this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2026
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this shuts down rumors that bethesda will move to unreal engine for ES6

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[–] zecg@lemmy.world 117 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Translation: it's the same shitty gamebryo they're always using.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 60 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Not content to look outdated in 2015 or 2023, now they're going to look outdated in 2030.

[–] lime@feddit.nu 45 points 1 week ago (12 children)

2015? that codebase started in morrowind. and say what you want about that game but it is not a looker. it launched the same year as metroid prime.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 39 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I didn't think Skyrim was too outclassed compared to its peers in 2011, given that it was so much larger and doing so much more than a lot of them under the hood. But Fallout 4 came out alongside The Witcher 3, and the difference between the two was night and day. Then of course Baldur's Gate 3 next to Starfield, and I have to scratch my head wondering what the hell Bethesda is doing still running this tech stack.

[–] ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago

Todd Howard doesn't know how to make games any other way.

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

It's not entirely out of question that they'll use Unreal for graphics while retaining Gamebryo for gameplay. That's kinda how the Oblivion remaster works. And might be best of both worlds if they manage to make Unreal not suck in terms of performance and don't fall for the photorealism trap

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think graphics are pretty low on my list of priorities for how those games need to modernize. Starfield looks pretty alright in sheer fidelity, but the faces don't animate well, the conversation system is dated even compared to The Outer Worlds doing basically the same thing, and the engine seems (for some reason) incapable of putting together a proper cut-scene.

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[–] mcforest@feddit.org 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Morrowind? Gamebryo is the continuation of the NetImmerse engine. Development started in 1997 with the first game released in 1999.

[–] lime@feddit.nu 12 points 1 week ago

yeah morrowind used netimmerse, first time bethesda used it.

[–] NachBarcelona@piefed.social 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think Gamebryo (neé NetImmerse) is even a bit older than Morrowind.

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[–] sudoMakeUser@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 week ago (5 children)

I love how the Gamebryo site is still up. I thought it was funny it was still up like 10 years ago when I looked last, and it's still up now without any changes.

www.gamebryo.com

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[–] ordnance_qf_17_pounder@reddthat.com 71 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I love the Elder Scrolls series, but I'm not convinced that 6 will be good. Owned by Microsoft in this age of AI shit.

[–] surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 32 points 1 week ago (2 children)

If ES6 isn't Skyrim with better writing and better combat, it will fail.

[–] NachBarcelona@piefed.social 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

We had that, its called Morrowind.

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[–] lath@piefed.social 42 points 1 week ago (1 children)

New version = old version + ai?

[–] stephen@lemmy.today 21 points 1 week ago

You’re hired!

[–] Tywele@piefed.social 33 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Anyone who believed that they would switch to Unreal Engine is delusional.

[–] devolution@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Maybe for the better. Sandfall Interactive seems the be the only company that could use it without performance issues.

Borderlands 4, Kill the Justice League, Immortals of Aveum, etc. are performance nightmares without tweaking and patches.

[–] arudesalad@piefed.ca 11 points 1 week ago

Coffeestain have done a good job with satisfactory but I can't think of any other studio.

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[–] TemplaerDude@sh.itjust.works 28 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Loading screen after loading screen after loading screen, but hey you can put a cheese wheel in funny places.

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[–] paultimate14@lemmy.world 27 points 1 week ago (4 children)

This may be unpopular, but I think this is great news.

Skyrim became one of the best-sellign games of all time in part BECAUSE of how great it is to see your character get ragdolled into the lithosphere by a giant, or to watch the chaos of spawning thousands of wheels of cheese on top of the throat of the world and watching them roll down.

An Elder Scrolls game that was built around having realistic physics, or being restricted to more cinematic movement and knteractions, would lose a key essence of what made the earlier games great.

I don't want engaging combat in Elder Scrolls. If I want combat that I have to pay attention to, I'll go play a Souls game or a fighting game or one of the thousands of games that have tried to be "Skyrim with better combat" that have languished in obscurity because they miss the point.

[–] dovahking@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago

Also the reason skyrim is still popular is because their engine is way easier to mod compared to unreal. I don't even know any unreal game that has even 10% of modding capability of creation engine. Granted it's outdated, but it's still the reason their games are popular. Hell even starfield recently got a star wars overhaul mod which wouldn't be feasible with unreal. As much as people like to shit on fallout 4, it's modding scene is still one of the most active one. And starfield's failure was more because of scale of the world (and poor writing which has been a staple since skyrim). I'm still skeptical but also somewhat hopeful as long as they build upon the previous es formula.

[–] zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 week ago

Fully agree. TES with UE would not be the same.

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[–] Romkslrqusz@lemmy.zip 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

this shuts down rumors that bethesda will move to unreal engine for ES6

It shuts down rumors that Bethesda will move to pure Unreal Engine for ES6, though I never believed that to be the case.

I see the Oblivion remaster as a bit of a proof of concept of sorts - the potential to have the world, scripts, logic, and physics running on the Creation Engine that devs (and modders!) are intimately familiar with while running the visuals on a separate Unreal Engine layer.

Shedding the need to do extra work on fancy lighting and graphical effects so they can focus on optimizing the bones / structure seems logical to me, but then again this is the diluted Microsoft-era Bethesda we’re talking about so who knows.

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[–] Coolkat@slrpnk.net 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

we can assure you the game will look better than starfield and surely totally not in development hell at all

[–] marighost@piefed.social 21 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I have a feeling Bethesda thought they were going to have a hit with Starfield, and when it was came out to painfully average reviews, they really had to think about their design philosophies. Or they didn't think about them at all and ES6 will be just as painfully average. We'll see.

[–] CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

From the reviews I saw it didn't help that starfield looked and played like a skyrim sci-fi mod that leaned into the Bethesda loading screen meme on purpose.

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[–] Maldreamer@lemmy.world 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This is actually a good news and I am glad creation Engine will be used, The best part of Bethesda games are the modability creation engine and its predecessor provide. Unreal engine is not moddable and is not even beginner friendly, while someone like me can fire up Geck or creation kit and do a full fledged quest mod.

[–] who@feddit.org 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (7 children)

I guess you've never had to reconcile the disaster that ensues when multiple CE mods update different parts of a game's .esp data.

If they touch properties that happen to be near each other, the mods that try to preserve properties that don't concern them end up stomping all over one other, leaving the player in a horribly broken land of conflicts and sadness. The mods can't help it, because the engine's modding system and data structures are fundamentally too coarse to allow touching only what's needed, and too stupid to make reliable conflict resolution possible. The endless quest to work around this flaw is why Skyrim has uncountable patch mods, which shouldn't be necessary in the first place. It's a bloody awful design.

I get that you love the possibilities afforded by modding. We all do. But please don't glorify Creation Engine in this area. What's under the covers is embarrassing, and particularly bad when more than a few mods are used at the same time. Players and modders deserve something better, and a competent engine developer absolutely could deliver it.

As someone who has spent too many hours dealing with its fallout, I wish Creation Engine would die.

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[–] CIA_chatbot@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

My unpopular take- I’m glad of this, the best part of the Elder Scrolls games are the ridiculous physics bugs. If a mount giant can’t send me to Jupiter in one hit I don’t want to play

[–] brsrklf@jlai.lu 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

I believe physics is still mostly Havok, so it's not them. They are just that... amazing at using it.

The annoying part about the "creation engine" is that it's still just the corpse of the gamebryo engine that they keep reanimating with their own crap on top of it. With its shitty proprietary netimmerse format that basically only exist for them at that point.

With time, people have developed tools to create content for it, but it's yet another area where they went, fuck it, people are going to make our games better, and we don't even need to do anything to make their life easier while they do.

[–] Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 week ago

At the same time, unreal games seem to have much less moddability, to your point, the ecosystem around the existing engine for Beth games means its much easier to get in and do modding.

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[–] devolution@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Unpopular opinion: The gamebryo/creation engine itself isn't that terrible considering almost every item is physics based. I love the engine for something like Fallout. Starfield... There are things they could have done with it to make it better. But Starfield did show that as proof of concept, vehicular traversal is doable.

The issue with Bethesda isn't the janky ass engine. The issue with Bethesda is Emil and his shitty writing.

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[–] Lightfire228@pawb.social 11 points 1 week ago

If history repeats itself, ES6 will be a completely different game to Skyrim

Everything complained about will he cut, nothing new will be added

[–] commander@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago

I'm sure they're well aware that the biggest knock on Starfield are its forgettable plot and universe and too much loading screens. It'll be less of a problem in an Elder Scrolls game as it's building on a great lore foundation and it's a region rather than a bunch of planets. I'm sure in the 7+ years later I expect to actually play the game, loading screens won't be much of a problem. Improved graphics will be a given. It won't set the world on fire but it'll look firmly like it belongs in the PS5 generation which is good enough for me

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

At this point there is nothing that they could do to make Creation Engine feel "new". I don't understand why they keep beating that dead horse.

A couple of months ago, I had some extra money, so I bought Starfield because I had an itch to go back into my Crimson Fleet character.

The problem was that a couple of weeks before that, I had also purchased a game that I had wanted for years, but could never justify spending the high price of new games on, Red Dead Redemption 2. In comparison, Starfield just felt so....lazy... in ways both big and small, beyond the common issues like repetitive dungeons, barren worlds, loading screens, etc...

The biggest thing I noticed immediately was the effect of bumping into people as you're walking. If you compare a Rockstar Game (Or even an assassin's creed game), where npcs will make a comment, will move out of the way, get upset, etc... Whereas in Bethesda can't be bothered to do anything except slide you to the right when bumping into a character, who doesn't react or flinch in any way.

I started noticing those little things fucking everywhere. And I have to believe that little limitations like that are because it's running on an engine that is older than dirt.

[–] eRac@lemmings.world 13 points 1 week ago

Nah. They are detecting the collision in order to push the player, so the engine is doing the work already. They could easily add an on_collision_player event in the NPC controller that fires at that point to handle NPC reaction.

The age of the engine impacts things like loading screens, poor use of modern hardware, etc. The 2004-era NPC handling is simply a reluctance to do any more than the bare minimum.

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[–] Snowman_sir@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Surely no one is surprised by this?

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago

I'm not surprised, but I am disappointed.

[–] cmhe@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago

That isn't really saying that much. It could still be a creation engine that has a UE5 renderer on top. Like the Oblivion remaster.

[–] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 week ago (7 children)

Ok and does it run optimized on old hardware and Linux? I'll easily skip it if it doesn't. 😜

[–] Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 13 points 1 week ago

does it run optimized

it's 2026, so obviously not.

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[–] hal_5700X@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 week ago

Bethesda...Bethesda never changes.

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