I think the tech is just the tools... Telling the craftsman which tool to use is micromanaging - the wealthy arisocracy wouldnt have micromanaged to that level.

Asking a painter to paint a landscape, or even a specific landscape - Fair enough. Telling the painter to use a number 2 brush to do the hills - Second guessing the artist.

Well, I disagree. Players actually see the game engine at work while playing the game, which means it's a material, not a tool. It makes up the objects, characters, and scenery. You don't see tools in a finished product; you see the worked material.

The actual software tools used to craft the game engine into a final product aren't visible to us. The developers use them, but we don't see them, any more than you see a sculptor's chisel in a statue when visiting a museum. I'm sure those tools are parceled with the Gamebryo engine in some way, but they're still separate from it.

More than that, the game engine used affects the appearance, feel and performance of the final product, in much the same way granite, marble and clay might effect the appearance of a finished statue. Gamebryo/Havok games seem to end up looking, performing and feeling a certain way, and a newer engine might improve upon that.

So in a way, you have a point: A specific game engine has specific software tools associated with it that developers might prefer to use. As customers, however, we might want a newer engine with different software tools, which will make the game look, feel and perform better, but require the developers to learn the new tools.

Bethesda will choose the engine that lets them best do what they want, balanced by its cost. Normally I'd exclude that last point, I imagine most of the AAA engines are fairly comparable when it comes to their price. However now that id and Bethesda are both Zenimax Media companies it probably is a factor worth considering.


Although this is less true now, certainly when Morrowind was in developement few games combined a large open world with such high object detail. TES III didn't have the absolutely best graphics of its time, but the fact that almost all objects were individual items, and that the game world was so large and open, was a nearly unique combination.

Given the unique needs of the developers Gamebyro (then NetImmerse) was a very appealing game engine because it was extremely customizable. In fact it was specifically designed to be customized and added to. I think it's less true now, but at the time is was basically just a graphics engine, and the other aspects were minimized so the developer could mold the engine to their specific needs. An extreme range of games ran on NetImmerse: RPGs, FPSs, RTSs, sims, and even MMOs. Compare this to the Unreal engine, where most games don't stray too far from its first person/third person origins.

Today I think most game engines are specifically built to handle both large open areas and high object detail, so Bethesda has far more choice when it comes to achieving this balance. Now, if they're still looking for something very customizable, or very familiar, Gamebyro may be their best bet. However I expect they could do what they want with most of these engines, and of course id tech 5 likely has the more appealing price tag.



But, as I mentioned before, we need to be careful about considering what Bethesda will do some of it may have started some time ago.

Sage advise...

And besides, Bethesda will go their own way, do what they think is new and exciting, and it will be awesome.

Of that, there can be no dispute.

Miax

This is true, to a degree. But let's be honest, most players are going to be very hard-pressed to really tell a difference between which game engine is going to be used. Most commonly, people generally mistake differences in art style, graphics, and whatnot for differences in engine. Those Rage videos look very nice; but that's so much more to do with the artists in that team than the engine itself. Few people would have been able to tell if that game was built in Gamebryo instead of Tech 5. (If I'm being honest, I highly doubt I would have called foul if I'd been shown a vid of that game and someone had told me it was build on Gamebryo.)

I'm far, far from an expert on videogame design and their engines. But even with what I do know about them, I can rarely look at a game and tell whether it was made on the Quake or Half-Life Engine, for example. Your average consumer is simply not going to be able to tell the difference between the two. And half the time, I'd wager than when they do show a preference over one engine or another; they really just prefer the art team in one game over another.

The question is kind of premature until I play Rage...

The recent news stories on Rage make it sound like a dream in some ways, but no one really knows until it comes out. Tech4 sounded amazing as well but ended up kind of lame, really... and that comes from someone who really liked Doom 3 and Quake 4 and Prey.

Can't we suggest granite over soapstone?

*Hey, I actually like Gamebryo, I just don't like the way it was used. ~Especially so after I played http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-Re0ZkLRIY&feature=related.

Id describes Rage as a racing/shooter, so I doubt the engine is tweaked for an RPG. (not that it couldn't be done...)

It's just pushing polygons around and loading up textures, when you get right down to it. I mean, look at Gamebryo - that can just as easily be used for something like Civilization as it can for Fallout 3, Warhammer Online, or Bully. id Tech 5 I'd imagine would work the same way. The engine doesn't really care one way or another.

That's not [quite] what I mean... Look at Oblivion's 32 character limit for Dialog topics... I'm remembering Prey, and how Tommy just said his lines and was told what to do. (Yeah they were good lines, and Prey wasn't trying to be an RPG... but the engine is geared for a shooter ~it doesn't mean you can't make an RPG with it, but it affects how difficult it might be to try).

I just wish the environmental geography and objects would cast shadows. I assume it would be a massive resource hog in gamebryo, but I've seen the Source engine do it in huge areas with no performance problems.

That's my personal problem with Gamebryo: Either the engine itself is rather inefficient at rendering, or Bethesda has trouble optimizing its releases graphically.

When I compare Half-Life 2 (the latest episode, in any case) to Fallout 3, in a number of ways Fallout 3's graphics are clearly superior, though no company has yet beaten Valve at its masterful, lifelike character renderings and animations. Yet, it seems to me that for every increment of "better graphics" in a Gamebryo/Bethesda game, you get two accompanying increments of "system resource hog." In other words, you need 3x more system resources to run Fallout 3 at max settings than you need to run Half-Life 2 at max settings, yet Fallout 3 only looks 50% better at best.

This makes me wonder when game developers in general (and Bethesda in particular) are going to stop pushing for photo-realism 100% of the time, and instead focus on performance, optimization, streamlining, reducing choppiness and jerkiness, etc. The amount of stuttering, pop-in, jerkiness, and frame rate inconsistency in most modern games even on powerful computers is getting pretty annoying. This is coming from someone whose computer can actually run Fallout 3 fairly smoothly at high settings, a rare feat (and that's the point, it shouldn't be rare even on mid-range gaming computers).

When the industry gets to the point where the in-game rendering looks just as smooth as turning your head in real life (on a decent gaming rig), then they can go for photo-realism again. Well, that's how I wish things were, anyway.

Well, Gamebryo looks great, and I'm sure that TES V will use that game engine. And besides, Bethesda knows that technology very well.

That would be a discussion on the art and sounds in my alegory.

Ah...
I had considered The ultimate shape as the art, but the substance as the foundation/medium. (IE. you could make a sculpture out of ice, clay, or even butter ~and in each case the medium comes with its own limitations, methods, flaws, and benefits).

Unreal Engine 3.5! , thats what it should use.

I don't know much about the differences between game engines, but id Tech 5 sounds more impressive and Rage looks more impressive than anything done with Gamebryo, I'm just going by Wiki and the features listed on the official sites, they both claim flexibility and easy cross-platform devolpment, the other stuff I wouldn't know about because I have never developed a game before.

Actually, Fallout: New Vegas will be released on the same engine that Fallout 3 was created on...

Hopefully version 2.6 [or perhaps 2.7?]

Fallout: New Vegas is not Fallout 4.

I assume it will be Gamebryo.. but the current or the next? (or the previous?).

Probably same version as FO3.

Gamebryo has been an awful engine since Morrowind. I can see why they stuck with it so long (its cell-streaming)

But now that every game and its dog is open world it seems a bit redundant to stick with the tattered broken down warhorse

World-building would be infinitely easier with id tech as well.

As awful as you say it is, it works very well for the games Bethesda makes. Oblivion and Fallout 3 look amazing at max settings... Oblivion at max settings is still one of the best looking PC games out right now. At the same time, it handles open worlds very well and streams in content well (on PC anyway). I don't see them giving that all up for untested technology... maybe after Rage releases and everyone knows what it can do.

Bethesda's main problem with Fallout 3 was animations and certain game mechanics looked too similar to Oblivion... Morrowind to Oblivion was night and day... I assume they couldn't modify Fallout 3 as much due to it being on the same consoles.

My only real complain about gamebyro is the uber annoying out-of-sync lag that happen in a lot of lcds/video cards. It was said several times its internally framed to 64hz, i really dont know why, but i am always forced to use clamp methods to avoid this problem.

Also it would helps to use physx as current nvidia cards support it.

Bethesda should use the CryENGINE 3 tech that Crysis uses. It'd look awesome!