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Comment by nilkn | Hacker News Reader

Almost all of Bethesda's software problems originate from their insistence on sticking with their old creation engine. The engine has been falling to pieces since Skyrim. I gave up trying to get Fallout 4 to run acceptably on high-end modern hardware and refunded it. It looks like Fallout 76 literally just gives you a stretched picture if you try to run it on a 21:9 monitor (which a very substantial proportion of high-end PC gamers have in late 2018).

For me, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and any subsequent Bethesda games based on this engine are automatic no-buys for me at this point. I sincerely hope Fallout 76 sells poorly (relative to other Bethesda titles) so that they can get the message where it hurts.

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There is a recent post in the Elder Scrolls subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/ElderScrolls/comments/9wmm98/bethes... discussing the Bethesda game engine and the following quote from Todd Howard was posted:

”I think most people that aren't making games use the word 'engine', you know, they think of 'engine' as one thing, and it's, we view it as technology, right? so there are lots of pieces, and every game, parts of that change. Whether it's the renderer, the animation system, the scripting language, the AI, the controls... so, some people talk about Gamebryo but that's, like, we haven't used that in a decade.”

”And a lot of it is, some of it is middleware, whether that's Havok animation here, and, so 76, we changed a lot of it. You know, it's an all new renderer, new lighting model, new landscape system, and then, when you go to Starfield, even more of it changes. And then Elder Scrolls 6 which is really out in the horizon, even more of that will change there.”

The quote is translated from a video interview in German here:

https://www.gamestar.de/videos/fallout-76-interview-mit-todd...

Here is an English translation of the video interview:

https://www.reddit.com/r/BethesdaSoftworks/comments/8v1u2z/t...

On the other hand there are players that find bugs from Skyrim in Fallout 4. The 3D engine still binds physics to FPS in Fallout 76 and can't go over 60.

I mean this is a company that currently releases a multiplayer game without any anti-cheat, anti-tamper technology. Cheating in Fallout 76 will be as hard as locating the config files and changing them with your text editor.

Todd is definitely right about how much has changed in their "engine" and how the layperson has little understanding of how it works under the hood. That said, there are some classic "Bethesda bugs" that have managed to hang around for a long time. For example, every one of their games going back to at least Oblivion has shipped with vsync on, and would have weird issues (typically with physics) when it was disable and the framerate went about 60 fps.

This is still present in Skyrim and Fallout. If you use a 144Hz monitor you have to change the config file. I heard in Fallout 76 it is still present.

It would be a start if they automatically adjusted the value based on the refresh rate of your monitor.

Yes 'Engine' is an all-encompassing concept, taken from the car where of course the engine is made up of many components. It drives the vehicle forward, but the drivers don't see it or know how it works. Until something goes wrong.

I hope they're working on a new director component for their content creators because Cyberpunk 2077 level of story scripting + animation + staging + etc seems to be generating results that Bethesda games are _well_ off.

People point at the right speech moments, look disappointed appropriately, a timer then fires for a story option that's only open for five seconds. It looks so much more _alive_ than a Bethesda game.

There's hints of it back in Witcher III if you know where to look but I'm super excite for 2077.

> Almost all of Bethesda's software problems originate from their insistence on sticking with their old creation engine.

I'd expect to read that on /r/games but not on HN :-(. Engines are source code, they can be fixed and many are fixed (some even descend from codebases older than the NetImmerse/Gamebryo/Creation engine). The issue is that Bethesda doesn't fix their engine, not that their codebase's history goes back more years than whatever time delta the marketing teams of mainstream companies have convinced the gaming public is supposed to be "good" by arbitrarily changing the name or version of their engines.

Unless we're talking about a brand new studio or tiny developer, no engine is being made from scratch anymore - especially in the AAA space. Even id Tech 6 traces its lineage to Quake 1 in 1996 (Carmack said at some point in the mid-90s that he starts new games from scratch, but that was up to Quake 1 and since then every new engine is an improvement to the existing codebase). Same with Unreal, LithTech (latest version being LithTech Firebird and used in Shadow of War), RAGE (which is based on earlier AGE from before Rockstar bought Angel Studios), Serious Engine and of course NetImmerse/Gamebryo as well as a bunch of others (and note here that i'm only mentioning engines that started in the 90s - if we go forward a little bit, a ton of "modern" engines started in early 2000s).

The framerate bug everyone mentions? By keeping the fixed timestep that they already have with their framerate capping, uncapping the framerate, decoupling the game updates and ensuring they are called at ~60Hz (or whatever they want) and interpolating the visual state between update states they'll have the currently best approach for 60+ Hz displays with barely touching most of their systems (mainly the rendering code), let alone rewriting everything from scratch.

(as a sidenote i always find it funny when people think that Bethesda will make a brand new polished and bugfree engine when they do not give enough time to their programmers to fix issues in their existing engine that are often minor)

> which a very substantial proportion of high-end PC gamers have in late 2018

According to Steam's hardware survey only a combined 1.28% uses an ultra-wide monitor as of October 2018. In perspective, that is almost the half of a combined 2.47% that uses non-widescreen resolutions and more than twice the users using 1280x1024 than users using 2560x1080 (the most common ultra-wide monitor resolution).

I mean, considering 160 million active users (or so, last time i checked) this is still an estimated around 2 million users, but that is only a tiny bit higher than the percentage of Linux users (0.72%) and less than half of the percentage of Mac users (2.84%) that Bethesda is completing ignoring - so i don't exactly expect them to put any effort towards a tiny percentage of ultra-wide monitors either (which, if we consider porting studios like Feral than handle everything themselves and only need a code dump from the original developer, might actually need more work from Bethesda's side than making the game available on Linux and Mac).

Not that i excuse their lack of support for ultra-widescreen, mind you (especially considering that it is trivial to have if you also don't screw up FOV tweaking - which btw, Bethesda also does). But the proportion of PC gamers using ultra-widescreen isn't really anything special to affect their decisions.

I don't think the points about the engine are very compelling. Just because something has a number of somewhat independent pieces doesn't mean it's also not a monolithic whole at the same time. That's why it's still called an engine, and that's why even Bethesda refers to it as such. That's also why they won't move away from it -- because there's an entire toolset built on top of it that every component has to interoperate with. It's the same idea with a car -- just because it has a separate transmission doesn't mean it's not a 1990 Honda Accord at the end of the day.

That said, I will admit that my language could have been more precise. It's less that they won't "move away" from their old engine, and it's more that they won't invest properly in updating it for modern times. Anyone who has played Oblivion can attest to the fact that, even if they've swapped out the terrain system or the lighting effects system, their new games are just reskinned copies of Oblivion, complete with all the same bugs, quirks, idiosyncracies, and lack of decent PC support that's always been there.

In the past Bethesda has relied on modders dealing with things like supporting modern monitors. Now that's not possible with Fallout 76, so the poor PC support becomes much more pronounced.

For what it's worth, I think it's hard to draw too many conclusions from the Steam hardware survey, because that's including everyone with Steam. Instead of asking how many Steam accounts have a 21:9 resolution monitor, it would be better to ask how many potential PC buyers of Fallout 76 have a 21:9 resolution monitor, and I suspect the number is higher than 2 million. You have to keep in mind many of those 1080p 16:9 folks have Steam on an old desktop or a laptop that couldn't even run Fallout 76 decently -- there are plenty of 2D indie games that would still justify having Steam installed.

I didn't really argue about the engine being monolithic or not though, i argued that, in your own words:

> they won't invest properly in updating it for modern times

This is very different from "moving away" from their old engine and isn't just a matter of language precision: one requires rewriting everything from scratch in a multiyear project that is a big undertaking on its own (with results that are very likely to not be as stable and bug free as people would imagine) that practically no company with an existing codebase does anymore (especially at the stage and size of Bethesda), whereas the other requires fixing a few subsystems that are already there and a tiny fraction of their existing codebase that can be done as part of their updates between games. It is certainly a much smaller change than the renderer updates they've done so far.

About the Steam hardware survey, every PC gamer has Steam installed (there might be a few who do not, but they either only play one or two games, like Battlefield or somesuch, so they do not really matter as far as PC audience comes, or they are so few that they are statistically insignificant - for all intents and purposes Steam has a monopoly on the market and both developers and publishers use every single statistic it provides as pretty much The Truth). With that in mind, PC buyers for Fallout 76 - or any other AAA game - are inside this audience, either as a whole or as a subset, so this 2 million is actually the best case. In practice it is most likely lower because not every single one of those 2m gamers would be interested in Fallout 76 (it isn't like having an ultrawide monitor is some sort of requirement to like the game :-P).

Bethesda is possibly the only AAA developer with this problem. What do you think all the other game developers in the world are doing? How exactly did RDR2 ever get made? How did BF V ever get made? How did AC: Odyssey ever get made? How did Nintendo ever make Breath of the Wild or Mario Odyssey? How did CD Projekt ever manage to make TW3? It's easy to defend Bethesda here until you play pretty much any other full-priced AAA $60 modern game. None of these games are one-off projects -- every single one is from a long-running franchise going back many years if not decades.

Not every PC gamer is in the potential target audience of Fallout 76. That doesn't increase the numerator -- it dramatically decreases the denominator, making those 2 million a much bigger percentage.

Either way, I feel vindicated with Fallout 76 now being the lowest rated Fallout game in history, selling >80% fewer copies than Fallout 4, etc. Hopefully Bethesda learns a lesson from this and starts putting in the same effort as their peers in the industry.

I'm not sure why you think i defend Bethesda... i wrote in my original message above that "The issue is that Bethesda doesn't fix their engine", which is also why i wrote that "in your own words > they won't invest properly in updating it for modern times" in my second message. My argument was really the part i originally quoted, specifically this:

> their insistence on sticking with their old creation engine

...because it is a common thing to say about Bethesda. But the reality is that they can stick with their engine just fine - they just need to fix their bugs. The problem isn't that they keep using their engine, everyone does (as you already wrote in the first paragraph here), the problem is that they do not give their programmers the necessary time to fix the issues with their engine.

Nobody is using resolutions larger then FHD because there is no GPU than can feed it at 144 Hz.

The reason they're hellbent on improving their existing engine is they have the biggest modder community out there. Their day 1 releases are always buggy as hell and crash to desktop bugs a year or three after release are still plenty, but I actually love their overall technology.

They do need to fix their physics and modernize frame rates and aspect ratios but other then that I hope they never change to some completely different engine. Loading in Bethesda games is always much faster than most other games too.

But FO76? I'm going to pretend it doesn't exist, they might as well have just released it as a DLC for FO4 because it seems completely pointless as is.

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