Todd Howard: Bethesda Engine Changes Better For Starfield And TES VI Than When Moving From Morrowind To Oblivion

During an interview at the Develop: Brighton online conference, the head of Bethesda Game Studios touched on how developers are preparing for a new generation of consoles and working on The Elder Scrolls VI and Starfield announced in 2018.

Among other things, he said that the games will use procedural generation technologies, and the technical base will be reworked in such a way that rendering and animation will become better.

It will be a long time before we tell people about these games and show them. And I am ready to defend this decision.

Many people say that we just need to start showing some material. But there are other problems. After all, if we show something, people will immediately be happy and start building expectations. We will immediately be asked: “when will the game be released?» And we’ll shrug our shoulders and say: «Wait». What if we have to move it? What if… And so on, and so on.

So when we show something, we want people to be able to immediately get an impression of what the finished product will be like.

Todd Howard
Executive producer Bethesda Game Studios

However, the game designer confirmed that there will be no online elements in Starfield, and stated that the Creation Engine will undergo significant changes. He acknowledged that in recent years, the Studio should have paid more attention to its own technologies and tools, so this is what Bethesda employees are currently doing.

Howard noted that developers have been preparing for the next generation of consoles for a relatively long time. Moreover, about five times more employees are currently working on the engine than before, which will allow us to achieve a significant technological leap.

We’ve probably never reworked our engine as much as we do now. Perhaps the changes will be more serious than the transition from Morrowind to Oblivion.

There are also some things that we still like about our technology. The way we build our worlds, the way we allow people to modify them. This, in my opinion, is a great advantage of our engine.

But in terms of rendering, animation, pathfinding, and procedural generation… I don’t want to say that we changed everything, but this work took us much, much longer than we would have liked. This will lay the Foundation for what we do in Starfield and the Elder Scrolls VI. And I think that when people see the results, they will be as happy as we are.

Todd Howard
Executive producer Bethesda Game Studios