I'm interested to see how this plays out. Cause if it was indeed real-time, then they may have just jumped a generation.

A game like that must also have an incredibly efficient asset generation pipeline. That's one of the bigger bottlenecks these days. Our engines can do better graphics than the artists can reasonably make if you want a full game.

RT Overdrive does make Cyberpunk 2077 have like the best overall lighting and atmosphere i've ever seen, but the assets are major hit and miss, and then stuff like the NPC animations are just visibly worse than what RDR is doing.

Graphics are the whole package, and RDR2 still hasn't been beaten as a whole just yet.

In fairness I am splitting hairs more than ever. Games just look great these days. Even Fortnite with Lumen is great looking.

Haven't personally seen a better looking game since RDR2 in 4k. That's my current go-to answer.

Lots of great looking games out there though. There's just no longer a "graphics king", hasn't been in well over a decade by now.

@dabear: So you're entire argument is based on something proven wrong?

@dabear: The industry is vast and, speaking as a software developer myself, what I said about commenting about codebases you do not have access too is foolish.

This is the problem with the appeal to authority. People in the industry are often as clueless as people outside of it.

Not only did that tweet you cited get deleted, some digging shows that the person quote is an environmental artist. Generally they are the ones that would know the capabilities of the engine on the hardware they are working with. However what I said above stands. They are making an educated guess since they cannot possibly know what the capabilities of the current version of the Creation Engine that Bethesda has been working on for the past several years are.

They also called themselves a fan so already there's an inherit bias from them trying to defend something they enjoy. Industry people aren't immune to fanboyism.

As I said before, Bethesda's history speaks far louder than some environmental artist working at a different studio on a completely different platform.

You do bring up the crux of Bethesda's argument for sticking with their engine. The even bigger reason from Bethesda's perspective is that their talent all knows it and there's a very large amount of developers they can bring on with vast modding experience within their engine who they can get up-to-speed with much quicker.

Bethesda integrating mods into the console version of their engine also indicates just how much they value mods as a core part of their business model. They have no problem dropping plenty of DLC but have never really gotten in modder's way when it comes to modding their games. They see it a symbiotic, not competitive.

That said, the size and scale of the success that Bethesda has paired with a much larger investor in the forms of their current owner Microsoft, they could, and absolutely should, invest massively in their technology. No engine these days is built from scratch, but the Creation Engine needs a serious bottom-up overhaul to modernize it.

This is completely doable but insanely expensive and time consuming. See Star Citizen on that front. Though Bethesda would benefit from oversight from an owner so they wouldn't fall to the endless feature creep that Cloud Imperium Games did with SC.

Another great example is what Boehima Interactive is doing with ArmA Reforger. They've taken their technology from ArmA and have reworked it heavily to become the Enfusion Engine which is highly moddable as they too are another developer that relies on mods as part of their business strategy.

I think ArmA Reforger and the Enfusion Engine is proof enough of how big of an upgrade to the end user experience as well as greatly increasing modding capabilities such an endeavor can be. While Reforger is still pretty broken and buggy, the core improvements made to the entire game are generational leaping in scope. ArmA Reforger plays so much better in every single way than ArmA 3. It feels like a modern game.

That's where Fallout 4 really suffered for me. It didn't feel modern because of that jank. I expect Starfield to be the same.

Eventually this will catch up with Bethesda and I thought a new IP under a new owner after all of the mega success they had in the past would be the perfect time to go in on such a project. Instead they can't even get 4k60 in what isn't even that graphically astounding of a game.

@kvallyx: I just know that it's stupid to make assumptions about a codebase you don't know anything about, which the God of War dev did. In fact, it's amateurish and unprofessional. I can't comment on codebases I don't know anything of, only make speculations which is all the God of War dev did. Now of course they are in a better position to comment than myself but in this case history has proven Bethesda to be mostly full of crap and routinely putting out bad tech.

Bethesda will just be covering their tracks so anything they say needs to be taken by a grain of salt.

@simple-facts: I don't think "lol people prefer to buy your console over mine" is the own you think it is.

@dabear: Appeals to supposed authority don't really fly here. Especially since other devs can only speak in very broad strokes given the fact they don't have access to Bethesda's codebase or knowledge of their technology or even content creation pipelines.

History is a far more reliable reference when it comes to Bethesda, and throughout history Bethesda's incompetence, when it comes to engine related issues, has been noted.

"Bethesda jank" is a common term for a reason.