“I think a lot of people don’t understand what the word ‘engine’ stands for. 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,” says Todd Howard.
Bethesda has somehow made a name about not changing a lot in terms of technology, gameplay and graphics between the games it releases, and that’s something director Todd Howard doesn’t really like.
Chatting with GameStar (via ResetEra), Howard discussed the matter and said that people don’t really know what they’re talking about when it comes to engines. Gamebryo, for example, has been dismissed several years ago and is no more at the base of Bethesda titles, while it’s still mentioned a lot on the Internet.
“I think a lot of people, who are not making games don’t understand what the word ‘engine’ stands for. 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,” Howard said.
“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.”
The director of Bethesda Game Studios also added that these things will be part of the technology that we’ll be seeing used in the upcoming Fallout 76, although the game looked very similar to Fallout 4 when it first popped up at E3.
And then there’s something even more ambitious in the making for Starfield, the first Bethesda new IP in 25 years, and there will be more and more for The Elder Scrolls VI when it releases sooner or later (probably thanks to the power of new hardware).
“For Fallout 76 we have changed a lot. 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.”
While Fallout 76 is releasing as soon as November 14, 2018, Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI haven’t been attached with a release date yet. All we know is Starfield is in a pre-production stage of its development process, while TES 6 hasn’t reached that phase yet so it’s basically a given that it’s coming during the next-generation of consoles.
