Bandai Namco Studios is developing in-house game engine capable of making open world games

Bandai Namco Studios stated that they’re currently working on an in-house game engine capable of use in large-scale projects, such as open world games. Two core members working on the game engine discussed their vision in a recent interview published on the Japanese edition of AUTOMATON.

*Disclosure: The interview piece mentioned above is a paid advertorial.

The studio has created a number of popular franchises over the years, such as Tekken, The Idolmaster, Tales of, and Ace Combat, while also working on other companies’ IP. And none of these games have been open world.

Although they have been using third-party game engines like the Unreal Engine and Unity, the studio explained that they want to maintain the technical capability to create a solid game architecture themselves, and control all technical aspects of game development, rather than relying on third-party software frameworks.

They also point out that many contemporary AAA titles are being developed with in-house game engines, which is quite true when you look at the recent AAA landscape. Simply put, a proprietary game engine would give a studio more control over its product.

The decision to develop a proprietary game engine was made around 2018 and was in an incubation period for a while. The project went full swing in 2019 but halted in 2020 to reevaluate the concept and its goal. Since then, they’ve resumed the project, and more than 50 members are working on it now.

They’re now aiming to develop a highly customizable game engine capable enough to use in complex, large-scale projects, including open world games. That doesn’t necessarily mean they will actually make an open world game, but a capable in-house game engine would make it within the realm of possibility and opens up the studio’s options. Besides, forming a clear and ambitious objective like “capable enough to make an open world game” would make it easier for the engineers working on the project to understand what they’re trying to achieve.

It’s being developed for high-end console games, but they plan to support mobile games in the future as well. There are no projects under development using the new game engine yet. They expect it to be ready to use in another year or so, but they point out that some titles might continue to use third-party game engines instead to take advantage of their unique strengths. Ultimately, the decision will depend on the needs of each project.