It seems Starfield could've been a watershed game for Bethesda beyond just being the studio's first new IP in decades. According to a former developer on the RPG, serious consideration was given to changing engines on the production, before it was decided the team should stay on the well-worn Creation Engine.
Heather Cerlan, now CEO and creative director at NEARstudios, but formerly an artist who worked on Starfield for several years, reveals as much in her recent conversation with Kiwi Talkz. "There was a lot of pressure internally to push to Unreal [Engine 5], especially when Nanite and Lumen and all these amazing features were coming out," she says.
"People were like, 'Why don't we just use Unreal?'," she recalls. Although development had been happening on Starfield for some years prior to Unreal Engine 5's preliminary launch in May 2021, it was still two years out from release, providing some runway for transition.
The upgrades and features were and are enticing, and this would've been before the performance inconsistencies came to light. Of course, Bethesda games aren't without their problems to begin with, so that's something of a moot point, and there are plenty of games that run just fine using the latest Unreal Engine.
But Bethesda had put years of iteration into its own framework by then, the Creation Engine. Used since Skyrim, it'd get an upgrade to the Creation Engine 2 for Starfield, and it was the versatility for the community surrounding Bethesda releases that settled the discussion.
"The real reason that Bethesda holds onto the Creation Engine is because of all the modding capabilities," Cerlan reveals. "The whole modding community that's built around those tools and those systems, it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense for Bethesda to switch over to any other engine, because they've already built up a whole community that sustains the success of their titles."
Truly, if ever there's an argument against changing engines for Bethesda, it would be potentially alienating modders. They're a huge part of the studio's longevity, breathing life into and sustaining Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallouts 3, 4, New Vegas, and beyond.
In a prior chat with us, Todd Howard mentioned that aspects of Unreal's tech have been incorporated into Bethesda's methodology. "There are workflows, and as we're hiring new people, we're often looking at those workflows, like, how does an Unreal Engine do this from an editor standpoint?" he told GamesRadar+. "So we are starting to borrow some workflows or things, but we're doing it in our own way, so that we're serving what we need for our games."
The Elder Scrolls 6 is confirmed to be using Creation Engine 3. We'll see what the future holds for Fallout 5, but I wouldn't expect any kind of rash pivot.
