Creation Engine

The Creation Engine (2011) is an engine derived from the Gamebryo engine which was created in 1997 (even if it had the Gamebryo name after 2003). It is notable for being the game engine used by Bethesda Softworks in almost all their games, and a big point of controversy as is believed to be the source of a lot of problems in these games, most notably in the infamous Fallout 76.

On June 20 2021, this engine was succeeded by the Creation Engine 2.

This article will talk about the engine and its poor use by Bethesda.

Why It Sucks Now

 * 1) The engine is insanely old and dated, and while at one point was very useful and had been upgraded a lot of times, this is not enough to pass its limitations.
 * 2) The engine was originally used for MMOs, but Bethesda uses it for their single player games, which isn't fully adapted to work with those type of games. As a result, it causes many bugs and glitches that Bethesda hasn't bothered to fix.
 * 3) Since it was made for MMOs, the NPCs, no matter how simple they are designed to be, have the same tributes in the game as the player character, which has a heavy impact on the resources of the game and can cause performance problems.
 * 4) While the engine has a system (called NavMesh) that allows it to automatically create navigation maps based on a polygonal design, this system doesn't work that well. Even worse is it causes problems with the collision detection, clipping, and NPCs falling through solid ground. And despite these problems, Bethesda not only hasn't fixed them, but has constantly acted like they were great, because they make games with not a lot of resources, when in reality it's a lazy and cheap job.
 * 5) The tools for shaping terrain are extremely limited and don't allow developers to make things like caves without literally making them separately, and then shoving them on the map.
 * 6) * Also due to how the memory of the engine works, it causes heavy loading times.
 * 7) The physics engine used (Havok), while pretty good, is poorly implemented on the already limited engine. Thanks to this, vehicles don't work in Gamebryo games, mandating the need to basically fuse models, or even more laughably, result in trains that are just many NPCs with a giant head shaped like a wagon, running at the same time, this is thanks to the engine not allowing other input to objects in the game besides the one of the player.
 * 8) * Regarding the physics; due to not being able to receive any input that isn't from the player, when the game has to process an input from something else, there is a big chance that a glitch will occur.
 * 9) * Even worse, the physics are linked to the frame rate, meaning unlocking it will make the engine go insane. One example is an insane amount of glitches.
 * 10) Due to the poor modifications to the engine, glitches like shadows flickering are common due to the rendering being poorly implemented.
 * 11) * The latter also has a huge impact on the frame rate.
 * 12) The Frustum Culling (a technique similar to the distance fog) is either terribly used or not used at all, which is the reason why the graphics and frame rate are awful, as the game is wasting resources on things that aren't even on screen.
 * 13) In interiors graphics look worse, as the engine cannot do shadows for objects in these locations. Bethesda tries to use static models as a solution, but it usually doesn't work.