Fallout: New Vegas showed you could take a talented RPG maker, Obsidian, give them the keys to Fallout 3, and get an incredible game turned around shockingly quickly. I’m making it sound way simpler and easier than it was, but the enduring legacy of New Vegas certainly makes you wonder why The Elder Scrolls never got a similar single-player spin-off. According to Kurt Kuhlmann, Skyrim‘s co-lead designer, there are a few possible reasons why we never got a similar collaboration on Bethesda’s open-world fantasy RPG franchise.
“I do think The Elder Scrolls Online took the heat off,” he told FRVR (via VGC). “There was a new Elder Scrolls product, and it was ongoing. It was creating new content constantly.” Kuhlmann, who had an acrimonious split with Bethesda in 2023, continued, “There are a lot of people…I mean, I know [there are] the single-player people, I’m one of those people—but there are a lot of people to whom The Elder Scrolls is now The Elder Scrolls Online. That’s their experience with it. That’s what they love. That’s where they got their Elder Scrolls gaming experience, and that’s probably what they want more of.”
And they will be getting more of it, though not as much as originally hoped for after some deep cuts at the studio behind the MMO, Zenimax Online. But the Bethesda veteran also had a couple of other thoughts about why we never got a New Vegas-style Elder Scrolls spin-off, despite the 15-year wait for a single-player sequel. One possibility is the weird competition that crept into the fandom with New Vegas and arguments over whether it was better than Fallout 3, and thus whether Obsidian was a better steward of the IP.
Kuhlmann theorized that director Todd Howard may not have wanted to “create that situation again for The Elder Scrolls,” especially since unlike Fallout, which was acquired from Interplay, TES was completely homegrown. “Todd, from my time there, he is very protective of it,” he said. It’s hard to imagine which studio might have been a good fit for a potential TES spin-off in the 2010s.
Obsidian did end up making its own first-person fantasy RPG last year, Avowed. It’s now been put on Fallout duty under Bethesda, seemingly instead of working on Avowed 2. Could it end up getting put on TES duty at some point in the future as well? Microsoft now owns the IP, and has recently demonstrated it’s no longer going to sit on its heels when it comes to extracting greater shareholder value from its franchises.