Bethesda Considered Using Unreal Engine 5 During the Development of Starfield

Bethesda Game Studios was working on Starfield—the ambitious sci-fi action RPG—almost a decade before the game was released on PC and Xbox Series X/S in 2023. This month, the game finally arrived on PlayStation 5, and it’s been heavily rumored that we might see Starfield’s release on Nintendo Switch 2 soon, as it recently received an official rating.

When developing the game, Bethesda used its own game engine—the Creation Engine, previously used in Fallout 4 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim; moreover, it was updated to version 2. However, in a recent interview on the Kiwi Talkz podcast, the former artist at Bethesda Game Studios and now the CEO of NEARstudios, Heather Cerlan, revealed that the studio considered using Unreal Engine 5 during Starfield’s development, but they abandoned that idea in favor of supporting the amendments. You can check out the highlights from her interview below:

“There was a lot of pressure internally to push to Unreal, especially when Nanite and Lumen and all these amazing features were coming out. People were like, 'Why don't we just use Unreal?'

The real reason that Bethesda holds onto the Creation Engine is because of all the modding capabilities. The whole modding community that's built around those tools and those systems, it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense for Bethesda to switch over to any other engine, because they've already built up a whole community that sustains the success of their titles.”

Although players often criticize Bethesda for different reasons, Starfield’s potential switch to Unreal Engine 5 didn’t happen precisely because of the studio’s attitude toward fans and those who enjoy creating mods for the game. It would have been interesting to see what fate Starfield would have faced in that scenario, but we’ll never know.

Would you like to see Starfield on Unreal Engine 5? Do you think this would help make the game better? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

The game is now available on PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5.