I think he’s on the money.
In an interview with VideoGamer, ex-Bethesda developer Bruce Nesmith defended the studio’s continued use of its proprietary Creation Engine and predicted that the RPG giant would likely stick with the tech in the future, even as more big name devs like BioWare, CD Projekt, and Halo Studios (formerly 343 Industries) trade in their bespoke engines for Epic Games‘ ubiquitous Unreal.
Ironically, the Creation Engine itself is based on licensed middleware similar to Unreal. Bethesda used the Gamebryo engine to develop The Elder Scrolls Morrowind and Oblivion, as well as Fallout 3—so Obsidian’s fan-favorite Fallout: New Vegas is also part of this little family tree—with the Creation Engine underpinning Skyrim, Fallout 4, and even last year’s Starfield iterating on the earlier engine. Gamebryo creator Gamebase appears to have gone defunct at some point after the engine’s last update in 2012, but Bethesda itself continues to carry it forward.
That long-term reliance on the same technology can result in „tech debt“, the manifold ways that errors, shortcuts, and other quirks in digital infrastructure can calcify and have knock-on effects over time. Nesmith points to this as the primary reason why Bethesda might consider an engine switch: „There are parts of the Gamebryo engine that I would not be surprised to find out that Bethesda can no longer compile, because the original source code just doesn’t compile any more.
