Skyrim was released in 2011. Fallout 4 arrived four years later. So it’s not absurd to imagine we might have gotten The Elder Scrolls 6 by 2019. Why didn’t that happen? Skyrim‘s co-lead designer, Kurt Kuhlmann, claims other projects kept getting foisted on the team at Bethesda Game Studios.
First came the online multiplayer spin-off Fallout 76, then the ambitious sci-fi RPG Starfield, which Kuhlmann positions as more of creative director Todd Howard’s personal dream project than something the studio as a whole had been passionate about pursuing.
“[Fallout 76] wasn’t originally supposed to involve our whole studio,” Kuhlmann recently told FRVR (via PC Gamer). “But then, I mean, what we were supposed to be working on next—it wasn’t ever that we were about to suddenly work on TES 6, even though that’s what I think most people wanted.”
He says Howard then pushed to make Starfield the studio’s next big game, and was able to get the Zenimax board to sign off at the time. Kuhlmann added that he “would’ve much rather been making TES 6 instead of [Fallout] 76 and Starfield, personally. And I think that would probably be true for the majority of the studio. That’s what most people wanted to do, you know?”
The veteran continued, “It wasn’t like Starfield was this big internal like, ‘Hey, we all want to make this space game, Todd.’ It was very much, ‘Guess what, team? We’re making this space game.’”
Kuhlmann’s perspective carries a lot of weight. He was at Bethesda for over 20 years before leaving in 2023 in an acrimonious split that arose from him being denied the lead designer position on The Elder Scrolls 6. He also pointed to issues during Starfield‘s development and a growing bureaucracy at Bethesda contributing to what he saw as problems at the studio.
After many detours, however, TES 6 is finally the next game Bethesda is putting out. Howard said it was the studio’s top priority in the wake of a layoff-filled reset at Xbox over the summer. While there’s no release window in sight, I think it’s a good bet we’ll see it before the end of the decade. Right?