After trying Unreal Engine, new fantasy RPG led by ex-Elder Scrolls leads goes back to its Bethesda roots with a unique proprietary engine that's "already more than doubled our development speed"

After unveiling new studio OnceLost Games in 2019, The Elder Scrolls series veterans Julian LeFay, Ted Peterson, and Vijay Lakshman went on to reveal The Wayward Realms – a fresh fantasy game they described as a "grand" take on the RPG genre.

Since then, they reintroduced it as a title that would restore "scope, choice, consequences, and roleplaying to RPGs" – a very big project, to say the least – and although LeFay passed away this summer, the team assured his "legacy will live on in every realm, every quest, and every moment of wonder" The Wayward Realms has to offer. So, how has work on what might just be one of the biggest new games underway been going?

It turns out that, much like Bethesda Game Studios with its own Creation Engine, OnceLost Games is shifting The Wayward Realms from Unreal Engine to an in-house one instead. The developers explain their decision in a new online post, outlining why they're "transitioning away from Unreal and building our own proprietary engine" mid-project: "This move gives us the control and flexibility needed to deliver the experience you've told us you want."

OnceLost Games continues: "Over the past few weeks, our entire focus has been on developing this new engine, and we're thrilled to say that we'll have something to show you soon, with a new Devlog showcase planned for early in the new year. Shifting to our own engine is a major step, and while it positions us to deliver a far better game, it also means we won't be able to meet the end-of-year goal we previously set."

For anyone out of the loop, this means Kickstarter backers won't get to play until June 2026, with a public Early Access release following just a few months afterward. The devs detail their choice further – and as a longtime RPG stan myself, it sounds like the right move. First off, their new engine will allow them to "achieve 30+ FPS on decade-old laptops without dedicated GPUs, giving us excellent performance even on very low-end hardware."

That, of course, means the game is more accessible to a wider pool of players. The engine is also set to see the game run "at nearly 30 FPS on a first-generation Nintendo Switch, ensuring smooth performance on all major consoles, with full Linux support included" – a wonderful admission, especially in the wake of Valve's exciting Steam Machine. The perks don't end there, though, with OnceLost Games highlighting others.

Thanks to the in-house engine, Eyjar – the world of The Wayward Realms, like Tamriel in The Elder Scrolls – is "four times the size of Manhattan" but can load "in under one second, providing an almost instant start." As for the engine itself, in its entirety, it loads "in roughly 300 milliseconds, which allows extremely fast iteration and has already more than doubled our development speed." That's… sort of a very big deal.

I'd argue it's a massive one, in fact, especially when considering *cough* The Elder Scrolls 6 *ahem* and its own… erm, lengthy development journey thus far. Lastly, but certainly not least by any means, the engine offers "full community modding support for everything outside the core systems, using a public scripting language inspired by C# as a tribute to the Daggerfall Unity community." Now we're talking.

Skyrim itself has stayed alive for well over a decade now, thanks to the power of modding – and from what we've seen so far, The Wayward Realms is brewing up to be quite a huge RPG, much like the last (and long-lived) Elder Scrolls entry.

The Elder Scrolls 6, Half-Life 3, or new God of War reveals could be imminent according to hopeful fans who've been sent spiralling over a cryptic Geoff Keighley post – or, "most likely a Diablo 4 expansion"