Recently-announced The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is dropping the Gamebryo-based engine used in
Oblivion and recent
Fallout games in favor of a new internally-developed engine, developer and publisher Bethesda said over the weekend.
2006's
Oblivion, 2008's
Fallout 3 and the Obsidian-developed
Fallout: New Vegas from this year all used heavily-modified versions of the Gamebryo engine from Emergent Technologies. While all three games were strong sellers and critically-acclaimed, the current engine has been showing its age.
Bethesda community manager Nick Breckon
said in a Tweet, "We can now confirm that the
TES V: Skyrim engine is all-new. And it looks fantastic."
He added that the new
Elder Scrolls engine is internally-built, and the game will have a new gameplay engine as well.
Over the weekend, Bethesda Softworks unveiled
Skyrim, its next open world role-playing game, via a trailer debut at Spike TV's annual Video Game Awards. Slated for a November 2011 release, it's the follow-up to
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, a game that sold 3 million copies in its first nine months and became one of the highest-rated RPGs of all time.
Bethesda's long-running
Elder Scrolls series debuted in 1994 with
The Elder Scrolls: Arena. Later additions to the respected series included
Daggerfall and
Morrowind, as well as substantial expansions to major franchise installments.
