First, those are all engine upgrades. What do you think an engine is? Second, it has barely changed from when? Morrowind? It’s essentially an entirely different engine. Starfield? How would you know?
You’re right on the first paragraph (though it sounds like it’s pulled from Wikipedia). The last one is a tiny subset of engine upgrades possible. Another is, for example, different rendering methods. FO4 added support for PBR textures, which doesn’t improve performance and only changes graphics, but it adds new capabilities. The same would be true if they add raytracing support now, or many other things. Another possibility is adding a similar technology to Nanite on UE. There are tons of graphics only improvements that could be made.
Anyway, there’s no way to know what they’re doing. Yeah, they’ve been disappointing, but you don’t know anything. You have no information on what’s being done, and you seem to not actually know what an engine upgrade could be.
First, those are all engine upgrades. What do you think an engine is? Second, it has barely changed from when? Morrowind? It’s essentially an entirely different engine. Starfield? How would you know?
An engine is the collection of core runtime features on top of which gameplay features and assets are put on.
A 4K texture pack and a few particle effects aren’t an engine update, it used to be available through mods.
What an engine update would be for example is seamless interior cell loading, or seamless high density cell loading for example.
Or better texture streaming, so on. A better engine would mean same exact screenshots, but more FPS and less loading screens.
You’re right on the first paragraph (though it sounds like it’s pulled from Wikipedia). The last one is a tiny subset of engine upgrades possible. Another is, for example, different rendering methods. FO4 added support for PBR textures, which doesn’t improve performance and only changes graphics, but it adds new capabilities. The same would be true if they add raytracing support now, or many other things. Another possibility is adding a similar technology to Nanite on UE. There are tons of graphics only improvements that could be made.
Anyway, there’s no way to know what they’re doing. Yeah, they’ve been disappointing, but you don’t know anything. You have no information on what’s being done, and you seem to not actually know what an engine upgrade could be.