this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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I don't blame the engine. There are other studios out there with custom engines that evolved over time. Also Creation Engine evolved a lot.
That they work with many connected scenes instead of a continuous world also has advantages ... it allows them to easily change the "world" between scenes by simply linking you "back" to a different scene (for example city under siege which before the dialog was not under siege). It's how they work. They could do the same shit with Unreal if they wanted to and if they believe this kind of game design is the only feasible for their story telling, they would shove it into another engine as well.
I also don't think the game feels "old". I do think it feels like it is conceptionally unfinished. They had many ideas and you can see a lot of different systems in the game (space fights, planets with different biomes, ship building, base building, and so on and so forth). Each of these systems in itself has some kind of concept, but all these systems together are missing a clear concept, IMO.
From what I know, game dev typically works in modules that get thrown together. And this also seems to be the case here. However the "big picture" wasn't refined or they realized that it needs a ton of small adjustments all over the place (conceptionally AND technically) to make sense of it and it looks like they were not able to deal with the complexity of that.
As a result we have a game that is okayish. It tells some stories, and offers a lot of content, but it feels not nearly as stunning as it should have and it's not on a single front ground breaking.
Creation is built on code over 20 years old at this point, and it shows. If they could have upgraded it to handle modern needs, I think they would have. Sarah Morgan looks like plastic in just about every lighting environment I've seen so far except for the room you meet her in. The conversation system may be an upgrade over what they were able to do with Daggerfall, but compared to its contemporaries from the likes of CDPR and Larian (even BioWare's old Mass Effect trilogy), it really feels lacking when they can't implement proper directed camera angles or performance capture.
Their side quest designers (referring here primarily to "activities" and non-faction quests) are either terrible at their craft or confined to an engine that can only easily spit out fetch quests where nothing interesting happens on the way to fetch the macguffin, once again, like their contemporaries can and do; the bar has been raised since the days of Fallout 3 and Skyrim.
When flying, the game loads you into an area where you always have to fly the "last mile" and dock, and the only reason I can imagine you would build it that way is that they couldn't make their engine load the space they need to load in a seamless way, like their competitors making other space games.
You can just as easily say the same thing about Unreal Engine, Frostbite, CryEngine, etc... all of these engines are built on decade(s) old code to some degree. The problem isn't Creation Engine, it's Bethesda. Unreal isn't a magic bullet. The results if they used Unreal at this point would likely be worse, not better.
The trend for a long while was to have an in-house engine to save on costs, but many of them, including the RPG companies we've been discussing, have moved off of those engines and onto Unreal.