Todd Howard has confirmed that The Elder Scrolls 6 runs on an upgraded version of the Creation Engine, and that it’ll be a return to Bethesda’s “classic style”.
Todd Howard has confirmed that The Elder Scrolls 6 runs on an upgraded version of the Creation Engine, and that it’ll be a return to Bethesda’s “classic style”.
Imo, the engine is what held back Starfield the most. I was hoping they were taking this time to come up with a new, modernised engine instead of just revamping the old one again. Maybe it’ll be worthwhile, but I’m sceptical.
It’s not. Starfield without loading screens would not be a better game, it’d just be Starfield without loading screens. The fundamental design choices (limited handcrafted areas, endlessly repeating “points of interest”, mostly static NPCs in towns with very limited interactions) that made the game just plain boring would still be there.
Where did I say anything about loading screens? Design choices are predicated on what the engine can handle, and they were working with a 12 year old engine at that point, leading to all the issues you pointed out. With a new engine, they (ideally) would be able to handle a more diverse and interesting setting, but they thought Skyrim: In Space would be good enough.
You didn’t, but that’s usually what people jump to with Starfield. Sorry.
But still, nope. None of the things I’ve listed were seriously limited by the engine, and fundamentally the issue for me was that the game wasn’t Skyrim in Space. Skyrim had cities that (while tiny) were filled with NPCs that had actual “lives”, and the countryside you could explore was fully handcrafted and had something hidden in every cave and behind every second tree stump. Starfield by contrast was dead and empty. By design. That was a conscious choice and not one forced by technical limitations.
The thing with Starfield is that it was much bigger than Skyrim, since it encompasses multiple star systems. And, from my point of view, it felt like they just stretched out the “budget” allowed by the engine, which consequently makes it feel much emptier by comparison. It’s certainly not the only issue with the game, though. The whole things was a pretty big whiff for a studio like Bethesda.