Game developers shed light on why Starfield didn't use Unreal Engine

rockpapershotgun.com:

Ring the bell, everybody, it's time for another round of game developers telling players that they don't really understand what a "game engine" is. The spark this time is little-known science fiction adventure Starfield, which I believe we've reported on before. The game has a few obvious foibles - in my experience as a space pirate, NPCs sometimes struggle to navigate their surroundings, and then there are those stark disconnects between planetary surfaces and orbital space. Hiccups such as these have led a few players to wonder whether the game might work better using different technology, and in particular, the newer versions of Epic's ubiquitous Unreal Engine. Isn't Bethesda's proprietary Creation Engine, which the company have been updating since 2011, getting a little long in the tooth?

You'll find a lot of the discussion below this post from Digital Foundry boffin John Linneman on Twxter, which has attracted both gloating PlayStation fans (remember, Starfield is Xbox-only in console land) and a number of thoughtful replies from some fairly senior game developers. This conversation goes back a fair way, of course - people have been ragging on Bethesda for using "the same engine" for years. And there's a definite air of world-weariness to some of the developer responses.

"I love Unreal but what people are missing is that Bethesda's codebase has been tailor made for big, open world RPGs," observed Giuseppe Navarria, a tech design director at Gears Tactics developer Splash Damage. "They have years and years of tech (quest systems, managing and serialising items) that you would need to redo, also those kind of games are commonly CPU-heavy."

Navarria added that "people know so little about what feature[s] unreal