When Skyrim launched in 2011, nobody expected the wait for a sequel to be this long. Surely, Bethesda would capitalize on the series’ newfound success as soon as possible? A little Fallout 4 detour in 2015, sure, but then the pendulum would swing right back to The Elder Scrolls. That’s not how it worked out.
In 2018, Bethesda announced Starfield as its next game, a brand-new space-faring RPG. Sure, we got a teaser trailer for The Elder Scrolls 6 to tide fans over, but you can only bleed so much out of a nondescript mountain range for eight years. What’s interesting, however, is that this change in direction wasn’t just a surprise for fans; even the studio was shocked.
“We all expected it to be directly after Fallout 4,” Skyrim co-lead and former loremaster Kurt Kuhlmann said on the FRVR Podcast. “Why wouldn’t it be? That’s what we did, and that was kind of the expectation. And then Fallout 76 came along.”
Kuhlmann explained that Fallout 76 was supposed to be handled entirely by BattleCry Studios, now Bethesda Austin, but that the project ended up pulling Starfield devs away from early production.
“It wasn’t originally supposed to involve our whole studio,” he continued. “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… And then Todd was like: ‘No, we’re doing Starfield. I got that approved. It’s going to be a new IP. It’s going to be this ambitious [game]. It’s going to be the greatest space RPG ever made.’”
Kuhlmann told FRVR that he “would’ve much rather been making TES 6” than Fallout 76 and Starfield, and believes this rings “true for the majority of the studio.” It didn’t shake out that way, and unfortunately, while Starfield reviewed well, it was also a major disappointment. The game was widely criticized for prioritizing hundreds of empty, barren planets with repetitive points-of-interest that sacrificed the hand-crafted environmental storytelling many had come to love from the studio.
Plenty of classic RPG elements were folded into the game, with Starfield feeling almost like a spiritual successor to Daggerfall, but those RPG elements weren’t given nearly enough room to breathe. There's certainly something to be said about studios being afforded the freedom to experiment and branch out from their usual toy box rather than being stuck churning out legacy IPs, but Skyrim left plenty of questions on a future conflict with the Aldmeri Dominion that have gone unanswered for over a decade — and many of us who started our journeys with The Elder Scrolls in 2011 as kids are now approaching 30.
Hopefully, TES 6 is worth the wait, but it’s fascinating to imagine where we’d be now if Bethesda hadn’t broken its usual cadence in 2018 with Starfield.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.thegamer.com/skyrim-co-lead-most-bethesda-devs-wanted-to-make-the-elder-scrolls-6/
