“What’s more frustrating for those working on SCP, and the wider Starfield modding community, is how difficult it is to work with Starfield’s code without official modding tools and support. This isn’t helped by the delayed mod tools from Bethesda, which the company says are coming at some point next year.”
You won’t hear me defending them using that old engine, except that development time is also a resource. They should have spent it a long time ago migrating to a more modern tech stack, and maybe they will for ES6 now that there’s a new boss in town; Microsoft did, after all, delay the game by a year and a half to make what is by all accounts their least buggy launch of one of their RPGs in decades. I also don’t know how much we can claim they’re leaving it up to modders when plenty of console versions are completely unmoddable.
Removed by mod
They must have had trouble, because Arkane moved from Unreal to Void (which is built on idTech) for Dishonored 2 and Deathloop and such, and then back to Unreal again. Everyone got in a hurry in the 2010s to have their own in-house engine to avoid paying out fees to Epic, and then after running into trouble trying to adapt those engines to genres they weren’t built for, they’re back to Unreal again.