Don’t worry though, Todd Howard himself said that Bethesda definitely did a lot of work on optimizing Starfield. This is all still the fault of the end users, who just need to “upgrade their hardware.” Just ignore the decrepit Gamebryo engine that still has all the same old bugs and quirks that it’s had for nearly two decades.
No! It’s Creation Engine 2! Ignore that it’s just Gamebryo with yet another new coat of paint!
Unreal engine 5 is just Unreal engine 1 with yet another new coat of paint, what’s your point?
Just because the initial release date of an engine is decades old, doesn’t mean the actual engine is. Game engines get updated and fitted with new features and capabilities on top of what’s there already, Devs don’t waste time rewriting the engines from scratch on each new version.
The issue with Gamebryo is more that key bugs are just not getting fixed. How long have NPCs walked away mid-conversation? How long has enemy AI just found itself stuck without taking actions. How long have companions been getting stuck in doors and blocking your path?
The frustrating part isn’t that they’re reusing the same engine. It’s that they’re endlessly tacking on more shiny baubles, without ever fixing issues that have been present across all of their games. Hell the newest bauble they added, the new facial animations, are already breaking down in bizarre ways.
At this point, it feels like there’s so much technical debt from half-implemented features that starting from scratch or licensing an engine from someone else might be the best route forward.
Starfield doesn’t even run on Arc GPUs.
