Bethesda Switching To Unreal Engine Would Threaten Mod Scene, Former Dev Says

Bethesda has spent well over a decade working on its proprietary Creation Engine, which has powered all of its games since Skyrim. However, following the recent releases of Starfield and the remake of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, some fans have questioned the studio's commitment to this engine. In a new interview, former studio lead Dan Nanni explained that ditching Creation would impose significant costs on both the community and the development team.

As the games industry has increasingly converged on a small number of standard engines--Unreal Engine 5 chief among them--studios like Bethesda that maintain their own have become rare. Speaking to VideoGamer, Nanni explained that there are good reasons that Bethesda remains focused on Creation Engine. Chief among these is that Bethesda has built up an avid modding community, which has become particularly integral to the lifespan of Bethesda games and the studio's strategy toward long-term support.

While moving to UE5 would likely benefit some modders who are experienced in creating mods for other games, the Bethesda mod scene as a whole would likely take a big hit, Nanni explained. "You have a mod community and knows how to use your engine, that has built things for decades on the system that you are launching with," he stated. "You have to ask yourself, is it worth losing all of that knowledge? What do you gain from it? And there is no right answer... You just have to make a choice."

Modders aren't the only ones who might be threatened by ditching Creation. Nanni further shared that Bethesda is a studio with low employee turnover, and large portions of its technical team are specialists in building with Creation. To shift to UE5 would mean to throw out this expertise and start from scratch.

"You have a whole bunch of coders and a department that's built around that technology," Nanni stated when asked why Creation is so important to Bethesda's internal processes. "There's a lot of people there who've worked there for like 20, 25 years... If you go into Unreal, you gotta take your whole technology department. And you've got to now train them into learning all this. That's a lot of time."

Be sure to check out VideoGamer's interview with Nanni for more on his experience at Bethesda and his work on Fallout 76. If you're interested in more about the modding community around Bethesda games, be sure to check out the top Fallout 4 mods and the top Skyrim mods. In addition, although the Oblivion remake doesn't officially support them, the community has nonetheless generated a bunch of cool Oblivion remake mods.

In other Bethesda news, the studio's recent launch of the Oblivion remake has been wildly successful, rapidly becoming one of 2025's top-selling games within a few weeks of release. We probably still have a long time to wait for Bethesda's next big title, The Elder Scrolls VI, although creative developer Todd Howard has promised that the team is still hard at work.