Creation Engine

The Creation Engine is an engine created by Bethesda Softworks for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76.

Background
The Creation Engine is the successor to the Gamebryo game engine, and was launched to support The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. It retains the basic framework.
 * Draw distance is greater to give a more epic, open-world feel.
 * Multiple levels of detail on "distant" objects, such as cities on the horizon, allow a more immersive world space without sacrificing too much performance.
 * Shadows were greatly improved, allowing almost any object to cast a shadow in real-time and better lighting systems make the world seem more alive.
 * Animations used better blending to allow more complex actions to translate into the model, such as drawing a bow while strafing sideways and showing both actions simultaneously rather than one animation overriding the other.
 * The Radiant AI system, introduced in Oblivion, is expanded to allow non-player actors to have more diverse and believable day-to-day activities, while still being able to take part in quests and large-scale events.
 * The Radiant Story system was introduced with Skyrim to allow a more diverse array of dynamic quest elements and creation of on-the-fly quests, such as an innkeeper who might tell the player there's a local ogre who needs to be hunted, at which point the ogre is created by the engine rather than being created in advance by the quest team.
 * The user interface transitioned from the old XML frontends and hard-coded backends to a Shockwave Flash system that, while more complex to edit, allowed much greater flexibility for modders and numerous graphical effects previously unavailable gave the interface a much more polished look and feel.
 * The quest journal was extended to allow tracking multiple quests at once, or no quests at all, and included a "Miscellaneous" section for simple quests that would have been untracked in previous games. This allowed better tracking of minor side quests without cluttering the journal needlessly.
 * The combat system was significantly updated, with each hand free to use any type of shield, weapon or spell independently of the other hand, allowing a much more diverse range of character builds and more complex combat tactics.
 * A new perk system was added, giving each skill a tree of perks to further diversify character builds. Perks can range from simple +damage per rank to allowing special attacks with certain weapons to allowing stolen items to be sold to any merchant.
 * The crafting system was expanded on to allow more flexibility in crafting and enchanting equipment, although the spell crafting system from previous Elder Scrolls games was non-existent in Skyrim.
 * Fallout 4 utilizes an updated version of the Creation Engine, supporting better graphics capabilities and more features. Many of Skyrim's features were removed or overhauled to fit the Fallout game world and SPECIAL skill system.

Features
Features include, but are not limited to:
 * Increased texture resolution for more object detail.
 * Volumetric lighting gives more realism in scenes with stark lighting contrast, such as sunlight filtering through a row of columns and illuminating dust in the air between columns while leaving the dust behind the columns dark.
 * Physically-based rendering (PBR) shaders give a much more realistic look to the game's artwork and allow assets created under one lighting condition to look right under another more easily.
 * The new weapon and armor modification system allows for more creativity and diversity in player-made items.
 * The settlement-creation system allows the player to build an entire town with fully customized building layouts and features, power grids, water supplies and more.
 * The character creation system has been redesigned into a point-and-click system rather than the old slider-based approach and is intended to make getting the perfect face much easier.
 * The player character is voiced, with a new camera view during conversations giving a more cinematic quality than previous games.
 * Conversations can be jumped out of at any time and dialogue choices have been simplified to a radial menu rather than scrolling through choices.
 * V.A.T.S. has been updated so time is still moving, but more slowly, to make V.A.T.S. combat more engaging than previous systems where time simply stopped while the player made their choices while giving more precision than free-aim mode.
 * An app for iOS, Android and Windows Mobile, Fallout Pip-Boy, allows one to access the in-game Pip-Boy wirelessly via smartphone.
 * Following the release of Fallout 4, the Creation Engine was updated again with additional features, such as the addition of multiplayer game mechanics, to be used with Fallout 76.

Creation Kit
The Creation Kit is the official editor used to modify or create content for Skyrim as well as Fallout 4.

Behind the scenes
During the development of Fallout: New Vegas, project director Joshua Sawyer at Obsidian Entertainment was aware of Bethesda's experimentation with the Creation Engine, but they did not have the time to work with it for New Vegas.