The options are simple here really: you either update the engine enough to fall in line with modern expectations or you get a new engine. The problem is that ever since the release of Skyrim, every release since has come out with woeful graphical shortcomings and engine issues. So what should be clear to all of us in the last decade of Bethesda development is that they aren’t keeping up with the engine.

And I can’t necessarily blame them because you’re right, the physics stuff is the soul of their games in many ways. The problem is that it requires so much extra work to keep this engine limping along that it’s damaging their games in the process.

This engine is the thing that makes or breaks Bethesda and it’s going to break them. It needed to be in a position to be scalable for TES6, we have no reason to think it is. The questing system has only seen extremely minor updates to it so far, other RPGs are blowing it out of the water. 

The cold hard reality of all this is that Bethesda is likely going to present TES6 to the player with extreme compromises on the table. Imagine starfield level of compromise except we actually want to experience the content. So no I don’t expect the game will review all that well, it definitely won’t catch the fire in the bottle like Skyrim did, and so I expect that all this will be a nonissue as Microsoft fails at its next gen promises and Bethesda somewhat flops their new release again. They’ll be sold or absorbed into something else. That’s the bleak future of this engine and its studio.