The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim To Use New Engine

It's been confirmed that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim will not use The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion's engine, the aging Gamebryo-powered tech that most recently powered Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 3.

Bethesda community manager Nick Breckon busted out this news over the weekend via Twitter, calling Skyrim's engine "all-new" and adding that it "looks fantastic." Rock, Paper, Shotgun followed up with Breckon soon after, asking if this new engine is some sort Gamebryo variant. Breckon replied with, "it's a new graphics/gameplay engine built internally. We'll have more details down the road."  
 
    

Haha, thats good news.

New engine = new bugs

Really good to know! The old engine was getting kinda... old.
I'm absolutely stoked already and it's still nearly a year until the release. Damn.

New engine = New ways to complain on the Internet

Bit old-ish this news but that's good nonetheless. Could've sworn I heard a certain Todd Howard say that they're were going to use a heavily modified GameBryo engine though which I guess this sort of is?...

I approve, but I wouldn't hold my breath. What they are doing is complicated, its quite possible that this is going to have its own problems.

I can't wait to see what crazy shit happens and how terrible humans look in the new engine.  Still probably pre-order like gangbusters though.

I don't think we can blame all the bugs on the engine... there were, after all, some competent and relatively bug-free games released that were using that engine. I think it has more to do with the massive scope and complexity of the world, and the developers themselves. But hey, new engine is awesome anyway. Hopefully it'll be just as permitting when it comes to mods as the old engine was.

That's great news, but I hope they look at the Gamebryo engine and say "Kay, let's do the opposite of everything in this line of code" as opposed to "let's fix this code". :/

I couldn't possibly be more excited.  My most anticipated game, even ahead of Mass Effect 3.  Well, maybe. 

Awesome, thanks Brad

New Elder Scrolls game..I'll be there on day one! Now the loooong wait begins for release.

I never really ran into any bugs, but it has always look terrible to me. Even when people were raving about the beginning of Oblivion when leaving the sewer, it looked really ugly.

" New engine = new bugs "

@SuperSambo: back then it looked amazing... it still does look good, and if you get some mods and texture packs on it it looks as good as any game out there. 
 
I've never been crying for them to get rid of the engine, it's always had a feel to it that I generally enjoyed... probably just because the games were so good.

GameByro had a bunch of games that were messed up in some way, with the exception of Civilization IV. So this is naturally good...

They should include duping just so they can show how much better the physics engine is optimized/for the hell of it. One of the best things to do when your bored is dupe a million items.

Yay new engine! lets hope my 5870 and i7 @ 4Ghz will max it out and run silky smooth. If not I will buy another 5870 and Xfire.

Thank you for being the first story to mention that Oblivion/Fallout 3 were using ridiculously buggy and aging technology powered by Gamebryo, instead of badmouthing the engine itself (especially since it's just adding insult to injury for any of the newly unemployed people who worked on it).

Those candyasses saying New Engine means new bugs, all I can say is that it can't be as bad as the GameBryo engine.  What other engine has caused this much trouble?

I just hope that the main quest gets better .... in Oblivion was a bit of a letdown

About fucking time. Gamebryo was satan's asshole incarnate. I can't honestly believe there were people who were trying to argue that that shit engine wasn't severely damaging the in game experience. Either way I have a funny feeling that this "new" engine is going to look suspiciously like Gamebryo. I just don't understand why they didn't go with id Tech 5, I mean it's pretty clear at this point that id makes far better game engines than the garbage Bethesda tries to make.

Thank god, now we know they haven't been ignoring the elder scrolls series in favor of fallout. But I wonder what are the implications for the next fallout game assuming there is one. Won't fallout 4 now have to use this engine?

Not sure why this is news. Shortly after the ID aquiring, Todd Howard came out and said that they will not be using ID Tech 5, and that they are creating a new engine for their next project.

Heh, I remember when I left the sewers of Oblivion for the first time. Definitely in my top ten awe-inspiring moments of video games.

Hallelujah! Finally that engine will get the silver bullet in its heart it deserves.

Thank god.
 
For me it is not only the bugs, but the loading times and how it limited the worlds in their games.  New Vegas in particular was ruined for me.  At the beginning of the game I had so much interest and excitement in seeing the Strip, since it was an untouched city and should have provided a bigger and more lively hub that hadn't been seen in Fallout 3 or anywhere else in Vegas.  Unfortunately, it was cordoned off with ugly fences and terrible load screens and the same, boring, repeated cookie cutter casinos and interiors.  It was such a disappointment for me that it made me stop playing the game right then.  I had bought the game and I sold it.
 
With a better engine, they can have larger, streaming worlds that will allow their games to be much more epic.  Hopefully they can have more characters on screen as well for some actual epic battles that you'd expect, especially for a fantasy world like Elder Scrolls.

Thank God. I skipped out on New Vegas just because I was so tired of the pudgy faces and weird glitches in Fallout 3 and Oblivion, this had better be all moonwalking Dogmeats or no moonwalking Dogmeats, I won't accept anything in-between.

Definitely happy to hear this. I love Oblivion and both of the new Fallouts, but the Gamebryo engine is a mess and it really needs to be put to bed. Not all engines have the staying power that Source or Unreal do.

I always thought the amount of hate levelled at the Oblivion/Fallout engine was rather out of step with reality. It wasn't the engine that made NPC's run around like they had sticks up their behinds, that was the 'skill' of the animators. It wasn't the engine that caused everyone to sound like the exact same person, that was the developers choice to use the three same actors for half a million denizens. And so on, and so on. In fact, when Oblivion came out it was pretty bloody impressive in its scope and beauty. Granted there were load points all over the shop but then there are few open world games (at least at that time) that don't require them. Still, hearing that Bethesda are rebuilding their tech from the ground up is super exciting and hopefully will only be a step forward for the game. Not only in its look but also in its role-playing possibilities.

" I always thought the amount of hate levelled at the Oblivion/Fallout engine was rather out of step with reality. It wasn't the engine that made NPC's run around like they had sticks up their behinds, that was the 'skill' of the animators. It wasn't the engine that caused everyone to sound like the exact same person, that was the developers choice to use the three same actors for half a million denizens. And so on, and so on. In fact, when Oblivion came out it was pretty bloody impressive in its scope and beauty. Granted there were load points all over the shop but then there are few open world games (at least at that time) that don't require them. Still, hearing that Bethesda are rebuilding their tech from the ground up is super exciting and hopefully will only be a step forward for the game. Not only in its look but also in its role-playing possibilities. "

If the last 2 engines were evident then this new engine basically means new bugs that will never be resolved.  I really hope that this time around that Bethesda actually learns how to make a good user interface as well.  Hell there are so many things wrong with their RPGs that question why I even like their games sometimes... I just really get hooked, despite a lot of the shortcomings.

" They should include duping just so they can show how much better the physics engine is optimized/for the hell of it. One of the best things to do when your bored is dupe a million items. "

" I just don't understand why they didn't go with id Tech 5 "

I played Fallout 3 a year late and the only bugs I ran into after 90 hours in-game were ALL event scripting bugs.  No amount of engine code re-writing is going to fix that.
 
Pretty much what I've found all along - lots of things are being wrongfully attributed to the game and gfx engine.  Bad looking faces?  It's the tool they use to gen up the face meshes not the engine.  Falling thru the world?  That would be the tools they use to build the geometry not error checking for holes or not auto-snapping objects together.  Animations freaking out?  All those in-engine animations are scripted... poorly.  Busted quest logic?  Bad scripting again.
 
Anyway I'm sure the engine is actually crap for entirely other reasons.  Elder Scrolls has been synonymous with Bugs ever since #1.  Game breaking game-save destroying bugs.

" @RsistncE said:

" I just don't understand why they didn't go with id Tech 5 "

I have a feeling the reasons will present themselves once Rage gets a little closer to release. "

Bugs made it better, anyone who disagrees is a moron. Nuff said.

Well, I would hope so.

 i find engines to be a fascinating topic

" . It wasn't the engine that made NPC's run around like they had sticks up their behinds, that was the 'skill' of the animators.  "

So crazy that they're almost proud of not taking advantage of the perhaps best engine maker in history - id.

While I'm glad they are finally swearing off Gamebryo, honestly I'm just so freaking psyched for a a new Elder Scrolls game that the engine is the last thing on my mind. I've been waiting for another Elder Scrolls ever since Bethesda shipped Fallout 3 and was becoming disheartened by the rumors of yet another Fallout game (don't get me wrong, I love F3 and F:NV) or even worse, that TES V would be an MMO. I'm just so thrilled to enter that world again, finally. I hope they DLC the shit out of it too. I want big, Fallout 3 style DLCs  or even better, 3-4 DLCs the size of Shivering Isles.

Buddha, Vishnu, Jesus, Allah, thanks guys. Really, I appreciate this.