What I don't understand is why people are here if they hated the past 2-3 games Bethesda made (and describing a game as an unplayable husk sounds like hate to me). Shouldn't they have just moved on by now?
I'm on this forum because I have enjoyed every Bethesda game I've played (even Daggerfall, though it ruined my computer), but some people just seem to be here to bash Bethesda. It confounds me.
But to "speculate", I wonder if they'll give us any warning before they announce it, like with Oblivion and the timer on their website, or if they'll just announce it out of the blue. Hopefully the former.
You can enjoy the gameplay, atmosphere, quests, characters etc. even if the underlying game engine isn't ideal. I loved Oblivion, but it took a bit of tweaking to make it look great, especially on the mid-range system I had back then. It's also incredibly unstable - change the tiniest thing and you get CTD's, crashes on exiting, or the game simply won't start.
Gamebryo was OK in 2006 when Oblivion was released.. but that was nearly five years ago. There were still some issues, and the hardware requirements were pretty steep compared to other games at the time (that looked just as good). But as technology changes and improves, there's a need for the underlying software to change too, to take advantage of new hardware in the most efficient way possible. When Fallout 3 came out two years ago, the engine was starting to show its age, and with New Vegas, it looks downright outdated, not to mention all the bugs and issues people are having - some may be due to an outdated game engine being asked to do too much. At some point you have to stop shoehorning features into an old game engine and rewrite it from scratch for modern, multi-core systems with DX11 graphics.
I will enjoy TESV regardless of which engine it uses, but I do hope it uses a more stable, faster and more optimized engine.
» Fri Feb 18, 2011 9:29 pm 
Sarcasm, am I right? 
