The Elder Scrolls 6 And Starfield Engines Discussed By Todd Howard- Most People Don’t Understand The Word ‘Engine’

There are some things that we’ve all come to expect from games made by Bethesda Game Studios, and while many of those are good, even great, the one negative aspect that keeps getting brought up is how the engine they make their games on seems a bit outdated. The fact that their games have technical issues (to say the least) is something that is commonly known by this point, and Todd Howard addressed these issues in a recent interview with GameStar.

Howard said, first and foremost, that their engine is constantly evolving, talking about how Bethesda uses a variety of technologies to piece together their engine for each of their games. He then went on to explain that Fallout 76 is going to have a large number of significant improvements on that front, which will only keep getting better and better with all subsequent games, such as Starfield, and the subsequent The Elder Scrolls 6.

“I think a lot of people, who are not making games don’t understand what the word “engine” stands for,” Howard said. “They think the engine is this one thing, we view it as technology. There’s a lot of different pieces and for every game, parts of that change. For example the renderer, the AI, the animations, the script language and so on. Some people talk about Gamebryo but we haven’t used that in a decade. A lot of our engine contains a lot of middleware like Havoc.”

“For Fallout 76 we have changed a lot,” he continued. “The game uses a new renderer, a new lighting system and a new system for the landscape generation. For Starfield even more of it changes. And for The Elder Scrolls 6, out there on the horizon even more. We like our editor. It allows us to create worlds really fast and the modders know it really well. There are some elementary ways we create our games and that will continue because that lets us be efficient and we think it works best.”

It’s encouraging to hear that Bethesda are putting in more of an effort to improve their tech, because that is one area where their games have been decidedly lacking over the last decade or so. And given the fact that both Starfield and The Elder Scrolls 6 are going to be next-gen games (though Starfield might still make it to current-gen systems), we’re curious to see what kinds of improvements they’ll implement in those games.