Starfield was already a milestone for Bethesda. It was the studio's first new original world in decades, and for a while it sounds like it might also have become a major engine reset. According to former Starfield artist Heather Cerlan, the team gave real thought to moving away from Bethesda's own technology during development.
Cerlan, who is now CEO and creative director at NEARstudios, worked on Starfield for several years. In a conversation with Kiwi Talkz, she said there was strong internal pressure to move the project to Unreal Engine 5, especially when features such as Nanite and Lumen were getting attention.
It is easy to see why that idea had pull. Unreal Engine 5's new tools looked exciting, and this would have been before wider talk about uneven performance in some UE5 games became part of the conversation. Even then, the engine itself was not the whole story. Plenty of games use modern Unreal tech well, and Bethesda's own games have never been known as completely trouble-free machines either.
Why Bethesda Stayed Put
By the time Starfield was being shaped, Bethesda had already spent years building and adjusting its own framework. The Creation Engine had powered Skyrim, and Starfield arrived on an upgraded version called Creation Engine 2. For Bethesda, that history mattered because the engine was not just a tool for the studio. It was also tied to the way players keep these games alive.
The big deciding factor, as Cerlan described it, was modding. Bethesda's mod community has become part of the studio's identity across games like Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and Fallout: New Vegas. Moving to a new engine could have risked pushing that community away from the systems and habits it already understood.
The Core Trade-Off
- Unreal Engine 5 offered tempting visual and workflow technology, including Nanite and Lumen.
- Creation Engine 2 kept Starfield closer to Bethesda's long-running development pipeline.
- The existing engine also protected the modding culture that has helped Bethesda RPGs last for years.
That last point is where the decision feels especially Bethesda. These games often become more than their launch versions. Players rebuild interfaces, restore old comforts, add new quests, adjust balance, and keep returning long after the first wave of reviews has passed. In that retro-minded sense, the engine is part of the memory of how Bethesda RPGs work.
Unreal Still Had An Influence
Staying with Creation Engine 2 did not mean Bethesda ignored Unreal's ideas. Todd Howard has previously said the studio looks at workflows from Unreal when hiring new people and reviewing how its own tools operate, including how an editor handles certain tasks. So the choice was not a simple rejection of newer methods. It was more about keeping the foundation that fit Starfield's needs and Bethesda's audience.
Starfield has continued to have a busy public life after launch. An analyst recently reported that it was the best-selling video game of the week in the United States for the first time in almost three years, even as discussion around its PS5 port remained rough. The engine debate, then, sits inside a larger story: Bethesda trying to modernize without losing the handmade, moddable character that players still associate with its worlds.
