The controversy around Bethesda's "game engine" is wrong

This morning, news headlines and YouTube videos on the Internet said Bethesda would not change engine for future games. Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI, causing a wave of indignation that has become widespread in the world of video games. This story, however, is misleading, based primarily on speculation and a general lack of understanding of what is a "game engine".

It started with a November 2nd Forbes article that criticized Bethesda's game engine Fallout 76Technical problems and graphic shortcomings of. This article quoted an interview of June 2018 in the German point of sale GameStar with Bethesda's creative director, Todd Howard. Here is what he said:

For Fallout 76 we have changed a lot. The game uses a new rendering engine, a new lighting system and a new system for landscape generation. For Starfield even more that changes. And for The Elder Scrolls VI, even more on the horizon. We love our publisher. This allows us to create worlds very quickly and the moders know it very well. There are basic ways to create our games and this will continue because it allows us to be effective and we think it works better.

Although the quote itself is not particularly controversial, its sudden rediscovery has led to flamboyant shots everywhere. An article on the Push Square website contains thousands of actions on Reddit and Facebook with its statement that "Bethesda will retain the same core game engine for The Elder Scrolls VI, Starfield". YongYea, a provocateur from YouTube, also mentioned this problem. to its hundreds of thousands of subscribers. "Fallout 76 In particular, he emphasizes more than ever all the inefficiency of this game engine with its inoptimal performance and poor graphic fidelity compared to other titles of his time, "he said.

It is true that Bethesda games have long been criticized for their revolutionary bugs and their inability to achieve the superb graphics standards of other high-end games, but the reasons can be multiple. One of these reasons could be their ambition: few other games offer as much global interaction as Skyrim or Fallout 4. Another reason may be internal processes, programming instructions, development timeline or even a distorted line of code buried somewhere in a file that no one has touched since 2004. It's hard to say .

To blame Bethesda's "game engine", however, is wrong because the word "engine" itself is misleading. An engine is not a program or technology, but a set of software and tools that are constantly evolving. Say that Starfield and Fallout 76 use the "same engine" because they could share a publisher and other common traits, it's like saying that the Indian and Chinese meals are the same because they both contain chicken and rice. What we see outside, such as a game's graphic style, animation system, and physics, can be changed in a variety of ways without switching to a new engine.

The term "engine" is often used by fans and video game experts, mainly in a pejorative way. When a match looks bad or it goes bad, people blame the engine, either by insulting comments about Unity or by hackneyed adjectives like "grumpy". Forbes article: "It's like, every month, we reach a new level of detail and beauty with a new version, and yet something like: Fallout 76 This is noticeable and it is significantly worse than anything else with a motor that feels like collapsing, even if new parts and improvements have been made to try to keep it running. "

To understand why this trend is so stupid, let's quickly examine what is a video game engine.

Say you just did Super Plumber Adventure. It has sold a few copies and you now want to make a sequel that, you know, will share many of the same traits. You always want your plumber to run from left to right, you still want the mushrooms to get bigger, and you still want the pieces to disappear when he picks them up.

Rather than writing new code and creating new animations for all these things, you can use what you've built for the first game and reuse it, bringing all of these features together as a physical system. Combine this physics with other systems, such as a level editor and a memory management tool, to get an engine, a collection of software that you can use in-game gaming to avoid redundant tasks. Super Plumber Adventure 2 I hope it will take a lot less time now that you have already done so much.

When we use terms like "Unreal" or "Frostbite", we are talking about a framework for creating games. These are not immutable creations. In fact, programmers in a game constantly change the functionality of an engine according to their needs. (Most game studios have tools that programmers are fully dedicated to these features.) Often, fans associate certain engines with specific graphic styles, but that can be misleading because two games can run on the same engine, but have artistic direction. Both the retro style Traveling Octopathus and realistic Past days use Unreal Engine 4. Both sport series FIFA and the next shooter from the shared world Anthem Use frostbite.

The engines are iterative, and any game studio using the same engine from game to game will change it constantly, as Todd Howard said in the quote that provoked so much indignation. To reiterate: "For Fallout 76 we have changed a lot. The game uses a new rendering engine, a new lighting system and a new system for landscape generation. For Starfield even more that changes. And for The Elder Scrolls VI, even more on the horizon. "

Often, the aspects of an engine will be developing alongside the game. In other words, the Bethesda engine in 2018 looks radically different from that of 2013, and The Elder Scrolls VI spell (2024?), it will look like something else. The editor may be similar – as Howard implies in this quote – but it is only one of the components of an engine that has been evolving for years and years.

This is not unusual, by the way. As a game developer pointed out this morning, even the widespread Unreal Engine 4 is still based on a foundation that started with the first Unreal, released in 1998.

When I announced the news in June that Fallout 76 It was an online survival game. A person familiar with his development told me that Bethesda's engineers had spent years adding multiplayer capabilities to the engine, which was a difficult and complicated task that required a lot of code rewriting. Outside, Fallout 76 could look like Fallout 4, but to take a look in his guts would tell a different story. Saying they use the same engine can be technically accurate, but it's misleading.

The game engine concept has become a hot topic for fans and, with Bethesda's long standing reputation for its nasty problems, it's always tempting to find faulty factors. Fans and experts must absolutely criticize games like Fallout 76 for their ridiculous bugs and their graphic failures. But today's controversy – and the idea that games of the next generation Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI would use the same "engine" as today's games – is at best misguided.