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Skyrim lead designer says Bethesda can't just switch engines because the current one is "perfectly tuned" to make the studio's RPGs (www.gamesradar.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think were seeing diminishing returns in graphics. Some games are almost photo realistic.

This means that any engine capable of these graphics will be largely future proof.

They should bite the bullet and build/move to a new engine. It likely won't need changing unless there is a major breakthrough.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

People have been saying this since Half Life 2, possibly even longer, then everyone said it about Crysis. To be fair, Cryengine has some validity as a future proof engine. It was first made in 2002, just 5 years after Gamebryo and is still being used in heavily modified forms by a large number of studios. But even that is showing its age and is getting heavily refactored yet again for the Open 3D Engine that the Linux foundation is working on. With that said, the amount of active development and intensive refactoring that the Cryengine has gone through at this point eclipses what has been done for the Gamebryo engine. But it still seems like lack of respect for tech debt is the larger problem than "just switch engines"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I get your logic but Source was developed as a foundation engine and it had a road map to improve its performance and graphics. Example: HL2 vs Dear Ester.

Cry Engine again, designed to be perormant and push graphics. Opened up to multiple developers as a service.

Bethesda's engine is tuned for RPG elements, fair enough. But there is apparently a limit to how graphically rich it can get.

Bethesda have pushed there engine as far as it'll go. There ex dev is saying "it isnt the engines fault the RPG was bad." These are 2x separate issues.

There will always be tech debt making large scale IT changes.

RE the point on Risk, I'd write it like this:

IF the engine is changed THEN there could be a delay to current projects. Mitigation: finish projects in flight. Start new projects on a new engine.

How about this risk:

IF the engine is not able to be modernized THEN there is a risk that Bethesda games fall beind their competition. Mitigation:

Better RPG elements (Dev says this didn't work).
Migrate to a new engine in a rush when the next project doesn't sell (cutting corners on the tech debt).

P.s. do you have a good definition of tech debt? Ive always used "Something we need fix in the future." Quite loose but ive had lots of arguments about this lol