Summary
- Bethesda has been using its own Creation Engine for years, which is built on an engine it has used since Morrowind.
- Fans have long complained that it feels dated now, even with the upgrades it got for Starfield.
- A former dev says that switching to Unreal could hurt the studio, however, as well as the modding community.
For years, many in the gaming community have called for Bethesda to ditch its own Creation Engine and instead make the switch to Unreal. These calls only ramped up when Starfield launched, and many felt that the game was too archaic, clinging onto Bethesda-isms like long loading times and awkward animations long after most developers had made huge advancements.
However, going to Unreal might not be the cure-all that fans think it would be. Speaking to Video Gamer, former Bethesda design lead Dan Nanni explains what this could mean for the company – and perhaps just as importantly, the dedicated modding community. Here, he says that an engine switch after all this time could hurt the modders who work so hard to tweak Bethesda’s games, something that the company itself would probably want to avoid.
Former Bethesda Dev Says There’s “No Right Answer” To The Engine Switch Debate
“You have a mod community [that] knows how to use your engine, that has built things for decades on the system that you are launching with,” says Nanni. “You have to ask yourself, is it worth losing all of that knowledge? What do you gain from it? And you can make arguments for, and you can make arguments against. And there is no right answer. There is an answer. You just have to make a choice.”
It isn’t just the modders who will suffer, as Nanni also points out that Creation Engine is built for Bethesda’s specific flavour of RPGs. If the studio switched to Unreal, the devs would have to make it work for their games, which Nanni compared to building a new engine anyway. However, he says it could benefit the studio in the long run, since it would be up and running with some work.
For now, it seems that Bethesda is sticking with its own engine. The only exception to this has been Oblivion Remastered, which was developed with Virtuos rather than completely in-house. This was made in Unreal, but it also doesn’t have mod support. Mods are still being made for the game – at a very fast pace, in fact – but it has made the modders’ work harder.
- Date Founded
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June 28, 1986
- Subsidiaries
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Bethesda Game Studios
- Headquarters
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Rockville, Maryland, United States