As representatives of Bandai Namco’s technology department explain to the Automaton Media site in the context of sponsored content that serves mainly as a recruitment brochure, this engine, which has been in the works for years, is designed to give rise to ambitious productions, in particular in the open world. Although having adopted the Unreal Engine at the beginning of the previous generation for the latest installments of franchises as emblematic as Tekken, SoulCalibur, Ace Combat and Tales of, but also new licenses such as Code Vein and Scarlet Nexus, Bandai Namco believes that a company of its size must also have its own technology instead of relying entirely on external technologies. After all, Capcom has succeeded in this bet with its RE Engine.
Validated in 2018, the development of this still unnamed engine began in earnest around 2019 with a handful of engineers and technical artists who are now more than 50 on the project, including technical director Julien Merceron, well known for having occupied this same position at Ubisoft, Square Enix as well as on Konami’s Fox Engine before joining Bandai Namco in December 2015. But as you can imagine, the development of this technology is not a simple formality and its production was discontinued in 2020 to be relaunched with a stronger development base and a new language.
Its ambition is to be able to support high-end open world games and games with complex mechanisms without flinching. Concretely, however, no game is in development with this engine at the moment and this should not be the case for another year or so. Bandai Namco’s idea is to develop some of its games (especially the biggest ones) with this engine, without imposing it as the company’s only solution, which means that some games will always be developed with it. Unreal or Unity depending on their characteristics. The engine will for example not be specially adapted to mobile games, at least not at the beginning.