Former Bethesda studio lead explains Creation Engine will “inevitably” need to change one day, but switching to Unreal could sacrifice modding as we know it

Bethesda Game Studios’ Creation Engine was massively overhauled for the release of Starfield, a game that didn’t really set the world on fire. Since the release of the game, many internet commenters have called for Bethesda to abandon its proprietary game engine and shift to the game’s industry’s ever-popular Unreal Engine 5.

In an interview with VideoGamer, former studio lead Dan Nanni explained that it’s not as easy as simply shifting the studio to Unreal. After former Skyrim designer Bruce Nesmith explained that key complaints like loading screens are key to the Bethesda experience, Nani detailed exactly what it would actually mean for Bethesda to move to Unreal… and it wouldn’t be the fix-all solution many gamers claim it would be.

Is Bethesda’s Creation Engine outdated?

Speaking on an upcoming episode of the VideoGamer Podcast, we asked Nani if the current Creation Engine 2 tools used at Bethesda are as “outdated” as gamers claim. The veteran game developer explained that anyone “can make an argument in any direction”, but that shifting the studio to Unreal is a lot more hassle than most gamers can imagine.

“If you wanna throw away your engine and restart, you have to go through the whole entirety of restarting,” the developer said. “Unreal doesn’t give you everything out of the box, you have to build it. If you went Unreal’s golden path, then yes, you have a dedicated team at Unreal who’s supporting you. But when you’re making a very specific game in a very specific way, with the systems that were built in a way that people are familiar with, it means you have to make changes fundamentally, it means you’re no longer on the golden path.”

Nani explained that to make a Bethesda game with the same open-ended structure, the same reliance on physics, the same focus on extreme modding, it would essentially be the same as crafting a whole new engine. As the developer explained, Unreal doesn’t give developers everything, and it also has its own core issues that many gamers have also complained about.

“Next thing you know, you’re still dealing with building an engine,” Nani explained. “The important question is whether you gain the benefit of the future, that’s the question to ask. You’re not asking about the game that you’re going to launch right now, you’re also asking the question of the game you’re going to launch five, six, seven years from now. Is that going to benefit from that as well?”

The developer explained that, just like how Unreal Engine 5 is an iteration of the original Unreal from the 90s, Creation Engine 2 is a major iteration of its predecessor. Is isn’t a “new” engine, but it isn’t an “old” engine either, and there have been massive improvements since the time of Skyrim and Fallout 4.

“They’re always iterations,” he explained. “It’s not like you throw away an engine, it’s more like versioning. Creation Engine 2 is an iteration of Creation Engine, Unreal Engine 5 is an iteraiton of Unreal Engine 4. But if you start looking at what is Unreal Engine 5 vs the original Unreal, even down to its level design principles, they’re completely opposite. That’s just time for you. But you genuinely throw it away from scratch and start over again: if you did so it you wouldn’t call it 5,4,3,2, you’d call it something brand-new.”

Nani explained that Creation Engine isn’t Gamebryo, otherwise it would simply be called Gamebryo. While some underlying technology may still be present, Bethesda’s engineers have done far more work to modernise their tools than many give the studio credit for.

“You have to ask yourself, is it worth losing all of that knowledge? What do you gain from it? There is no right answer.”

FORMER BETHESDA STUDIO LEAD DAN NANNI

Why Bethesda’s engine is so important

It’s also worth mentioning that Bethesda is not a studio like most. Unlike game studios like 343, now Halo Studios, which recently abandoned its own SlipSpace Engine for Unreal Engine 5, Bethesda does not have the rapid turnaround time for developers.

While UE5 is very useful for contractors and newcomers as the tools are almost industry standard, Bethesda developers have extremely long tenures at the company. Some devs working on The Elder Scrolls 6 started working on Morrowind, some have been there even longer, and shifting everything to Unreal would mean training almost 500 people on the engine’s unique quirks, causing potentially years of delays.

“From a technology standpoint… you have a whole bunch of coders and a department that’s built around that technology. Who understands the technology you have,” Nani explained. “There’s a lot of people there who’ve worked there for like 20, 25 years… even if you go into Unreal, you gotta take your whole technology department. And you’ve got to now train them into learning all this. That’s a lot of time. However long it takes you to make it, you have to ask yourself, are you going to buy that time back in order to make that transition?”

“I think inevitably, you’re going to have to [change engines] just because engines atrophy after a certain point, engines leak too much, you’re building on a codebase which is decades old and it has to move away from it at one point.”

One of the key issues of Bethesda moving away from Creation Engine is the risk of ruining the mod community that keeps their games alive for decades. While games like Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl allow mods on Unreal Engine 5, it’s a very different beast, and we’ve already seen issues with modding Oblivion Remastered due to its use of Epic’s tools.

“You have a mod community and knows how to use your engine, that has built things for decades on the system that you are launching with,” he said. “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.”

The risk of Engine Atrophy

Nani explained that “inevitably” Bethesda will, one day, probably move away from Creation Engine “just because engines atrophy at a certain point”. However, while the internet claims that the tools are too old, the often regurgitated line is heavy hyperbole.

“I think inevitably, you’re going to have to [change engines] just because engines atrophy after a certain point, engines leak too much, you’re building on a codebase which is decades old and it has to move away from it at one point,” he said. “It’s just a question of time more than anything and when is it the right time to do so.”

“But the question isn’t where do you go: do you build a new engine, do you take the engine you had and you build upon it in such a way that it branches in a new direction, do you start from scratch or do you take an engine like Unreal and start from there?”

The Elder Scrolls VI is undoubtedly using an evolved version of Starfield’s Creation Engine 2, one that will hopefully focus more on bespoke level design rather than procedurally generated planets, but one day Bethesda will have to make a change, even if that’s sometime in the 2030s. At the end of the day, it’s not as simple as just moving to Unreal, no matter what gamers on Reddit or Twitter say—it’s a potentially studio-changing move, and it will change everything about how Bethesda games are made.

For more from our chat with Nani, read about the development of the extremely obscure N-Gage spin-off The Elder Scrolls Travels: Shadowkey or read about how it felt to create Fallout 76 expansions while the game was being blasted by the community.