Skyrim's lead designer thinks Bethesda should stick to its in-house engine: 'The benefits that you get from switching to Unreal Engine are probably not going to materialise until two titles down the road'
Through the years of Bethesda games suffering from rocky launches, spectacular bugs, and erratic physics, there's been a common refrain from the fans: ditch the engine. Originally Gamebryo, nowadays the Creation Engine, Bethesda's in-house platform, has been seen as the root of all evils in The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, the supposed cause of everything from instability to floaty combat to lumpy potato faces.
In an interview with PressBoxPR, however, former Bethesda veteran and Skyrim's lead designer Bruce Nesmith has defended the studio's continued use of the engine, pointing to the huge disruption that would be caused by a changeover.
"It is a massive effort. You are talking about dozens of people spent doing nothing but making an engine work," says Nesmith. "You are talking about putting your developers into a situation where they can't play the game. 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."
He doesn't quite go as far as praising it, but he does seem to have faith in it as a platform that can continue to be modified and improved as needed.
"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," he says. "The benefits that you get from switching to Unreal Engine are probably not going to materialise until two titles down the road… If there's something you see that is only possible in Unreal, put it into the Creation Engine."
Though Bethesda's software does clearly have its quirks, it does tend to be true that fans are a bit too preoccupied with engines as a source of gameplay problems—and unrealistic about how much work is involved in switching. BioWare, for example, had enormous difficulty moving Dragon Age and Mass Effect over to EA's Frostbite engine, leading to protracted development periods and cancelled projects.
Meanwhile, the famous bugginess of Bethesda's games is likely far more due to the sheer scale of the projects than any inherent flaw with the engine. An open world of the size of Skyrim's, with that amount of moving parts, is extraordinarily difficult to give a fully clean bill of health to, even before players get in there and start actively trying to break it.
On the other hand… after Starfield, I am starting to feel like almost any price might be worth paying to rid the Bethesda-verse of its glassy-eyed mannequin NPCs.