While Bethesda Game Studios’ games are rightly commended for being huge, expansive RPGs, the one thing that they get a lot of flak for, also rightly so, is their technical deficiencies. Fallout and The Elder Scrolls games have looked to be two-three years behind the times with each of their releases over the last few years, from a visuals and technical perspective, and that’s only become truer with each new release.
That’s mostly down to the engine that they run on, Bethesda’s Creation Engine. Its aged nature has become well documented by now, and though Bethesda constantly tinkers with it by adding or removing features to suit each of their new games, the fact that the engine is becoming increasingly out of date is inarguable.
According to Kyle Rebel, who’s the lead on the ambitious and popular Skyrim mod known as Skyblivion, which remasters and recreates all of Oblivion’s Cyrodiil using Skyrim’s creation tools, the Creation Engine is becoming outdated, and he wishes to see a better engine being used in The Elder Scrolls 6.
“You definitely notice the age of the Creation Engine,” said Rebel while speaking with German site Gamestar. “As far as dealing with textures, I would almost say that the method is ancient. It is very ineffective. It is also very difficult to make weapons and armor look good and like real metal. For The Elder Scrolls 6, I really want a better engine.”
Rebel mentions that though the Creation Engine is friendly toward beginners and easy to create projects with, it’s not so easy to make that stuff look good using the engine. According to him, something like the Unreal Engine is a much better option than the Creation Kit, which he calls “too old-fashioned”.
“Getting started with the tool is very easy,” said Rebel. “You need virtually no experience to create landscapes, just time and patience. It’s very easy to make stuff with the editor, but not so easy to make it look as good as you want.
“There are much better engines, like Unreal Engine 4. If you want to rebuild a game from scratch, use the Unreal Engine, do not take the Creation Kit, that’s just too old-fashioned!”
While he does have a point, it’s unlikely that Bethesda will move away from the Creation Engine- though Todd Howard recently did speak about the matter as well, and said that the engine’s going to receive improvements for both, Starfield and The Elder Scrolls 6.
The Elder Scrolls 6 might have been officially announced, but don’t expect to hear much about it any time soon. It probably won’t even launch on current-gen consoles.
