Dean Carter, project lead on Fallout 4’s impressive total conversion mod Fallout: London, is worried that, when it comes to the next game, Bethesda might once again use its proprietary in-house Creation Engine. In an interview with Esports.net, Carter expressed a belief that it might be time for Bethesda to move on from the Creation Engine because it has been showing its age in recent times.
The Creation Engine first debuted as the game engine powering the incredibly-popular The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. Later, the same engine was also used to develop Fallout 4 and Fallout 76. The development of Starfield saw updates to the engine, with it being dubbed Creation Engine 2.
“I’m really worried that they’re gonna keep going with the Creation Engine,” said Carter when asked about what new features could show up in Fallout 5. “I understand that it is proprietary. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of pluses to it. I’m not just someone that’s going to sit there and lie and say it’s a terrible engine. It could be better, yes, but it’s not a bad engine but I do think it started to show its age. It needs to be overhauled somewhat.”
The idea fundamentally comes down to the fact that it might be difficult for Bethesda to add in new features to the engine that support new kinds of gameplay. For example, drivable vehicles would be a major addition that would require quite a bit of development on the Creation Engine.
“If they can overhaul it, then there’s no reason why they couldn’t push its limits and start adding things like drivable cars, maybe even metro systems like what we built in Fallout: London,” Carter continued. “I mean, if we found a way, I’m sure they could bring some of this stuff back into Fallout 5.”
Going into further detail about what kinds of technical issues could be fixed if Bethesda were to move over to a more modern game engine, Carter responded by saying “load screens and optimization, without a doubt,” before going into the painstaking work that the Fallout: London team did in its attempts to reduce load screens.
“That was our biggest complaint, rightly so from the public, that our game wasn’t optimized, and that’s because it was far too late in development to be able to change it, and it was because we as gamers did not want load screens,” he explained. “So we built things like the East Minster, which is in the Trafalgar Square area and is notoriously one of the more unstable areas in the mod, and we were just trying to literally slap down walls on anything to optimize it by the end.”
“That’s just because we didn’t want to have load screens. It would have really taken away from the vibe and we paid the price for it because the engine wasn’t suitable for what we wanted to achieve. If they have to upgrade it, that’s what they need to solve: get rid of the load screens and allow better optimization.”
In the same interview, Carter has also expressed his thoughts on the current state of the Fallout franchise, and how it might be better off if Bethesda were to sell the IP to a new developer.
