DF Direct Q+A: Creation Engine 3 in Elder Scrolls 6/Fallout 5, Is Doom THE Great American Videogame?

**Rich** (0:02)
Hello there, and the warmest of all potential welcomes in the multiverse to this, the latest edition of the DF Direct Q&A show. Joining me to field a bunch of questions. First of all, Will Jard, hello.

**Will Jard** (0:15)
Hello. It's so good to be here on a day where we're not melting in the UK for once, and also the questions have some measure of actual good things happening and things we can be excited about. It makes such a change.

**Rich** (0:27)
Yeah. Crazy stuff, I know.
Hello, Oliver McKenzie.

**Oliver McKenzie** (0:31)
Yes, Rich. Very busy week for me, I'm sure for all of us, but I've managed to carve out some time in my schedule for you as always.

**Rich** (0:40)
Lovely. Thank you very much. Then first question here, actually, it's a couple of questions. I've grouped them together because they're concerning the same subject. This one comes from Scud.
Hi, Chaps. When it comes to Bethesda, what do you think we could expect from Creation Engine 3? I desperately hope they can do away with all the loading screens. After playing Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and Crimson Desert, seamless exteriors slash interiors adds enormously to immersion in KCD2, looking out a window as the sun sets and seeing everyone head home, makes the world feel alive and a partitioned world feels very antiquated these days. Do you reckon changing that is even possible? Anything is possible, right? Daniel Kilpatrick asks, Hello there, lovely Foundrymen. In a recent interview between Todd Howard and Michael Hayam of IGN, Todd spoke of a focus on scalability for Creation Engine 3 With the rise of things like handheld PCs and longer cross-generational games increasing, this may become more important. In the past, you've often highlighted that Bethesda's tech is primarily bottlenecked by the CPU due to its persistent object tracking and radiant AI. With The Elder Scrolls 6 moving to Creation Engine 3, how can Bethesda realistically scale a simulation-heavy engine across a wider range of hardware without completely gutting the density and AI mechanics of the lower end baseline? Many thanks, Exclamation Point. Some interesting questions there, Oliver, because fundamentally it is entirely speculation at this point. We don't know anything about these games other than the fact that they exist and are in development. But obviously we've got some idea of what's happening with the next generation systems and the need to scale across as many pieces of hardware as possible while surfacing stuff like high-end consoles, that sort of thing.
Where do you want to start with this one?

**Oliver McKenzie** (2:29)
Yeah, I mean, I do definitely see the need for scalability. Obviously whatever Bethesda ships, I presume, will be fairly scalable to at least the wide range of PC handhelds and consoles will be available at that point, including, I'm sure, Series S and Series X, PlayStation 5 in all likelihood as well, assuming it isn't one of those benighted exclusives that Microsoft is so keen on promising, but I don't know how many will be emerging, at least, depending on maybe the commercial performance of some of their exclusive titles they've already announced.
But actually Todd Howard did mention a few things in an interview, I think. There were a couple of interviews out there, but one of them was with IGN, like this user mentions. And he basically talked about, yes, scalability, but also how the world's load, how they load content and present things of high detail close to the camera. And they talked about working with scale. So it sounds like to me they might be working on some of these problems already, and ensuring presumably that they scale to appropriate levels of hardware capability, including possibly things like, I mean, he, with that wording there, present things of high detail close to the camera. That sounds awfully like a micropolygon system. I don't know. Maybe that's speculating a bit too much, but it does sound awfully like that, doesn't it? And we do know that games in general with these systems do tend to scale all right to handhelds. And indeed, when we're talking about a game that might not be released until 2028 or 2029, we might be talking about different expectations entirely for what handheld systems look like at that point, right? We're going to be well into kind of the Panther Lake era of capability, I would suspect. And maybe systems like the ROG LIX, Xbox ROG LIX, these kinds of devices, are going to be a little bit lower priorities. Perhaps they will run, but perhaps not in as great a form as they do currently with titles like Starfield, which runs acceptably well on handheld. So that capability of that caliber, I would have to say.