Creation Engine 3 is helping Bethesda test Elder Scrolls 6 builds more consistently than ever before

Bethesda's new Creation Engine is helping speed up development for Elder Scrolls 6 thanks to upgraded pipeline efficiencies and other major technical tweaks.

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Bethesda is back in the news again, and Todd Howard is on a fresh press junket to discuss Starfield's new PS5 release. As these things typically go, Howard was asked about Elder Scrolls 6, and while he doesn't really confirm much regarding the game, he does say that the next-gen Creation Engine 3 is making a big difference in how the game is being made.

In a recent interview with IGN, Howard says that Creation Engine 3 allows the team to make more stable builds that can be consistently tested--which is a critical part of any game's development. A sizable portion of how games are made comes from the back-and-forth between creators and testers.

"I want to be careful what I say about The Elder Scrolls 6, because everyone wants to know, but we want to find a time where we'll talk about that in depth.

"One thing I'll say is really the tech. As we go into Creation Engine 3...the team has done a really, really incredible job in not just pushing what it is, but how we've integrated it into our development cycle. You don't feel what you're doing on a day-to-day basis--the game goes down.

"So we're in a fortunate position where the builds are really consistently working [more often than not], we've had more days of it working than ever before, where the build's good and new stuff is in it, and we can play it."

Howard goes on to say that the team has done a better job in allowing its engine to grow alongside creation tools, helping reduce any kind of displacement between technical tool-making and the creative endeavor of design.

Thanks to Creation Engine 3, things are apparently going more smoothly with Elder Scrolls 6's development than with Starfield's.

"When you're making those kind of technical changes that we talked about, often you're pulling the rug out from the team who's making content. It's like, 'okay, that doesn't work for this period of time, you'll have to wait until we get that working again.'

"We've done a really good job of managing that on Elder Scrolls 6. On Starfield, we struggled there for a number of years in terms of going through the engine change."