I adore the Netimmerse / Gamebryo / Creation engine and I hope they continue to use it (and to improve it) for many years to come. I think it is perfectly suited to the kind of non-linear, open-world games Bethesda makes. And when it comes to modding it is the most flexible engine I have ever worked with.

I appreciate the fact that there may be no other engine that does that Bethesda's engines can do, but if its a brand new engine, why can't it do more than 60fps? Surely that is a result of the framework being old, otherwise it would have modern features and support stuff like 120 fps, adjusting texture and shadow size from within the game (and not in the launcher), why are the keys ALWAYS hardcoded in every game Bethesda makes with this engine, why does mouse acceleration have to be adjusted within ini's etc? All of these features seems to be throwbacks to a time where engines were clunky and unintuitive, and not something a brand new engine would ever feature.

I'd like to see a better TES world with better everything: ccharacter animations, character movement, cloth and hair physics, larger scale battles, better npc collision with the terrain, some destructible environment, more up to date graphics. Everything on top of the current interaction with clutter and everything. If all these can be achieved in the old engine, I couldn't care less how old the engine actually is. If they can't, then I think they should buy/create/license a new one.

Oh boy

On PC at least the PC version of Fallout 4 it seems like you can now render 30,000 NPC's without a Crash to Desktop (CTD). Thanks to the PC version of Fallout 4 running on a 64-bit .exe and allowing for more RAM to be used.

Here you go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ_uoayfrDg

There are some FPS drops it seems though.

Fallout 4 has some destructible environments does it? The Bethesda Softworks E3 2015 conference the YouTube video that I watched I remember the Player Character (PC) throwing a grenade in a building and some panelings flying off and cars still explode don't they?

Of course this can't be achieved in the present engine, or else Fallout 4 would have all that you wanted

Morrowind and Oblivion had some pretty advanced graphics (for their time) but Skyrim and especially FO3 and FO4 were pretty disappointing compared to the year they came out. Witcher 3 and DA:I, that's what you can achieve with a better engine. Another one to watch is the upcoming Deus Ex Mankind DIvided.

We also will see what kind of graphics video games can achieve with DirectX 12 and the more drawcalls that DirectX 12 allows for.

There are shooters that locks the framerate to 60fps (Wolfenstein the New Order) and you hardly see people complaining about that. Why is it such a big deal that an RPG, as complex as Bethesda's, locks the framerate to 60? It's perfectly reasonable to me. The hotkeys aren't hardcoded. the latest beta patch for Fallout 4 allows you to rebind everything except the number keys. Mouse acceleration hasn't been an issue except with Fallout 3 (and subsequently NV), so I don't know what you're talking about there.

Keep in mind, This a Fallout game not a TES game. Fallout 4 is the follow up to Skyrim just as Fallout 3 was the follow up to Oblivion. I fully expect TES VI will have the next major iteration of the engine.

Yeah, I'd love to see what BGS can do with the CryEngine. I love what I've seen so far from Kingdom Come Deliverance.

Because they haven't changed those things yet.

I don't know *why* they haven't changed them; with the possible exception of the physics being linked to the framerate limit, they should be trivial, and have nothing to do with the engine -- if they wrote a new engine, they might do the exact same thing with those settings. The physics issue may or may not be difficult -- I don't know *why* it's linked to the framerate, so it could be a trivial fix (replacing references to the framerate with a constant) or incredibly difficult (e.g., the physics calculations are intimately entwined with the rendering code for historical reasons).

That said, the single biggest mistake a company can make is to try to rewrite their software from scratch; I sincerely hope Bethesda never makes that mistake.

No, the keys are hardcoded. Try remapping the alt key. Try remapping the wasd keys, and use those new keys when lockpicking or in VATS, they won't work because you still have to use wasd. Remap your pipboy button (TAB) to something else - you can open up your pipboy but the other functions of TAB such as closing menus have to be done with TAB. These are just a few of the things I could mention. Remapping keys in Fallout 4 is a nightmare.

The patch Bethesda threw out was a superficial one that didn't address the problem at all, it simply moved the hotkeys off the numpad and only partially fixed the Activate command (it still is labeled as E after remapping). And Fallout 4 certainly does have mouse acceleration, you have to edit the ini with bForceIgnoreSmoothness=1. On the subject of mouse control, the x and y axis for mouse movement is off, again that has to be fixed with an ini edit.

No, they will continue to improve it as they should

God's let's hope they bin it! It was dated 7 years ago. Frankly I'm shocked they are still using it when their are far superior engines out there and has been for many years.

Imagine using drying lights engine for example. That's the type of engine we should be seeing these days.

yeah, some stuff can be destroyed. It's hardly Frostbite, and seems like they need to be deliberately placed in order to be destroyed, but it's a big-up on what they had previously. I wish you could destroy *everything*. You launch a fatman at a trailer, there shouldn't be much left. Maybe in FO5

They won't retire the engine, or they would have done so already. They'll keep making improvements to it, and giving it new names for marketing but also when they've made a significant number of changes to it. Really you can't still call it Gamebryo for a number of games now. They've improved it so much. Maybe they haven't improved it as much as people would like, or made the types of improvements people want to see, but at this stage (even for Skyrim) I just don't see them dropping everything and starting from scratch in some ways by picking up a new engine. I am sure it would also be a big blow to the modding community. It's their long development cycle, not the engine itself, that results in their games being a couple years behind the curve at release. Bethesda fans have always lived with that fact and I'm sure we always will.

Hope not, the Creation engine is perfect for them. It'll just keep getting improved, as stated.

Not trying to be contentious, but Witcher 3 and DA:I may both have better rendering but their respective worlds are more limited in the amount of layered details that are present within the game world. I'd like to see anybody pick up a random pot in Witcher 3 or DA:I and move it around. Personally, the rendering on both of those titles did not fill me with the same level of awe that it has some people. I will not discount Witcher 3 as a beautiful game but I also will not say that it looks "better" than FO4. DA: I was pretty fugly to me. I hated the super sparkly textures that were used for armor and whatnot. I saw much beauty in the environmental stuff, but it just didn't seem all that great with character textures and animations.

All that said, I don't think that Bethesda will abandon the Creation engine anytime soon. I imagine that they may gut and rebuild some of the limiting portions of it, but to get rid of it would make future Bethesda ARPG titles seem less like Bethesda games.

Personally, I would rather they stopped making idiotic design decisions. They made the same keybinding decisions with Skyrim and received the same backlash. Fix that and the UI issues and Fallout 4 would score near perfect in my book. Right now it is an 7.75/10 for me. I'm having a blast with it, but the above mentioned issues are detracting from the overall experience. That has little to do with the engine itself and more with design decisions though, so probably do not have a place in this thread.

It's a fundamentally flawed engine. Yes they have managed to improve the graphics (as far as the engine goes) but it's not up to current generation standards.

The problem with the engine is it poorly supports coding and pathfinding. AI handles badly, objects don't integrate well with the environment and pathfinding is diabolical. Yes the AI can be coded and scripted better but it will never be great and the environment can be tweaked to help pathfinding. But the whole way the engine handles data is very process intensive and relies on an outdated heavily patched decade old engine. They should of started from scratch and worked on the engine from the ground up rather than spending 7 years trying to make the engine look pretty. Yes it looks good compared to fallout 3 and NV but compared to witcher, dragon age or dieing light it's terrible.

I will not be buying another Beth game till they have invested in a new engine. Flogging a dead horse comes to mind here.

But the Witcher and Dragon Age can't do the things Fallout 3, NV and Fallout 4 can do. Most things in those games don't move but that's not the case in Fallout. Go into a room in Dragon Age/Witcher and in most cases nothing in there moves or can be picked up but in Fallout you can move or pick up most things.

I just play the game. I leave the nuts and bolts to other people.

True, but what good does it do? Its fun to run around on tables in Skyrim, scattering all manner of pots and pans onto the floor, but the only time I ever interact with these objects is to loot them. I know I can lift that dinner plate and put it on a shelf, but I never do it.

I have to wonder if the trade off is even worth it.

Maybe not to you, but it absolutely is to me. Knowing that I can touch anything, even if I choose not to, does wonders for my immersion and making me feel like I'm actually a part of a real world, rather than just jumping through a designed obstacle course.

You are -still- jumping through that designed obstacle course whether you're doing it in F4 or TW3. But I take your point, the fact that you can interact with most items can add to the believability.

Surely the current Xbox & PS consoles will remain in their configurations for many years yet.

So why would it be necessary to develop a pumping new engine, the result of which consoles could not handle?

No matter what they do someone is going to be upset. I say keep the same engine I don't want every RPG to be a clone of each other.