Creation Engine is the subject of many jokes but it is incredible at what it does.
The engine is expressly built to let you pick up every single item in the game. Anyone pushing for another engine is pushing to move away from what makes Elder Scrolls and Fallout what they are.
I occasionally give the “video games and their audience/narrative background/moral intentions are the most important artform of the modern West” spiel, but in terms of the literal art and aesthetic, even here there is a reflection of the West’s own incoherence.
Doesn’t this remind you, just a little bit, of a claimed maintenance of civic identity? While the flesh and blood nation is changed out for anything and everything that only superficially resembles it in form (or not at all)?
Halo *shaped* rings, yes, but the textures are all wrong! Why did they need to change? And then eventually the scale and backstory does too. Someone might then claim - “what do you care? It’s an update. It looks more modern” - yet curiously exhibit extreme resistance to just making things *look* the same, as though there were secretly, even unconsciously, concerned intensely with more than just the superficial things changing.
Isn’t that curious? Isn’t it strange how this plays out?