> Almost all of Bethesda's software problems originate from their insistence on sticking with their old creation engine.
I'd expect to read that on /r/games but not on HN :-(. Engines are source code, they can be fixed and many are fixed (some even descend from codebases older than the NetImmerse/Gamebryo/Creation engine). The issue is that Bethesda doesn't fix their engine, not that their codebase's history goes back more years than whatever time delta the marketing teams of mainstream companies have convinced the gaming public is supposed to be "good" by arbitrarily changing the name or version of their engines.
Unless we're talking about a brand new studio or tiny developer, no engine is being made from scratch anymore - especially in the AAA space. Even id Tech 6 traces its lineage to Quake 1 in 1996 (Carmack said at some point in the mid-90s that he starts new games from scratch, but that was up to Quake 1 and since then every new engine is an improvement to the existing codebase). Same with Unreal, LithTech (latest version being LithTech Firebird and used in Shadow of War), RAGE (which is based on earlier AGE from before Rockstar bought Angel Studios), Serious Engine and of course NetImmerse/Gamebryo as well as a bunch of others (and note here that i'm only mentioning engines that started in the 90s - if we go forward a little bit, a ton of "modern" engines started in early 2000s).
The framerate bug everyone mentions? By keeping the fixed timestep that they already have with their framerate capping, uncapping the framerate, decoupling the game updates and ensuring they are called at ~60Hz (or whatever they want) and interpolating the visual state between update states they'll have the currently best approach for 60+ Hz displays with barely touching most of their systems (mainly the rendering code), let alone rewriting everything from scratch.
(as a sidenote i always find it funny when people think that Bethesda will make a brand new polished and bugfree engine when they do not give enough time to their programmers to fix issues in their existing engine that are often minor)
> which a very substantial proportion of high-end PC gamers have in late 2018
According to Steam's hardware survey only a combined 1.28% uses an ultra-wide monitor as of October 2018. In perspective, that is almost the half of a combined 2.47% that uses non-widescreen resolutions and more than twice the users using 1280x1024 than users using 2560x1080 (the most common ultra-wide monitor resolution).
I mean, considering 160 million active users (or so, last time i checked) this is still an estimated around 2 million users, but that is only a tiny bit higher than the percentage of Linux users (0.72%) and less than half of the percentage of Mac users (2.84%) that Bethesda is completing ignoring - so i don't exactly expect them to put any effort towards a tiny percentage of ultra-wide monitors either (which, if we consider porting studios like Feral than handle everything themselves and only need a code dump from the original developer, might actually need more work from Bethesda's side than making the game available on Linux and Mac).
Not that i excuse their lack of support for ultra-widescreen, mind you (especially considering that it is trivial to have if you also don't screw up FOV tweaking - which btw, Bethesda also does). But the proportion of PC gamers using ultra-widescreen isn't really anything special to affect their decisions.
I don't think the points about the engine are very compelling. Just because something has a number of somewhat independent pieces doesn't mean it's also not a monolithic whole at the same time. That's why it's still called an engine, and that's why even Bethesda refers to it as such. That's also why they won't move away from it -- because there's an entire toolset built on top of it that every component has to interoperate with. It's the same idea with a car -- just because it has a separate transmission doesn't mean it's not a 1990 Honda Accord at the end of the day.
That said, I will admit that my language could have been more precise. It's less that they won't "move away" from their old engine, and it's more that they won't invest properly in updating it for modern times. Anyone who has played Oblivion can attest to the fact that, even if they've swapped out the terrain system or the lighting effects system, their new games are just reskinned copies of Oblivion, complete with all the same bugs, quirks, idiosyncracies, and lack of decent PC support that's always been there.
In the past Bethesda has relied on modders dealing with things like supporting modern monitors. Now that's not possible with Fallout 76, so the poor PC support becomes much more pronounced.
For what it's worth, I think it's hard to draw too many conclusions from the Steam hardware survey, because that's including everyone with Steam. Instead of asking how many Steam accounts have a 21:9 resolution monitor, it would be better to ask how many potential PC buyers of Fallout 76 have a 21:9 resolution monitor, and I suspect the number is higher than 2 million. You have to keep in mind many of those 1080p 16:9 folks have Steam on an old desktop or a laptop that couldn't even run Fallout 76 decently -- there are plenty of 2D indie games that would still justify having Steam installed.
I didn't really argue about the engine being monolithic or not though, i argued that, in your own words:
> they won't invest properly in updating it for modern times
This is very different from "moving away" from their old engine and isn't just a matter of language precision: one requires rewriting everything from scratch in a multiyear project that is a big undertaking on its own (with results that are very likely to not be as stable and bug free as people would imagine) that practically no company with an existing codebase does anymore (especially at the stage and size of Bethesda), whereas the other requires fixing a few subsystems that are already there and a tiny fraction of their existing codebase that can be done as part of their updates between games. It is certainly a much smaller change than the renderer updates they've done so far.
About the Steam hardware survey, every PC gamer has Steam installed (there might be a few who do not, but they either only play one or two games, like Battlefield or somesuch, so they do not really matter as far as PC audience comes, or they are so few that they are statistically insignificant - for all intents and purposes Steam has a monopoly on the market and both developers and publishers use every single statistic it provides as pretty much The Truth). With that in mind, PC buyers for Fallout 76 - or any other AAA game - are inside this audience, either as a whole or as a subset, so this 2 million is actually the best case. In practice it is most likely lower because not every single one of those 2m gamers would be interested in Fallout 76 (it isn't like having an ultrawide monitor is some sort of requirement to like the game :-P).
Bethesda is possibly the only AAA developer with this problem. What do you think all the other game developers in the world are doing? How exactly did RDR2 ever get made? How did BF V ever get made? How did AC: Odyssey ever get made? How did Nintendo ever make Breath of the Wild or Mario Odyssey? How did CD Projekt ever manage to make TW3? It's easy to defend Bethesda here until you play pretty much any other full-priced AAA $60 modern game. None of these games are one-off projects -- every single one is from a long-running franchise going back many years if not decades.
Not every PC gamer is in the potential target audience of Fallout 76. That doesn't increase the numerator -- it dramatically decreases the denominator, making those 2 million a much bigger percentage.
Either way, I feel vindicated with Fallout 76 now being the lowest rated Fallout game in history, selling >80% fewer copies than Fallout 4, etc. Hopefully Bethesda learns a lesson from this and starts putting in the same effort as their peers in the industry.
I'm not sure why you think i defend Bethesda... i wrote in my original message above that "The issue is that Bethesda doesn't fix their engine", which is also why i wrote that "in your own words > they won't invest properly in updating it for modern times" in my second message. My argument was really the part i originally quoted, specifically this:
> their insistence on sticking with their old creation engine
...because it is a common thing to say about Bethesda. But the reality is that they can stick with their engine just fine - they just need to fix their bugs. The problem isn't that they keep using their engine, everyone does (as you already wrote in the first paragraph here), the problem is that they do not give their programmers the necessary time to fix the issues with their engine.
I'd expect to read that on /r/games but not on HN :-(. Engines are source code, they can be fixed and many are fixed (some even descend from codebases older than the NetImmerse/Gamebryo/Creation engine). The issue is that Bethesda doesn't fix their engine, not that their codebase's history goes back more years than whatever time delta the marketing teams of mainstream companies have convinced the gaming public is supposed to be "good" by arbitrarily changing the name or version of their engines.
Unless we're talking about a brand new studio or tiny developer, no engine is being made from scratch anymore - especially in the AAA space. Even id Tech 6 traces its lineage to Quake 1 in 1996 (Carmack said at some point in the mid-90s that he starts new games from scratch, but that was up to Quake 1 and since then every new engine is an improvement to the existing codebase). Same with Unreal, LithTech (latest version being LithTech Firebird and used in Shadow of War), RAGE (which is based on earlier AGE from before Rockstar bought Angel Studios), Serious Engine and of course NetImmerse/Gamebryo as well as a bunch of others (and note here that i'm only mentioning engines that started in the 90s - if we go forward a little bit, a ton of "modern" engines started in early 2000s).
The framerate bug everyone mentions? By keeping the fixed timestep that they already have with their framerate capping, uncapping the framerate, decoupling the game updates and ensuring they are called at ~60Hz (or whatever they want) and interpolating the visual state between update states they'll have the currently best approach for 60+ Hz displays with barely touching most of their systems (mainly the rendering code), let alone rewriting everything from scratch.
(as a sidenote i always find it funny when people think that Bethesda will make a brand new polished and bugfree engine when they do not give enough time to their programmers to fix issues in their existing engine that are often minor)
> which a very substantial proportion of high-end PC gamers have in late 2018
According to Steam's hardware survey only a combined 1.28% uses an ultra-wide monitor as of October 2018. In perspective, that is almost the half of a combined 2.47% that uses non-widescreen resolutions and more than twice the users using 1280x1024 than users using 2560x1080 (the most common ultra-wide monitor resolution).
I mean, considering 160 million active users (or so, last time i checked) this is still an estimated around 2 million users, but that is only a tiny bit higher than the percentage of Linux users (0.72%) and less than half of the percentage of Mac users (2.84%) that Bethesda is completing ignoring - so i don't exactly expect them to put any effort towards a tiny percentage of ultra-wide monitors either (which, if we consider porting studios like Feral than handle everything themselves and only need a code dump from the original developer, might actually need more work from Bethesda's side than making the game available on Linux and Mac).
Not that i excuse their lack of support for ultra-widescreen, mind you (especially considering that it is trivial to have if you also don't screw up FOV tweaking - which btw, Bethesda also does). But the proportion of PC gamers using ultra-widescreen isn't really anything special to affect their decisions.