**** Starfield ****

The "Jank" doesn't keep me up at night... but it is something that always elicits a sigh whenever it rears its head. Not angry, just disappointed. And yes, I'm sure at this stage the engine has been patched, refactored, amended and tweaked so much it's debatable how much of "gamebryo" remains. But the point would be: the foundations of the code would still be gamebryo; certain behaviours, logic etc. that all the refactoring in the world can't change. Or feature additions that the engine was never designed to handle (such as the building mechanic in Fallout 4, or anything involving a 3rd person perspective really). Or, more critically to development: the various toolsets used by those creating assets for the games; it's not all about what the end-user sees.

Similar enough scenario to Boards' recent migration when you look at it: the old software was technically "vBulettin": but over the 20 years of the site's lifespan, that software had been customised, changed, edited and patched so much it was distant enough from the original code that it couldn't be upgraded to the most recent, official 2021 version of vBulletin. Still technically vBulletin yes; but not really as well. Enough that an upgrade was impossible, even while the code was falling apart.

The problem is: the Open World genre - and especially Bethesda's flavour - are possibly the most logistically complex games out there; to upgrade every pipeline for every department (such as Design, DEvelopment, AI, Mapping, Misson building, QA etc. etc.) to Unreal 4+ or similar would probably require about 3-5 years heavy development alone. So Bethesda would have to be happy with a giant investment of time and resources on a maybe, just so future games could use a new engine.

While the other thing about GameBryo, as we have seen with Skyrim and the 50 million releases - it'll work on any system you throw it at. Hard to ignore that degree of portability.

That reminds of this YouTube video; it's a good channel in general TBH: specific to the subject of Animation in games; what makes them memorable, impactful or ... in the case of Skyrim's mining animation, very bad

I love Skyrim and Fallot, I can also see the engine's a duct tape slapped piece of crap. It's not an absolute scenario and a perfectly valid form of cognitive dissonance; it's simply a shame there's no latitude to better the architecture for a less buggy experience. Yes it'd take supreme effort as I speculated, but I daresay Bethesda may have the liquidity to do so, given the aforementioned bajillion forms of Skyrim.

I accept jank to a degree with low budget European mainland games like your Truck Simulators; it's a bit harder to totally swallow in one of the larger AAA studios going. It was cute at first, funny even, now it's just... well, disappointing.

The only thing that might be different is how the world/universe comes together; do we know if there's any space travel?

Cos if there is - then I'm really sceptical about the engine cos the one thing GameBryo has never done even at all successfully, has been vehicles. Terrestrial or otherwise; either officially or mods. The Dragonborn DLC for Skyrim had dragons but they handled horribly. It was just beyond the engines capabilities.

If there's no space travel, then I guess it'll be like other DLC packages where you click "use" on a point (space port!) that loads a new map / biome. That might work well from an engine optimisation point of view, if there's many small to medium sized maps, rather than one giant one. Whether you can have events and states persist between those areas goes beyond my understanding of GameBryo Creation.

Well, it's definitely coming out and not a vaporware con, so it ain't Star Citizen 😆