deathmetal27

True, resolving bugs depends on how effective debugging tools available to the developers are.

But there is no perfect game engine. All have quirks and bugginess of a game usually just comes down to how willing the team is to find and squash them. That's why all games need patches after launch.

Language is not really an issue here since the Creation Engine uses Papyrus for all game logic, which is good enough for what it does.

Makes sense. Though I would still rather they not abandon the Creation Engine and improve its underlying technical features. The modding community has more than a decade of experience with its underlying subsystems and what actually contributes to the robust modding scene of Bethesda's games.

What you described are game design issues. The art is always only as good as the artist who makes it and the Bethesda game design team are not very good (or perhaps Todd is a mediocre director since he is directly responsible for almost all aspects of the game).

If you see how ENB and Sweetfx enhance the visuals you know that the engine is capable of much more. There is a mod called Enderal which is a total conversion of Skyrim that uses the same engine but improves the visual in almost all aspects: better models, better post processing, new game mechanics, etc. There is also a team working on porting Vampire The Masquerade Redemption to the Skyrim engine with all new assets (guns, etc).

So basically Bethesda games being mediocre is due to a mediocre team and direction. Even if they start using Unreal their games will still be mediocre.

Edit: Before someone points it out, I know that ENB is not a part of the Creation Engine, but an external postprocessor that hooks into the DirectX API and modifies the rendered output. I was just saying that Bethesda could use something like this to enhance the lacklustre visuals but they deliberately chose not to perhaps due to their artistic vision for the game.

Whether a game is buggy or not depends on the competency of the developers building the game, not the engine.

The engine is just a platform, like a canvas to an artist. How effectively it is used depends on the skill of the person using it.

No, I'm saying from having used the Creation Kit and I modding Skyrim and Fallout.

I'm not defending the games or Bethesda. It's their game design and narrative team's fault, not the engine's.

Modders have been familiar with Bethesda's engines since Morrowind (Netimmerse and then Gamebryo, which form the basis of the Creation Kit), which is why the modders are able to make mods pretty quickly for these games. I'd rather still have the community use this experience with future Bethesda titles for modding than use something like Unreal that does not have the same level of customisation and tools.

The Creation Engine is not bad. It's very purpose built for RPGs and has all the frameworks for worlds, NPC AI behaviour, quests, dialogue trees etc already in it.

It also has in-built support for creating addons, which is why the modding scene is so robust.

You should install the Creation Kit on Steam to check it out.

More context for someone out of the loop?

Working in enterprise software development really hammers in the importance of unit tests and integration tests.

Prefer composition over inheritance. Though that doesn't mean inheritance has no place in programming.

I host my own instance for that added oomph.

Endeavour does it for me.

No nonsense arch setup without any bells and whistles.

Hydra dominatus