Today, Bethesda offered a great update on how the studio is planning its future.
Xbox’s massive cuts have left many of its subsidiaries reelingand fans were worried that Microsoft may have cut the legs off many of the industry’s most beloved franchises. id Software sought to reassure fans on the issue this week, and now Bethesda is also doing its part.
Bethesda just confirmed it in a big note that Elder Scrolls VI is progressing very well and reaching milestones, Starfield will continue to get new content, and finally, Fallout is getting a ton of new projects. Fallout 5 is in pre-production, Obsidian is returning with its own Fallout spin-off, and Fallout 3 and New Vegas are getting remakes, confirming our previous report.
One piece of news that might fly a little under the radar here is about Creation Engine 3, which Bethesda is developing specifically for Elder Scrolls VI and Fallout 5. I recently sat down with Todd Howard to learn a little more about how the studio is positioning Creation Engine 3, Creation Club, and how it’s becoming an increasingly critical part of Bethesda’s future.
“I can’t say enough about our tech team. It’s just amazing.”
Creation Engine has been a bit controversial in some corners, with some players feeling that it lacks the fidelity of engines like Unreal or the cinematic qualities of in-house engines like the RE Engine.
In my opinion, Creation Engine has always been more of a sandbox game, designed for extensibility first and foremost and rapid iteration in large-scale worlds. It’s also designed to modify at its core, and Creation Club members have earned over $10 million in revenue since the platform’s inception.
I caught up with Todd Howard recently to talk about a variety of topics, including how the Creation Engine 3 is leveraged in Fallout 5 and Elder Scrolls VI, and how he thinks about the platform given the rise of Roblox and Minecraft’s own extensible platform features.
“When we build these worlds, it starts with the technology. A lot of people think about the engine, they think about the rendering, but there’s a lot more that goes into it from the tool side and the system side.” Todd explains.
“Because of the kind of worlds we want to build and also knowing that we were going to make Fallout 5, and how we do them simultaneously in a way that’s not a start and stop. And we’re so happy. I can’t say enough about our tech team. It’s just amazing. Our designers ask for so many crazy things, and our tech team finds a way to do it. And I think that really defines our games where you feel like anything is possible.”
I mentioned the statistic Bethesda mentioned: $10 million has been paid to creators in the Creation Club program on games like consequences 4 and Starfield. Given Roblox’s rise as a user-generated content giant, I asked if these changes in the industry have informed how Creation Engine 3 will be displayed.
“If we go back, something we’ve been very passionate about since we started this run with Morrowind, I was adamant that I wanted the Elder Scrolls building set to come with the game, as a separate disc. And we’ve been doing that for decades. We have a group of creators that have been doing it for decades, it’s what has kept games like Skyrim alive after fifteen years.
It reminds you of when you played D&D and you can create your own adventures. That spirit of creation. It takes a lot of different flavors, so it’s really about supporting all those different flavors. I think we’re in an amazing situation with Creations, with verified creators, and they’re making that revenue. He has raised all the levels, the free mod too, and those things are more popular. You see people who maybe were amateurs and now become professionals. The content there leaves us speechless. They just do an amazing job. And for some, this is now their career, and that fills us with joy.”
Could Creation Club and Creation Engine be another answer to Xbox’s Roblox problem?
On the Xbox layoffs, Todd Howard mourned friends who will no longer remain at the studio with visible pain, but noted that the gaming industry as a whole is going through a massive change. He flashed back to 2016, just before the Xbox acquisition, about Bethesda’s rush into mobile and multiplayer, when gamers seemed to be moving away from single-player titles in droves.
That similar shift now revolves around user-generated content in many ways. Roblox is now bigger than Steam and PlayStation combined, as creators create entire games and worlds and build entire businesses within Roblox. Bethesda’s Creation Club pioneered that space to some extent, along with Minecraft, giving the modding community ways to turn their hobbies and passions into careers that pay the bills.
It’ll be interesting to see how Creation Engine 3 shows up in Fallout 5 and The Elder Scrolls VI, but we’ll probably be waiting a bit to see how it all plays out.
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