Just curious....

Its not a new engine just a heavily modified Gamebyro with a new name.

It's new, but they made the same mistakes they made in the old engine. That's why it doesn't feel new.

It's the same engine, it's not new. It's just been modified.

I don t think its new , if its new its really a shame.

It's the same engine that ran Morrowind.

There is no way the engine is new. Almost exactly like FO3.

Who cares? Try to enjoy the game or move on already.

It remains the Gamebrio engine. The "Creation" part pertains only to graphics.

Todd Howard played with words and mislead a whole lot of people (including myself) into believing they were using an entire new engine. They were less than honest during E3. Did they lie? No. But they certainly phrased themselves to give a false, unrealistic impression.

The good news is that this is bound to be the last elders scrolls on the gamebrio engine. There's no chance in hell that it'll hold up 3-5 years from now.

Why would using a new engine matter so much? A new engine could be better, worse, or play exactly the same as the current one. It's all behind the scenes stuff.

That's pretty much what I was gonna say. And, not being involved with the programming or any aspect the game's design (besides having no way to measure - Lines of code?), how the hell can I tell how much is new and how much is ported over?

Skyrim looks almost exactly like New Vegas with user made graphical mods. Sand storms (snow storms/wind in skyrim), water effects, particle effects...just as good as skyrim.

"New" in the software world is a rather useless phrase.


Honestly, the engine appears to be "new" in that it is not the same engine used in previous games, and has obvious updates in how some things are handled.
It is however, not what some people assume "new" to mean, being written completely from scratch without reusing anything from the old engines.


The thing about software is that it does not wear out. Software does not get worse with age. Unlike any other field we are familiar with, where tools wear out with useage, things break down, and stuff just generally degrade over time, software does not do this.

What does software do as it gets older? It gets better. Issues are found, exceptions are written, errors are fixed. After time it can often look horrible and become hard to follow, but all those changes to the code were done for reasons.

To start from scratch again is to throw out all that bug finding and error fixing. And this, is not a good thing.


Software should never be rewritten from scratch if it can be avoided.

Yup. It's feels and looks almost identical to FO3 engine.

Skyrim is using the "same" engine, Gamebryo. They've just changed so much with it, that they've decided to call it a "new" engine. It most definitely also has to do with that the old engine had a very, very bad reputation, due to their buggy and (sometimes ugly and outdated) games. Calling it a new engine is (somewhat false) marketing. So to say that it's a "new" engine, is practically a lie.

Be that as it may, the Gamebryo engine, outside of graphics has been stagnating since Morrowind. The same issues crop up in each itteration, while new issues are tacked on via radiant X stuff.

A rewrite, in this case, could allow them to use their experience to avoid the pitfalls that have come to cause so many of the issues they cannot seem to fix game after game after game.

The company that made Gamebryo is now out of business. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamebryo

The creation engine is entirely new BUT it's basically Gamebryo 2.0, the Creation Engine is simply similar to Gamebryo.

It's not entirely a new engine, but there were significant changes made.

They did actually get rid of Gamebryo, technically. Gamebryo is not really an engine, it's a 3D render API that you can purchase as middleware for your projects. Model detail, texturing, lighting, shadowing, animation, and shaders are what Gamebryo deals with. The rest is all Bethesda or other licensed middleware.

Creation Engine is technically what Bethesda has always used, only they've now made it official because for Skyrim, they have heavily modified the original Gamebryo render model. However, the same basic details are still there, the lighting techniques, the shaders, the texture application... that's all the same, just optimized. Basically, Bethesda is doing everything Gamebryo did, but in a different, more efficient way.

Oblivion's engine was not Gamebryo, because Gamebryo is not an engine. It handles the render and animation, nothing more. For Oblivion, the render and animation was accomplished primarily by Gamebryo with a tie-in from SpeedTree, Physics were Havok, Scripting was Bethesda's in-house model, and the Interface was XML. Only half of the engine is actually Gamebryo.

For Skyrim, Bethesda re-wrote the render for efficiency and a few new features (dynamic shadows, new flora animation scheme, volumetric LOD clouds), and plugged in Havok Behavior for the skeletal animations. It's technically not Gamebryo anymore, but the influence is still there because most of the render techniques used in Skyrim have not changed since Fallout 3 and the 3D model format remains the same (.NIF).

Skyrim's engine uses Bethesda's heavily modified version of Gamebryo for the render and basic animations, Havok Behavior for the skeletal animations, Havok for physics, scripting is still Bethesda (they call it Papyrus now), and the Interface is Flash.

It may not look it, but there were a lot of changes under the hood.

Same Engine, Much better graphics make it feel new.

And, stop saying it's the Gamebryo engine, it's not. That's only a portion of the overall engine.

It's a shame you wrote all that and forgot that "game engine" can sometimes be informally synonymous with "graphics engine".

Which in a way makes it new. It's different.

Ah ha, I wasn't aware Gamebryo online related only to graphics! Interesting!

When they mentioned rewritting the engine, I expected it to mean more than graphics. I expected it to include AI, scripting, all that whacky stuff thats been a real awkward mess for years.

I would say more of an upgrade. I wouldnt call it new though, I think that stretches it. No sugar coating that one, their description of a "new" engine was quite misleading.

Not that most gamers know what an engine is but, technically they did have the right to call it new if it's not the same as the old one. As misleading as that is. Not sugar coding, just saying that's how business works.

Bad thing is, it's not a "new" engine. It's the same NetImmerse/GameBryo engine they've used since Morrowind.

Good thing is, it means the modding tools remain largely the same, which is the great thing about the engine they use. The quality of the content in Skyrim is very probably a direct result of them having become so familiar with the engine and the tools.

If there have been significant changes to the platform running the game, it hasn't been regarding the game engine itself (How everything moves about and interacts).
Graphics, Menus, the 3rd person camera, the Magic system, and they added Shouts.
But the effects of the shouts have all either been in the game already, or been added with mods (OB/FO3/FNV).