Hear me out, the engine isn't the problem, Bethesda is.

[UnreasonablySaucyConcrete]

You see, Starfield's performance isn't because of the outdated engine. The Creation Engine is basically black magic in software form when used correctly. Just look at the Fallout 4 and Skyrim SE modding scenes.

Both Skyrim SE and Fallout 4 can be optimised out the wazoo to the point my 1050ti laptop could reliably run both at around 50-60 FPS with 1k and 2k textures on almost everything and 500+ mods.

I didn't look in depth at Skyrim, but Fallout 4 tends to run terribly because of poor texture work, horrendous ambient particle placements and their overuse, broken or missing previsibines in multiple locations, built in upscaling support that was never implemented in a usable way in vanilla.

Just getting the baseline performance mods for FO4 makes the game run significantly smoother. Then you could go into using xEdit, Wrye Bash, and Cathedral Asset Optimiser (or a similar tool/s) to boost that to the damn moon.

Bethesda, as they've shown time and time again, have left everything unfinished, and will inevitably leave everything unfinished even after the final update for Starfield comes out.

I only really made this post to clear up the misunderstanding I keep hearing where people argue all the problems Bethesda are having with game development are because they don't put time into using a new engine. The most braindead of these takes I heard was from someone saying that if Starfield was made in Unreal Engine 5 it'd run way better. It's Bethesda, they need to step up their optimisation time when developing the games, just as a lot of modern game studios need to. Cyberpunk, Last of Us the remake, and Jedi Survivor have all suffered the same problem, and that problem isn't necessarily the engine it was built on. I could see the argument of the problem being the engine somewhat true if Starfield was developed on the Gamebryo engine, but it's on the Creation Engine 2, the engine has come a long way and is for the most part about as powerful (if not more so) than Unreal Engine 4 or some slightly older versions of Unity.

Rant over I guess. I just keep hearing that stupid argument as if it was an excuse for Bethesda's modern ♥♥♥♥♥♥ corporate dev cycle.

[Jᴧgᴧ]

Both are to blame, imo.

The only game that you listed that has issues currently, and which runs on Creative Engine 2, is Starfield. Since we aren't privy to exactly what changes happened to it behind the scenes, it could very well be broken spaghetti code.

We won't really know if the game and it's engine are "fixable" until a year or more after the Creation Kit is released, and people have a good long while to delve into performance and problems for Starfield.

[usafirefly]

OK, I have these points in mind.