I’d rather see consoles be limited to what they can handle than a game to be limited for everyone because of what a single console can handle.

I want this game to be huge and look beautiful. If my PC can handle 60fps I don’t want to locked to 30fps because that’s all an Xbox can handle. And if I want to play it on an Xbox I don’t want it to be a blurry mess to get 60fps, I want it to look as good as it possibly can. Especially in a game like this where the visuals do a great majority of the storytelling when it comes to exploration and finding new things.

I’m curious about this kind of thing from an engine and console architecture perspective. Any gamedevs able to shed some light?

I work in the industry, but not directly on low-level engine implementation details. Personally, my gut thinking is that the Creation Engine is falling behind in terms of modern asset streaming techniques.

Similarly, I wonder if a lack of strong virtualized geometry / just-in-time LOD generation tech could be a huge bottleneck?

From what I understand, efforts like Nanite in UE5 were an enormous engineering investment for Epic, and unless Bethesda has a massive engine team of their own (they don’t), they simply won’t be able to benefit from an in-house equivalent in tech.

Ultimately, I do think the lack of innovation in the Creation Engine is due to internal technical targets being established as “30FPS is good enough”, with frame times below 33ms being viewed as “for those PC gamers with power to spare.”

I love how Microsoft said that with their exclusive titles they’ll only have to focus on one console and as such the performance will be better. Now here we are and seemingly all of these titles run at 30 FPS. I just hope they will offer a performance option if it is run on a lower resolution. Having these options is exactly what keeps me on the PC platform.