Originally Posted by
Badpaladin
AFAIK the only things you can play with are scripts, not actual engine source. The latter is the truly important part regarding performance, and it's probably copyrighted. I can't speak for the code quality since I've never looked at their source, but I have a truly hard time believing their code lives up to those claims, especially with the added conspiracy.
It's a simple fact of development that when a project with a due date has literally millions of lines of code, things like performance and debugging take a backseat to simply making sure it's a video game be release. Good code, as stated by an executive in the US Department of Defense, has 10 ways it can mess up for every thousand lines of code. If their code is considered good by military standards, the game can screw up tens of thousands of times. If it were considered "rocket shuttle code", it could mess up 1 time every 10,000 lines - that's hundreds of places for something of Skyrim's magnitude.
In short, I'm not believing it unless I talk to someone who has (likely illegally) decompiled their source (not scripts released to developers) and viewed the code themselves.