Bandai Namco has officially announced its intention to build a first-party graphics engine, currently unnamed and in development since 2019. The Japanese studio has almost always relied on Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4 to produce its video games, including the recent Scarlet Nexus, Tales of Arise, and Little Nightmares. Still, between 2018 and 2019, the executives decided to start producing a first-party engine suitable for large-scale game production.
Project manager Katsusuke Horiuchi and Technical Director Minami Sou talked about it in an interview for Automaton Media, stating the following: “The reason we are creating a graphics engine is related to a question of independence. We want to work on the foundations of a video game with our strength rather than with the engines of other companies. We made this decision in 2018, but the work continued slowly due to the many projects in production […], but now the development is proceeding well “.
Julien Merceron, former supervisor of Konami’s Fox Engine used for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and Silent Hills, is working on Bandai Namco’s new graphics engine with Horiuchi, Sou, and a team of specialized engineers. The studio intends to use this new engine mainly for the production of Triple-A “on a large scale,” i.e., open world in the style of Elden Ring and Tales of Arise, so it could continue to use Unreal Engine 4 for less ambitious projects. The development is good now, but the end of the works would still seem to be distant.
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