Bethesda’s not about to move to Unreal Engine anytime soon, says Skyrim’s Lead Designer

We’ve known for some time now that The Elder Scrolls 6 would be built in Creation Engine 2, the very same game engine that powers Starfield. Whether that’s a good thing, nobody can currently tell, but a former Bethesda game designer has recently discussed this topic in an interview.

Speaking with VideoGamer, Bruce Nesmith, who worked as the lead designer of Skyrim and the systems designer for Starfield, explained a few things. Notably, his point is that Bethesda’s Creation Engine has been specifically fine-tuned to deliver the kind of sandbox RPG that the company is known for. To that end, it doesn’t seem like there are any plans to move on over to Unreal Engine 5. This should, hopefully, put such discussions to bed.

Bruce Nesmith explains why there’s value in Bethesda’s Creation Engine still

In his interview with VideoGamer, Nesmith said, “The game engine is not the point, the game engine is in service to the game itself. You and I could both identify a hundred lousy games that used Unreal. Is it Unreal’s fault? No, it’s not Unreal’s fault.”

Even though Nesmith is no longer at Bethesda, his involvement in basically every major first-party sandbox RPG the company has put out means he’s had ample insight into the inner workings of the company. When asked whether it would pay off for Bethesda to move to Unreal, he said that “it would be—I’m just going to say a number that’s certainly not the real number—a year or two of technical work just to move it over to the engine as is. And then more work beyond that to tune the engine, to tune the game, to work in it. That’s the penalty side. That’s the risk side.”

Nesmith did say that moving to Unreal would nullify whatever tech debt Creation Engine might have accrued by now, but this would be far from trivial.

“The modding community also has a huge tech debt, Script Extender is probably the easiest one to talk about,” he continued. “They’ve put in a tremendous amount of effort, the modders, into understanding the Creation Engine and understanding the Creation Tool Kit. If there is a cut over, all that is thrown out the window and it all has to start all over again.”

There is, indeed, a legacy of modding tied up with Bethesda’s work. Even though the modern Unreal Engine does ostensibly support mods, my experience with UE5 games hasn’t been the greatest in that regard. Further, the fact of the matter is that there simply aren’t any other companies making sandbox, ImSim-lite RPGs such as the ones put out by Bethesda. The games that come the closest are arguably the likes of The Outer Worlds, and even that’s a far cry from even Fallout: New Vegas‘s mechanical complexity.

Never say never, I guess, especially now that it’s clear that Bethesda has struggled with producing Starfield‘s first major expansion pack. Yet, I just don’t think there’s merit in moving every single project under the sun into Unreal Engine 5. Starfield‘s problems don’t lie in the graphics or performance departments but somewhere else entirely, and gameplay and immersion would’ve been problems no matter what engine the game is built on.