My point wasn’t that it was well made. It was that Bethesda is at least trying to update and expand their tech far beyond what they’ve been willing to commit to in the past. Compare the difference between their older games vs Fallout 76 vs Starfield. A lot more is clearly re-written and updated rather than just tacked on unlike their previous “updates”. The widespread use of procedural level generation, for example - something that wouldn’t have been possible before regardless of the amount of duct tape. To my knowledge, no one else is currently putting that much effort into trying new mechanics and tech in RPGs, and certainly not with a triple A budget. I guess you have something like Mount and Blade: Bannerlord, which is using their tech improvements to significantly increase scale and complexity of their battles, but thats a very different type of game, and I can’t think of anything else that is using newer tech to add to gameplay.
Creation Engine is a great engine for Bethesda style games, no doubt about that. But it is not a particularly innovative engine. The main innovation was just how moddable it was. It’s basically a pretty SQL database, with the formids being primary keys. (Have you ever screwed with xEdit? It’s so easy to mod!)
BUT that being said, widespread use of procgen was in Dagger Fall. Aside from a few key dungeons, everything was procedurally generated, and that was in 1996. Hell, I’d venture that it had better procgen, because they had roads. And before that, Rogue was procedurally generated. Procgen just isn’t an innovation.
My point wasn’t that it was well made. It was that Bethesda is at least trying to update and expand their tech far beyond what they’ve been willing to commit to in the past. Compare the difference between their older games vs Fallout 76 vs Starfield. A lot more is clearly re-written and updated rather than just tacked on unlike their previous “updates”. The widespread use of procedural level generation, for example - something that wouldn’t have been possible before regardless of the amount of duct tape. To my knowledge, no one else is currently putting that much effort into trying new mechanics and tech in RPGs, and certainly not with a triple A budget. I guess you have something like Mount and Blade: Bannerlord, which is using their tech improvements to significantly increase scale and complexity of their battles, but thats a very different type of game, and I can’t think of anything else that is using newer tech to add to gameplay.
Creation Engine is a great engine for Bethesda style games, no doubt about that. But it is not a particularly innovative engine. The main innovation was just how moddable it was. It’s basically a pretty SQL database, with the formids being primary keys. (Have you ever screwed with xEdit? It’s so easy to mod!)
BUT that being said, widespread use of procgen was in Dagger Fall. Aside from a few key dungeons, everything was procedurally generated, and that was in 1996. Hell, I’d venture that it had better procgen, because they had roads. And before that, Rogue was procedurally generated. Procgen just isn’t an innovation.