A veteran designer recently sat down with PC Gamer to discuss his surprise departure from Bethesda Game Studios in 2023 after two stints and over 20 years at the company. He cited what he saw as detrimental changes in the Elder Scrolls and Fallout maker’s development process due to Bethesda’s continued expansion as the driving impetus behind his decision.
Kurt Kuhlmann, who worked for Bethesda as a junior designer in the late 1990s before rejoining the studio as a senior designer in 2003, made waves in the industry when he decided to step away from the role. By that time, he had worked on every major game in the Elder Scrolls series—apart from the first, Arena—and was responsible for building out much of its setting and lore.
“It was almost certainly time for a change,” Kuhlmann told PC Gamer. “There were some things that had been going on for a long time that I’d not been super happy with.”
Communication breakdowns on Starfield
Much of this unhappiness, Kuhlmann explained, revolved around Bethesda’s growth from a handful of developers making games in a basement office to hundreds of people across four studios that were managed by Microsoft. No longer could they just pop in on each other to discuss something and get a quick decision from trusted leaders like executive producer Todd Howard.
Instead, senior developer responsibilities were becoming more managerial, and everything had to go through several layers of bureaucracy. Kuhlmann described the environment as prone to “communication breakdowns,” attributing some of Bethesda’s recent development struggles to this bloated, hands-off structure. Starfield teams, for instance, were often confused about what they were supposed to be doing as discussion filtered through the various studio leads.
“The expectation was your job can’t be also making content if you’re actually managing that scope of the project,” Kuhlmann said. “I didn’t want to work that way, because I like making games and being hands-on. It had gotten to a scale beyond where I was really enjoying working in that environment.”
An Elder Scrolls 6 cliffhanger
This shift in priorities, combined with Howard retracting a previous promise to make Kuhlmann lead designer on The Elder Scrolls 6, signaled to the veteran it was time to leave Bethesda. Kuhlmann, for his part, does acknowledge it was a smart decision to change his potential responsibilities on the still unreleased game, as he probably wouldn’t have liked the job much due to Bethesda’s new development woes.
As for what he envisioned for The Elder Scrolls 6, Kuhlmann likened his rough ideas to Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back: The bad guys would have won, setting up the main conflict of The Elder Scrolls 7. The protracted AAA release schedule, however, would likely have made a cliffhanger of that magnitude “unfeasible.”
“That’s not a good way to end a game and say, yeah, we’ll see you in 10, 15 years,” Kuhlmann said.
