Large-scale change of the engine "Creation Engine" - the largest ever

Todd Howard, acclaimed game designer and director of Bethesda Game Studios, has just been featured in an hour-long Develop session : Brighton Digital 2020 available at YouTube if you missed it.

During the conversation, Howard talked about the long-awaited "overhaul" Creation Engine coming to the next Bethesda Game Studios, Starfield and TES VI games. According to him, this is a bigger jump than even the one that was observed between The Elder Scrolls III and IV.

We update it with every game. We too recognize that this requires more work than in previous times, we do this between generations, and we do it.

I can say that the work on the Creation Engine that we started some time ago... It was a long time ago. We now have more people doing engine work, probably five times more than ever, so the Creation Engine overhaul is probably the biggest overhaul we've ever done.

Maybe more than Morrowind to Oblivion. There are things we do that we still love, the way we build our worlds, the way people can modify them, these are the things that I think are fundamentally good in our tech stack, but from rendering to animation before moving to procedural generation... I don't want to say it all, but it's a significant, significant overhaul.

This has taken us longer than we'd like, but it will contribute to what we're doing with Starfield and Elder Scrolls 6. When people see the results, they'll hopefully be as happy as we are, so what's on the screen, but also how we can make our games.

After discussing the engine change Creation Engine, Howard was also asked if the "experiment" would remain Fallout 76, the first multiplayer game developed by BGS, is a one-off.

The veteran game designer said that's not necessarily the case, as in the end, even with all the problems, he considers Fallout 76 a positive experience for the team.

You don't want to say never. I think the only thing we would have done differently is put it live 24/7 before really charging people to play at full price.

You really need to test these things for a long period of time, 24/7, with live players.

They are different from the normal single player games we would do. But I would never... Overall, it was a really positive experience.

It's made us a lot better developers, it's made us more connected to our community, so I can't say it's going to be a one-time thing.

Obviously all we'll have, Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI are single player games, but I don't rule it out in the future, it's been a very positive experience.

As a reminder, Bethesda Game Studios is in the process of acquiring Microsoft along with all other Bethesda Softworks and parent company Zenimax for $7.5 billion in cash.