Bethesda isn’t known to switch game engines for its upcoming titles very often, and the studio has been using its in-house Creation Engine since The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. It also means The Elder Scrolls 6 and future Fallout games will also likely use it. Skyrim’s former lead designer Bruce Nesmith has noted that switching game engines tends to be a “massive effort”, and that the studio is unlikely to move away from Creation Engine any time soon.
“What you have to realize is that if you were to switch engines, and I’ll say this for any game anywhere, is that it is a massive effort. You are talking about dozens of people spent doing nothing but making an engine work,” explained Nesmith in an interview with Press Box PR when asked about misconceptions about the Creation Engine.
“You are talking about putting your developers into a situation where they can’t play the game. They may not even be able to work on making the game for long stretches because the engine is not there or up to snuff yet.”
Nesmith continued, noting that Bethesda has already made several modifications to the Creation Engine since it was first developed, with one key example being the multiplayer component for Fallout 76.
“That’s an enormous thing. We ran into it with Fallout 76. The engine had to be changed dramatically to do multiplayer. It made things extremely difficult for the team,” he said.
“Also, the Creation Engine has been tweaked to serve Bethesda’s purposes for so many years, decades really, that at this point, it’s probably a wiser bet to keep working with it. The benefits that you get from switching to Unreal Engine are probably not going to materialize until two titles down the road.”
Considering all the work that has gone into it, even Nesmith would be wary of switching out of the Creation Engine. Rather than making the jump to Unreal Engine, he suggests adding any specific features that developers might need into the toolkit they are already using.
“I would fall on the side of keeping the Creation Engine, keep working on it. If there’s something you see that is only possible in Unreal, put it into the Creation Engine. That would be a place where, if it’s anything vs everything, you say, let’s do that. Let’s do that anything. If Unreal does it and Creation doesn’t, and we feel we need to do it, do it,” he said.
Interestingly, project lead on Fallout 4 overhaul mod Fallout: London, Dean Carter, has expressed his beliefs that Bethesda should move on from the Creation Engine in favour of something like Unreal Engine 5 for its future projects.
“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; I do think it started to show its age. It needs to be overhauled somewhat.”
For more of Nesmith’s thoughts, check out what he thinks about Starfield and a potential remake of Morrowind.
