At the start of July, following the announcement that roughly 3,200 employees across multiple Xbox-owned studios were to be made redundant, multiple staff at Bethesda revealed to IGN that the layoffs would have a “substantial and cascading effect” on the development of The Elder Scrolls 6. This week, however, Bethesda has stated otherwise, as they believe that “the most significant restructure in Xbox history” won’t affect the game’s roadmap.
This news comes from MrMattyPlays (via PC Gamer), who published a video on July 22 detailing the answers to several questions he sent to Bethesda. MrMattyPlays directly asked if the “reports of a fear of some kind of delay for The Elder Scrolls 6” following Xbox’s layoffs had any truth to them. Bethesda simply replied, “No, the roadmap is unaffected.”
It’s hard to believe. For a start, Bethesda just announced four new Fallout games, including Fallout 5, which is apparently already in pre-production. Plus, 440 of the currently announced layoffs at Xbox directly affected 440 Bethesda and Zenimax employees, which has already led to the team behind The Elder Scrolls Online announcing that the “roadmaps [they] previously shared will be shifting.”
The responses MrMattyPlays received from Bethesda also mentioned that it’s still working on “optimizations” for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered. The studio also claimed that it wasn’t forced to make all of these recent announcements by Xbox CEO Asha Sharma.
“Look, we read the internet too,” the studio reportedly said in its email to the YouTuber. “All of our fans and plenty of creators have been asking for us to lay out our road map for a long time. As bits of info or announcements come out individually, they get lost in the larger picture of all we’re doing as a studio. So, we felt it was best to do it all at once and paint a clear picture for everyone. This is a shift in our approach to communication that Bethesda Game Studios has been contemplating for some time now.”
Given the timing and the hundreds laid off, it’s all a bit hard to swallow. Considering that a bunch of people at Bethesda just lost their jobs, several employees have claimed that the game’s development will be impacted by the layoffs, and Bethesda has just announced a whole slew of new projects… well, let’s just say that if you believe everything is great and this is purely a coincidence, I have a bridge to sell you.