Just recently, Xbox boss Phil Spencer said he hopes Starfield will be a 12-year hit, just like Skyrim.
Yeah no fucking shit Phil, the fans would have loved a generation-defining megahit as well! Maybe you should have told Todd to try making the game good as well as marketable?
The tech debt is just glaring at this point. They need an actual new engine instead of yet another gamebryo rework.
No, they need a competent dev team. To this day, Valve is using a game engine that is, at its core, the Quake engine from 1996. Goldsrc? Source? Source 2? All increasingly heavily reworked versions of the Quake engine. And they can use it for everything from Alyx to Dota 2! If Valve can do it, why can’t Bethesda?
To this day, Valve is using a game engine that is, at its core, the Quake engine from 1996. Goldsrc? Source? Source 2? All increasingly heavily reworked versions of the Quake engine.
All Valve statements about the Source2 port of Counter-Strike say Source2 is a completely new engine.
It’s new in the sense they have rebuilt large enough parts of it to fully justify giving it a new name. Certainly it’s very far removed from Quake. It’s not like they’ve been sitting on their hands for almost 30 years. But it’s not like they rebuilt it all from scratch, either; just the parts they needed to. Old code is still being used, and even new code still sometimes uses the old as a base. The most obvious visual example that comes to mind is the pattern they still use for flickering lights which has been around since the Quake days.
It’s a bit of a Ship of Theseus situation, but I think my point still stands: Bethesda doesn’t need an entirely new engine, they need devs who can (or more likely, need to give their devs time to) properly rebuild the parts that need it.
I mean a huge (really huge) number of game engines ultimately draw lineage from Quake. It’s either Quake or Unreal.
Nobody is denying that but the claim that Source2 is at its core just Quake 1 is just insane.
The most obvious visual example that comes to mind is the pattern they still use for flickering lights which has been around since the Quake days.
But you wrote “To this day, Valve is using a game engine that is, at its core, the Quake engine from 1996” and that’s just untrue. Just because nobody ever saw the need to change the light flickering pattern for no reason other than to make it new, doesn’t mean that Source2 is “at its core” still Quake1. Even the community-maintained wiki (not a officially sanctioned Valve document, btw) you’ve linked only speaks about “some residual Quake code”.
Semantics.
Another to look at it is that if Valve properly managed their VCS, you could do
git ls-files HEAD^10000and see Quake/goldsrc code building the foundation for everything that came after. Every subsequent rewrite and refactor was shaped and constrained by what came before and what hadn’t been rewritten yet. If they had started with another engine, they wouldn’t have ended up here.Beyond semantics, Source 2’s lineage is still very apparent. While the engine is very good at what it does, it’s without question much better suited to a rather specific class of semi-realistic 3D games. It has a look, a feel, strengths and weaknesses. It can’t be Unity or Unreal Engine, and it would have been a ridiculous mistake to use it as a base for Elite Dangerous or Assassin’s Creed Valhalla or Terraria.
Funny that you claim deeper insight into Source2 than Valve.
Source2 was first developed for Dota. It’s way more likely that its limitations are because it was never developed as a complete allrounder, not because some minor bits and pieces like flickering pattern were developed in the 1990s because that’s also where Unreal Engine was first developed.
I’m in awe of how confident you are.
They need an actual new engine instead of yet another gamebryo rework.
The Starfield engine is already half idTech7 anyway.
Didn’t know that, what parts?
Didn’t know that, what parts?
At least the parts that are mentioned in performance tweaking guides that instruct users to edit config files and the parameters are all named
bTemporalAA_idTech7=0etc.
I wish people would stop saying “it’s the engine” when they don’t know what they are talking about
Maybe you should have told Todd to try making the game good as well as marketable?
But he “Plans to Release a 1st-Party Blockbuster or Highly Anticipated Title Every 3 Months”
There is no place for “when it’s done” with this attitude.
