No different from all the other major engines like Unreal which is based on a 20 year old engine. As long as the engine gets parts updated each gen it doesn't matter how old the original is. A good example is the Eve Online Engine. Look how that has changed over 15 years in the same game. Or the Frostbite engine that is over 10 years old.
It is normal for developers to keep using the same engine and to keep updating that engine. It makes no sense for Bethesda to drop the Creation Engine as that's what the Bethesda devs will be experts in. Its not like they are using the same Creation engine from 7+ years ago. Todays Creation engine has some major updates and rewrites.
I don't think you realise how bad the engine is and how little Bethesda cares,and if anyone has played their games you would see why its a huge problem. Bethesda have just put one band aid over another. Even for Fallout 76 they found code from Morrowind,which is based on an engine from 1997. Skyrim had X87 instructions at its launch,which meant inefficient performance on modern CPUs(AMD and Intel said to use SSE),and the community had to step and develop Skyboost so it could use SSE and eventually they "fixed it".
It also looks cack for the amount of hardware it uses. Even in Fallout 76 physics and framerates are linked. Go much above 70FPS and animatons start to get wonky. This is a limitation of the original Gamebryo engine in 1997.
Also in Fallout 76,even one a few mbs of updates,means 10s of GBs of data downloads,etc.
It heavily is single thread bound to stupidity,and Bethesda support its poor - it literally got no patches for newer CPUs like Ryzen or Skylake X for example,with their last major game,ie,Fallout 4 although they spent more effort introducing paid mods into the game last year which meant frequent game patches! Even for Fallout 4 look at how the community has managed to improve performance - look at Boris Vorontsov and his work on ENB.
I would consider CCP Games much more technically competent.
A post on AT forums summed it up:
It may or may not be the case if it was an argument being made by one person. This is not the case.
Many people have been making this case about Fallout 4, but the truth is that these issues are not new and as such are very well understood. Boris Vorontsov, of ENB fame, has been making this case successfully for a long time. It is well understood that the engine in recent Fallout and Elder Scrolls games, which began as a toolkit in Gamebryo and is now called the Creation Engine, has had significant inefficiencies that have gone unaddressed by Bethesda for over a decade, many of them having their origin in Oblivion.
Here is a question you should try and answer: how does a programmer with no access to source code resolve significant performance and stability issues with Bethesda games weeks or even only days after a game is released, using code injection? That's exactly what ENB is. I, like many people, could not get Fallout 4 to run at launch because of the state it was released in. I had to wait for the first ENB for Fallout 4 before I could even play the game. Thankfully I didn't have to wait long as Boris had a beta ENB out fours days after Fallout 4 became available to the public.
The Creation Engine offers a lot of creative freedom. It's modability is its strength. At the other end of the scale, the Creation Engine's graphics are garbage, with a lot of functionality jerry-rigged in using third party APIs. Just ask Boris about the way the Creation Engine does shadows...
The Creation Engine is out of date, but worse than that, it's out of date bad code. This means that it produces visuals that are well behind state of the art and takes silly hardware to produce those out of date visuals.
They also have access to the id Tech engine,since their parent company owns it - it seems penny pinching and reusing a 21 year old engine(for the most part),for another decade seems what they aim to do.
So unless this "Gamebryo engine" they use is something essentially brand new,we can all call it now - Starfield/Elder Scrolls 6 will look terrible,run badly,be full of bugs which existed for decades,etc. Except now since Bethesda is trying to make all mods paid ones,there will be no mod community to "fix" the issues.
Edit!!
Jesus wept... Seriously??? So capped 60fps and horribly clunky movement again... I was incredibly excited for the new TES game, not so much anymore.
Dont they have access to ID assets now? Id engine or whatever they use would be a huge step up surely?
I think they don't care anymore since its just cheaper to not use id Tech. I am not sure what they are smoking,once CDPR comes out with Cyberpunk 2077,Bethesda will really start to look behind the times.
Maybe its for the best,they need a jolt to the system.
