Yeah, Lol.

Using Cyberpunk as a comparison to hold another engine up to is funny, considering how watered down Cyberpunk was on launch compared to what was promised and compared to titles launched a generation before it and on top of that it was incredibly broken almost everywhere. The AI system in Cyberpunk was braindead and it had nowhere near the amount of systems, AI and physical interactions as a Bethesda title.

Could at least use a good competitor like Red Dead Redemption 2 which has an amazing world. As an open world title, Cyberpunk was average on launch, I did actually really enjoy the story though and the gunplay, I also liked the art-style of the world but as an open world title it was average in nearly every aspect from stuff to do, to navigation, to AI, etc. The world whilst looking nice, felt dead.

Cyberpunk's world doesn't come close to a Bethesda world in detail and systems. It's even more funny to criticise Creation Engine 2 whilst praising Cyberpunk 2077's engine when CDPR themselves are ditching RedEngine (Cyberpunk's engine) in favour of Unreal Engine 5 so it can't have been that amazing, Lol.

I'm just going to assume you've never played a single-player Bethesda game before because literally NO ONE shares this sentiment other than yourself. For those of us who have spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours in Bethesda games over the years, we know how Fallout 4 didn't look good at all even when it launched whether by graphics, gunplay, animations. Same deal with even Skyrim. Starfield is a night and day difference by a landslide. 

It truly feels like a next-gen version of their engine. Comparatively to Unreal Engine. That's how good it looked. 

The only thing that hasn't made a major improvement is facial animations, but everything else, you can clearly tell is a night/day difference.

Show me a list of what you're able to do in the open world of CP2077 compared to Bethesda. 

CP2077, while I really enjoyed the game for what it is, is a hollow experience compared to Bethesda games. 

Has anyone here argued that Bethesda's engine lags in terms of overall feature-set and dev-friendliness?  

The discussion was mainly about run-time performance and stability. 

Having a robust I/O management system for item location/form tracking is not a task necessarily more (or less,  depending on specific implementation) CPU intensive than say constructing a Bounding Volume Hierarchy for path-tracing (which typically happens on the CPU, not the GPU.) 

Especially when the prior is mostly  done when loading/saving a save file (and not typically as you play the game) whereas the latter is (now) done in real-time. 

This isn't to say that Bethesda's accomplishments aren't impressive. I do agree that Starfield looks much better (relative to its competitors) than previous Bethesda titles did with respect to their competition. I also agree that their engine is pretty awesome from an engineering perspective.

But many of the systems Bethesda has implemented are natural evolutions/scale-extensions of systems they have had for decades. They're hard to implement, and Bethesda has done a good job at implementing them (although they had the time to perfect them), but it isn't clear where the difference is that would make these systems especially more demanding in Starfield (with respect to the platforms they're running on) than they were in prior releases. 

Furthermore, game development has moved toward middle-ware, for better or worse. Even Nintendo, a company that is known to prefer proprietary solutions, uses middleware for many of their games. Why? Because this allows the developer to focus on things that aren't engine development. There is a huge gain from dividing and specializing the labor used to develop a game engine from that to develop a game.

The comment being called out was Kratos where he claimed (based on nothing) that Creation Engine 2 is a minor upgrade to Creation Engine 1 and also criticised the animation (which is a massive step up from Skyrim/Fallout 4 and pretty much everyone agrees there) and the graphics. He didn't actually mention the performance or stability at all (I'm sure he will now, Lol).

If he actually watched the Digital Foundry video he could see for himself how much of a huge step up Starfield is compared to Bethesda's previous titles and how much praise Digital Foundry had for Starfield's overall technology and the implementation of said technology, aside from the facial animations, almost everything is a huge step up from previous Bethesda titles.

And half of the aspect of an engine none of us can even comment on because engines are often upgraded to make them easier for developers to work with and for that, none of us can answer that question because none of us has worked with Creation Engine 2 that I know of, Lol. Kratos is very much, as another user put it, talking out his ass.

He can't even get the name of the main city right, it's New Atlantis and it doesn't only have one type of tree, although it is the primary tree.

It's quite clearly a creative choice, not an engine choice, to have a lot of the same flat tree though, it's a singular city, it'd not going to have 100s of different types of trees growing in the same area, Lol. I can look outside my window now and the vast majority of trees that I see are the same type of tree. You can see them in the concept art too, has nothing to do with the engine, Lol.

Like I get why some folks would want to use it for examples, but people like Alex over on DF actually use it for the right type of use, in that he uses the game to show fof examples of Raytracing/path tracing, two aspects which 2077 has nailed down better than say, Dying Light 2.

Outside of that, 2077 is really just a watered down GTA clone, with some in-game cinematics that your camera is tied to and forced to watch, it's nothing new we haven't seen already, let alone via a game engine. 

People like to talk about Ai this or that from an engine perspective, but honestly, not much has really changed. I'm still waiting for Ai to act like they did in FEAR 1-2, but I know full well the devs heavily scripted/tooled those AI to act the way they did (aka: appearing smart and tactical to the player), and these days all we get is AI scripted to either hide behind a wall or something chest high enough to throw slurs at you while you pop their head off with ease.

The funniest thing I've seen in terms of advancements in games, are things like horses pooping in MGS5, or horse nads doing their thing in RDDR2. Then there's Nvidia's sand tech that was used in Conan exiles, and I've still yet to see that used in other games/engines (seriously, dragging a body through the sand for a few miles and seeing the body trail go that far is neat to see).

hell, if we want to talk small for, there's Minecraft and all the mods that have since come about over the years. Seeing people introduce item/block physics, on the Java engine of all things, and modders still manage to get it to work without breaking completely. 

Also, bethesda is just that kind of company where you are far likely to revisit their games over anyone else. I know and still see multiple ppl on my Steam friends list or favourite Streamers that STILL play Skyrim to this day, or Fallout 4. I've yet to see someone play TLOU 1 for the billionth time, or 2077, or Witcher 3 (I see a few, but not many that play it for 5+hrs like Skyrim streamers do). 

I'm gonna be that guy with the hottest take:

I don't think facial animations that aren't tied to a cinematic in modern gaming these days, are all that great, nor accurate to what is being spoken. The majority of AAA's I've seen over the years always have this stiff look to eye movement to mouth movement, and it never truly feels like it's done right. I get that lip syncing and getting the eyes to move about to where or who a character is speaking towards, but man, it's been this long.

Like I get that people like to rag on bethesda's lip syncing/facial animations, but I look back at say, FF XV, and even I see some jank/weird stiffness to character facial expressions, especially when it's in-game based.

I already watched the video. They also stated how the game wasn't in native 4k, or even close.  Also the lighting they spoke global illumination,  wasn't present that often throughout. 

I'm not saying throw away their work on the engine. They should obviously keep the stuff that's been working for them, but who ever programs and writes the code, they need to overhaul the graphics sides to things and start adding stuff that should be next gen or atleast on par with last gen. Whether it's possible to moddify the current engine , or if not, they need to start fresh taking the best of what they have and bringing the rest up to date.

Nah, they don't, game looks great.

It would be perfect if we can combine bethesdas creation mechanics with CDPR's graphics and design pipeline.