It's not that you can't but rather that it is very inaccessible. The creation kit is a tool built out of the creation engine to give modders the rough tools that Bethesda's quest and world designers would have. It's incredibly easy and intuitive to use compared to UE. If Bethesda did switch the easiest choice to make would to just say Modders can use UE to make mods, and hopefully they would release all the code they wrote to manage the game, quests, NPCs, since UE doesn't have any of that by default. Without that code it would be very challenging to implement new quests or characters since your pretty much guessing as to what Bethesda might have done; which would mean modding would only be available to the expert programmers. And Bethesda would not want to release that code as it would be a legal nightmare to manage (considering people who would steal the code for their own projects, not just individuals but other big dev's). But releasing that code would also have some legal problems for Epic Games since some of that would likely include code written exclusively for UE, which contrary to popular belief is not Open Source. UE is Source Available which means you can look at it but you can take it or repurpose it without express permission. The harder option would be what they already did when they made morrowind which is create a completely independant tool like the creation kit, that they can hand out all they want without violating any license agreements or revealing any code that could be then stolen by outside parties, or be used for corporate espionage giving their competitors a leg up, which happens pretty much all the time.
@@micholitzia5726 Any engine can be easy to mod, it's all about whether the developers are willing to package and release their internal tools that they use to make the process easier. That's why it's far easier to mod Bethesda games than most, because they provide the tools. UE has quite decent tools as it is, the reason it's a bad choice is it's bad at open world games even with all the new stuff in 5. CryEngine otoh would be excellent because its a beast at open worlds and can handle tons of physics objects, and it's Sandbox is actually also a great editor that lets you test things live without compiling. Frankly the Creation Kit's tools are hardly improved over Gamebryo, mostly just better UI. They are nothing to write home about, it's just that people know them well.
Am I the only one who likes the radiant AI in Oblivion? I liked that people had random conversations instead of the same one over and over when you entered an area
i've played Skyrim recently and with in a few days i'm already tired of the convos they have and the same comments they make towards me as i walk past them. I got a disease and it's refreshing to hear them comment on something else for once lol
I always loved it myself. I didn't realize how much of a joke it was to fans until social media lol so for years I thought it was cool and normal then in the early 2010s noticed everyone thought of it as a joke. Don't get me wrong I love the memes but to me it's still cool and not as jokey as others think.
And I want Elder Scrolls 6. Like, now. ;:y not in 5 to 7 years! Now! So far, Starfield doesn't even seem to have interesting factions I'd like to learn more about, so thats probably not as entertaining to me as Fallout and the Elderscrolls are! Even though I love space ships and sci fi. But that generic shooting is boring to me.
For Bethesda to implement Radiant AI as originally intended they would need to redesign core game mechanics. Namely the game ecconomy and NPC injury and justice system. Give non trader NPCs the ability to buy and sell, have location damage like in fallout and have other things to manage via survival mechanic, Don't make stealing a crime instantly punishable by death for NPCs.
Well modding in Unreal is definitely possible. I think the biggest reason they don't do it is because A. It takes a long time to adjust their workflow to suit Unreal instead of Creation Engine and B. They would need to pay licensing fees to Epic Games, which they probably want to avoid in any way possible.
they would also need to build an entirely knew set of modding tools in order for it to be anywhere near as functional, whereas their engine is already built for it.
@@TheCantinaChannel Conan Exiles has modding tools (UE4) since it's beta. If they can do it I have no doubt that it would be relatively easy to implement.
@@looniper3551 yes. And it was not the same version of unreal engine that exists now. People are asking why Skyrim isn't made on Unreal engine because of how much better it looks, not realizing it's a version of unreal engine ten years newer than the game.
Unreal engine doesn't make world items spaz out when you pick up another item near them. This makes The Bethesda engine ideal for immersing clumsy people into the game world.
@@clunky9072 they don't, most player don't play with mods and that applies not only to games from Bethesda but all other games from other developers, because most players follow the path of least resistance. And Bethesda itself reported that only 8% of Skyrim players have ever used a mod. So most people don't buy Bethesda games for modding.
Creation engine is super easy to use and convenient for anyone who tries. I've tried using other engines, and they're either not as good, way too complicated, or require actual programming still that I do not have
Creation Engine has mad potential to create massive open worlds or even metaverses.Only thing Bethesda has to do is to refine the engine and remove jank
I’m honestly remembering why I appreciate Bethesda games again. Out of the box they’re a bit clunky but I just installed 50 mods before I even started fallout 4 for the first time and it ran seamlessly lol
The ease of modding is the biggest strength of the creation engine. Even a person like myself with no programing experience can learn to do basic things in it that would not be possible for any other engine that I am aware of. It has been this way since Morrowind with very little change in that regard. I don't have to know how to program to add an item to an NPC or even add a whole other NPC. Which really opens modding to people that would never otherwise even try to mod a game. It also allows those that do know how to program and script things and other programming stuff I don't even know about work their magic on a 10 year old game and make it do things that the Bethesda probably never thought to do with it. Mods are a major reason why Bethesda games have a longevity to them rarely found in other games of this type. Modders have kept Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind and the Fallout series (Yes I'm including New Vegas it uses the engine and mods are a huge part of it to). A lot of people that complain about the engine do not realize how much the modding community would lose if they switched. Thank you for putting into words something I have thought for a long time.
Lots of games define stuff like items or NPCs in configuration files that you can change without programming with the right tools. It's hardly a special feature of the creation engine rather a common practice.
@@101Mant except there's no documentation and you need to know what you're doing because files and stats are named with numbers instead of descriptive names. You don't even need the guide offered by Bethesda to learn how to use their Creation Kit, (a guide is something that other games don't even have, why would they? They don't support modding) i learned it solely by clicking the items and seeing how everything works. It's THAT easy.
@@ghostwizard7597 same with blueprints in unreal engine. You're just clicking things and connecting lines. It's their visual scripting language. It's very easy to use
As someone from the game industry, I can tell you, that most of this is really not the case. It's 10%revenue sharing, 10% ''don't fix what's not totally broken (even if it almost is)'' approach and 80% changing pipelines and making their staff learning new engine
@@parkercadmin3666 I don't think it's entirely classifiable as laziness on Bethesda's part. There are stil lots of valid reasons for them to stick with their own engine. But some of the points here are definitely reaches, and others wrong.
@@nisem0no The "modding thing" is 100% true, NO other game company comes remotely CLOSE to the "modability" of bethesda games, and there's an incredibly obvious reason for that.
This whole video was nonsense. It showed that he either has no clue that Unreal Engine is offered as source code, allowing developers to customize their own build... Or that he doesn't understand that being able to customize code in Unreal Engine to rebuild it, is the same as being able to customize the code in Creation Engine to rebuild it. Everyt "point" he gives is either not true because they can change anything they like... Or doesn't work as a point in Favor of Creation Engine because it works for both. Familiarity... is the only advantage. And since they're both in the same programming language, and UE is designed to allow features like Creation Engine to be added to it... They could simply modify the CE's code a bit to make it a Module within Unreal Engine... allowing them to use the familiar interface, while taking full advantage of all of the compatibility, resource-utilization, and efficiency advantages of Unreal Engine. (not to mention the infinitely superior rendering speed and quality)
Creation Engine is criminally underrated. Apart from modding & quest creation, the creation engine also handles a lot of interwoven systems very well. It manages the state of it's large open world pretty well considering player & AI input permanently affects the said state. The only engine that comes close to replicating this in the AAA gaming space is Rockstar's engine for GTA & RDR.
I feel they have to severely update the engine however because a lot of the Bethesda games made on it all feel too like samey. It needs to be improved because it still seems to be like its 11 year old state.
I hope Creation engine 2 is upgraded over 1. They have really nice ai and availability of modding capability with the engine. If they are able to apply modern gen graphics with CE2 holy Bethesda will be legends.
@@j-s-m Better graphics would be good, I hope they put more effort into what makes the engine unique, improve the radiant a.i, and better memory management to support their dynamic open worlds and event scripting and more modding tools
I've done and published mods for Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 / NV, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, Divinity Original Sin 2, Neverwinter Nights, Neverwinter Nights 2, Dragon Age Origins, Dragon Age Inquisition etc. And I can tell you that all the games I've tried modding, Unreal Engine games are among the hardest to mod, and I am someone with actual programming (JSX, Python, C++, C# etc.), 3D modeling (3Ds Max) and texturing experience. The issue is that when someone comes to modding scene, and they want to try it out, and eventually improve and become REALLY good at it, the initial threshold can not be too high, or it will kill all interest. The threshold of using Creation Kit is very low (I started out when I was 14yo with zero programming knowledge), the threshold of Using Unreal engine... you basically have to be an IT engineering student or programmer hobbyist with burning passion for deciphering someone else's code without designer notes.
That's a problem more with the studio's not issuing any documentation and not supporting development of modes, over the engine not doing so. Epic offers a endless sea of documentation as well as low level SDK that lets you functionally rewrite anything you want in the engine. I mean, that's one of the big hitching points with Creation Kit and modding with Bethesda titles and why we have to turn to code injection and rely on Script Extender teams, to do what high level kits like the Creation Kit cannot, that isn't documented anywhere. You're more benefitting from a long-term dedicated community than from the developers there.
If modders cannot use those Unreal tools with limited programming knowledge, that doesn't help. The reason SkyUI has been downloaded 24 million times is because it was available 5 weeks after release.
@@SylviusTheMad Semantically you don't need any programming knowledge to use Unreal 4 or 5. It's unadvised, but their visual script system is robust and making a UI wouldn't be too hard. I would also point out, Sky UI was not made by some noob modder just learning things, but a group with professional experience and programming skills. Still took them around a month.
The way I see it, Unreal itself is highly modifiable as designed by the engine devs, but is only 30% the way to a full game. Then when individual game developers using Unreal implement the remaining 70%, they are likely not paying attention to moddability, which ruins the foundation for any future modders looking to add on new functionality. Additionally, if you had the expertise to develop a moddable framework on Unreal, you would likely then sell that as a "Tool" asset on the UE Marketplace, which means any future modders will need to own that as well. Skyrim/Creation kit on the other hand is 100% of the game implemented, and moddability/DLCs were at the forefront of the dev's minds for the entire process, so the foundation is 100% solid for any additions. The game devs are creating those tools for their own benefit, and after they sell the game there's no serious profit motive in depriving the mod devs of those tools.
@@ShadoFXPerino I wouldn't say it was intentional entirely on Bethesda's part. A big thing that drives the moddability is the open pack/file structure, which is a byproduct of them adopting Gamebryo early on. Many older engines, even UE2, have more open file structures for reading/loading assets. That changed in part for security, and in part for more efficient storage and loading of assets on modern engines that archive most of their assets into often proprietary formats. Even Creation Engine does this, it's just that Bethesda allows people to read their archives through Creation Kit. Modders still end up building tools to actually access, unpack, and repack those files. Bethesda does not provide that functionality. Similarly modders have to force archive invalidation for using the loose file system. Bethesda stumbled it's way into having a big modding scene early on, but it did grow to support it.
The Witcher 3’s engine was pretty fantastic as well, for the sake of how seamless and near glitchless the giant map and landscape was itself. It only loaded in what you were facing, which saved so much on rendering and whatnot. Even some games on Unreal still don’t look that good
It's also considered heresy by Epic, and those of use who've waited since UE4 landed for usable shadows in orthographic mode (great for top-down) are still feeling that one.
@@mezzb This is, of course, why the unofficial patch is one of the most-downloaded mods for every edition of Skyrim; because Bethesda patches very aggressively, and only leaves "crumbs of bugs". How much for a ticket to the alternate reality you're living in?
@@mezzb at some point when they re-re-release their games, they could you know fix the bugs? Like come on there's like a dozen versions of skyrim and yet they still have game breaking bugs in the latest one. They could even ask the modders to use their unnoficial patch to be part of the official game like some good devs do.
it's also just not true, there are tons of things in major engines like Unity and UE that the communities have been clamoring for fixes multiple versions ago that just don't get touched at all lol
I feel like you forgot one of the biggest benefits for a game company to make their own engine and that is they don't need to pay a fee to Unreal. I mean a lot of these big companies want to maximize profits
Thats a much bigger part in the decision-making for a large developer than a small Indy team. Especially since Bethesda sells games for longer than a decade, and lots of different platforms.
@@smolpener7430 It actually is! You don't understand just how expensive licensing fees are. While keeping an employee with skills and experience is worth much more to you
They didn't make this engine, tho. It's the Gamebryo engine. They've been using it since Morrowind and just "improving" it since then. Does that mean lots of bugs? Yup. And they're perfectly content allowing the community to deal with that via unofficial patches and mods.
@@MrCobalt Bethy has done a poor job of engine design and updating for a long time. There are a ton of bugs, glitches and problems in the CE that have been solved - admittedly, Bethy has to give the dev's enough time (and enough dev's) to fix them but it's possible. That being said, they do own the old Gamebryo engine now and have made so many updates to it that it's like saying anything built on UE 5 is just the old UE 1 engine from, ya know, the game Unreal back in 1998. It's disingenuous. The newest Creation Engine is leagues ahead of the original Gamebryo engine. By the way, UE 5 has code that is as old as the original UE 1 engine from back in the day. Since UE 5 is an update to a 27 year old engine, essentially, it must be as much garbage as the Creation Engine, whose code base was founded 1 year prior to the original UE 1, right?
Although I've seen a lot of people criticize the Creation Engine, I actually like it because it's difficult to comprehend but is incredibly mod-friendly. I appreciate it when developers use their own engines to create their games.
It was fine until... New Vegas. Since then it has been enough behind the pack that it's hard to justify. And it isn't their own engine, its the Gamebryo, but on steroids. Much how Call of Duty still runs on a hotrodded Return to Castle Wolfenstein engine. As for being able to mod, that's mostly about the devs supplying the right tools more than anything.
@@thetowerfantasymusic the creation engine is very poorly written for what I have heard. It is unoptimized for modern hardware, was a cpu chugger when it released, and honestly without modding their games would be mid. Its that most game lack tools made by the developer to mod their games either because of licensing issues or more commonly they don't have the energy to do so. I look at operation harsh doorstop, a skeleton of a game and how they implemented tools to mod it from the start, wishing more developers would give us a good framework to build upon. That was why ARMA 2&3 was successful, why bethesda keeps people playing, and doom still has an active scene.
Unreal has a low level SDK that allows you to develop just about anything you want. It actually is more flexible than the Creation SDK since you can go in and modify or replace entire components of the engine. That's a difference with the Creation Kit, which is more of a high level SDK which gives you access to the code, assets, and tools that have been built on top of the Creation Engine, not access to the engine itself. This is also something Bethesda has to rebuild every time they make a new game, since even with using largely the same code base, they still do a lot of minor changes, updates, and tweaks that they ultimately have to make another version of their kit. The problem with modding in many games is that devs don't spend the time to develop public kits for their low level tools. This is also why many large or significant mods for Bethesda titles have to rely on the likes of Script Extender teams to develop injection methods, so that modders can forcibly modify or extend features of the engine that Creation Kit does not grand access to, but Unreal SDK natively does.
@@monody But does it allow to have 30 differen people modifying the same area through an form id system that allows for the game to be generated by reading any combination of those?
I really like creation engine actually it’s so easy to mod old mods form 2011 Skyrim can work on SE no work needed, probably why there’s thousands of them per game while the Witcher 3 has a few mods but they break with any game update and we’re such a pain to get working originally with bat files that often conflicted and still limited with how much you can mod
@@chainsaw8507 FriendlyHUD is a good Witcher 3 mod. It's a negative feedback loop: No demand for mods means less active modders means less mods means less demand for mods. But the vanilla game is far more solid than any Bethesda game since Morrowind. Fallout New Vegas has good mods and quite a lot of them in fact, but that game is also better than the other Bethesda titles, so less people install mods for it.
@@totallynuts7595 FriendlyHUD just improves the HUD. No offence, but that's not what I would call a good mod, or at least not the kind of mod I'm talking about. It's a helpful one and it's nice to have, but it doesn't add characters, stories, mechanics, locations, entire remakes of games, or even completely original games. Those are the kind of mods I'm talking about. If The Witcher 3 had an engine as modder friendly as Bethesda's we'd see mods like those. Also, where's your source that not many people mod New Vegas?
@@totallynuts7595 CDPR still doesn't have nearly as moddable of a game. Has nothing to do with fixing anything. And Witcher 3, and Cyberpunk both had their fair share of bugs. It's going to happen with any open world game like that. And what are most of the mods that come out for Skyrim? Textures, armors, weapons, etc... they're adding in new content to the game because it's easier to implement on the CE rather than the Red Engine. Demand for mods has nothing to do with how well the game is. Skyrim did win GOT after all, and so have other Bethesda titles. Even Morrowind has a huge collection of mods, but that doesn't make it a bad game. Where are the new quest mods, the total retextures of everything, the new thousands of armor and weapon mods, the different mount mods? As far as I recall, there's one mod for Witcher that let's you wear pretty much any in-game outfit you'd want, but it's a buggy mess and a hell of a time to install where Skyrim you can already do that in Vanilla. They both have their own strong suits as far as a game goes. Witcher has better combat and a great story. Skyrim has better immersion and exploration with more roleplaying and replayability. Creation Engine is just far easier to mod with because they give you the engine to do whatever you want and all the tools and assets they have.
A huge benefit of Unreal Engine is that its Open Source. If the engine has issues, you can fork it and have your engine team fix and extend the engine as you see fit. Probably the biggest reason, is the time and cost of hundreds switching employees - many who have worked at BGS for over a decade - learning a completely new system, and implementing a huge back catalogue of tools and modules to the new engine instead of incrementally tweaking them for the next game.
The problem is more that because it's not an in-house tool, the studio will not have the knowledge to make big changes to it and might not be able to fix every issue that pops up. At the very least it takes a lot more time. With an in-house engine they generally have the person who made that system on staff, and the issue might not even have occured in the first place because the engine was designed for the game specifically. When a game is as big as what Bethesda makes, Unreal would need significant changes. And when the studio is big enough to roll their own tech, then why bother modifying Unreal to do what you want? Almost all the bigger studios use their own tech after all.
@@utfigyii5987 I know. Its OS not FOSS. Having source access still allows you to resolve engine bugs that a closed source engine would force you to simply work around.
I've been playing Morrowind a lot recently and not gonna lie - I thought the footage from Skyrim in native engine was the UE5 content. It's amazing how your brain just accepts graphical fidelity for what it is after a while.
Radiant AI is the only way to do Bethesda NPC’s they feel like real people in Oblivion. The lack of that in Skyrim was one of the first things I noticed when playing Skyrim where the dialogue was repetitive and stale
It's actually alot more simple. Money and experience. They got tons of experience with their own engine and they're not looking to pay royalties to Epic.
I understand why many developers use the Unreal Engine. That said, I applaud all the studios and publishers, included Bethesda, who are hell-bent on using their own. In fact, we need **more** studios building and using their own engines! We do not needs games technology monopolized under a single company and their one proprietary engine, which is what's happening more and more with every studio that caves and opts for the Unreal Engine for convenience's sake. I was so very sad to hear that CD Projekt Red was going to drop their RED Engine for Unreal Engine 5 moving forward. I understand the logic behind that choice, especially considering the fact that they had run off most of their senior devs who had helped to build and were intimately familiar with RED Engine, and that the majority of their workforce now is effectively new hires, probably fresh out of college and who only know Unreal Engine because their college coursework required it. Again, I get it. But I don't like it. And it still makes me sad.
i completely agree with you. About CDproject...well, looking at the absolute mess they made with cyberpunk i'd rather have a game made with UE5 at this point. The "photorealistic" look of cyberpunk can be achieved only with an ultra expensive pc. Even with a 3050ti it runs like crap.
@@astral_anomaly2250 Much of that is the fact that CDPR higher ups and their disastrous development philosophy/practice had and was continuing to run off much of their senior staff, i.e., the legacy developers who had developed TW2 and TW3 and consequently developed and knew the RED Engine best. This also means a lot of the features implemented in the Cyberpunk iteration of it are done so in a haphazard, "fast and loose" fashion, with little to no optimization. Their running philosophy seems to be to bludgeon the GPU into submission instead finessing frames out of it. And not only is this because most of the senior devs who know RED best are gone, but the green devs who were left behind also were crunching and trying to develop a game that moderately resembled what was shown in the "gameplay trailer" for the unrealistic launch date imposed upon them from their pathetic excuses for executives. My suspicion is that if development of the RED Engine was spun off to a seperate team of engineers whose sole responsibility was to clean up and optimize what's already there, to partner with dev teams to develop and integrate new features into it as needed, and otherwise to keep it updated and it properly maintained, RED Engine has the potential to be one of the best in the industry for those types of games. As a side note, I also would love to see them drop DirectX12 in favor of Vulkan and also drop Nvidia's various proprietary solutions for AMD's open source, vendor-agnostic counterparts. With both of these changes, there would be no "black box" potentially hindering performance of their games. The engineers always would have the freedom to dig into the source code and change whatever they needed to to gain more and better performance.
SORRY BRAINFARTS BUT ITS INT JUST FOR CONVINIENCE SAKE.LOEV ME ALL KNOWING KEYBOARD WARRIORS WHO SUDDENLY KNOW EEVRYTHING UNDER TEH SUN BUT I BET IF YOU WER EPLACE D TO RUN A COMPANY IT WOULD GO BANKRUPOT WITHIN A WEEK IF LUCKY!!!!!
@@HickoryDickory86 you DO understand that writing your own engine means supporting it on multiple platforms, constantly fixing a lot of bugs that can eventually create new ones. Checking whenever game running on Graphics API A looks the same as on the API B. Some times graphics drivers will try ruining your day. Or, even better thing, DX12/Vk both are messy, and you have to write your own graphics driver similar or better than DX11 did. Some times you'd have to fix small thing like - renaming some variables that are saved per material/scene - kaboom -> you have to migrate all of your projects right now (not really right now, it depends). Source: my experience at work So writing own engine comes with both advantages and quite strong disadvantages. But I think decision of choosing an engine depends on a kind of project you'll have, team size, money, game style, janre and lots of other factors. And I do think that it's a bit of a shame CDPR switching to UE5 instead of keeping their own.
I'm not sure how well unreal would handle things like being able to go into a house and pick up, throw etc all the plates, the potions being actual items you can pick up and are not just background images things that teleport into your inventory etc.
To be fair, Unreal could handle that just fine. Probably better than CE. Real question is, how would Unreal Engine handle quest building, adding in totally new frameworks for totally new game mechanics (like SKSE, Nemesis, vastly improved physics including soft body physics) and modular plugin files for new content? In Creation Engine, a total noob like me can fire up the Creation Engine, open the documentation and have simple new quest with all the necessary scripts, dialogue, locations, markers etc up and running in a few hours.
@@cmdr.shurimal8980 All of that could be handled easily by UE. Because in the end modding is always about how games developers support it. How many tools will they make for you, how easy it will be and stuff. As for handling plates, potions that was mentioned, all of that is on coding basis and has literally nothing to do with an engine. If anything it would make it easier to do since UE has pretty good physics engine implemented out of the box.
It's not wacky to the "silent majority", it's just that it's so popular to bash them a smaller vocal group is all you hear - meanwhile the masses are racking up thousands of hours in Skyrim and Fo4....
the way i got into creating games was by making oblivion, and later skyrim and fallout 4, mods. For me this felt like the perfect introduction because the tools were so obvious and simple that even with only a 5 minute youtube tutorial I could jump in, make a quest, create a dungeon for that quest to happen in, fill it with enemies and npc's, and create a reward for completion with minimal issues. This meant more of my time could be dedicated to making the layout and quest make sense. Even though I can now also use Unity and Unreal, the Gamebryo and Creation engines will always have a special place in my heart for that first day of adding my first mod, booting up Oblivion and having that "omg i actually did a thing!" moment
Knowing Creation Engine ever since Oblivion and without even watching the video I'll say this: I'd take the thousands of mods that CE made possible over a mainstream fancy engine any day, thank you very much. No offense to unreal, but everyone and their mother uses it, it's awesome that people stick to proprietary engines that still work best for them.
Now try to make you own game and sell it with creation engine... You can't! The problem here is the oranges and apples. CE is great FOR MODDERS, not for someone trying to make their OWN GAMES. For someone who makes games UE isn't FANCY AT ALL, far from it, is actually the most accessible engine out there. So before you, Bethesda slaves start to shit on UE for the sake of stupid comparison? Why don't you guys go ask Todd if he would borrow to you his precious engine?
@@efxnews4776 he literally did borrow people the engine. It's literally how people are able to make mods lmao. And I'm not shitting on the UE, it's a great engine, it just wouldn't possibly be as moddable as CE is and the majority of Bethesda's player base enjoys creating and using mods in their games because it's so simple to do. And CE obviously is great for people trying to make games, as Bethesda has made several on that engine. There's just isn't open to use for people to make and sell things from (it's in the terms and conditions). No one here was shitting on UE. You just can't read. Why are you so butthurt that people like and watch BGS to keep using the engine?
@@efxnews4776 Everything Steven Seagal said AND the fact that a bunch of really talented mod teams DID, in essence, make their own games. Look up Nehrim, Enderal from SureAI and The Forgotten City which was originally a large mod, later also made into a standalone game on UE. Me saying UE is fancy doesn't mean it's bad, just mainstream. It is in fact more capable than CE on plenty of fields but it, like every other engine doesn't come close to CE's versatility when it comes to modding. CK is among the most (if not the most) versatile kits, period. Being able to make your own shit for a game is not slavery, it's consensual, creative and sure as shit better than not being able to at all.
People also don't understand that UE is not really great at handling big dynamic complex open worlds that Bethesda games are known for. Sure, there are UE4 games with big levels, but even then they are no match to Beth open worlds. Obsidian tried to replicate the Fallout NV formula in UE4 through The Outer Worlds, and even though it's a good game, it's nowhere near the openness and complexity of Fallout NV which ran on Gamebryo. Funnily enough, in UE5, Epic remodified the engine to use CELL based area asset streaming/loading to support huge open worlds. A system which Bethesda has been using for the last 2 decades in both Gamebryo and Creation Engine. Sure, the graphics renderer, physics and animation engine in the Creation Engine is way out of date, but other than that, Bethesda did a lot of things with their engine which was way ahead of their time. In fact, it's these advance features (along with modding) which carried their games through decades instead of eye candy like graphics and photorealism which honestly doesn't matter much in the grand scale of game development. Creation Engine 2 (Starfield) is resolving a lot of those outdated systems and issues, like a completely new PBR pipeline, physics and animation system which will all improve the overall experience by a lot, and will bring the engine back to modern standards. Not to mention all the more awesome mods that can take advantage of these new systems.
“If there’s a problem, the developers are able to go out of their way and fix it” Meanwhile Bethesda: We couldn’t figure out how to add trains to fallout 3 so we made an NPC wear a train as a hat LOL
It's all smoke and mirrors. If method A looks stupid, but is quick to implement and end result is indistinguishable from method B you'd have to spend a lot of time to develop, the method A will do. By the way, the plantable soil in Skyrim's Hearthfire DLC is actually NPC-s, too. So are armor mannequins (a script disables their AI at loading the game, but sometimes with heavy script load, it doesn't happen). When you buy sawn logs to build your house, they're actually weightless items in your inventory, just hidden so you don't see them in the menu. The log piles near the houses are just activators with simple scripts attached to get and display the amount of logs in your inventory. Every piece of dialogue in Bethesda games is a quest. All games use "hacks" like this.
I've been programming in unity and i think the only problem with using another engine is reinplementing the systems required for the game such as radiant quests, unity (and probably unreal engine too) has stable versions that are used to develop full projects without the need to update the engine version where you can still update single components without breaking the assemblies, while using these versions i never came across the errors you talk about until i used unstable and preview ones, its such an unlikely event that it's not a reason to not use an all traits better engine like UE5, the problem is that reimplementing mod compatibility, dialogue system or a flexible mission sistem with consequences and alternatives like the creation engine takes more time than updating their own one
Their arguments were kind of misinformed in general. As you noted, most releases for Unity and UE4/5, especially if you're using them to develop a full project, are stable releases. Version control on any project dictates you lock into a given iteration of a chosen engine and roll with it for development. The same can even be said about Creation Engine as it's not a direct evolution from one game to the next in terms of the engine and it's version. There's many small numeric updates we don't directly see as consumers. They seem to readily conflate the high level scripts, tools, and assets built over the engine with the engine itself, which also confuses things.
Interesting video, but as an Unreal user I don't agree with a lot of the points made. When you sign up to use Unreal Engine you're given access to the source code of the engine in a private Git repo. It's not open source, that implies you can freely share the source, but you have access and can make custom versions of UE with what changes you want. This is the same codebase that the Epic team building Unreal work on themselves and so you're not artificially limited. If you hit a major problem, and if you have the skills, you can fix it yourself. You can even push the changes back to the engine and, if Epic accept the Git push, it'll be part of the core and you won't need to patch the same changes into future releases if you update- and if not then normally updating patches is a fairly quick task. It's this level of access you need if you're writing Borderlands and want to rewrite large parts of the rendering system, or writing Fortnite and need to rework the network system to handle more players- and, yes, Fortnite is by Epic but there's nothing in their changes that an external company couldn't have done too. As a specifc example if you want better mod coding support then add better mod coding support directly to the engine, or even as a plugin which links in. Get the runtime for Lua, JavaScript V8, AngelScript or similar and link it into the Unreal engine, there're plugins for this on the Marketplace and NCSoft did it with linking JavaScript support in for their games (now UnrealJS, a downloadable extension). It's tricky to get right and performant, moving data quickly between the managed scripting engine and the C++ UE is using is a challenge, but it's do-able. If you're a company on the scale of Bethesda then even contact Epic directly about getting access to their preview version of Verse, a scripting language they're working on which will make UE5 a lot more mod-friendly. From what little we've seen it looks a bit like Python but with massive support for co-routines and similar techniques to make it so you can focus on building the gameplay logic you're after without needing to worry about how it ties into the frame updates. It looks to be building on top of the SkookumScript technology (who Epic acquired) so if you want more info their 'Death to the Tick' article is good. You can also add support for loading models at runtime this way so modders can add content easily, I did this myself with a .obj importer years back (imported real-time captured and textured models at 25fps, was pretty nifty) and with UE5's Geometry Scripting it's now possible to import a mesh included as a full Nanite model so all the nice detail level and lighting we're seeing. Same with textures, audio and all the other asset types. If you decide to support it then you can even use UE as your modding environment. Let modders use Unreal as their level editor, and have an open API spec exposing your internal systems to them via Blueprint and/or C++. I've written a few small add-ons to Satisfactory because they use UE and I could add logic in C++, and I enjoyed the game. It is a different skill set and you risk losing modders who don't want to learn Unreal, but you also stand to gain modders who already know Unreal or want to learn as it's a more useful skill which will allow them to make their own games later on. There's also a lot more learning resources for how to use Unreal than there are for even the best supported custom modding systems so learning should be quicker. This isn't easy and will take time but this is not a solo dev working from their bedroom, this is a AAA development with massive budgets. Take a small fraction of the team working on maintaining and updating their own engine and move them to fixing issues and adding functionality to Unreal and you've got the benefits of the UE5 rendering (Lumen+Nanite is amazing for open world with the detail level and real-time dynamic global illumination, and is why the Matrix demo looked good) and a much more stable framework together with all of the company-specific special sauce that Bethesda could ever want. It will also increase the minimum spec but that's probably not as big an issue as people seem to think. Skyrim running on very low-spec PCs isn't because Skyrim was built to run on very low-spec PCs, it's because Skyrim is over a decade old. As the times Skyrim's requirements were the equivalent of a decent Unreal game nowadays, and I've run UE5 projects on a GeForce 1080 which, while high-end at release, is now a six year old card and two generations out of date. When Bethesda release their next game it won't be running comfortably on Skyrim-level hardware.
Hold on. Unreal Engine source code is available to all the game developers who want to use it. If you are missing a feature in the engine, you don't have to wait for Epic to add it in -- you can do it yourself. Companies like Bethesda have large teams of engineers to support feature development on engines -- so, rather than spending lots of man hours recreating the boiler plate features already supported out of the box by Unreal Engine, they could instead spend their time working to extend Unreal Engine to support their game specific needs. The real reason why game dev companies don't all just immediately switch over to UE is because they've already spent a lot of time creating their own engines and they probably already have several games in the development pipelines using their in-house engine. Switching over to a different engine in the middle of a production cycle would cost many, many months of delay on a game production because your whole content pipeline would need to be refactored and all of your staff would need to be trained on the new content production workflows, which will take a lot of time. The right way to make an engine switch is when you're in between projects. You make your engine switch, start production, lock into a specific engine version, work on content until release, rinse and repeat. Supporting modding can also be done if your engineers and designers build in support for it. There are plenty of games made in Unreal Engine which support modding. IMHO, one of the best reasons to switch over to Unreal (aside from the technical superiority) is that the engine has reached critical mass in the market place and any new hires are likely to have expert experience with the engine already, allowing them to hit the ground running with minimal training and ramp up times.
You make it sound so easy, yet fail to mention that any feature you add to UE5 have a 90% not working. Not to mention how hard it is for people to use who are not programmers.
@@AP13P We're talking about AAA game studios with hundreds of professional software engineers, not your scrappy indie developer working on their first game project.
Not entirely true about unreal being updated and ruining the game, you have an option to update or keep working on the game in the current version. There not being a feature or functionality for your game, that makes more sense but unreal allows you to write your own code, you can add on whatever you want. You really aren’t limited.
ya that's why I side you can't update it (unless I accidentally cut that part out). Also there's still limitations that you have to work around when writing your own code.
Finally a CZcamsr that talks sense about the creation engine and doesn't just shit on it despite not taking into account any of the reasons they use their own in house engine
I think the other problem is that UE4 isn't really suited to big open worlds... could be wrong but I don't think it's as capable as the CE at streaming textures/LODs etc. The only UE4 game that is kinda open world RPG I can think of is The Outer Worlds, and even then it's not truly open, more like an assemblage of large hub areas - and it doesn't really run all that well.
Please please please tell me the background music you have in your videos. I remember the melody so vividly and it's nostalgic in a way I can't describe but I can't figure out the name of it or what game it's from
I love how your video easily explains how having a proprietary game engine allows devs to easily manage and tune their creation process. I mean id Tech is the most efficient and well optimised engine out there that allows a game to run on a Hierarchy or power levels and is a reason why Microsoft wants to expand its use and allow more of their in-house studios to implement it.
Unreal Engine is open source so developers can fix bugs by themself. Also, the unreal engine allows modding tools to create (like editing specific parts of code and all assets). Also, switching engines require reteaching most developers.
Just FYI, Unreal Engine is completely open sourced. You can easily fix problems yourself and send those fixes to Epic, which most major developers who use UE do. The Creation Engine has made systems to make creating missions really easy, while UE does not, but that doesn't stop you from creating your own quest system exactly for your needs, and it wouldn't really be any more or less difficult than doing it for your in-house engine. The same goes for AI, and any other system you can think of. Regarding modding. Unreal Engine is A LOT MORE modding friendly than Creation Engine. The entire engine is open source (Creation Engine is not), so basically mods for a UE5 game, given that the developers release the game open source instead of just creating tools, would be a lot more modding friendly than Skyrim, by a country mile. UE5 is easier to work with and more people are familiar with the engine. Modding in a game open for modding with UE is significantly less bound than what modding is with Skyrim. Take for example multiplayer. Skyrim Reborn is absolutely insane, what they've done is simply short of a miracle done through thousands of hours through many many many years. With Unreal Engine you could probably create a better multiplayer mod alone, in a single evening. Why? UE already has the framework built from the ground up within the engine. You wouldn't even need to worry about mod compatibility at all. If it works in singleplayer it works in multiplayer. The real reason why Bethesda doesn't use UE is threefold: 1. Back in 2006-2011 UE4 wasn't as fleshed out as today, meaning creating an open world within UE4 was a lot more work. 2. Knowledge. The developers of Bethesda know the Creation Engine inside out. They know who knows what parts of the engine and who can make things happen. If they now switch engines to UE that would mean months if not years to get back to speed learning the ins and outs of the engine. They have some 400 developers. Let's say that 200-300 of them are developers. That's a lot of money to get all 300 up to speed with the new engine. 3. Licensing fees/money. They already have an engine, which their developers already know which saves money teaching them to use a brand new engine. Additionally, UE isn't free. They'd have to spend a lot of money for an enterprise license of UE5 in addition to the costs of teaching every developer the new engine.
“Mod friendly” can mean many things. I think when people say the CE is mod friendly, I think they’re more talking about the accessibility and ease of the Creation Kit. There’s a reason Bethesda games generally have one of the most active modding communities. You don’t have to be super knowledgeable about game development or coding to make a mod for a Bethesda game. But overall I agree with your points as to why Bethesda doesn’t switch over to UE or another engine. Keeping things in-house makes development much easier and streamlined. Not to mention that it saves a lot of money and time.
How does everyone not realise that the unreal tech demos of Skyrim are just that tech demos. We see zero gameplay, all we see is a panning camera. People see one tech demo on a game that is ten years old, see the fancy graphics and particle effects and start crying. To turn that into a full game would take so much more work than what you it has already taken to create the demo. Bethesda won't use the unreal engine because all of their code is tied up in the creation engine. And that is not a bad thing. The reactions to these unreal demos are dumb. The demo is a fun exercise for the creator to load the assets into unreal and use that to demo skyrim in a new way. But that is all it is. If we can stop having a go at Bethesda for using the engine that they use. They have been doing this for a long time, they know what they are doing. For them to use unreal we wouldn't see ES6 until 2050.
@EXODST right?! Almost feel petty saying it, but it's just annoying. Everyone also has a go at Bethesda for their engine saying it's outdated, but that's also not an easy thing to understand since yeah sure it's older and perhaps not got all the modcons that an unreal engine game might have, but it works exactly as Bethesda wants it to, for the games they want to make. For good or bad right?! I mean if they release a game so bad that no one buys perhaps they'll go back to the drawing board move to a new engine and design everything from the ground up, but as long as people keep buying their games, that's not going to happen. The engineering challenge would be enormous
It’s not hard to port from unreal engine 4 to 5. Only issues I had with minor or major update is that some of my code needs rework but not much. If Epic deprecates part of API the code editor will tell you few updates before it happens so you have time to fix it before it would stop working and it does not happen a lot.
Okay, as much a meme as Unreal Engine is, and as good as Unreal Engine is at recreating small bits of gorgeous scenery from Skyrim, there’s an emphasis on the “small bits of scenery.” There’s a big difference between creating a town or a tower and actually creating the open world they’re contained in. Of course you can afford to be more detailed, (not to mention it’s an updated engine since 2011) and of course you can worry less about the amount of assets that take up memory to be loaded in, especially if you’re just recording the environments and not actively playing a character with the all options of customisation, the NPCs, the interactable terrain, while also rendering in the distant scenery like mountains from across the map. I imagine it might start to struggle under that load as well.
This is incorrect that unreal engine cannot handle large open world. Previous generation would have struggled, but ue5 is built with open world in mind. Witcher 4 is being built in ue5. The reason you stay with your own engine is because it is a specialist engine, meaning what you want is built into it. If you switch to a generalist engine, you would have to make the lacking features yourself. Also unreal engine is open source you can modify the source to suite your needs. I can assume its also a factor that there is a 5% royalty cut. Which may be greater than what it currently costs them to manage their engine.
@@asiseverything3404 Not certain any more on that last point, given Bethesda has a team of ~200 people working on the engine to try and push it's update for Starfield last I knew.
Sorry, but this is totally not true. Especially not in UE 5. The technology is kinda revolutionary even for large-scale maps, and actually allows far away horizons scenery that is otherwise often faked to be actually rendered cheaply. The last thing that was missing was nanite vegetation wind support, and it's coming out now. Unreal Engine 5 is actually with its latest technologies has overall lower FPS but pretty much constant and not that much dependable on objects in scenes and render distance in comparison to other engines. Just for the record, I'm Unity Freetime Fanguy, tried many different engines and we use CryEngine as a main in our company, but everyone here realizes every other engine is just miles behind and most likely won't recover for A-tier 3D games (which is kinda sad) on basically every level.
AND THERE IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HAVING RESEARCHED SOMETHING AND NOT RESEARCHING SOMETHING!!!!!! AND YOUY DEFFINETLY DIDNT RESEARCH ANYTHING ABOUT UE5 WHATSOEVER!!!!!!!! YOUR OWN COMMENT PROVES IT!!!!!!
Some huge miss conceptions. Unreal modding is superior than creation kit. Creation kit are a set of tools that help with mod creation but require an obscure specific workflow and other external tools. Meanwhile with Unreal engine modding, you use unreal engine itself to make mods. For example Ark, you can download a version of unreal engine with all the ark assets so that you can create any content. It takes crazy amounts of years to make a whole map for creation kit. Meanwhile for ark, multiple groups of modders make new huge maps every year and they make new dinos with ease. An open engine will always be better for modding then creation kit. Another miss conception is that studios need unreal engine to make updates for them. Unreal engine has it’s source code available to partners and partners can change the code and add code. In other words, they can update the engine to their needs and an added bonus, unreal has support teams for partners
You've also made an enormous misconception. You say "with Unreal engine modding, you use unreal engine itself to make mods." how is that not true with Creation Kit mods? The Creation Kit is the same set of tools Bethesda uses to make their games. Modders are still using the official dev tools, it's not like Halo Forge where it's some fancy legos the developers hand us.
@@ucm6397 I have made mods for both. Creation kit is not a game engine, it lets you read files and add files to the game but it’s not the game engine itself. They are tools made specifically for mods. The devs don’t use those tools, they use the actual game engine. It’s faster to use the actual game engine but creation engine is a private engine. When you sit down to make mods for creation kit, you have to use the limited set of tools they give you plus other community tools. And most importantly, modding requires a different work flow then actual game creation. Half the work is finding workarounds or using the community made workarounds. Fallout and Skyrim have amazing mods not because of Bethesda specifically, but because the community behind the modding create a lot of groundwork
An in-house engine is always better in basically every way. Someone else's engine, especially one that's meant to be general-purpose, just gets in the way and requires a lot of work to get it to do what you want efficiently. Graphics means little because most have good capabilities in that regard- and it's more about assets, implementation, and constraints specific to the game when it comes to the end result.
It's worth pointing out that most game studios that use Unreal (including Epic themselves, I think) don't use a release version of the engine. Rather, they have their own custom version of the engine with any type of tweaks that they need to make to the engine itself. Unreal Engine isn't *technically* open source (because of licensing agreements) but the engine's source code is available and anyone can modify it to build their own version of it. These custom versions will still need to be updated if they want the latest new features, but typically that's pretty easy to do as long as the custom changes aren't anything too crazy, and will ideally just be a git merge.
Hey, unreal dev here. Just want to clear a few things up. Unreal engine version changes are actually incredibly stable we have taken projects from 4.16 all the way to 4.27.2 and never had any major issue. Also the unreal source code is available you can modify the engine to do basically anything we implemented a change a few days ago to add a whole new material blend mode for instance. Bethesda could definitely modify the engine to fit an elder scrolls game. Modding also isn’t a strong argument here. Epic actually has documentation on how to enable modding in unreal games. The actual reason Bethesda doesn’t use unreal is because it takes time to learn new tools. We all know the general layout and design language of Bethesda games hasn’t changed much in 20 years. Switching tools has a real world time and money cost, why change tools though when all your developers already know how to do a great job with basically the same tools they’ve been using for years. Not a bad video just a bit misinformed. Didn’t mean for this to come off in any negative way, just being informative seeing as this is my industry and my tool of choice.
So, quick question, you know where I could find some good lessons and tutorials, going al the way from the basics and Ui. I trued searching myself, but found some ok (and very long) tutorials, mostly teaching how to do x and y, but not teaching the fundamentals.
@@fatmon95 I believe it's because it is very hard to duplicate their engine, seems like Creation Engine are the only engine capable of making every ingame objects interactable.
The problem isn't that Bethesda has their own engine, it's that there were some big shortcomings with that engine that had to be worked around. It's no coincidence that SKSE, ENB, SkyUI, FNIS, XEdit, USLEEP and others are basically mandatory FIRST just to give the majority of other mods the proper foundation to run.
The Gamebryo/Creation engine line have always been setup to do EXACTLY what Bethesda needed it to do for that game and very little if anything more. This is a problem for modders because they need to add functionality in order to enable things they want to do, but it's not a problem for Bethesda. Arguably Bethesda shouldn't be including a bunch of unneeded features as it will more likely than not result in issues for little to no gain. Still the Gamebryo/Creation line is pretty easy to add functionality onto and accepts new features slotted into it rather well. My biggest problem with Creation and Bethesda is that Bethesda doesn't build things in it using best practices, their content is full of horrible implementations and poor quality work which they could have done a lot better even within the constraints they themselves put on the engine. Bethesda could avoid most of the critique they and their engine is getting if Bethesda actually bothered to put out quality work. There are limitations which are baked into the engine, but most of what the end user experiences as "engine issues" is down to shoddy level building and bad scripting I think.
SKSE exists because modders want to make scripts that the base game didn't. Bethesda didn't need any of those functions to build their games, why would they add and mantain them then? It's nice to have all those extra engine features when making mods. But the game would continue to have mods without it. Bt Bethesda is not choosing to not add those features because modders will. They just don't need those features.
Using the wrong engine for a game is disastrous. BioWare were forced to use FrostBite, an engine designed for FPS multiplayer like BattleField in a singleplayer RPG in DA:I and ME:A. It didn't even have basic stuff like saving and loading.
Saving and Loading are things you actually write when developing a game. In UE, basic saving and loading system can be done in under an hour using BPs.
game dev here, they use their own proprietary engine so they don't have to pay any licensing fees as well as the fact that they are comfortable with it and can easily customize it to their liking. That's it
To provide a small correction you can improve Unreal yourself, but in the liscencing agreement you have to turn over that fix/improvement to Epic. So you are paying to advance their engine rather than your own.
YEAH BUT YOU GET SORCE CODE BASICLAY FOR FREE!!! YOU DONT NEED TO SPEND LITTERAL MILLIONS AND YEARS TO MAKE ONE!!!!!! PEOPEL TYHINK MAKING ENGINE IS EASYA ND CHEAP!!1 IST ONE OF THE MOST EXPENSIVE THINSG TO MAKE!!!!!!! ESPECIALY IF ITS FOR BIGGER GAMES/BIG STUDIO CALIBER GAMES. TEH RANGE IS LITETRALY SEVERAL MILLIONS JUST FOR MAKING AN ENGINE NOT EVEN ADDING THE COST OF EPLOYESE,BUILDING ASSETS,STORYBOARDING,SCRIPTING,ANIMATIONS........ MANY TIMES MOTS OF PRODUCTION BUDGET IS EATEN NOT BY GAVE DEVELOPMING BUT BY ENGINE CREATION ITSELF!!!!
God forbid we have a universal engine that has all of the tools, plugins etc. all in one single location, rather than needing to reinvent the wheel everytime
@@akaslowmoney You're never going to have a single engine that does everything equally well unless your standard for "well" is absolute dog shit or at least sub par. The issue is hardware limitations for any given set of expected hardware specs. Game developers are going to try to utilize what ever hardware performance they feel is reasonably expectable for players to have at the time that game is released. So there is always a resource budget that they need to keep in mind. So they need to decide what are the things they are going to cut corners on and what things are they going to go all out on in order to balance performance and FPS to total resource utilization. Those optimizations usually start by picking the correct engine for what you're trying to achieve and when a dev doesn't do that you get stuff like Star Citizen where they picked Cryengine and then realized that it is a really bad decision for a MMO then shifted to Lumberyard which was ok for an MMO but not so great for FPS and they've ended up rewriting most of the engine and are now basically on a scratch built engine because they relized there wasn't and engine that was good for what they were trying to do.
Yes and using the Creation Engine 2 worked so well for Starfield. And every single argument you make against UE5 also applies to CE2 or any other engine for that matter. Plus all updates are announced to be working on ahead of release so a studio knows what's coming down the pipeline and acts accordingly, this is why game developers have project leads and Producers, they decide what the team prioritises.
People don't seem to understand that while the NetImmerse engine is older, it's pretty versatile and is unrecognisable with Bethesda modifications. If bethesda were to come to unreal engine they would be bringing along the bulk of three same sorts of engine modifications that make their games so unstable and buggy.
This video was much needed to be honest, i see so many people spout off about engines and scripts and oh how Bethesda should totally move on from the old crappy one they got and i always just roll my eyes like, you have no clue what the hell you're on about lol. Having made mods myself and worked on bigger mods with other modders i can guarantee that none of us would even try to take apart a Bethesda game that wasn't built around the creation engine, there's a reason Bethesda modding is so big to begin with but plebs just don't get it.
1:16, yes and Creation Engine is arguably a prime example of this, it's been updated over and over since 2011 (we all know it came from the Gamebryo engine which means it's technically 1997), and that's why it seems to have so many more bugs with each new game, and lacks extensibility in some areas especially multiplayer 1:50, Unreal Engine's source code is accessible so whats being said here is completely untrue, you can add more functionality or fix issues in the engine, especially if you're a AAA company not hating, just pointing out the truth. I actually agree, I don't think Bethesda would be able to create such amazing game worlds if they hadn't been refining their processes and engine over such a long time.
First Unreal game came out, what, 1998, using Epic's own engine - the first iteration of Unreal Engine. Using the argument that "Creation Engine bad because it's ancient" is silly when you consider this fact. The difference is Unreal (the game series) has always been a simple (multiplayer) arena shooter, whereas Elder Scrolls has always been a complicated RPG with extensive questlines, open world, rich lore etc. Which naturally means that Epic, the devs of Unreal engine, has had more resources to emphasize the graphics part of the engine. IIRC past 10 years or so Epic has not released games of their own, focusing solely on the engine development. Unreal engine is also used in film and TV production, and these guys are able to pay a lot of money for their tools, so Epic has pretty good resources to focus on developing the engine. So the real reason why Unreal has such advanced graphics capabilities compared to Creation is NOT the age of the engine (both started out at about the same time, both are an iterative process with each new version building on the previous), but because Epic puts a lot of emphasis on graphics capabilities and, not having to deal with actual game development, has a lot more resources to do that. Bethesda has to do a delicate balancing act dividing their resources between graphics, quest building tools, open-world mechanics, modularity/moddability and actually developing a game on top of that. An .esp file is a pretty amazing database that can reference to and bring together all the asset files including meshes, textures and scripts in a clear and easy to implement way. It's quite amazing that you can activate and sometimes deactivate a whole DLC sized plugin in the middle of a playthrough, build dependencies between different .esp-s to make a mod to a mod that mods a mod and create whole new frameworks that add totally new functionality to the game. At this point we have fully functioning hair, cloth and soft body physics with collisions, 8k textures, extremely high poly meshes, Nemesis, dynamic animation replacer and other stuff not really even imagined back in 2011!. Modding in other games (with exceptions like Minecraft and the OG Half-Life) tends to be limited at best, outright hacky at worst.
@@cmdr.shurimal8980 I'd say historically the reason Unreal has more advanced graphics capabilities is they just had more money to spend on it. Licensing their engine out to others meant they did have to work harder to improve it, but also meant they had more money to spend on devs to do the work. With games such as Batman and Borderlands making good incomes there're few gamedev companies other than Valve making as much profit from other people's games. For the last few years though things have been different, and it's because Epic do have to deal with actual game development. Fortnite happened. Epic entered the 'Add a couple more zeros' level of accounting. Massive success with it's own challenging technical challenges, such as networking and how to render that many customisable players on things down to phone-level hardware, but bought in massive revenue, and other outside investment (unfortunately including Tencent, wish that hadn't happened). More money to spend on development and things picked up. In the pub after a games programmer event an Epic community spokesperson dealing with Megagrants joking said they were there "To give away the Fortnite cash", which just made me imagine Tim Sweeney swimming in their vault Scrooge McDuck-style. They pick up a few graphics researchers who have some interesting-but-unproven ideas building on new shader techniques (mesh shaders) and suddenly they have Nanite and Lumen, and Unreal Engine 5 happened.
Not really about modding, it's about tools. It would be a huge amount of Dev time to implement all the tooling needed for the designers to make a Bethesda game in ue5. Mod support is a nice byproduct of these designer friendly tools
Honestly, ALL of the points mentioned can be done in UE just as well as in bethesda's own engine. They aren't REAL reasons to not use UE. But there aren't any real reasons why they SHOULD use UE either. Unreal Engine is open source, so you can change / add / remove / correct anything and everything. You can add the entire bethesda AI system to the unreal engine, either directly incorporated, or as plugin. You can add the quest system, or even complete DEV tools. The REAL reason why they should use their own engine is because they have decades of experience building and refining it. It does what they want it to do, and it costs minimal effort to change / correct anything for them. It's also THEYR code, so harder to hack / abuse than an open source engine like UE. AND, by using their own engine, they earn back quite a bit of the cost of developing it. Yes, using UE CAN mean less time programming the engine, more time for developing models, maps, quests etc. But is can also mean more time wasted on needless communication between the engine developers in a different company and the game developers. It all comes down to cost in the end. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE UE, and use it to build games myself. And I make Skyrim mods, so I work with TES creation kit quite a bit. The workflows can't be more different! And I enjoy both TBH :p
The engine is versioned, so if you use 4.27 you're golden. Updates that are released on that version will, for the most part, just fix bugs. Some bugs don't get addressed until a new version of the engine is updated and other bugs even much later than that. Also, the engine is for a large part open to developers to get into the deeper end of things. Large companies can use the engine as a base and build upon it themselves. And the engine is compartmentalized. Meaning you can take out the sound engine and replace it with something else. Same goes for physics, even the rendering if you'd want to go so far. Bethesda using their own engine means they won't have to pay any fees. As for the quest system, that's the major reason why. It's such a convoluted scripting system, it'd be a monstrous task to re-create it, same goes for the AI. Anything done in Bethesda's engine can be done in Unreal, seriously. But the time and money required is absurd. And then there's the pipeline(s). These would completely change everything. I'd be curious to see how much of the new engine is actually just updated from the old one. Like how will the AI behave in Starfield compared to Skyrim and Fallout. It'll be very interesting to see how many bugs Starfield will ship with. After seeing the gameplay trailer my excitement got deflated and then some. But too early to say anything really. Let's hope it'll be a good game but so much has changed since Skyrim and I truly wonder if Bethesda can still make something amazing. Fallout 4 was alright. We haven't seen anything huge like the leap from Morrowind to Oblicion to Skyrim from Bethesda in a long, long time. I hope Starfield can really show us something new and innovative. I have my doubts. But yeah, the incentive to pour money into UE4 to me is really why they probably won't. Not because it can't be done, because the amount of work required and the engine fees probably is the main reason. They have engine programmers and they have their established pipeline of how to get things done.
The problem you run into is with console SDKs. You may start a project on say 4.24 - but over a three year projec, the console SDKs change and at some point the XBox or Sony SDKs require support which is not present in 4.24 - so you either have to upgrade or backport the changes to your version of unreal.
@@zoeherriot That's very true. Right now I know about a project that started a few versions ago and they won't go beyond 4.26 because it's not worth it. They had to fix all the weird stuff that got broken or depricated during engine upgrades. I think the project got updated two or three times. At some point it's not worth it. But a ton of the custom code was for the large part working. The switch SDK got updated not so long ago, which was a headache. :P
@@joure.v Yeah - it's a pain - I had an issue once where we had to migrate to 4.24 - but in doing so it broke a bunch of anti-aliasing code on the PS4. Epic's response was - oh yeah, that's not implemented yet. You can try and port it yourself... that was a tough week. (Not ragging on Epic - it's just that's what happens...)
Not just modding man. It's the interactive environment. I.e. picking flowers mining minerals. Picking up plates, food etc. That takes a bunch of power. While Unreal engine looks fantastic, it doesn't allow as much interaction with the environment. Without being a pain. I for one prefer interaction vs graphic quality. Just me. You do you.
Finally someone who gets it. Bethesda switching engines would mean a complete collapse of their modding community and renders all the knowledge gained and all the external tools completely worthless for future titles. Even if they switch to an engine that's equally moddable, it would take years upon years for modders to rebuild the ecosystem we now have for the Creation Engine.
Yes we get it without the Mod community Bethesda would not be the company it is. Reason why they will not move away from that engine if its ever possible.
Probably less about profits and more about handing code for proprietary tools over to Epic. Epic allows UE forking, but licensees who fork it have to share it with Epic. Bethesda likes to keep their tools proprietary
We would have had it by now if Bethesda let them use steam api, but hey, bethesda are the ones working with an engine older than I am for the sake of modders
this arguement is like "we building cars like 1920 so everyone is able to fix it and tune it by itself" ..... the engine is outdated and there is no excuse for it
"Since they're making their own engine, if there is something completely fucked, they can just go in and make just enough of a change to make it work(...)" That's definately doesn't sounds like bethesda
Creation engine is amazing, to make a game like "Bethesdas games" in UE, with the a.i. having their own rotines etc, independent of the player interaction is IMPOSSIBLE
Finally a clear and objective video on the pros and cons of UE5 and the Creation Engine. People see UE5 demo videos on CZcams, but look no further and don't understand what is involved. Having different engines for different types of games is a good thing, we don't want all games to play the same, and have the same mechanics. It will be interesting to see what happens with the Witcher 4, now that they are using Unreal Engine 5. Will they change the Unreal Engine to suit their game (they're working in partnership with Epic), or will they change their game to suit the Unreal Engine? I'm hoping the former, but fear it will inevitably be the latter.
cause its not their engine??? like really unreal isn't some magical fix for everything you know this sudden dumb spike of people who think unreal engine is like the definitive graphical solution doesn't know how game development works
The main Reason Why Developpers don't change their main technology so easily is inertia Developers at Bethesda are more familiar with Gamebrio/Creation engine, switching to a new and more modern engine has a learning curve which can cost a lot to the company If Bethesda want to use a new technology like Unreal, Unity or CryEngine they will start with a more modest project like any AA Game with few hours of gameplay and not a huge AAA game with hundred hours of gameplay like Skyrim or Fallout
Thank you thank you thank you it is so annoying to hear some other CZcamsrs and even people shitposting and complaining about how buggy the creation engine is and wish that we had jumped to a different engine. But they clearly don't realize how big the modding Community is and if they switched over it would destroy the community and careers of people. The best moments in gaming that I have ever had was modding Skyrim. It has always fun and this is the longest I have ever stuck with a game and usually I only last for a game until I complete every thing on many others. there's not really much else to do after beating everything in a game and I've never really last it even over at least two to three months, until I started playing Skyrim and got into modding. Also it has taught me quite a lot on how games work and Scripts. and gained quite a lot of interest in game development because of it. I spend hours on end messing around with mods adding removing, creating, merging, patching. I would have been so devastated if they had it changed to a different engine I am so glad they're sticking to their engine.
i mean creation engine is made so everything is a moveable object without lagging down the whole system. im not sure if unreal is as far on this as creation is. as creation engine has been pretty much the only real engine for this stuff for many years, summoing and moving around in 500 cheese wheeels is a prime example of how it can handle alot of objects.
And not only it's able to move 500 cheese wheels. It's also able to persist them in your save, so anything you change in the game world is there forever, a permanent mark in the world. Other than minecraft and it's clones, no other games let you modify the game worlds as much as Creation Engine games do.
I'm curently trying to remake Skyrim in Unreal Engine 5.1, and... This my first ever post about this project on the internet, so let's see if people find my comment and share their opinion, but what a challenge to just find/create a heightmap of the whole Skyrim map for the landscape... Btw i'm a noob in Unreal so yeah, it's a challenge, so if anyone would like to help me in this project, i'll be super happy, and maybe one day, i'll create something as huge as Skyblivion ! To anyone reading this, have a lovely day !
Radiant ai is extremely necessary for elder scrolls games when you follow them and figure out their schedules or patterns to Rob them or for assassination missions.
Yup, as is taking the actual gear an enemy has equipped. These are things unique to Bethesda games and far too many people just want a generic FPS with a Fallout or Elder Scrolls skin.
@kyzantia8884 You can have mods on Console lol unless your a PS player then you might as well not have any because of how stingy Sony is about external assets.
I love how Bethesda keeps making sure that ancient old Bugs always make it into their next gen games that look like last gen games and also forcing their ancient engine to do things it was never designed to do, which results in insane optimization issues.
It's kinda funny that this video was made as though someone (other) is asking; because the information itself is interesting. I feel like "should bethesda use unreal engine?" would have fit the info just as well, I mention because you made your description the elaborated version of the title, which I haven't thought before, but I have watched this video.
Another thing I want to point out is Bethesda's engine has feature of making every ingame objects interactable, not sure if Unreal can do that yet, but this was the given reason why Fallout 4 runs on Creation Engine, and not id tech 6 that used to power DOOM 2016, even though it's better looking and from the same company, id tech 6 just isn't built for open world RPG.
Seem to be linking to this game a lot here (it's a good example of a moddable Unreal game, as well as being good fun and worthy of better recognition- but do get the "Smart!" mod if you want to play at a good speed) but here's some footage of a megafactory built inside Satisfactory- czcams.com/video/-hu5bRhcPtU/video.html What you're looking started as an open world wilderness and the player built the factory themselves- so now it's all dynamic objects with dynamic lighting, nothing prebuilt and baked. Every machine is actively working to make things ("The factory must expand to meet the growing needs of the factory's expansion") with potentially different settings for each, and can be interacted with to adjust them, and even the floors and walls can be recoloured and similar, and this can cover a good sized map with factory. The items zooming along on the conveyor belts are actual game objects too and you can walk up to take them or drop others on as you want. This is also Unreal Engine 4, not Unreal Engine 5. Add Nanite and Lumen to this and it'd look a lot better with more detail on the machines, and really impressive real-time lighting effects. Most of the objects don't have physics enabled, but most things in Skyrim don't either- I can't push over the stalls in Whiterun. That's not really a problem though, Unreal has had PhysX physics engine support for years so can do many watermelons, and now has their new Chaos engine which is built to be more performant and capable of being network replicated better which matters for multiplayer.
Betheadas engine is also incredibly modular and modable. With unreal bethesda would have to provide their engine source files etc. Eg the ark mod kit is like 200+ gb big because its literally their source files. And you need to grab unreal which is addintional 30gb. With a beth game you just download the creation kit and the game itself becomes the source and everything is directly modifiable .
Unreal engine stanky tho, is it not also just a graphics engine? Like unreal games usually say physics by havok is that not a diff engine. Gamebryo or whatevs is stink in its own way, but probs better than unreal for huge AI intensive games.
Unreal engine 5 has it's own physics engine now but that is something I originally talked about then ended up cutting out. Bethesda's engine has a pretty optimized physics engine that's capable of handling tons of interactable objects.
No, a game engine ties together multiple different systems to run a game. Some of those systems may be specially created for the engine -- as the rendering engine often is in commercial game engines -- or they may be provided by middleware such as Havok. The Creation Engine also uses middleware, notably including the Havok Physics Engine.
Part of the reason that Bethesda's engine is so easy to mod is because modders have had nearly 25 years to learn how it works, and how to play with it. It came out around 1997 as the NetImmerse game engine, and was used for a number of projects, including Morrowind. Between 2003 and 2007, NetImmerse was retooled to become Gamebryo, but it was still so rooted in NetImmerse, a mod was created for Bethesda's games called Netimmerse Override, something some Bethesda fans should be familiar with. Now why would the Creation Engine- used in Skyrim and Fallout 4- need to override anything from NetImmerse if NetImmerse was replaced by Gamebryo, and Gamebryo was replaced by Creation? Because they're the same engine to the point that Creation is still using NetImmerse as a foundation, and some mods need to be able to override that NetImmerse engine code. The engine powering Starfield and most likely Hammerfell came out in 1997. Yeah, I'd HOPE modders know what they're doing with it by now.
A short answer: Because engines don't make good games. When someone says something like "Why do they just use Unreal 5!" It only confirms that the person knows absolutely nothing about programming or game dev. Nice video BTW!
One big problem with Unreal, it really dislikes mods. Every modded Unreal game I have breaks almost all mods whenever I it updates. Also you need to download 100GB just to create a mod for those games.
The timing on this videos release was damn near perfect. Why Bethesda doesn't use Unreal Engine, not even 20 days after Bethesda announces they are moving to Unreal Engine.
I think your getting confused between studios that work under Bethesda and the Bethesda game studio, which is the studio that makes TES and Fallout, and has no intention of moving, especially since they just invested so much time and money into the creation engine. Those other studios however weren't using the creation engine to begin with.
@@TheCantinaChannel I enjoyed the video, it was well put together. Also thank you for providing me with better information on this. I only heard about it in passing so thank you for the correction.
I played Outer Worlds recently, which is the closest we have to a Bethesda RPG on unreal, and made me appreciate the Creation Engine more. The NPCs felt less alive, there was far less interactable clutter, there's barely any mods for it, and it just didn't feel right. There's nothing like a Bethesda RPG, cause the secret sauce is the engine. It might suck, or have issues at times, but it has such a unique feel! Which is so hard to capture on another engine! Outer Worlds is definitely a fun game, I can easily see myself replaying it some time, but it just doesn't hit the same as a Bethesda game.
Why can’t you mod a game created with ue 5?
It's not that you can't but rather that it is very inaccessible. The creation kit is a tool built out of the creation engine to give modders the rough tools that Bethesda's quest and world designers would have. It's incredibly easy and intuitive to use compared to UE. If Bethesda did switch the easiest choice to make would to just say Modders can use UE to make mods, and hopefully they would release all the code they wrote to manage the game, quests, NPCs, since UE doesn't have any of that by default. Without that code it would be very challenging to implement new quests or characters since your pretty much guessing as to what Bethesda might have done; which would mean modding would only be available to the expert programmers. And Bethesda would not want to release that code as it would be a legal nightmare to manage (considering people who would steal the code for their own projects, not just individuals but other big dev's). But releasing that code would also have some legal problems for Epic Games since some of that would likely include code written exclusively for UE, which contrary to popular belief is not Open Source. UE is Source Available which means you can look at it but you can take it or repurpose it without express permission.
The harder option would be what they already did when they made morrowind which is create a completely independant tool like the creation kit, that they can hand out all they want without violating any license agreements or revealing any code that could be then stolen by outside parties, or be used for corporate espionage giving their competitors a leg up, which happens pretty much all the time.
I see, thanks for the explanation. So in a way it’s easier to create a new game in UE than to mod one?
@@micholitzia5726 Any engine can be easy to mod, it's all about whether the developers are willing to package and release their internal tools that they use to make the process easier. That's why it's far easier to mod Bethesda games than most, because they provide the tools. UE has quite decent tools as it is, the reason it's a bad choice is it's bad at open world games even with all the new stuff in 5. CryEngine otoh would be excellent because its a beast at open worlds and can handle tons of physics objects, and it's Sandbox is actually also a great editor that lets you test things live without compiling. Frankly the Creation Kit's tools are hardly improved over Gamebryo, mostly just better UI. They are nothing to write home about, it's just that people know them well.
You can, but it's a spectacular pain in the ass.
@LogmanBenson We don't speak Orcish
Am I the only one who likes the radiant AI in Oblivion? I liked that people had random conversations instead of the same one over and over when you entered an area
I enjoy it.
i've played Skyrim recently and with in a few days i'm already tired of the convos they have and the same comments they make towards me as i walk past them. I got a disease and it's refreshing to hear them comment on something else for once lol
No, it’s quite enjoyable! I love listening to them.
I've heard others say the same.
I always loved it myself. I didn't realize how much of a joke it was to fans until social media lol so for years I thought it was cool and normal then in the early 2010s noticed everyone thought of it as a joke. Don't get me wrong I love the memes but to me it's still cool and not as jokey as others think.
I want elder scrolls 6 to have more advanced version of radiant ai
same
And I want Elder Scrolls 6. Like, now. ;:y not in 5 to 7 years! Now! So far, Starfield doesn't even seem to have interesting factions I'd like to learn more about, so thats probably not as entertaining to me as Fallout and the Elderscrolls are! Even though I love space ships and sci fi. But that generic shooting is boring to me.
For Bethesda to implement Radiant AI as originally intended they would need to redesign core game mechanics. Namely the game ecconomy and NPC injury and justice system. Give non trader NPCs the ability to buy and sell, have location damage like in fallout and have other things to manage via survival mechanic, Don't make stealing a crime instantly punishable by death for NPCs.
@@gordyrroy it will probably take about 5 years of modding to get good so the sooner it's out the sooner modders can fix the bugs and improve it.
And I'd like it to play on my laptop because most of us who play on computers don't have nor could afford fancy gamer computers.
Well modding in Unreal is definitely possible. I think the biggest reason they don't do it is because A. It takes a long time to adjust their workflow to suit Unreal instead of Creation Engine and B. They would need to pay licensing fees to Epic Games, which they probably want to avoid in any way possible.
they would also need to build an entirely knew set of modding tools in order for it to be anywhere near as functional, whereas their engine is already built for it.
Unreal engine isn't suited to create the type of open world games BGS is creating
@@t.t6294 That's absolute nonsense.
@@TheCantinaChannel Conan Exiles has modding tools (UE4) since it's beta. If they can do it I have no doubt that it would be relatively easy to implement.
@@Blaise815 Conan Textiles is a game about selling Conan's used loincloths.
I love that this question really amounts to "why didn't Bethesda use Unreal Engine from 2022 for a game they started making in 2006"
They made fallout 4 and 76 since then, get your head out of Howard's crotch
Yeah. The entire video is complete nonsense.
Unreal Engine has been around since 1998.
@@looniper3551 yes. And it was not the same version of unreal engine that exists now. People are asking why Skyrim isn't made on Unreal engine because of how much better it looks, not realizing it's a version of unreal engine ten years newer than the game.
@@looniper3551 Yeah, be the Unreal Engine 4 and 5 didn't existed in 1998.
Unreal engine doesn't make world items spaz out when you pick up another item near them. This makes The Bethesda engine ideal for immersing clumsy people into the game world.
Bro..unreal engine is a game engine..you can make any feature u want..dontt know what u r talking about.
OP has no idea what he is even talking about and got 30+ likes. Think about that
@@jackstack2136 this guy couldn't detect the obvious cheekiness in OP. Think about that.
@@jackstack2136 It's a joke, not a dick.
You absolute nerd, it’s a joke. Put the pocket protector down and laugh, you rodent.
Modding the creation engine is usually easy to mod and its one of the main reasons people buy bethesda rpgs
The vast majority of people who play those games do not make mods
@@striker8961 majority of them use the mods though...
Edit: on the pc at least
@@striker8961 no but they play the mods. How many other games do you know that have mods like beyond skyrim.
@@clunky9072 they don't, most player don't play with mods and that applies not only to games from Bethesda but all other games from other developers, because most players follow the path of least resistance.
And Bethesda itself reported that only 8% of Skyrim players have ever used a mod. So most people don't buy Bethesda games for modding.
@@LordHerek most people who play Skyrim on pc for longer than 50 hours use mods.
Creation engine is super easy to use and convenient for anyone who tries. I've tried using other engines, and they're either not as good, way too complicated, or require actual programming still that I do not have
that's because Creation Engine is aimed only at one type of games - Bethesda open world RPGs, not because other engines would be bad.
Creation Engine has mad potential to create massive open worlds or even metaverses.Only thing Bethesda has to do is to refine the engine and remove jank
@@Mike-wb3oc "Refinement" and "removing jank" are not in Bethesda's purview.
I’m honestly remembering why I appreciate Bethesda games again. Out of the box they’re a bit clunky but I just installed 50 mods before I even started fallout 4 for the first time and it ran seamlessly lol
You gotta PRACTICE bruh to get better, cant just pick up a violin and master it bruh
The ease of modding is the biggest strength of the creation engine. Even a person like myself with no programing experience can learn to do basic things in it that would not be possible for any other engine that I am aware of. It has been this way since Morrowind with very little change in that regard. I don't have to know how to program to add an item to an NPC or even add a whole other NPC. Which really opens modding to people that would never otherwise even try to mod a game. It also allows those that do know how to program and script things and other programming stuff I don't even know about work their magic on a 10 year old game and make it do things that the Bethesda probably never thought to do with it. Mods are a major reason why Bethesda games have a longevity to them rarely found in other games of this type. Modders have kept Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind and the Fallout series (Yes I'm including New Vegas it uses the engine and mods are a huge part of it to). A lot of people that complain about the engine do not realize how much the modding community would lose if they switched. Thank you for putting into words something I have thought for a long time.
so you make new modding tools for the new engine
Lots of games define stuff like items or NPCs in configuration files that you can change without programming with the right tools. It's hardly a special feature of the creation engine rather a common practice.
@@101Mant except there's no documentation and you need to know what you're doing because files and stats are named with numbers instead of descriptive names. You don't even need the guide offered by Bethesda to learn how to use their Creation Kit, (a guide is something that other games don't even have, why would they? They don't support modding) i learned it solely by clicking the items and seeing how everything works.
It's THAT easy.
@@hoesmad8626 It's not that easy. Changes have to made to make a game moddable.
@@ghostwizard7597 same with blueprints in unreal engine. You're just clicking things and connecting lines. It's their visual scripting language. It's very easy to use
As someone from the game industry, I can tell you, that most of this is really not the case. It's 10%revenue sharing, 10% ''don't fix what's not totally broken (even if it almost is)'' approach and 80% changing pipelines and making their staff learning new engine
I thought as much. The modding thing isn't really a worthwhile justification, and "radiant AI" is...
Right, this whole video, as much as I love Cantina, seemed like conjecture meant to justify laziness.
@@parkercadmin3666 I don't think it's entirely classifiable as laziness on Bethesda's part. There are stil lots of valid reasons for them to stick with their own engine. But some of the points here are definitely reaches, and others wrong.
@@nisem0no The "modding thing" is 100% true, NO other game company comes remotely CLOSE to the "modability" of bethesda games, and there's an incredibly obvious reason for that.
This whole video was nonsense.
It showed that he either has no clue that Unreal Engine is offered as source code, allowing developers to customize their own build...
Or that he doesn't understand that being able to customize code in Unreal Engine to rebuild it, is the same as being able to customize the code in Creation Engine to rebuild it.
Everyt "point" he gives is either not true because they can change anything they like...
Or doesn't work as a point in Favor of Creation Engine because it works for both.
Familiarity... is the only advantage.
And since they're both in the same programming language, and UE is designed to allow features like Creation Engine to be added to it...
They could simply modify the CE's code a bit to make it a Module within Unreal Engine... allowing them to use the familiar interface, while taking full advantage of all of the compatibility, resource-utilization, and efficiency advantages of Unreal Engine.
(not to mention the infinitely superior rendering speed and quality)
Creation Engine is criminally underrated. Apart from modding & quest creation, the creation engine also handles a lot of interwoven systems very well. It manages the state of it's large open world pretty well considering player & AI input permanently affects the said state. The only engine that comes close to replicating this in the AAA gaming space is Rockstar's engine for GTA & RDR.
I feel they have to severely update the engine however because a lot of the Bethesda games made on it all feel too like samey. It needs to be improved because it still seems to be like its 11 year old state.
I hope Creation engine 2 is upgraded over 1. They have really nice ai and availability of modding capability with the engine. If they are able to apply modern gen graphics with CE2 holy Bethesda will be legends.
@@j-s-m Better graphics would be good, I hope they put more effort into what makes the engine unique, improve the radiant a.i, and better memory management to support their dynamic open worlds and event scripting and more modding tools
Haven't yall seen Starfield, it literally looks like UE5 graphics, at least in their latest trailer
@Triss Merigold it looks like fallout 4 with an ENB what are you smoking 😂
I've done and published mods for Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 / NV, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, Divinity Original Sin 2, Neverwinter Nights, Neverwinter Nights 2, Dragon Age Origins, Dragon Age Inquisition etc.
And I can tell you that all the games I've tried modding, Unreal Engine games are among the hardest to mod, and I am someone with actual programming (JSX, Python, C++, C# etc.), 3D modeling (3Ds Max) and texturing experience.
The issue is that when someone comes to modding scene, and they want to try it out, and eventually improve and become REALLY good at it, the initial threshold can not be too high, or it will kill all interest.
The threshold of using Creation Kit is very low (I started out when I was 14yo with zero programming knowledge), the threshold of Using Unreal engine... you basically have to be an IT engineering student or programmer hobbyist with burning passion for deciphering someone else's code without designer notes.
That's a problem more with the studio's not issuing any documentation and not supporting development of modes, over the engine not doing so. Epic offers a endless sea of documentation as well as low level SDK that lets you functionally rewrite anything you want in the engine.
I mean, that's one of the big hitching points with Creation Kit and modding with Bethesda titles and why we have to turn to code injection and rely on Script Extender teams, to do what high level kits like the Creation Kit cannot, that isn't documented anywhere. You're more benefitting from a long-term dedicated community than from the developers there.
If modders cannot use those Unreal tools with limited programming knowledge, that doesn't help.
The reason SkyUI has been downloaded 24 million times is because it was available 5 weeks after release.
@@SylviusTheMad Semantically you don't need any programming knowledge to use Unreal 4 or 5. It's unadvised, but their visual script system is robust and making a UI wouldn't be too hard.
I would also point out, Sky UI was not made by some noob modder just learning things, but a group with professional experience and programming skills. Still took them around a month.
The way I see it, Unreal itself is highly modifiable as designed by the engine devs, but is only 30% the way to a full game. Then when individual game developers using Unreal implement the remaining 70%, they are likely not paying attention to moddability, which ruins the foundation for any future modders looking to add on new functionality. Additionally, if you had the expertise to develop a moddable framework on Unreal, you would likely then sell that as a "Tool" asset on the UE Marketplace, which means any future modders will need to own that as well.
Skyrim/Creation kit on the other hand is 100% of the game implemented, and moddability/DLCs were at the forefront of the dev's minds for the entire process, so the foundation is 100% solid for any additions. The game devs are creating those tools for their own benefit, and after they sell the game there's no serious profit motive in depriving the mod devs of those tools.
@@ShadoFXPerino I wouldn't say it was intentional entirely on Bethesda's part. A big thing that drives the moddability is the open pack/file structure, which is a byproduct of them adopting Gamebryo early on. Many older engines, even UE2, have more open file structures for reading/loading assets.
That changed in part for security, and in part for more efficient storage and loading of assets on modern engines that archive most of their assets into often proprietary formats.
Even Creation Engine does this, it's just that Bethesda allows people to read their archives through Creation Kit. Modders still end up building tools to actually access, unpack, and repack those files. Bethesda does not provide that functionality. Similarly modders have to force archive invalidation for using the loose file system.
Bethesda stumbled it's way into having a big modding scene early on, but it did grow to support it.
The Witcher 3’s engine was pretty fantastic as well, for the sake of how seamless and near glitchless the giant map and landscape was itself. It only loaded in what you were facing, which saved so much on rendering and whatnot. Even some games on Unreal still don’t look that good
Cyberpunk 2077: Hold my beer.
I still remember being stuck in that swamp in a witcher 3.
Um no, you probably noticed how lame the in-game npcs are, they are basically static objects, only interactive with the world through cutscenes.
That's not how it works. Glitches, bugs etc are all dependent on how good of a polishing job the devs do. W3 and cyberpunk run on the same engine.
The engine was good for Witcher but terrible for Cyberpunk 2077
"1:06 If there's a problem, then we know developers are eventually going to get around to fixing it." This statement is considered heresy by Bethesda.
Exactly. Most of the bugs fixes have done by their customers rather than the developers.
It's also considered heresy by Epic, and those of use who've waited since UE4 landed for usable shadows in orthographic mode (great for top-down) are still feeling that one.
@@mezzb This is, of course, why the unofficial patch is one of the most-downloaded mods for every edition of Skyrim; because Bethesda patches very aggressively, and only leaves "crumbs of bugs". How much for a ticket to the alternate reality you're living in?
@@mezzb at some point when they re-re-release their games, they could you know fix the bugs? Like come on there's like a dozen versions of skyrim and yet they still have game breaking bugs in the latest one.
They could even ask the modders to use their unnoficial patch to be part of the official game like some good devs do.
it's also just not true, there are tons of things in major engines like Unity and UE that the communities have been clamoring for fixes multiple versions ago that just don't get touched at all lol
I feel like you forgot one of the biggest benefits for a game company to make their own engine and that is they don't need to pay a fee to Unreal.
I mean a lot of these big companies want to maximize profits
Thats a much bigger part in the decision-making for a large developer than a small Indy team. Especially since Bethesda sells games for longer than a decade, and lots of different platforms.
Yeah, they just have the keep dozens of specialized employees on the payroll indefinitely, that's way cheaper.
@@smolpener7430 It actually is! You don't understand just how expensive licensing fees are. While keeping an employee with skills and experience is worth much more to you
They didn't make this engine, tho. It's the Gamebryo engine. They've been using it since Morrowind and just "improving" it since then. Does that mean lots of bugs? Yup. And they're perfectly content allowing the community to deal with that via unofficial patches and mods.
@@MrCobalt Bethy has done a poor job of engine design and updating for a long time. There are a ton of bugs, glitches and problems in the CE that have been solved - admittedly, Bethy has to give the dev's enough time (and enough dev's) to fix them but it's possible.
That being said, they do own the old Gamebryo engine now and have made so many updates to it that it's like saying anything built on UE 5 is just the old UE 1 engine from, ya know, the game Unreal back in 1998. It's disingenuous. The newest Creation Engine is leagues ahead of the original Gamebryo engine.
By the way, UE 5 has code that is as old as the original UE 1 engine from back in the day. Since UE 5 is an update to a 27 year old engine, essentially, it must be as much garbage as the Creation Engine, whose code base was founded 1 year prior to the original UE 1, right?
Although I've seen a lot of people criticize the Creation Engine, I actually like it because it's difficult to comprehend but is incredibly mod-friendly. I appreciate it when developers use their own engines to create their games.
Warframe's Evolution engine is also proprietary, and that game runs on Integ graphics, and soon, mobile!
It was fine until... New Vegas. Since then it has been enough behind the pack that it's hard to justify. And it isn't their own engine, its the Gamebryo, but on steroids. Much how Call of Duty still runs on a hotrodded Return to Castle Wolfenstein engine. As for being able to mod, that's mostly about the devs supplying the right tools more than anything.
Ok but it's just a way worse engine overall. Starfield is garbage already. Get with the times!
@@thetowerfantasymusic Dude came in a comment from a year ago to lie to himself lol
@@thetowerfantasymusic the creation engine is very poorly written for what I have heard. It is unoptimized for modern hardware, was a cpu chugger when it released, and honestly without modding their games would be mid. Its that most game lack tools made by the developer to mod their games either because of licensing issues or more commonly they don't have the energy to do so. I look at operation harsh doorstop, a skeleton of a game and how they implemented tools to mod it from the start, wishing more developers would give us a good framework to build upon. That was why ARMA 2&3 was successful, why bethesda keeps people playing, and doom still has an active scene.
actually this is kind of what i figured, how tf are people supposed to mod unreal vs when we all so used to creation kit
Unreal has a low level SDK that allows you to develop just about anything you want. It actually is more flexible than the Creation SDK since you can go in and modify or replace entire components of the engine.
That's a difference with the Creation Kit, which is more of a high level SDK which gives you access to the code, assets, and tools that have been built on top of the Creation Engine, not access to the engine itself. This is also something Bethesda has to rebuild every time they make a new game, since even with using largely the same code base, they still do a lot of minor changes, updates, and tweaks that they ultimately have to make another version of their kit.
The problem with modding in many games is that devs don't spend the time to develop public kits for their low level tools.
This is also why many large or significant mods for Bethesda titles have to rely on the likes of Script Extender teams to develop injection methods, so that modders can forcibly modify or extend features of the engine that Creation Kit does not grand access to, but Unreal SDK natively does.
Simple, they won't need to mod a game that isn't fucked
@@monody But does it allow to have 30 differen people modifying the same area through an form id system that allows for the game to be generated by reading any combination of those?
@@Niyucuatro Concurrently in real time, yes. It allows much more than that. It's called Multi-User Editing and is a feature of both UE4 and 5.
@@monody Then maybe bethesda's code could be applied over unreal.I still wouldn't buy it if Epic would get money from it though.
I really like creation engine actually it’s so easy to mod old mods form 2011 Skyrim can work on SE no work needed, probably why there’s thousands of them per game while the Witcher 3 has a few mods but they break with any game update and we’re such a pain to get working originally with bat files that often conflicted and still limited with how much you can mod
CDPR doesn't rely on modders to fix their game tho
@@totallynuts7595 They don't want to mod it because it doesn't have good mods.
@@chainsaw8507 FriendlyHUD is a good Witcher 3 mod.
It's a negative feedback loop: No demand for mods means less active modders means less mods means less demand for mods. But the vanilla game is far more solid than any Bethesda game since Morrowind.
Fallout New Vegas has good mods and quite a lot of them in fact, but that game is also better than the other Bethesda titles, so less people install mods for it.
@@totallynuts7595 FriendlyHUD just improves the HUD. No offence, but that's not what I would call a good mod, or at least not the kind of mod I'm talking about. It's a helpful one and it's nice to have, but it doesn't add characters, stories, mechanics, locations, entire remakes of games, or even completely original games. Those are the kind of mods I'm talking about. If The Witcher 3 had an engine as modder friendly as Bethesda's we'd see mods like those. Also, where's your source that not many people mod New Vegas?
@@totallynuts7595 CDPR still doesn't have nearly as moddable of a game. Has nothing to do with fixing anything. And Witcher 3, and Cyberpunk both had their fair share of bugs. It's going to happen with any open world game like that.
And what are most of the mods that come out for Skyrim? Textures, armors, weapons, etc... they're adding in new content to the game because it's easier to implement on the CE rather than the Red Engine.
Demand for mods has nothing to do with how well the game is. Skyrim did win GOT after all, and so have other Bethesda titles. Even Morrowind has a huge collection of mods, but that doesn't make it a bad game.
Where are the new quest mods, the total retextures of everything, the new thousands of armor and weapon mods, the different mount mods?
As far as I recall, there's one mod for Witcher that let's you wear pretty much any in-game outfit you'd want, but it's a buggy mess and a hell of a time to install where Skyrim you can already do that in Vanilla.
They both have their own strong suits as far as a game goes.
Witcher has better combat and a great story.
Skyrim has better immersion and exploration with more roleplaying and replayability.
Creation Engine is just far easier to mod with because they give you the engine to do whatever you want and all the tools and assets they have.
A huge benefit of Unreal Engine is that its Open Source. If the engine has issues, you can fork it and have your engine team fix and extend the engine as you see fit.
Probably the biggest reason, is the time and cost of hundreds switching employees - many who have worked at BGS for over a decade - learning a completely new system, and implementing a huge back catalogue of tools and modules to the new engine instead of incrementally tweaking them for the next game.
The problem is more that because it's not an in-house tool, the studio will not have the knowledge to make big changes to it and might not be able to fix every issue that pops up. At the very least it takes a lot more time. With an in-house engine they generally have the person who made that system on staff, and the issue might not even have occured in the first place because the engine was designed for the game specifically.
When a game is as big as what Bethesda makes, Unreal would need significant changes. And when the studio is big enough to roll their own tech, then why bother modifying Unreal to do what you want? Almost all the bigger studios use their own tech after all.
Open source and source available is not the same thing. Unreal has a very restrictive license
@@utfigyii5987 I know. Its OS not FOSS.
Having source access still allows you to resolve engine bugs that a closed source engine would force you to simply work around.
I've been playing Morrowind a lot recently and not gonna lie - I thought the footage from Skyrim in native engine was the UE5 content. It's amazing how your brain just accepts graphical fidelity for what it is after a while.
What a grand and intoxicating innocence... how could you be so naïve?
@@baronvonbeandip Lol, I play on a CRT with less that 900p, enjoy a bleeding wallet for your modern graphics.
Exactly, graphics in gaming never really bothered me (although except the DOS Era and SNES)
@@ammagon4519 Some of those games are still worth playing tho
@@ammagon4519 what? those graphics were golden
Radiant AI is the only way to do Bethesda NPC’s they feel like real people in Oblivion. The lack of that in Skyrim was one of the first things I noticed when playing Skyrim where the dialogue was repetitive and stale
It's actually alot more simple. Money and experience. They got tons of experience with their own engine and they're not looking to pay royalties to Epic.
Unlike the totally *wrong* reasons given in the presentation, these are actual valid reasons.
I understand why many developers use the Unreal Engine. That said, I applaud all the studios and publishers, included Bethesda, who are hell-bent on using their own. In fact, we need **more** studios building and using their own engines! We do not needs games technology monopolized under a single company and their one proprietary engine, which is what's happening more and more with every studio that caves and opts for the Unreal Engine for convenience's sake.
I was so very sad to hear that CD Projekt Red was going to drop their RED Engine for Unreal Engine 5 moving forward. I understand the logic behind that choice, especially considering the fact that they had run off most of their senior devs who had helped to build and were intimately familiar with RED Engine, and that the majority of their workforce now is effectively new hires, probably fresh out of college and who only know Unreal Engine because their college coursework required it. Again, I get it. But I don't like it. And it still makes me sad.
i completely agree with you. About CDproject...well, looking at the absolute mess they made with cyberpunk i'd rather have a game made with UE5 at this point. The "photorealistic" look of cyberpunk can be achieved only with an ultra expensive pc. Even with a 3050ti it runs like crap.
@@astral_anomaly2250 Much of that is the fact that CDPR higher ups and their disastrous development philosophy/practice had and was continuing to run off much of their senior staff, i.e., the legacy developers who had developed TW2 and TW3 and consequently developed and knew the RED Engine best. This also means a lot of the features implemented in the Cyberpunk iteration of it are done so in a haphazard, "fast and loose" fashion, with little to no optimization. Their running philosophy seems to be to bludgeon the GPU into submission instead finessing frames out of it. And not only is this because most of the senior devs who know RED best are gone, but the green devs who were left behind also were crunching and trying to develop a game that moderately resembled what was shown in the "gameplay trailer" for the unrealistic launch date imposed upon them from their pathetic excuses for executives.
My suspicion is that if development of the RED Engine was spun off to a seperate team of engineers whose sole responsibility was to clean up and optimize what's already there, to partner with dev teams to develop and integrate new features into it as needed, and otherwise to keep it updated and it properly maintained, RED Engine has the potential to be one of the best in the industry for those types of games.
As a side note, I also would love to see them drop DirectX12 in favor of Vulkan and also drop Nvidia's various proprietary solutions for AMD's open source, vendor-agnostic counterparts. With both of these changes, there would be no "black box" potentially hindering performance of their games. The engineers always would have the freedom to dig into the source code and change whatever they needed to to gain more and better performance.
SORRY BRAINFARTS BUT ITS INT JUST FOR CONVINIENCE SAKE.LOEV ME ALL KNOWING KEYBOARD WARRIORS WHO SUDDENLY KNOW EEVRYTHING UNDER TEH SUN BUT I BET IF YOU WER EPLACE D TO RUN A COMPANY IT WOULD GO BANKRUPOT WITHIN A WEEK IF LUCKY!!!!!
@@goranstojanov1160 Try writing that again, but this time without all caps and using proper English. Thank you.
@@HickoryDickory86 you DO understand that writing your own engine means supporting it on multiple platforms, constantly fixing a lot of bugs that can eventually create new ones. Checking whenever game running on Graphics API A looks the same as on the API B. Some times graphics drivers will try ruining your day. Or, even better thing, DX12/Vk both are messy, and you have to write your own graphics driver similar or better than DX11 did.
Some times you'd have to fix small thing like - renaming some variables that are saved per material/scene - kaboom -> you have to migrate all of your projects right now (not really right now, it depends).
Source: my experience at work
So writing own engine comes with both advantages and quite strong disadvantages.
But I think decision of choosing an engine depends on a kind of project you'll have, team size, money, game style, janre and lots of other factors.
And I do think that it's a bit of a shame CDPR switching to UE5 instead of keeping their own.
I'm not sure how well unreal would handle things like being able to go into a house and pick up, throw etc all the plates, the potions being actual items you can pick up and are not just background images things that teleport into your inventory etc.
To be fair, Unreal could handle that just fine. Probably better than CE.
Real question is, how would Unreal Engine handle quest building, adding in totally new frameworks for totally new game mechanics (like SKSE, Nemesis, vastly improved physics including soft body physics) and modular plugin files for new content? In Creation Engine, a total noob like me can fire up the Creation Engine, open the documentation and have simple new quest with all the necessary scripts, dialogue, locations, markers etc up and running in a few hours.
@@cmdr.shurimal8980 All of that could be handled easily by UE. Because in the end modding is always about how games developers support it. How many tools will they make for you, how easy it will be and stuff. As for handling plates, potions that was mentioned, all of that is on coding basis and has literally nothing to do with an engine. If anything it would make it easier to do since UE has pretty good physics engine implemented out of the box.
@@cmdr.shurimal8980 source for this claim? as far as i know, no engine can handle as many objects as creation engine can
that was fucking dumb are you retarded?
I mean the vjolt physics engine can handle some pretty massive loads
my hottest, wackiest take is that bethesda's engine is good and I understand why they are hesitant to drop it like everyone seems to want them to
It's not wacky to the "silent majority", it's just that it's so popular to bash them a smaller vocal group is all you hear - meanwhile the masses are racking up thousands of hours in Skyrim and Fo4....
the way i got into creating games was by making oblivion, and later skyrim and fallout 4, mods. For me this felt like the perfect introduction because the tools were so obvious and simple that even with only a 5 minute youtube tutorial I could jump in, make a quest, create a dungeon for that quest to happen in, fill it with enemies and npc's, and create a reward for completion with minimal issues. This meant more of my time could be dedicated to making the layout and quest make sense. Even though I can now also use Unity and Unreal, the Gamebryo and Creation engines will always have a special place in my heart for that first day of adding my first mod, booting up Oblivion and having that "omg i actually did a thing!" moment
Knowing Creation Engine ever since Oblivion and without even watching the video I'll say this: I'd take the thousands of mods that CE made possible over a mainstream fancy engine any day, thank you very much.
No offense to unreal, but everyone and their mother uses it, it's awesome that people stick to proprietary engines that still work best for them.
People don't seem to realize that with the CE, Elder Scrolls and Fallout titles wouldn't be nearly as moddable.
@@stevenseagal5950 yeah.. should bethesda one day uses UE... they will bitch about why there're no more mods for the games
Now try to make you own game and sell it with creation engine...
You can't!
The problem here is the oranges and apples.
CE is great FOR MODDERS, not for someone trying to make their OWN GAMES.
For someone who makes games UE isn't FANCY AT ALL, far from it, is actually the most accessible engine out there.
So before you, Bethesda slaves start to shit on UE for the sake of stupid comparison? Why don't you guys go ask Todd if he would borrow to you his precious engine?
@@efxnews4776 he literally did borrow people the engine. It's literally how people are able to make mods lmao.
And I'm not shitting on the UE, it's a great engine, it just wouldn't possibly be as moddable as CE is and the majority of Bethesda's player base enjoys creating and using mods in their games because it's so simple to do.
And CE obviously is great for people trying to make games, as Bethesda has made several on that engine. There's just isn't open to use for people to make and sell things from (it's in the terms and conditions).
No one here was shitting on UE. You just can't read.
Why are you so butthurt that people like and watch BGS to keep using the engine?
@@efxnews4776 Everything Steven Seagal said AND the fact that a bunch of really talented mod teams DID, in essence, make their own games. Look up Nehrim, Enderal from SureAI and The Forgotten City which was originally a large mod, later also made into a standalone game on UE.
Me saying UE is fancy doesn't mean it's bad, just mainstream. It is in fact more capable than CE on plenty of fields but it, like every other engine doesn't come close to CE's versatility when it comes to modding. CK is among the most (if not the most) versatile kits, period. Being able to make your own shit for a game is not slavery, it's consensual, creative and sure as shit better than not being able to at all.
People also don't understand that UE is not really great at handling big dynamic complex open worlds that Bethesda games are known for. Sure, there are UE4 games with big levels, but even then they are no match to Beth open worlds. Obsidian tried to replicate the Fallout NV formula in UE4 through The Outer Worlds, and even though it's a good game, it's nowhere near the openness and complexity of Fallout NV which ran on Gamebryo.
Funnily enough, in UE5, Epic remodified the engine to use CELL based area asset streaming/loading to support huge open worlds. A system which Bethesda has been using for the last 2 decades in both Gamebryo and Creation Engine. Sure, the graphics renderer, physics and animation engine in the Creation Engine is way out of date, but other than that, Bethesda did a lot of things with their engine which was way ahead of their time. In fact, it's these advance features (along with modding) which carried their games through decades instead of eye candy like graphics and photorealism which honestly doesn't matter much in the grand scale of game development.
Creation Engine 2 (Starfield) is resolving a lot of those outdated systems and issues, like a completely new PBR pipeline, physics and animation system which will all improve the overall experience by a lot, and will bring the engine back to modern standards. Not to mention all the more awesome mods that can take advantage of these new systems.
No way unreal could handle diamond city, shit had like, 30 npcs in it.
@@smolpener7430 and how does it handle information of every npc, alot of npc are loaded all the time like caravans.
It doesn't matter. Being bits of code built on top of Gamebryo means that it will be a buggy mess.
@@night_fiend6 UE 5.3 still have lines of code from UE1
@@Khannah69 UE was a good engine to begin with.
Gamebryo doesn't handle large worlds well and is best for rhythm games and simple plat formers.
“If there’s a problem, the developers are able to go out of their way and fix it”
Meanwhile Bethesda: We couldn’t figure out how to add trains to fallout 3 so we made an NPC wear a train as a hat LOL
Engineers have to come up with creative solutions. It's a crucial part of being a great engineer.
I know this is prob a joke but just wanted to say it
To be fair, you do a lot of stuff like that when you make games
It's all smoke and mirrors. If method A looks stupid, but is quick to implement and end result is indistinguishable from method B you'd have to spend a lot of time to develop, the method A will do.
By the way, the plantable soil in Skyrim's Hearthfire DLC is actually NPC-s, too. So are armor mannequins (a script disables their AI at loading the game, but sometimes with heavy script load, it doesn't happen). When you buy sawn logs to build your house, they're actually weightless items in your inventory, just hidden so you don't see them in the menu. The log piles near the houses are just activators with simple scripts attached to get and display the amount of logs in your inventory. Every piece of dialogue in Bethesda games is a quest. All games use "hacks" like this.
Thats actually good development
dont worry f76 has a train set!
I've been programming in unity and i think the only problem with using another engine is reinplementing the systems required for the game such as radiant quests, unity (and probably unreal engine too) has stable versions that are used to develop full projects without the need to update the engine version where you can still update single components without breaking the assemblies, while using these versions i never came across the errors you talk about until i used unstable and preview ones, its such an unlikely event that it's not a reason to not use an all traits better engine like UE5, the problem is that reimplementing mod compatibility, dialogue system or a flexible mission sistem with consequences and alternatives like the creation engine takes more time than updating their own one
Their arguments were kind of misinformed in general. As you noted, most releases for Unity and UE4/5, especially if you're using them to develop a full project, are stable releases. Version control on any project dictates you lock into a given iteration of a chosen engine and roll with it for development. The same can even be said about Creation Engine as it's not a direct evolution from one game to the next in terms of the engine and it's version. There's many small numeric updates we don't directly see as consumers.
They seem to readily conflate the high level scripts, tools, and assets built over the engine with the engine itself, which also confuses things.
Interesting video, but as an Unreal user I don't agree with a lot of the points made.
When you sign up to use Unreal Engine you're given access to the source code of the engine in a private Git repo. It's not open source, that implies you can freely share the source, but you have access and can make custom versions of UE with what changes you want. This is the same codebase that the Epic team building Unreal work on themselves and so you're not artificially limited.
If you hit a major problem, and if you have the skills, you can fix it yourself. You can even push the changes back to the engine and, if Epic accept the Git push, it'll be part of the core and you won't need to patch the same changes into future releases if you update- and if not then normally updating patches is a fairly quick task. It's this level of access you need if you're writing Borderlands and want to rewrite large parts of the rendering system, or writing Fortnite and need to rework the network system to handle more players- and, yes, Fortnite is by Epic but there's nothing in their changes that an external company couldn't have done too.
As a specifc example if you want better mod coding support then add better mod coding support directly to the engine, or even as a plugin which links in. Get the runtime for Lua, JavaScript V8, AngelScript or similar and link it into the Unreal engine, there're plugins for this on the Marketplace and NCSoft did it with linking JavaScript support in for their games (now UnrealJS, a downloadable extension). It's tricky to get right and performant, moving data quickly between the managed scripting engine and the C++ UE is using is a challenge, but it's do-able.
If you're a company on the scale of Bethesda then even contact Epic directly about getting access to their preview version of Verse, a scripting language they're working on which will make UE5 a lot more mod-friendly. From what little we've seen it looks a bit like Python but with massive support for co-routines and similar techniques to make it so you can focus on building the gameplay logic you're after without needing to worry about how it ties into the frame updates. It looks to be building on top of the SkookumScript technology (who Epic acquired) so if you want more info their 'Death to the Tick' article is good.
You can also add support for loading models at runtime this way so modders can add content easily, I did this myself with a .obj importer years back (imported real-time captured and textured models at 25fps, was pretty nifty) and with UE5's Geometry Scripting it's now possible to import a mesh included as a full Nanite model so all the nice detail level and lighting we're seeing. Same with textures, audio and all the other asset types.
If you decide to support it then you can even use UE as your modding environment. Let modders use Unreal as their level editor, and have an open API spec exposing your internal systems to them via Blueprint and/or C++. I've written a few small add-ons to Satisfactory because they use UE and I could add logic in C++, and I enjoyed the game. It is a different skill set and you risk losing modders who don't want to learn Unreal, but you also stand to gain modders who already know Unreal or want to learn as it's a more useful skill which will allow them to make their own games later on. There's also a lot more learning resources for how to use Unreal than there are for even the best supported custom modding systems so learning should be quicker.
This isn't easy and will take time but this is not a solo dev working from their bedroom, this is a AAA development with massive budgets. Take a small fraction of the team working on maintaining and updating their own engine and move them to fixing issues and adding functionality to Unreal and you've got the benefits of the UE5 rendering (Lumen+Nanite is amazing for open world with the detail level and real-time dynamic global illumination, and is why the Matrix demo looked good) and a much more stable framework together with all of the company-specific special sauce that Bethesda could ever want.
It will also increase the minimum spec but that's probably not as big an issue as people seem to think. Skyrim running on very low-spec PCs isn't because Skyrim was built to run on very low-spec PCs, it's because Skyrim is over a decade old. As the times Skyrim's requirements were the equivalent of a decent Unreal game nowadays, and I've run UE5 projects on a GeForce 1080 which, while high-end at release, is now a six year old card and two generations out of date. When Bethesda release their next game it won't be running comfortably on Skyrim-level hardware.
There isn't a single game made by unreal engine that has skyrim's size, detail, modability or item persistence.
Hold on. Unreal Engine source code is available to all the game developers who want to use it. If you are missing a feature in the engine, you don't have to wait for Epic to add it in -- you can do it yourself. Companies like Bethesda have large teams of engineers to support feature development on engines -- so, rather than spending lots of man hours recreating the boiler plate features already supported out of the box by Unreal Engine, they could instead spend their time working to extend Unreal Engine to support their game specific needs.
The real reason why game dev companies don't all just immediately switch over to UE is because they've already spent a lot of time creating their own engines and they probably already have several games in the development pipelines using their in-house engine. Switching over to a different engine in the middle of a production cycle would cost many, many months of delay on a game production because your whole content pipeline would need to be refactored and all of your staff would need to be trained on the new content production workflows, which will take a lot of time.
The right way to make an engine switch is when you're in between projects. You make your engine switch, start production, lock into a specific engine version, work on content until release, rinse and repeat.
Supporting modding can also be done if your engineers and designers build in support for it. There are plenty of games made in Unreal Engine which support modding.
IMHO, one of the best reasons to switch over to Unreal (aside from the technical superiority) is that the engine has reached critical mass in the market place and any new hires are likely to have expert experience with the engine already, allowing them to hit the ground running with minimal training and ramp up times.
You make it sound so easy, yet fail to mention that any feature you add to UE5 have a 90% not working. Not to mention how hard it is for people to use who are not programmers.
@@AP13P We're talking about AAA game studios with hundreds of professional software engineers, not your scrappy indie developer working on their first game project.
Not entirely true about unreal being updated and ruining the game, you have an option to update or keep working on the game in the current version.
There not being a feature or functionality for your game, that makes more sense but unreal allows you to write your own code, you can add on whatever you want. You really aren’t limited.
ya that's why I side you can't update it (unless I accidentally cut that part out). Also there's still limitations that you have to work around when writing your own code.
@@TheCantinaChannel I also feel like it wouldn’t have that Bethesda feel to it
Finally a CZcamsr that talks sense about the creation engine and doesn't just shit on it despite not taking into account any of the reasons they use their own in house engine
I think the other problem is that UE4 isn't really suited to big open worlds... could be wrong but I don't think it's as capable as the CE at streaming textures/LODs etc. The only UE4 game that is kinda open world RPG I can think of is The Outer Worlds, and even then it's not truly open, more like an assemblage of large hub areas - and it doesn't really run all that well.
Please please please tell me the background music you have in your videos. I remember the melody so vividly and it's nostalgic in a way I can't describe but I can't figure out the name of it or what game it's from
lol it's youtube royalty free music. You probably just heard it in my other videos.
@@TheCantinaChannel Wait really?! It really sounds like something from elder scrolls lol. What's it called?
I love how your video easily explains how having a proprietary game engine allows devs to easily manage and tune their creation process. I mean id Tech is the most efficient and well optimised engine out there that allows a game to run on a Hierarchy or power levels and is a reason why Microsoft wants to expand its use and allow more of their in-house studios to implement it.
Ask Obsidian. Josh explained very well that it's extremely easy to use. And also, if they swtich to Unreal the modding scene wil be crippled.
I liked the mismatched water tiles at the end. Modding a Bethesda game is soo much fun...
Unreal Engine is open source so developers can fix bugs by themself. Also, the unreal engine allows modding tools to create (like editing specific parts of code and all assets). Also, switching engines require reteaching most developers.
Just FYI, Unreal Engine is completely open sourced. You can easily fix problems yourself and send those fixes to Epic, which most major developers who use UE do. The Creation Engine has made systems to make creating missions really easy, while UE does not, but that doesn't stop you from creating your own quest system exactly for your needs, and it wouldn't really be any more or less difficult than doing it for your in-house engine. The same goes for AI, and any other system you can think of.
Regarding modding. Unreal Engine is A LOT MORE modding friendly than Creation Engine. The entire engine is open source (Creation Engine is not), so basically mods for a UE5 game, given that the developers release the game open source instead of just creating tools, would be a lot more modding friendly than Skyrim, by a country mile. UE5 is easier to work with and more people are familiar with the engine.
Modding in a game open for modding with UE is significantly less bound than what modding is with Skyrim. Take for example multiplayer. Skyrim Reborn is absolutely insane, what they've done is simply short of a miracle done through thousands of hours through many many many years. With Unreal Engine you could probably create a better multiplayer mod alone, in a single evening. Why? UE already has the framework built from the ground up within the engine. You wouldn't even need to worry about mod compatibility at all. If it works in singleplayer it works in multiplayer.
The real reason why Bethesda doesn't use UE is threefold:
1. Back in 2006-2011 UE4 wasn't as fleshed out as today, meaning creating an open world within UE4 was a lot more work.
2. Knowledge. The developers of Bethesda know the Creation Engine inside out. They know who knows what parts of the engine and who can make things happen. If they now switch engines to UE that would mean months if not years to get back to speed learning the ins and outs of the engine. They have some 400 developers. Let's say that 200-300 of them are developers. That's a lot of money to get all 300 up to speed with the new engine.
3. Licensing fees/money. They already have an engine, which their developers already know which saves money teaching them to use a brand new engine. Additionally, UE isn't free. They'd have to spend a lot of money for an enterprise license of UE5 in addition to the costs of teaching every developer the new engine.
More people should read this instead of gushing about the video.
“Mod friendly” can mean many things. I think when people say the CE is mod friendly, I think they’re more talking about the accessibility and ease of the Creation Kit. There’s a reason Bethesda games generally have one of the most active modding communities. You don’t have to be super knowledgeable about game development or coding to make a mod for a Bethesda game.
But overall I agree with your points as to why Bethesda doesn’t switch over to UE or another engine. Keeping things in-house makes development much easier and streamlined. Not to mention that it saves a lot of money and time.
Can you name a UE title with a sizable amount of mods that aren't just minor table edits/QoL stuff, but substantially change the game?
“And you need those mods for the game to run”
-my girlfriend
I wouldn't trade modding capability to a more fancy graphic that unreal is offered, not even a bit.
there is also the fact that the devs just have years of experience on Creation and not on unreal.
If you knew what Bethesdas turnover was you wouldn't be saying that shit
How does everyone not realise that the unreal tech demos of Skyrim are just that tech demos. We see zero gameplay, all we see is a panning camera. People see one tech demo on a game that is ten years old, see the fancy graphics and particle effects and start crying. To turn that into a full game would take so much more work than what you it has already taken to create the demo. Bethesda won't use the unreal engine because all of their code is tied up in the creation engine. And that is not a bad thing. The reactions to these unreal demos are dumb. The demo is a fun exercise for the creator to load the assets into unreal and use that to demo skyrim in a new way. But that is all it is. If we can stop having a go at Bethesda for using the engine that they use. They have been doing this for a long time, they know what they are doing. For them to use unreal we wouldn't see ES6 until 2050.
@EXODST right?! Almost feel petty saying it, but it's just annoying. Everyone also has a go at Bethesda for their engine saying it's outdated, but that's also not an easy thing to understand since yeah sure it's older and perhaps not got all the modcons that an unreal engine game might have, but it works exactly as Bethesda wants it to, for the games they want to make. For good or bad right?! I mean if they release a game so bad that no one buys perhaps they'll go back to the drawing board move to a new engine and design everything from the ground up, but as long as people keep buying their games, that's not going to happen. The engineering challenge would be enormous
It’s not hard to port from unreal engine 4 to 5. Only issues I had with minor or major update is that some of my code needs rework but not much. If Epic deprecates part of API the code editor will tell you few updates before it happens so you have time to fix it before it would stop working and it does not happen a lot.
Okay, as much a meme as Unreal Engine is, and as good as Unreal Engine is at recreating small bits of gorgeous scenery from Skyrim, there’s an emphasis on the “small bits of scenery.”
There’s a big difference between creating a town or a tower and actually creating the open world they’re contained in. Of course you can afford to be more detailed, (not to mention it’s an updated engine since 2011) and of course you can worry less about the amount of assets that take up memory to be loaded in, especially if you’re just recording the environments and not actively playing a character with the all options of customisation, the NPCs, the interactable terrain, while also rendering in the distant scenery like mountains from across the map. I imagine it might start to struggle under that load as well.
not to mention none of these ever show off npcs or anything also
This is incorrect that unreal engine cannot handle large open world. Previous generation would have struggled, but ue5 is built with open world in mind.
Witcher 4 is being built in ue5.
The reason you stay with your own engine is because it is a specialist engine, meaning what you want is built into it. If you switch to a generalist engine, you would have to make the lacking features yourself.
Also unreal engine is open source you can modify the source to suite your needs.
I can assume its also a factor that there is a 5% royalty cut. Which may be greater than what it currently costs them to manage their engine.
@@asiseverything3404 Not certain any more on that last point, given Bethesda has a team of ~200 people working on the engine to try and push it's update for Starfield last I knew.
Sorry, but this is totally not true. Especially not in UE 5. The technology is kinda revolutionary even for large-scale maps, and actually allows far away horizons scenery that is otherwise often faked to be actually rendered cheaply. The last thing that was missing was nanite vegetation wind support, and it's coming out now.
Unreal Engine 5 is actually with its latest technologies has overall lower FPS but pretty much constant and not that much dependable on objects in scenes and render distance in comparison to other engines.
Just for the record, I'm Unity Freetime Fanguy, tried many different engines and we use CryEngine as a main in our company, but everyone here realizes every other engine is just miles behind and most likely won't recover for A-tier 3D games (which is kinda sad) on basically every level.
AND THERE IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HAVING RESEARCHED SOMETHING AND NOT RESEARCHING SOMETHING!!!!!! AND YOUY DEFFINETLY DIDNT RESEARCH ANYTHING ABOUT UE5 WHATSOEVER!!!!!!!! YOUR OWN COMMENT PROVES IT!!!!!!
Some huge miss conceptions. Unreal modding is superior than creation kit. Creation kit are a set of tools that help with mod creation but require an obscure specific workflow and other external tools. Meanwhile with Unreal engine modding, you use unreal engine itself to make mods. For example Ark, you can download a version of unreal engine with all the ark assets so that you can create any content. It takes crazy amounts of years to make a whole map for creation kit. Meanwhile for ark, multiple groups of modders make new huge maps every year and they make new dinos with ease. An open engine will always be better for modding then creation kit. Another miss conception is that studios need unreal engine to make updates for them. Unreal engine has it’s source code available to partners and partners can change the code and add code. In other words, they can update the engine to their needs and an added bonus, unreal has support teams for partners
exactly...
You've also made an enormous misconception. You say "with Unreal engine modding, you use unreal engine itself to make mods." how is that not true with Creation Kit mods? The Creation Kit is the same set of tools Bethesda uses to make their games. Modders are still using the official dev tools, it's not like Halo Forge where it's some fancy legos the developers hand us.
@@ucm6397 I have made mods for both. Creation kit is not a game engine, it lets you read files and add files to the game but it’s not the game engine itself. They are tools made specifically for mods. The devs don’t use those tools, they use the actual game engine. It’s faster to use the actual game engine but creation engine is a private engine. When you sit down to make mods for creation kit, you have to use the limited set of tools they give you plus other community tools. And most importantly, modding requires a different work flow then actual game creation. Half the work is finding workarounds or using the community made workarounds. Fallout and Skyrim have amazing mods not because of Bethesda specifically, but because the community behind the modding create a lot of groundwork
An in-house engine is always better in basically every way. Someone else's engine, especially one that's meant to be general-purpose, just gets in the way and requires a lot of work to get it to do what you want efficiently. Graphics means little because most have good capabilities in that regard- and it's more about assets, implementation, and constraints specific to the game when it comes to the end result.
It's worth pointing out that most game studios that use Unreal (including Epic themselves, I think) don't use a release version of the engine. Rather, they have their own custom version of the engine with any type of tweaks that they need to make to the engine itself. Unreal Engine isn't *technically* open source (because of licensing agreements) but the engine's source code is available and anyone can modify it to build their own version of it. These custom versions will still need to be updated if they want the latest new features, but typically that's pretty easy to do as long as the custom changes aren't anything too crazy, and will ideally just be a git merge.
Hey, unreal dev here. Just want to clear a few things up. Unreal engine version changes are actually incredibly stable we have taken projects from 4.16 all the way to 4.27.2 and never had any major issue. Also the unreal source code is available you can modify the engine to do basically anything we implemented a change a few days ago to add a whole new material blend mode for instance. Bethesda could definitely modify the engine to fit an elder scrolls game. Modding also isn’t a strong argument here. Epic actually has documentation on how to enable modding in unreal games. The actual reason Bethesda doesn’t use unreal is because it takes time to learn new tools. We all know the general layout and design language of Bethesda games hasn’t changed much in 20 years. Switching tools has a real world time and money cost, why change tools though when all your developers already know how to do a great job with basically the same tools they’ve been using for years. Not a bad video just a bit misinformed. Didn’t mean for this to come off in any negative way, just being informative seeing as this is my industry and my tool of choice.
So, quick question, you know where I could find some good lessons and tutorials, going al the way from the basics and Ui. I trued searching myself, but found some ok (and very long) tutorials, mostly teaching how to do x and y, but not teaching the fundamentals.
@@flowerthencrranger3854 unreal actually does live streams on different stuff every week. It's all archived on their channel it's a great start.
Did you know anyone tried to make Bethesda type of RPG in Unreal? With huge modding scenes of course.
@@GHOSTRIDER373737 I’m literally no one has tried to compete with Bethesda on any engine.
@@fatmon95 I believe it's because it is very hard to duplicate their engine, seems like Creation Engine are the only engine capable of making every ingame objects interactable.
The problem isn't that Bethesda has their own engine, it's that there were some big shortcomings with that engine that had to be worked around. It's no coincidence that SKSE, ENB, SkyUI, FNIS, XEdit, USLEEP and others are basically mandatory FIRST just to give the majority of other mods the proper foundation to run.
The Gamebryo/Creation engine line have always been setup to do EXACTLY what Bethesda needed it to do for that game and very little if anything more. This is a problem for modders because they need to add functionality in order to enable things they want to do, but it's not a problem for Bethesda.
Arguably Bethesda shouldn't be including a bunch of unneeded features as it will more likely than not result in issues for little to no gain.
Still the Gamebryo/Creation line is pretty easy to add functionality onto and accepts new features slotted into it rather well.
My biggest problem with Creation and Bethesda is that Bethesda doesn't build things in it using best practices, their content is full of horrible implementations and poor quality work which they could have done a lot better even within the constraints they themselves put on the engine.
Bethesda could avoid most of the critique they and their engine is getting if Bethesda actually bothered to put out quality work. There are limitations which are baked into the engine, but most of what the end user experiences as "engine issues" is down to shoddy level building and bad scripting I think.
@@NATIK001 why? Bethesda have Creation Engine 2 and Starfield looks really nice
@@Socom1994 Nice and also unmistakably Bethesda...
@@khymaaren yes its a new masterpiece
SKSE exists because modders want to make scripts that the base game didn't. Bethesda didn't need any of those functions to build their games, why would they add and mantain them then? It's nice to have all those extra engine features when making mods. But the game would continue to have mods without it.
Bt Bethesda is not choosing to not add those features because modders will. They just don't need those features.
Using the wrong engine for a game is disastrous.
BioWare were forced to use FrostBite, an engine designed for FPS multiplayer like BattleField in a singleplayer RPG in DA:I and ME:A. It didn't even have basic stuff like saving and loading.
Saving and Loading are things you actually write when developing a game. In UE, basic saving and loading system can be done in under an hour using BPs.
game dev here, they use their own proprietary engine so they don't have to pay any licensing fees as well as the fact that they are comfortable with it and can easily customize it to their liking. That's it
To provide a small correction you can improve Unreal yourself, but in the liscencing agreement you have to turn over that fix/improvement to Epic. So you are paying to advance their engine rather than your own.
YEAH BUT YOU GET SORCE CODE BASICLAY FOR FREE!!! YOU DONT NEED TO SPEND LITTERAL MILLIONS AND YEARS TO MAKE ONE!!!!!! PEOPEL TYHINK MAKING ENGINE IS EASYA ND CHEAP!!1 IST ONE OF THE MOST EXPENSIVE THINSG TO MAKE!!!!!!! ESPECIALY IF ITS FOR BIGGER GAMES/BIG STUDIO CALIBER GAMES. TEH RANGE IS LITETRALY SEVERAL MILLIONS JUST FOR MAKING AN ENGINE NOT EVEN ADDING THE COST OF EPLOYESE,BUILDING ASSETS,STORYBOARDING,SCRIPTING,ANIMATIONS........
MANY TIMES MOTS OF PRODUCTION BUDGET IS EATEN NOT BY GAVE DEVELOPMING BUT BY ENGINE CREATION ITSELF!!!!
God forbid we have a universal engine that has all of the tools, plugins etc. all in one single location, rather than needing to reinvent the wheel everytime
What? You literally don't lmao. You can do anything you want to their engine and you dont have to tell them shit about it.
@@akaslowmoney my notes say that's a monopoly lets have a tech monopoly
@@akaslowmoney You're never going to have a single engine that does everything equally well unless your standard for "well" is absolute dog shit or at least sub par. The issue is hardware limitations for any given set of expected hardware specs. Game developers are going to try to utilize what ever hardware performance they feel is reasonably expectable for players to have at the time that game is released. So there is always a resource budget that they need to keep in mind. So they need to decide what are the things they are going to cut corners on and what things are they going to go all out on in order to balance performance and FPS to total resource utilization. Those optimizations usually start by picking the correct engine for what you're trying to achieve and when a dev doesn't do that you get stuff like Star Citizen where they picked Cryengine and then realized that it is a really bad decision for a MMO then shifted to Lumberyard which was ok for an MMO but not so great for FPS and they've ended up rewriting most of the engine and are now basically on a scratch built engine because they relized there wasn't and engine that was good for what they were trying to do.
In Mr. Krabs Voice: Money!
Question not asked, question answered, thank you very much.
Much love.
Yours truly,
Nereguar.
I appreciate them using their own engine and not using the lifeless unreal engine
That's funny because you can actually do realistic facial expressions in unreal.
Yes and using the Creation Engine 2 worked so well for Starfield. And every single argument you make against UE5 also applies to CE2 or any other engine for that matter. Plus all updates are announced to be working on ahead of release so a studio knows what's coming down the pipeline and acts accordingly, this is why game developers have project leads and Producers, they decide what the team prioritises.
People don't seem to understand that while the NetImmerse engine is older, it's pretty versatile and is unrecognisable with Bethesda modifications. If bethesda were to come to unreal engine they would be bringing along the bulk of three same sorts of engine modifications that make their games so unstable and buggy.
This video was much needed to be honest, i see so many people spout off about engines and scripts and oh how Bethesda should totally move on from the old crappy one they got and i always just roll my eyes like, you have no clue what the hell you're on about lol. Having made mods myself and worked on bigger mods with other modders i can guarantee that none of us would even try to take apart a Bethesda game that wasn't built around the creation engine, there's a reason Bethesda modding is so big to begin with but plebs just don't get it.
they are uneducated in the matter
technically speaking anyone not in the 1% is a plebian.
Welp, you are one of the plebs if you just can see things from your pov without the ability to see things from the perspective of others.
@@ypsilondaone I can see things from their perspective, and i deemed them wrong based on technicalities. Get outta my face with your dog shit.
1:16, yes and Creation Engine is arguably a prime example of this, it's been updated over and over since 2011 (we all know it came from the Gamebryo engine which means it's technically 1997), and that's why it seems to have so many more bugs with each new game, and lacks extensibility in some areas especially multiplayer
1:50, Unreal Engine's source code is accessible so whats being said here is completely untrue, you can add more functionality or fix issues in the engine, especially if you're a AAA company
not hating, just pointing out the truth. I actually agree, I don't think Bethesda would be able to create such amazing game worlds if they hadn't been refining their processes and engine over such a long time.
First Unreal game came out, what, 1998, using Epic's own engine - the first iteration of Unreal Engine. Using the argument that "Creation Engine bad because it's ancient" is silly when you consider this fact. The difference is Unreal (the game series) has always been a simple (multiplayer) arena shooter, whereas Elder Scrolls has always been a complicated RPG with extensive questlines, open world, rich lore etc. Which naturally means that Epic, the devs of Unreal engine, has had more resources to emphasize the graphics part of the engine. IIRC past 10 years or so Epic has not released games of their own, focusing solely on the engine development. Unreal engine is also used in film and TV production, and these guys are able to pay a lot of money for their tools, so Epic has pretty good resources to focus on developing the engine.
So the real reason why Unreal has such advanced graphics capabilities compared to Creation is NOT the age of the engine (both started out at about the same time, both are an iterative process with each new version building on the previous), but because Epic puts a lot of emphasis on graphics capabilities and, not having to deal with actual game development, has a lot more resources to do that. Bethesda has to do a delicate balancing act dividing their resources between graphics, quest building tools, open-world mechanics, modularity/moddability and actually developing a game on top of that. An .esp file is a pretty amazing database that can reference to and bring together all the asset files including meshes, textures and scripts in a clear and easy to implement way.
It's quite amazing that you can activate and sometimes deactivate a whole DLC sized plugin in the middle of a playthrough, build dependencies between different .esp-s to make a mod to a mod that mods a mod and create whole new frameworks that add totally new functionality to the game. At this point we have fully functioning hair, cloth and soft body physics with collisions, 8k textures, extremely high poly meshes, Nemesis, dynamic animation replacer and other stuff not really even imagined back in 2011!. Modding in other games (with exceptions like Minecraft and the OG Half-Life) tends to be limited at best, outright hacky at worst.
@@cmdr.shurimal8980 I'd say historically the reason Unreal has more advanced graphics capabilities is they just had more money to spend on it. Licensing their engine out to others meant they did have to work harder to improve it, but also meant they had more money to spend on devs to do the work. With games such as Batman and Borderlands making good incomes there're few gamedev companies other than Valve making as much profit from other people's games.
For the last few years though things have been different, and it's because Epic do have to deal with actual game development.
Fortnite happened.
Epic entered the 'Add a couple more zeros' level of accounting.
Massive success with it's own challenging technical challenges, such as networking and how to render that many customisable players on things down to phone-level hardware, but bought in massive revenue, and other outside investment (unfortunately including Tencent, wish that hadn't happened).
More money to spend on development and things picked up. In the pub after a games programmer event an Epic community spokesperson dealing with Megagrants joking said they were there "To give away the Fortnite cash", which just made me imagine Tim Sweeney swimming in their vault Scrooge McDuck-style. They pick up a few graphics researchers who have some interesting-but-unproven ideas building on new shader techniques (mesh shaders) and suddenly they have Nanite and Lumen, and Unreal Engine 5 happened.
Not really about modding, it's about tools. It would be a huge amount of Dev time to implement all the tooling needed for the designers to make a Bethesda game in ue5. Mod support is a nice byproduct of these designer friendly tools
Honestly, ALL of the points mentioned can be done in UE just as well as in bethesda's own engine. They aren't REAL reasons to not use UE. But there aren't any real reasons why they SHOULD use UE either. Unreal Engine is open source, so you can change / add / remove / correct anything and everything. You can add the entire bethesda AI system to the unreal engine, either directly incorporated, or as plugin. You can add the quest system, or even complete DEV tools.
The REAL reason why they should use their own engine is because they have decades of experience building and refining it. It does what they want it to do, and it costs minimal effort to change / correct anything for them. It's also THEYR code, so harder to hack / abuse than an open source engine like UE. AND, by using their own engine, they earn back quite a bit of the cost of developing it. Yes, using UE CAN mean less time programming the engine, more time for developing models, maps, quests etc. But is can also mean more time wasted on needless communication between the engine developers in a different company and the game developers. It all comes down to cost in the end.
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE UE, and use it to build games myself. And I make Skyrim mods, so I work with TES creation kit quite a bit. The workflows can't be more different! And I enjoy both TBH :p
I’m granting you the title of defender of Bethesda.
Who made you the jarl?
The engine is versioned, so if you use 4.27 you're golden. Updates that are released on that version will, for the most part, just fix bugs. Some bugs don't get addressed until a new version of the engine is updated and other bugs even much later than that.
Also, the engine is for a large part open to developers to get into the deeper end of things. Large companies can use the engine as a base and build upon it themselves. And the engine is compartmentalized. Meaning you can take out the sound engine and replace it with something else. Same goes for physics, even the rendering if you'd want to go so far.
Bethesda using their own engine means they won't have to pay any fees.
As for the quest system, that's the major reason why. It's such a convoluted scripting system, it'd be a monstrous task to re-create it, same goes for the AI.
Anything done in Bethesda's engine can be done in Unreal, seriously. But the time and money required is absurd. And then there's the pipeline(s). These would completely change everything. I'd be curious to see how much of the new engine is actually just updated from the old one. Like how will the AI behave in Starfield compared to Skyrim and Fallout. It'll be very interesting to see how many bugs Starfield will ship with. After seeing the gameplay trailer my excitement got deflated and then some.
But too early to say anything really. Let's hope it'll be a good game but so much has changed since Skyrim and I truly wonder if Bethesda can still make something amazing. Fallout 4 was alright. We haven't seen anything huge like the leap from Morrowind to Oblicion to Skyrim from Bethesda in a long, long time. I hope Starfield can really show us something new and innovative. I have my doubts.
But yeah, the incentive to pour money into UE4 to me is really why they probably won't. Not because it can't be done, because the amount of work required and the engine fees probably is the main reason. They have engine programmers and they have their established pipeline of how to get things done.
The problem you run into is with console SDKs. You may start a project on say 4.24 - but over a three year projec, the console SDKs change and at some point the XBox or Sony SDKs require support which is not present in 4.24 - so you either have to upgrade or backport the changes to your version of unreal.
@@zoeherriot That's very true. Right now I know about a project that started a few versions ago and they won't go beyond 4.26 because it's not worth it.
They had to fix all the weird stuff that got broken or depricated during engine upgrades. I think the project got updated two or three times.
At some point it's not worth it. But a ton of the custom code was for the large part working.
The switch SDK got updated not so long ago, which was a headache. :P
@@joure.v Yeah - it's a pain - I had an issue once where we had to migrate to 4.24 - but in doing so it broke a bunch of anti-aliasing code on the PS4. Epic's response was - oh yeah, that's not implemented yet. You can try and port it yourself... that was a tough week.
(Not ragging on Epic - it's just that's what happens...)
Not just modding man. It's the interactive environment. I.e. picking flowers mining minerals. Picking up plates, food etc. That takes a bunch of power. While Unreal engine looks fantastic, it doesn't allow as much interaction with the environment. Without being a pain. I for one prefer interaction vs graphic quality. Just me. You do you.
This video is basically;
Tell me you have no clue about game engines without telling me
Thank you for not dragging out the video for the sake of CZcams bucks. Other CZcamsrs would have made this a 10 minute video minimum.
because modding might get limited
ya lmao
Bethesda should just hire modders to make ESVI
that actually did some of that for skyrim
and I don't mean the creation club
They hire modders all the time
Finally someone who gets it. Bethesda switching engines would mean a complete collapse of their modding community and renders all the knowledge gained and all the external tools completely worthless for future titles. Even if they switch to an engine that's equally moddable, it would take years upon years for modders to rebuild the ecosystem we now have for the Creation Engine.
Yes we get it without the Mod community Bethesda would not be the company it is. Reason why they will not move away from that engine if its ever possible.
Unreal Engine is open source, Bethesda could change the source code.
You forgot one of the biggest problems with using a premade engine. Being forced to hand over a percentage of profits to Epic.
Probably less about profits and more about handing code for proprietary tools over to Epic. Epic allows UE forking, but licensees who fork it have to share it with Epic. Bethesda likes to keep their tools proprietary
I love that coop is going to be possible. It's like a dream that died years ago came back to life.
We would have had it by now if Bethesda let them use steam api, but hey, bethesda are the ones working with an engine older than I am for the sake of modders
@@smolpener7430 Hopefully there's a Creations 3
this arguement is like "we building cars like 1920 so everyone is able to fix it and tune it by itself" ..... the engine is outdated and there is no excuse for it
"Since they're making their own engine, if there is something completely fucked, they can just go in and make just enough of a change to make it work(...)"
That's definately doesn't sounds like bethesda
Creation engine is amazing, to make a game like "Bethesdas games" in UE, with the a.i. having their own rotines etc, independent of the player interaction is IMPOSSIBLE
Finally a clear and objective video on the pros and cons of UE5 and the Creation Engine. People see UE5 demo videos on CZcams, but look no further and don't understand what is involved. Having different engines for different types of games is a good thing, we don't want all games to play the same, and have the same mechanics. It will be interesting to see what happens with the Witcher 4, now that they are using Unreal Engine 5. Will they change the Unreal Engine to suit their game (they're working in partnership with Epic), or will they change their game to suit the Unreal Engine? I'm hoping the former, but fear it will inevitably be the latter.
cause its not their engine??? like really unreal isn't some magical fix for everything you know
this sudden dumb spike of people who think unreal engine is like the definitive graphical solution doesn't know how game development works
The main Reason Why Developpers don't change their main technology so easily is inertia
Developers at Bethesda are more familiar with Gamebrio/Creation engine, switching to a new and more modern engine has a learning curve which can cost a lot to the company
If Bethesda want to use a new technology like Unreal, Unity or CryEngine they will start with a more modest project like any AA Game with few hours of gameplay and not a huge AAA game with hundred hours of gameplay like Skyrim or Fallout
Thank you thank you thank you it is so annoying to hear some other CZcamsrs and even people shitposting and complaining about how buggy the creation engine is and wish that we had jumped to a different engine.
But they clearly don't realize how big the modding Community is and if they switched over it would destroy the community and careers of people.
The best moments in gaming that I have ever had was modding Skyrim. It has always fun and this is the longest I have ever stuck with a game and usually I only last for a game until I complete every thing on many others.
there's not really much else to do after beating everything in a game and I've never really last it even over at least two to three months, until I started playing Skyrim and got into modding.
Also it has taught me quite a lot on how games work and Scripts. and gained quite a lot of interest in game development because of it.
I spend hours on end messing around with mods adding removing, creating, merging, patching. I would have been so devastated if they had it changed to a different engine I am so glad they're sticking to their engine.
i mean creation engine is made so everything is a moveable object without lagging down the whole system. im not sure if unreal is as far on this as creation is. as creation engine has been pretty much the only real engine for this stuff for many years, summoing and moving around in 500 cheese wheeels is a prime example of how it can handle alot of objects.
And not only it's able to move 500 cheese wheels. It's also able to persist them in your save, so anything you change in the game world is there forever, a permanent mark in the world. Other than minecraft and it's clones, no other games let you modify the game worlds as much as Creation Engine games do.
I'm curently trying to remake Skyrim in Unreal Engine 5.1, and... This my first ever post about this project on the internet, so let's see if people find my comment and share their opinion, but what a challenge to just find/create a heightmap of the whole Skyrim map for the landscape... Btw i'm a noob in Unreal so yeah, it's a challenge, so if anyone would like to help me in this project, i'll be super happy, and maybe one day, i'll create something as huge as Skyblivion ! To anyone reading this, have a lovely day !
Like you said, it's really mods. Mods is what makes Bethesda games, imo, a really fun time and can keep the game going for 10 years and more
Radiant ai is extremely necessary for elder scrolls games when you follow them and figure out their schedules or patterns to Rob them or for assassination missions.
Yup, as is taking the actual gear an enemy has equipped. These are things unique to Bethesda games and far too many people just want a generic FPS with a Fallout or Elder Scrolls skin.
@@Not-Great-at-Gaming People get easily impressed by some staged scene with nice visuals. Much easier to do than an actual working large game.
I think that Bethesda rely on the creation engine cause they want modders to fix and more content to their barebone games
most Skyrim players are console players that don't have mods, you can not like the game but calling it barebone is stupid.
@@kyzantia8884 sorry it's boring after a while
@kyzantia8884 You can have mods on Console lol unless your a PS player then you might as well not have any because of how stingy Sony is about external assets.
I love how Bethesda keeps making sure that ancient old Bugs always make it into their next gen games that look like last gen games and also forcing their ancient engine to do things it was never designed to do, which results in insane optimization issues.
It's kinda funny that this video was made as though someone (other) is asking; because the information itself is interesting.
I feel like "should bethesda use unreal engine?" would have fit the info just as well, I mention because you made your description the elaborated version of the title, which I haven't thought before, but I have watched this video.
Another thing I want to point out is Bethesda's engine has feature of making every ingame objects interactable, not sure if Unreal can do that yet, but this was the given reason why Fallout 4 runs on Creation Engine, and not id tech 6 that used to power DOOM 2016, even though it's better looking and from the same company, id tech 6 just isn't built for open world RPG.
Seem to be linking to this game a lot here (it's a good example of a moddable Unreal game, as well as being good fun and worthy of better recognition- but do get the "Smart!" mod if you want to play at a good speed) but here's some footage of a megafactory built inside Satisfactory- czcams.com/video/-hu5bRhcPtU/video.html
What you're looking started as an open world wilderness and the player built the factory themselves- so now it's all dynamic objects with dynamic lighting, nothing prebuilt and baked. Every machine is actively working to make things ("The factory must expand to meet the growing needs of the factory's expansion") with potentially different settings for each, and can be interacted with to adjust them, and even the floors and walls can be recoloured and similar, and this can cover a good sized map with factory. The items zooming along on the conveyor belts are actual game objects too and you can walk up to take them or drop others on as you want.
This is also Unreal Engine 4, not Unreal Engine 5. Add Nanite and Lumen to this and it'd look a lot better with more detail on the machines, and really impressive real-time lighting effects.
Most of the objects don't have physics enabled, but most things in Skyrim don't either- I can't push over the stalls in Whiterun. That's not really a problem though, Unreal has had PhysX physics engine support for years so can do many watermelons, and now has their new Chaos engine which is built to be more performant and capable of being network replicated better which matters for multiplayer.
Betheadas engine is also incredibly modular and modable. With unreal bethesda would have to provide their engine source files etc.
Eg the ark mod kit is like 200+ gb big because its literally their source files. And you need to grab unreal which is addintional 30gb. With a beth game you just download the creation kit and the game itself becomes the source and everything is directly modifiable .
Unreal engine stanky tho, is it not also just a graphics engine?
Like unreal games usually say physics by havok is that not a diff engine.
Gamebryo or whatevs is stink in its own way, but probs better than unreal for huge AI intensive games.
Unreal engine 5 has it's own physics engine now but that is something I originally talked about then ended up cutting out. Bethesda's engine has a pretty optimized physics engine that's capable of handling tons of interactable objects.
No, a game engine ties together multiple different systems to run a game. Some of those systems may be specially created for the engine -- as the rendering engine often is in commercial game engines -- or they may be provided by middleware such as Havok. The Creation Engine also uses middleware, notably including the Havok Physics Engine.
Let’s be honest, nobody would want a game made by Bethesda using someone else’s software. Would immediately kill the vibe of the game.
Part of the reason that Bethesda's engine is so easy to mod is because modders have had nearly 25 years to learn how it works, and how to play with it. It came out around 1997 as the NetImmerse game engine, and was used for a number of projects, including Morrowind. Between 2003 and 2007, NetImmerse was retooled to become Gamebryo, but it was still so rooted in NetImmerse, a mod was created for Bethesda's games called Netimmerse Override, something some Bethesda fans should be familiar with. Now why would the Creation Engine- used in Skyrim and Fallout 4- need to override anything from NetImmerse if NetImmerse was replaced by Gamebryo, and Gamebryo was replaced by Creation? Because they're the same engine to the point that Creation is still using NetImmerse as a foundation, and some mods need to be able to override that NetImmerse engine code. The engine powering Starfield and most likely Hammerfell came out in 1997. Yeah, I'd HOPE modders know what they're doing with it by now.
A short answer:
Because engines don't make good games. When someone says something like "Why do they just use Unreal 5!" It only confirms that the person knows absolutely nothing about programming or game dev.
Nice video BTW!
Imagine defending Bethesdas engines with all their bugs, insane
One big problem with Unreal, it really dislikes mods. Every modded Unreal game I have breaks almost all mods whenever I it updates. Also you need to download 100GB just to create a mod for those games.
The timing on this videos release was damn near perfect. Why Bethesda doesn't use Unreal Engine, not even 20 days after Bethesda announces they are moving to Unreal Engine.
I think your getting confused between studios that work under Bethesda and the Bethesda game studio, which is the studio that makes TES and Fallout, and has no intention of moving, especially since they just invested so much time and money into the creation engine. Those other studios however weren't using the creation engine to begin with.
@@TheCantinaChannel I enjoyed the video, it was well put together. Also thank you for providing me with better information on this. I only heard about it in passing so thank you for the correction.
I played Outer Worlds recently, which is the closest we have to a Bethesda RPG on unreal, and made me appreciate the Creation Engine more.
The NPCs felt less alive, there was far less interactable clutter, there's barely any mods for it, and it just didn't feel right.
There's nothing like a Bethesda RPG, cause the secret sauce is the engine. It might suck, or have issues at times, but it has such a unique feel! Which is so hard to capture on another engine!
Outer Worlds is definitely a fun game, I can easily see myself replaying it some time, but it just doesn't hit the same as a Bethesda game.