Yeah because it's Bethesda Game Studios engine and the same base they work on. You also can tell if it's a Unreal game or if it's a Cryengine game if you are able too. Also you can tell if a different studio works on a part of your beloved franchise.

So what?

Focus where the real problem's are and not on a hypothetical engine you have no idea about (and yes I know that is harsh but proven true thousends of time, simply changing the engine is not the ultimate solution you are looking for).

I don't think a moderator would ever say "there will not be" but one may have indicated that they didn't believe there ever would be. They tried it, it didn't work.

Do game engines really cramp a studio so much? I mean, things like poly-count, draw-distance, number of light sources etc., yeah, those are clear technical distinctions. But, for example, are the animations producible with one game engine really so different from those that can be produced with another? Is the level of colour saturation different, or the quality of character model?

What precisely is the difference between the Unreal engine and the Cryengine, and what impact does that have on the look of a game?

Or are we talking about the different art/design styles of different studios, the quality of their animators, modellers and texture artists?

That you should ask Zanderat which I answered here.

Maybe a misunderstanding on my part. Because you said;

"You also can tell if it's a Unreal game or if it's a Cryengine game if you are able too."

...I thought you were saying that you could tell what engine a game was based on - which surprised me, hence my question to you

I very often can, yes. Since I have looked through a lot of available engines for my own game.

Ok, so, how do the engines look different? This is not a veiled challenge question, I'm genuinely curious, because personally I can't identify the differences.

Differences between studios, and types of game, those I can see. But I don't seem to have an eye for the differences between engines, so I was wondering if they're easy to spot (except to my stupid eyes ), or very subtle.

Personally, I think every UNREAL engine game is easy to spot because it either looks like Gear of War or the Batman games, in that everything looks bulky for no reason, and looks like its made of cheap plastic like children's toys, or it looks like Borderlands and Bioshock, were everything is STILL bulky for no reason, has ultra low resolution textures, but a cartoon art style to try to hide it.

The exception to the rule was Mirrors Edge, which somehow managed to look like no other Unreal game before or after.

I think Sesom's whole point was that we should be blaming Bethesda for their games' shortcomings rather than their engine. However that was never what this thread was about and people were simply identifying the creation engine by the name of it's predecessor gamebryo, which for some reason seemed to cause a somewhat unhealthy amount of frustration in him/her.

Once you have added more to and changed the engine and your work is greater than the original engine then it becomes a new one. Sort of the same way that microsoft will require you purchase a new license for windows if you change out too many parts on your pc. Because once you have changed and added enough, it' s just not the same anymore. That is why I will always refer to it as the Creation engine. I mean, they used Gamebyro. It's not the same and all changes since then were created by Bethesda.

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Is that Gamebryo, though, or just Bethesda's own code? What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamebryo#Games_using_Gamebryo_and_LightSpeed? I haven't played most of these, but do you think you could have been playing the games on this list and just known, "oh, this is totally Gamebryo."?

Bethesda games definitely have a "look" to them, though; like, the distance blur they used in http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/fallout/images/5/5c/Evan_King.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20110118200141 is almost identical to the distance blur they use in http://images.uesp.net/d/d4/SR-place-Blackreach_02.jpg. It's possible they didn't change much of Skyrim's renderer and just amped up the settings and added more (like volumetric lighting out the wazoo in the trailer) to match the new console specs.

That definitely falls in line with the "Bethesda look", especially the far distance LOD, but I think the crop is being deceptive here. It doesn't give a good image of the progression between close and far.

It's no different to Skyrim or Fallout, the crop shows enough, I've spent many hours fighting with LOD, I know it well. I have high res textures installed in New Vegas and when I render it at 4K it looks exactly like the garage shot, chances are Bethesda rendered parts of that video at 4K and then downsampled it, it's a common trick to make games look better. The game could have been in development well before the current gen console specs were known or dev kits released, they may well have put high res textures on existing assets and then added fancy lighting, we know from modded games just how much difference those two things make, a fully modded Morrowind puts vanilla Skyrim to shame and that's mostly fancy textures and lighting effects. Then again, I may be completely wrong, time will tell.

I don't care much if FO 4 looks better than Skyrim or the previous two FO games. I want a new story with better writing, consequences, and a deeper RPG experience with greater choices.

Oh, I'm not disagreeing with you. Although I'd be hesitant to say a fully modded Morrowind puts Skyrim to shame; not until OpenMW becomes a functional replacement of the original engine, at least. Although it is funny that Morrowind got volumetric lighting and ambient occlusion before Bethesda put it in their games... is there any AO in the trailer?

I start on the last sentence of yours: easy to spot or subtle?

That depends on you and your ability to spot the differences in lighting, shaders and animations. Because these are usually the things that catches ones eye. When I watched the trailer of FO4, I instantly noticed the shaders. They are infact quite simple. Basetexture + Normalmap + specular. Add an alpha layer for transparency where applicable. Next, lighting. Creation Engine uses so called omnilights, the most used type doesn′t cast shadows. Take a closer look and you will see a lot of objects not casting a shadow. Simple reason for that: all shadows are rendered in real time, unlike for example UE3 that uses a shadowmap + dynamic lighting. Realtime shadow calculations are resource heavy, hence shadowcasting lights are sparsely used. Animations are a bit of a problem. Because these do depend a bit more on the dev, but they are also limited by what the engine can do. However, using animations to pinpoint an engine is actually a bad idea. If you would, you would come to the conclusion that the Mass Effect series and the Dragon Age series use the same engine. Now put what I said to the test and take a look at Batman: Arkham Asylum and Unreal Tournament 3/Gears of War ( IIRC both were developed by Epic, choose either ). Both games use the UE3. For the gamebryo, you can take a look at Divinity 2 : Ego Draconis and Oblivion.

Todd Howard is executive producer. Just in case you don't know what that entails, it means he has the final say in all matters.

I would also remind everyone that the masterpiece that is Morrowind is straight from the mind of Todd Howard including the construction set which incidentally was largely coded by Todd personally, off the clock. A man with that kinda passion and success(he has half again increased revenue with each title since he took the directors chair at the start of MW dev cycle) whom attained said success with a huge gamble( Morrowind took two years to sell the bulk of it's copies) isn't going to just throw all of that away to use a flashier engine with zero capability to do everything the Creation Engine can do...and by that I mean make a BOWG.

The only engine out there that could match the capability of the CE is Unity and switching over to that engine would ultimately just mean rewriting all of the current code in a new language without really gaining any graphical fidelity but gaining a lot of new problems.

Exactly right. I am not sure what @sesom 's problem with me is.

Eh, I wouldn't take it personally. I always get frustrated (more than I should, I guess) when people trash Bethesda's choice of engine without really knowing what they're talking about. There actually hasn't been much of that in this thread, compared to others I've seen, and not from you.

Those are some decent scaled hills actually. With all the brown scrub it almost looks like home. Is Boston particularly hilly ingame I wonder? They'd established before that the war caused the rise of mountains in formerly flat areas.

It is hilly around Boston. Boston itself is pretty flat.

But, it IS the same engine since morrowind. With slight improvements here and there, but, essentially, it IS the same.

What you are putting forth here, would imply that the C2 Corvette, wasn't really a corvette, because a few things changed.

No, it isn't. In fact, Bethesda bought the source after Emergent went bankrupt, and there is little to nothing left of the original NetImmerse (Morrowind) or even Gamebryo (Oblivion, FO3).

Claiming that an engine that was coded for Windows XP and original XBox in 2002 is essentially the same as the Creation Engine (in its current post-Skyrim form) in 2015 is pretty silly as various pieces of software from 2002 don't even work on new OSes and their associated hardware (and that includes console hardware and software, of course).

More relevant Windows has had three kernels. First was windows 3 kernel used in 3, 3.1 and 3.11, 95, 98

then the NT kernel. NT 3, 4, 2000, xp also the servers versions up to 2003 server. (this was the pure os without dos in bottom)

Finally the vista kernel used from vista to today including windows 10.

How much code is carried over? Probably a lot.

Because Unreal 4 IS the same engine since Unreal 1. With slight improvements here and there, but, essentially, it IS the same.

What you are putting forth here, would imply that the C2 Corvette, wasn't really a corvette, because a few things changed.