Though it makes you wonder why 343 chose Slipspace over Unreal Engine, Slipspace is an old ass engine with reportedly a lot of tech debt, built from the original Blam engine which so was Bungie's engine which coincidentally was also reportedly an awful engine during Destiny 1's development, I don't know if they've even fixed it.

Coupled with the dumb contractor rules, having an in-house engine that contractors have to spend months to learn only to have to be let go shortly after makes those issues even worse. I have to assume 343 has a good reason for using Slipspace still over Unreal Engine because on paper it sounds like Unreal Engine would fix a lot of their issues.

I'd be actually curious to know, Lol.

Its probably because there is tech within the slipspace engine that is not replicated in Unreal like Forge that would take a serious amount of new development time to create within Unreal.  

Creation Engine is all about the moddability for Bethesda. Bethesda knows their fans love mods, and Creation is the most easily moddable engine around (even more so than it's predecessor Gamebryo, which Bethesda used pre-Skyrim). There is a reason why the top 7 games with the most mods available on PC are all Bethesda games, Skyrim, Skyrim Special Edition, Oblivion, Fallout 4, Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 3, and Morrowind. Skyrim has 67k mods on Nexus, the non-Bethesda game with the most mods is Stardew Valley with 8.2k mods. The non-Bethesda AAA with the most mods is Star Wars Battlefront 2 (2017) with 5.8k mods. Witcher 3, in spite of selling 30m+ copies lifetime same as Skyrim, has 14x less mods available than Skyrim, the reason for that is because Creation Engine is much more easily moddable than Red Engine is.

So yeah, Bethesda will never drop Creation engine, and especially not for Unreal 5, as Unreal seems to be one of the least moddable engines around, I'm not seeing any Unreal games in the top 20 on Nexus for mod count. The two Unreal Engine games with the most mods are Ace Combat 7 with just 1.2k mods and Kingdom Hearts 3 with just 1k mods. I'm just glad Bethesda largely rebuilt it as Creation Engine 2 for Starfield and Elder Scrolls 6, based on what we saw of Starfield so far it's a truly substantial graphics leap over Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, a true generational gap.

It's an ok Gamepass update but nothing special, I can't help but be disappointed. These Gamepass updates have been largely disappointing this whole year so far. Objectively speaking, last year's Gamepass updates were better than this year.

• Most updates now have around 3 of the usual 7-10 slots taken up by Cloud support for games already on gamepass, when those Cloud games should be in addition to the usual 7-10 games per update, not in place of some of them.
• Another 2-3 slots are usually taken up by PC only games these days (the combination of mostly focusing on Cloud and PC really hurts for a console only gamepass player like myself)
• JP support has dwindled considerably, especially AAA JP support, Gamepass was once getting quite a few AAA JP announces (Tekken 7, Ace Combat 6, SoulCalibur 6, Nier Automata, Kingdom Hearts 3, Resident Evil 7, Monster Hunter World, the 10 game Final Fantasy gamepass deal, Code Vein, Dragon Quest 11, Yakuza series), but Microsoft has allowed most of those AAA JP Gamepass deals to expire now without renewal and simply aren't replacing them with new AAA JP gamepass deals. If I'm not mistaken, the last new AAA JP announced for Gamepass (that wasn't part of the FF or Yakuza multi game deals signed earlier) was DQ11 way back in December 2020, 16 months ago. Most recent JP added to Gamepass have been A or AA instead, and many updates, like this one, have no JP games at all. The Judgment deal with Sega teased by Gamepass twitter last summer never happened, with rumors that Judgment 2 will join Judgment 1 on the new PS+ instead.
• We haven't had a day one AAA 3rd party on Gamepass since Back4Blood in October (Sniper Elite 5 and Total War: Warhammer 3 are more large scale AA than AAA).
• We are getting less older AAA games per update than we did in the past

Microsoft really needs to step up their Gamepass efforts and soon, especially with Sony's new PS+ coming in June. Sony is rumored to be throwing around quite alot of money on 3rd party game service exclusivity deals for the new PS+, the Gamepass situation is only going to get worse if Xbox doesn't start throwing around large amounts of dough on 3rd party Gamepass deals as well.

And now we have these rumors that Xbox is considering locking online play behind base Gamepass and raising base Gamepass and Gamepass Ultimate prices by $5 a month each, to $15 and $20 respectively. If MS goes through with that they will be shooting themselves in the foot in a big way when Online Play is $60 a year on PS. It's like Xbox forgot that just a year ago they tried to double Gold pricing and got immediate huge amount of backlash, locking online play behind Gamepass and raising Gamepass to $15 a month would mean tripling the price for online play, far worse than when they tried to double it a year ago.

Yup, agreed. We keep getting awesome day one drops like MLB, some a few months later like GoTG and even smaller but still awesome titles like Tunic.

The output has been great.

The thing is, there is nothing new about Sony new service.  Its still PS Now, all that it does as far as doing anything different is include PS Plus.  Sony could have spent more money for PS Now at any time during its inception even when MS came out with GP so I am not sure where this rumor is going around that suddenly Sony new PS Now Plus is going to do more.  Sony cannot outspend MS so that would never be a worry instead its just more money for Devs if Sony got a bit serious.  Either way, without day one releases, its still up in the air how good just adding Plus to PS Now will be.