. All in all it was something they did for the first time without the reassurance of modding and they had a deadline that was not enough. They needed a bit more time in development after this BETA in order to fix all these things people complained about and the game would come out better.

    Another thing I wanted to mention and get off my chest is that I see many die hard fans of Bethesda/FO on reddit saying "oh F all those bad people badmouthing the game they are just Bethesda haters" and they have an us against them mentality. They do not even realize how bad that is for the game they like and the gaming in general. The problem of most people who criticised ( it is criticism in many cases and not just badmouthing) is not with the game/title or because they hate Bethesda it is with the technical issues which are very serious for many mmo players, I play mmos over 15 years and had many issues with the FO76 on PC which actually turned me away from the game (DoF, fov, key bindings, locked fps FO63 lol among others killed me). Constructive criticism and voising our displeasure as customers with certain aspects of their product is what might potentially give us a better game that we will enjoy more and what might help them to improve as a creator. Unless we want to blindly vouch for a game no matter what it is or the state that 's coming out as long as it is from Bethesda and then we might get to the point where we 'll play the next ES 6 on mobile like Blizard is doing with Diablo lol.


    This post was edited by Duvain at November 14, 2018 6:29 PM EST
    • 1467 posts
    November 14, 2018 6:52 PM EST

    So I don't have a huge opinion because I'm taking a wait and see approach. Bethesda using the same engine for Fallout: 76 is entirely logical, fair and whatnot. It's a spin-off (kinda) of Fallout 4 so I can't make assumptions at the moment. It'd be like New Vegas having a different engine from Fallout 3, it just wouldn't have made a lot of sense, might be awesome but you shouldn't expect it.

    I do fully believe that they'll develop a new engine for TES:6, whether it improves on what we want it to (mainly the bugs) is another story, but...are Bethesda's bugs that huge of a deal. I haven't played Red Dead Redemption which I think may be the biggest argument against me here, but The Witcher 3 was full of bugs, Breath of the Wild was full of bugs, glitches, etc. I think open world games are just going to have a certain amount of bugginess to them, though I suppose the difference there is that Bethesda likes leaving them in. I just don't think bugs specifically are as much an issue as people say they are (I will say that it's fair to point out that with Fallout: 76 being an MMO it needs to be less buggy than Skyrim/F4).

    • 1467 posts
    November 14, 2018 6:56 PM EST

    But something’s really struck me lately, seeing all the responses to Fallout. I remember in the summer, listening to the E3 conference and being, quite frankly, in awe of the confidence and raw excitement Bethesda seemed to have in all their upcoming projects. Comparing it to what’s happening now, it just seems strange. I mean, they’ve got to sell themselves, I get that, and maybe I was naive for assuming the confidence was real. And I don’t play Fallout, but I expected them to just knock this out of the park. I mean, they were just bubbling over with excitement and anticipation, it makes me wonder if everyone there was fooling themselves or if all the last-minute things that went wrong just caught them off guard. 

    Yeah, it's...been kind of strange to see Bethesda's complete tonal change recently. I think maybe they...it's not so much that they got overconfident but I'm thinking their tests went a lot better than the B.E.T.A did for some reason (maybe it was just a simpler version of the game so it had less noticeable problems) and they've been really taken aback by the reception. That or we have to remember that this is the first time in a long time that Bethesda has really recieved a pre-game reception that was this divided, probably since they first took over for Fallout 3, but Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 4 were all recieved well when they were announced with pretty minimal pushback.

    This is a weird place for them maybe? Because you have people that are just as passionatly for the game as against it and it's created something they weren't expecting...Got no idea, but I do think the initial confidence was real, but something's changed at some point.

    • 122 posts
    November 14, 2018 7:20 PM EST
    To me their shaky confidence seems to come from negative player feedback. This is the first game for the main Bethesda team which relies heavily on handling a tool kit to players and telling them to go have fun. While this is a common type of game (and some of them have been insanely popular), this is also a type of game which tends to settle into comparatively small, niche market compared to the usual Fallout or Elder Scrolls game. Development initially began as part of Fallout 4, so using the same engine makes a lot of sense, and the story, from what I could see, did look awfully rushed in places, but the big thing that worries them is when their rabid fan-community began pushing back against something they didn’t recognize. Bethesda is scared because people distrust new things.
    • 203 posts
    November 14, 2018 7:29 PM EST

    Dragonborn2021 said:

    So I don't have a huge opinion because I'm taking a wait and see approach. Bethesda using the same engine for Fallout: 76 is entirely logical, fair and whatnot. It's a spin-off (kinda) of Fallout 4 so I can't make assumptions at the moment. It'd be like New Vegas having a different engine from Fallout 3, it just wouldn't have made a lot of sense, might be awesome but you shouldn't expect it.

    I do fully believe that they'll develop a new engine for TES:6, whether it improves on what we want it to (mainly the bugs) is another story, but...are Bethesda's bugs that huge of a deal. I haven't played Red Dead Redemption which I think may be the biggest argument against me here, but The Witcher 3 was full of bugs, Breath of the Wild was full of bugs, glitches, etc. I think open world games are just going to have a certain amount of bugginess to them, though I suppose the difference there is that Bethesda likes leaving them in. I just don't think bugs specifically are as much an issue as people say they are (I will say that it's fair to point out that with Fallout: 76 being an MMO it needs to be less buggy than Skyrim/F4).

    Besides that, I also think that the upgrades the engine has received have indeed made it a whole lot stabler than it ever was. I've played a few hours of FO76 today and I had one crash, and a guy I played along with had a single crash at some point as well. Which if you're going by launch days for MMOs is absurdly low in my experience, I've met no one with connection or server issues either, especially when made with an engine that isn't made for MMOs the thing is holding up extremely well. I haven't encountered any bugs as far as I'm aware either, a rare moment of framerate drop when I walked into a specific building at one point but that's it.

    I can't play unfixed Skyrim for that long without having a minimum of two crashes, one of which is most definitely an eternal loading screen, and a handful of minor but ultimately non-impeding bugs and glitches. This Engine has come a long way and even if it has limitations I don't think this is as big of a deal as most of you guys are making it out to be.

    The only major issue I've encountered so far has very little to do with the engine (unless that ability was somehow removed since Skyrim, but not in SSE) and a lot more with how Bethesda decided to code this particular part of both FO76 and FO4, is the inability to properly rebind keys as an English speaking (and playing) AZERTY user (or it being smart and automatically detecting your keyboard set-up as Skyrim has always done). At least it doesn't have you using the "change keyboard language" shortcut as a part of the gameplay, because that has happened to me in the past and it was horrible.

    When it comes to technical issues I'm always very sceptical, while I do think the lack of configurations is ever so slightly infuriating, I often find that most bugs don't occur nearly as often as public outcry would have you believe. If you can live with the lack of config or have gotten into this mess often enough to have found a solution, the game is perfectly enjoyable and really rather stable. I don't think Bethesda needs to change their engine. Would an upgrade hurt? Probably not, but I would prefer they keep focusing on what they do well.

    • 167 posts
    November 15, 2018 2:50 AM EST

    @Teineeva - Yeah that 's exactly where most if not all of the negative criticism is coming from, the technical issues. I agree that the game went through some improvements as the BETA progressed but some key issues remained and these were enough to turn away many people or cause quite a bit of negativity. I believe (or at least want to believe) though that as we go down the line the game will get better, probably.


    This post was edited by Duvain at November 15, 2018 2:51 AM EST