One of the most notable things about games made and released by Bethesda has always been the fact that their in-house engine – the Creation Engine – has been loved for just how moddable it has been. This love for the engine has been present despite many also believing it to be the source of many of the technical issues that have often plagued games built on them. In an interview with VideoGamer, former studio lead Dan Nanni spoke about the difficulty that would arise if Bethesda were to leave behind its own engine in favour of something like Unreal Engine 5.
“If you wanna throw away your engine and restart, you have to go through the whole entirety of restarting,” the developer said. “Unreal doesn’t give you everything out of the box, you have to build it. If you went Unreal’s golden path, then yes, you have a dedicated team at Unreal who’s supporting you. But when you’re making a very specific game in a very specific way, with the systems that were built in a way that people are familiar with, it means you have to make changes fundamentally, it means you’re no longer on the golden path.”
Nanni also spoke about the difficulty that arises when a studio decides to make its own game engine. There are often several technical hurdles to jump, along with the fact that it often tends to be a major investment for a studio both in terms of time as well as resources.
“Next thing you know, you’re still dealing with building an engine,” Nani explained. “The important question is whether you gain the benefit of the future, that’s the question to ask. You’re not asking about the game that you’re going to launch right now, you’re also asking the question of the game you’re going to launch five, six, seven years from now. Is that going to benefit from that as well?”
Nanni went on to explain that the development of an engine tends to be iterative; new features are often built on top of older foundations, and a studio’s decision to leave an engine behind in favour of a new one would often mean that years’ worth of work would be left behind. Because of this, Bethesda would be hesitant to leave behind all the work it has done on the Creation Engine.
“They’re always iterations,” he explained. “It’s not like you throw away an engine, it’s more like versioning. Creation Engine 2 is an iteration of Creation Engine, Unreal Engine 5 is an iteraiton of Unreal Engine 4. But if you start looking at what is Unreal Engine 5 vs the original Unreal, even down to its level design principles, they’re completely opposite. That’s just time for you. But you genuinely throw it away from scratch and start over again: if you did so it you wouldn’t call it 5,4,3,2, you’d call it something brand-new.”
Bethesda most recent major release was The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, which made use of Unreal Engine 5 for its visuals while still maintaining the bones of its original Creation Engine. The last major release by the company, Starfield, was also built on a modern iteration of the Creation Engine.
