Perhaps Bethesda Game Studios should stick to its trusty Creation Engine, despite many fans' calls for a swap to another framework like Unreal Engine – or, at least, former Skyrim lead designer and studio veteran Bruce Nesmith seems to think so.
The ex-Elder Scrolls developer reveals as much during a recent interview with Press Box PR, first explaining that jumping from engine to engine is no easy feat. "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," admits Nesmith. "You are talking about dozens of people spent doing nothing but making an engine work." It's a large ask, to say the least.
"You are talking about putting your developers into a situation where they can't play the game," he continues. "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. That's an enormous thing."
A past game actually serves as an example of just how "enormous" a task this would be: Fallout 76, thanks to the heavily modified version of the Creation Engine it employed. "We ran into it with Fallout 76," as Nesmith recalls. "The engine had to be changed dramatically to do multiplayer. It made things extremely difficult for the team."
Fallout 76 and Bethesda's past difficulties with changing things up to make the Creation Engine work aren't the only reasons the studio shouldn't stray from its in-house framework, however. The fact that devs have spent so long improving it and working on it matters, too.
"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," Nesmith describes. "The benefits that you get from switching to Unreal Engine are probably not going to materialize until two titles down the road."
The effort that Bethesda has poured into its engine can be seen in, well, pretty much every title it's launched.
"Every Bethesda game that has ever released has had major improvements made to the Creation Engine," says the former Bethesda dev. "Significant improvements are always being made to it. There's an entire team that's devoted to nothing but doing that. But the advantage you have there is that you can still run the game during the whole time because you have an existing engine. You're not having to figure out how to put this new thing in place."
He then, understandably, concludes that he'd stick to the Creation Engine. "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."
I suppose that makes sense – if Bethesda sees something it likes in another engine, there's no reason not to try and make it work in its own in-house one. It'd be simpler than swapping.
"The Creation Engine is way more than a rendering engine," after all. "Way, way more. It's a whole method of how data is converted into function, and to graphics, and to the ability to do other things. You cannot just swap that out. That is not something that happens easily."
This likely rings especially true for new games like The Elder Scrolls 6 – so I wouldn't hold my breath that Bethesda itself will ever opt to move over to another engine, when so much work has gone into maintaining the Creation Engine.
