Bandai Namco is Developing an In-House Engine to Make “Large-Scale Games”

While Bandai Namco has been gearing up for the launch of their next big published title coming out this month with FromSoftware’s Elden Ring, the company has been working on a few things of its own as well- one of them being an in-house engine.

The company announced that they are actively producing an in-house engine to facilitate their needs, and remove the reliance on third-party engines for game development. To make that happen, the company is looking for several engineers who can help them develop it, describing it as an “engine designed to withstand the development of large-scale games such as the open world.”

To elaborate on this, Bandai Namco Studios’ Engine Unit Director Katsusuke Horiuchi and Technical Director of the engine Minami Sou sat down to talk with the Japanese website Automation Media (via MP1st), where they explained the reason for building a new engine.

Horiuchi says that the reason for this decision is that the company wanted to have the capabilities to create titles by themselves instead of relying on engines made by third parties. He said: “The reason for in-house production is that we want to continue to have the technological capabilities to create a solid foundation by ourselves, rather than leaving the base to game engines made by other companies”

Horiuchi also mentioned that the plans for developing the engine were decided in around 2018, initially as a policy to prepare only the runtime in the form of a game framework along with the development of tools. However, that also coincided with the development of other games by the company, hindering its development, which convinced several people to greenlight the project, and full-scale development began around 2019.

He said: “I think the development was decided around 2018. First of all, it was a policy to prepare only the runtime in the form of a game framework, and develop tools when there is room. So I was allowed to run for it. However, at that time, it coincided with the development of other large games, and the development was at a slow pace. After that, the concept of the game engine was verified by several people, and based on this prototyping, full-scale development began around 2019.”

Even though the engine has been in development for the last two years, it is still yet to be finished, so it might not be ready for a while yet. When it does, it should be interesting to see how it helps Bandai Namco’s internally developed games.