better to have off the shelf engine? : V - Skyrim

» Fri May 27, 2011 9:40 pm

Xngine for Daggerfall and Battlespire.

And it doesn't matter if they ever made one. What matters is the quality and creativity of the coders and designers they have on it now.

well id say it would matter, because they would know how much resources/people/time would needed to be allocated

» Fri May 27, 2011 10:22 pm

Do you honestly believe that Bethesda has constructed an entire game engine from scratch and developed an entire game in the standard 4 yr cycle?

Todd Howard: The technology is ours and it is inspired by the technology we have. We have a lot of it. But that's our starting point - the Fallout 3 tech. It started with Morrowind, we went to Oblivion, we did a lot between Oblivion and Fallout 3 because now we had final hardware - with Oblivion we had six months on final hardware, so Fallout 3 technically does a lot more than Oblivion. The new stuff is an even bigger jump from that.

The technology they have, which is a highly altered and customized version of the Gamebryo engine. They can call it their own because it's middle-ware and the ability to alter the stock engine's core code is what makes it their own.

The engine is entirely new as in it's a new Gamebryo build, unlike FO3 and New Vegas which used the Oblivion build as a base starting point.

Given the fact that it was released at the exact same time as development on Skyrim began and seeing what Todd has said in the quote above I think it is a safe assumption they are continuing on the path they were on and using Gamebryo's latest engine. Mark my words ladies and gents, Skyrim will be running on a Bethesda build of http://www.emergent.net/en/Gamebryo-LightSpeed/Features/. Bank on it.