Bethesda confirms Fallout 5 feature we were all dreading

Bethesda dropped a major bombshell on Friday when it not only confirmed that Obsidian Entertainment is working on a new Fallout game, but that Fallout 5 has officially entered pre-production.

However, there was another major piece of news that largely went under the radar, and was later confirmed in an interview between Todd Howard and Windows Central – Fallout 5 will use Creation Engine 3, just like The Elder Scrolls 6.

Creation Engine is the proprietary tool Bethesda has used to create its games since The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. Since then, the engine has gone through several iterations with the team at Bethesda investing a lot of time to upgrade it to Creation Engine 2 for Starfield.

Now, Bethesda is on its third iteration of Creation Engine for The Elder Scrolls 6. While we don’t quite know exactly what those new innovations mean for the anticipated title, studio lead Todd Howard has a lot of great things to say about the team that’s built it.

“I can't say enough about our tech team. It's just incredible,” Howard says. “Our designers ask for so much crazy stuff, and our tech team finds a way to do it. And I think that's really defined our games where you feel like anything is possible.

Read Bethesda's statement from Friday in full below:

The Creation Engine has proven controversial over the last several years. While it’s undoubtedly spawned some of the most beloved games of our generation, it’s also been described as outdated in a lot of ways.

For one, it still forces players to hit a load screen when transitioning from outdoor to indoor areas. It’s also known for its bugs and instability, with even Starfield prone to many crashes and visual glitches.

However, there is one major upside to the Creation Engine – modding. The modularity of the Creation Engine and its ability to be used via the publicly available Creation Kit allows Bethesda fans to fairly easily create massive mods for their favourite games.

This is something that Howard is keen to preserve for the likes of Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5. |It harkens back to when you played D&D and you can make your own adventures,” Howard says. “That spirit of creation. It takes a lot of different flavors, so it's really about supporting all those different flavors.”

With Fallout 5 only just entering pre-production, we can likely expect a long wait before we see how Creation Engine 3 manifests itself for Bethesda’s next project after Elder Scroll 6. It’s currently unconfirmed whether Obsidian is using Creation Engine for its own Fallout project or whether it’s using Unreal Engine 5 like The Outer Worlds and Avowed.

Bethesda did allow Virtuous to use Unreal Engine on top of the Gamebryo engine for the remaster of Oblivion last year, so a jump a different engine is not out of the question.