The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim Wasn’t Always On a New Engine

Bethesda didn't always plan for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to run on a new engine. Todd Howard revealed that the company's decision to switch to a new engine happened wholly by chance and circumstance. 

"We had a pretty big list of what we felt the 360, the PS3 and the high-end PCs could do, and it wasn't like we said 'we're going to re-write the engine'; we just sort of started with 'okay, let's do this to the graphics; let's do this to the gameplay'," he said.

"We started hitting that hard right after Fallout 3, so I'd say after the course of the next year and a half it turns out we'd re-written all of this—look how it looks; we're not using this anymore; we're not using that anymore. So that's when we decided to brand it; we should call it something of our own," Howard continued.  

"But it wasn't from the get go 'we're going to rewrite the whole engine.' It was a priority list and we ended up re-writing more than we thought we were gonna, but it worked out." 

In the same interview with AusGamers, Todd Howard explained that the game's E3 presentation was Xbox 360 only, and that the visuals on the PC version could be expected to be a lot better than what we've already seen.

"We tend to show it on 360 so that it's a good baseline for people to look at," he explained. "So when they see the PC version it's going to go up. We'd rather do that than have people see the 360 later and it takes a step down." 

"As a game developer, the 360 is much easier to show it on, from getting it started, to showing it, to controlling it, it's just much easier to demo on logistically."