Sounds more like “We’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas!”
Perfectly tuned to churn out mediocre crap. Checks out.
Perfectly tuned is not the right environment for creativity.
“perfectly tuned” means their game engine is coupled to their game design, which yeah, more or less makes genuine creativity impossible
not to mention the psychological factors, like the hurdle of convincing higher ups to try something new when simply not doing that is 10x less work
It makes sense. It would be pretty costly to train everyone there on a new engine and tweak the new engine enough to play nice with the kind of games they want to make.
I mean it is, but it might be less costly than continuing on the proprietary engine. CD Projekt and Halo both cut their losses and moved to UE5 as a compromise moving forward .
If CD Projekt, creators of one of the best RPGs of the last 20 years, thinks they can benefit from an engine switch I’m inclined to think they might be right.
Skyrim is a better RPG than anything CDPR made, and Skyrim isn’t a good RPG.
Not better, but they are different kinds or RPG. Both are open world action RPGs yes, but CDPR makes highly story driven games when Bethesda makes sandbox style RPGs where the story is only framing all the mechanics and possibilities. In Bethesda games I can roleplay my characters, in The Witcher I can roleplay as Gerald.
The problem with Halo is that 343 didn’t keep a lot of the people that actually knew how to use the Blam/Slipspace engine. They didn’t want Bungie employees working there. So of course they were going to switch to Unreal. Now Halo is going to have the same bad performance problems all the other games that use Unreal have been having lately.
A big benefit of using a proprietary game engine is that the development studio does not need to pay a yearly fee per person for a game engine license every year that a game is in development. That gets very expensive very quickly. Both 343 and CD Projekt have a lot more money behind them now than they did 10 years ago, so they must think the huge financial loss is somehow going to please investors. Because at the end of the day, for both companies its all about pleasing the investors, not gamers.
People really need to understand what an engine is before complaining about it.
counterpoint: if it isn’t the engine holding them back, then everyone left is just fundamentally bad at designing games (i’m not counting “let’s just copy what we designed last time” as design), and that’s worse
then everyone left is just fundamentally bad at designing games
Obviously. The problem with Bethesda was never the damn engine, they’ve been consecutively dumbing down their games ever since Oblivion. The only anomaly was New Vegas made by Obsidian, which are actually competent at making RPGs and even with the dated FO3 engine at the time they managed to make one of the best games ever. The problem was never the engine, it’s their game design philosophy.
the average player doesn’t care about crunchy rpg systems. they do care if the core gameplay would’ve been outdated in 2010.
bethesda doesn’t seem to be able to improve the core gameplay because the engine can’t cope.
even if you fixed the writing and tossed out the awful procedural generation in favor of hand-crafted environments, at it heart it’s still going to play like a stripped down borderlands 1
I also don’t think it’s fair to blame the devs,I think they have a lack of direction.
Ever since Fallout 4, they’ve been trying to take their games in every direction possible at the same time.
Crafting? Check Vehicles? Check Skills? Check Online? Why not? Thousands of procedurally generated planets? Go for it Story? Anything goes, it doesn’t need to make sense
The gameplay loop in Skyrim made sense, quests took you to dungeons that gave you loot which took you back to towns and more quests.
Ugh the crafting is a drag. You need to level up, you need to build outposts for materials, and you need to create useless stuff as practice, and you have to deal with an inventory system from 2010. It’s like after the daggers in Skyrim they decided crafters in a single player game needed to be punished. Any one of those systems would have worked to provide a feeling of progression and keeping people from going too fast on crafting.
