'All New' Game Engine For Next Elder Scrolls

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.