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I honestly don’t understand why anyone is surprised by this, or why it makes them have a negative opinion of Bethesda Game Studios.
I understood when they announced that TES VI was in development that it wasn’t in active development at this time, but that the announcement was to quell the fanbase who thought TES had been entirely abandoned.
Skyrim took 3 years, Fallout 4 took 4 years, Fallout 76 took 3 years (but wasn’t a mainline game), and Starfield took 5 years, which is the longest development time for mainline games by… one year, the horror, and it’s an entirely new IP with space systems that I’m sure took additional time to develop engine-specific features to support. I anticipate TES VI will be a larger and more ambitious game than Skyrim and will be influenced by how they’ve developed Fallout 4 and Starfield, so seeing it release in 2028 with a 5 year dev time vs. Skyrim’s 3 seems entirely reasonable.
Yup. No one should be surprised and this is far better in a lot of ways.
This is how Bethesda has worked for decades now. One game at a time, developed over several years. Have someone else develop/oversee the non-mainline games (eg. New Vegas, ESO) but work on all the mainline games with singular focus. No splitting teams or any of that.
The difference is the teaser. Usually, they drop the teaser, announce the game, it’s out in a few months. Although, they also teased Starfield early, but I think some things like the pandemic and the acquisition had a larger effect on the development time.
About a year after Starfield, they’ll probably get deep into TES: VI pre-production. Maybe a bit of writing will be done, but they’ll probably still be bouncing ideas (which I think they have quite a few already) off each other for a few months and seeing where it goes from there.
I’m guessing major development begins around mid-2025 and they work on that for next three or so years. Maybe a 2028/2029 release. Day one exclusive on next-gen Xbox, probably.
I think having one team that works on all the mainline games contributes to BGS games being what they are. I imagine it contributes to cohesion and knowledge transfer among the devs between games, which helps maintain consistency in output over time. In an age of AAA teams churning through devs with burnout and crunch, it seems like BGS keeps a team together that has multiple years of experience collaborating, and that’s a good thing.
Re: the teaser… imo, in the context of the time, people were going to believe TES had been entirely abandoned if they didn’t release that teaser. Since BGS had alternated TES and Fallout to that point, there was the expectation that TES 6 would be the next game after Fallout 4; but instead, in 2018, they announced, “Fallout 76 is next and Starfield after that, and we haven’t forgotten TES, it’s just 3rd in line.” If they’d only announced FO 76 and Starfield, TES fans would have blown up about the franchise being dead.
That’s long enough away to release Skyrim at least three more times.
Any game that’s been in development for so long is going to be a hot mess.
I didn’t even think it was in development. Weren’t they only working on Starfield?
Yeah, with how huge their games are, they might be “developing” multiple games at once, but it means they’re in the pipeline with some specific stuff handed out to people who don’t have projects for the main game they’re working on, not that they’re actually making multiple games at once. The games are too big for that.
Probably just doing story prep, basic theorycrafting on mechanics, etc. No real work is being done and much of the stuff they do work might get thrown out anyway
Last time Bethesda said anything about the Elder Scrolls 6 they said it was in preproduction. I doubt they’ll really start working on it until Starfield is out.
Meh, I don’t care, Skywind is all I’m waiting for. :D But who knows when this will be finished…
insert Matt Damon aging gif
Open world games have been shit lately but you can always rely on GTA and TES to really build a believable fun world to play in. Insanity that they can sit on this IP for so long knowing the market is dying for a solid open world RPG and knowing TES will sell no matter what.
Microsoft really has no idea how run game studios or they’re gearing up to take over the world.
the market is dying for a solid open world RPG
Whether they hit the mark is still TBD but starfield fits this definition; it’s not like they’ve been sitting on their hands.
I believe it, I think that panning shot of rocks and grass was probably all they had, made public just to confirm that they weren’t finished with the elder scroll series. Other projects took priority.
Bethesda has been an animated corpse for years and years now. Used to be a company I really liked but I stopped buying their stuff before Skyrim even.
And it’s not going to get any better with Microsoft at their helm now.
Are both of you living in an alternate reality or what are you on about?
I don’t like the massive changes in design philosophy, business practices, or respect for the audience that have taken place since Morrowind. It is no longer a brand that I deal with. And I haven’t paid for a Microsoft product since it was bundled with a white box PC in the mid 90s.
Oblivion has wonderfully creative quests and writing, Fallout 3 is a brilliant post-apocalyptic game that respects the player like few other open world titles, Skyrim oozes atmosphere and is an excellent example of careful world building. You’re missing out.
At this point I don’t even care. I’m sure I’ll still buy it when it comes out, but they’ve lost my enthusiasm with the milking dry of Skyrim instead of developing something new.
They developed Fallout 4, wasted time on 76, then developed Starfield. They can only actually make one game at a time, and the scale they build for takes 4-5 years for a game. I can understand thinking elder scrolls was going to be next before we knew Starfield was a thing, but once we did the best case was always going to be 4-5 years after that.
Agreed, Bethesda hasn’t been idle in the time since Skyrim came out. Granted their last few titles have been somewhat hit or miss but to say they’ve not been making anything new would not be accurate.
I didn’t love fallout 4, but it clearly had a lot of work put into it, and a lot of people really did like it. It wasn’t that far off from what I wanted it to be.
I do think 76 was a misstep, but I don’t think it was a metal gear survive level disaster of an idea. It’s not like nobody asked for co-op fallout, and a lot of games with similar core ideas around that time were pretty successful. It’s just not what I’m interested in and not something they have experience with, and they made some bad decisions.
Starfield is going back to what they do best, which is a single player game with a massive world and complexity from top to bottom. I’m extremely hopeful. Obviously until it releases, we don’t know, but that 45 minute direct looked damn good. I just wanted Skyrim/fallout with modern gunplay and in space, but “you can be a space pirate” means it might capture the need I’ve had since Assassin’s Creed Black Flag for the first time, too. It really does look truly expansive, though.
I also absolutely want Elder Scrolls 6, but this looks like there’s a good chance it will justify the wait.
It was such a huge relief when they revealed that the protagonist for Starfield would be unvoiced, and even more when they showed character backgrounds and traits in the gameplay demo last year.
We don’t have Starfield in our hands just yet, so ofc our hope could be misplaced, but based on the evidence so far, they understand what fans loved about Skyrim and earlier games and where Fallout 4 departed from that. For me, that departure was the main quest that railroaded you into a specific sort of character and the voiced protagonist limiting dialogue to “yes/sarcastic yes/yes, but I need more info/no.” Everything they’ve shown us about Starfield makes it look like we’ll be able to come up with very different characters for each of our playthroughs, and that’s exciting.
That’s not what I meant by not making anything new, I meant in the elder scrolls series. Instead of developing anything new in that line like the fans have been begging for, they just keep releasing Skyrim over and over and making release announcements for Skyrim, over and over like it’s something new.
But that’s the point. That’s what they’ve been doing instead of making another elder scrolls game. They’re not “elder scrolls studio”. They’re Bethesda. It’s only possible to do one game at their scope at a time and they take half a decade to make.
They can’t both give you another Elder Scrolls and make the other stuff they’re making.
You keep repeating that, I understand that they’ve been making other games, but they have 3 satellite studios and decided for the last 12 years to milk Skyrim completely fucking dry instead of giving us another elder scrolls game. My lack of enthusiasm has nothing to do with their other games, it’s just their shitty business practice of selling us Skyrim over and over again, remastered bullshit, trying to monetize mods and all the other garbage that they’ve done with Skyrim. This entire post was about elder scrolls, hence the discussion of elder scrolls and not their other games.
Because none of the shit you’re saying is meaningful in any way.
It’s literally impossible for them to make more than one game at a time, period.
How is it impossible? Plenty of studios will work on multiple projects. They can easily have multiple teams working on different projects under the same studio. To think that a company as large as Bethesda is only working on a single IP at any given time is idiotic.
Because their scope is bigger than anything else. If they did what you wanted and worked on all their IP at once, you’d hate it because it wouldn’t in any way resemble a Bethesda game. It takes their whole studio committed completely to it for half a decade for their games to exist.
They absolutely are only actively developing one game a time. They might have a handful of teams that don’t have a specific project for the game they’re actively developing doing rough broad strokes on the next project, but that next project absolutely isn’t being developed.
Plus they’ve had a very long time to grow their teams. Skyrim came out 12 years ago. We’re looking at over 15 years delay for a sequel to one of the best selling games of all time.
On the short term, you can’t grow very fast. Developers take a long time to onboard and while new ones are onboarding, senior devs will have to spend a bunch of time mentoring the new ones. But on the long run, you can certainly scale up considerably, especially with enough investment.
At this point I’d prefer if they just went Paradox on Skyrim and released a bazillion DLCs with real content, like Dawnguard or Dragonborn was.
I would be happier to play Skyrim level graphics than something that may never arrive.
I still think we’ll see TES6 around the same time we see Half-Life 3 and the next Game of Thrones book.
The Glder Scrolls VI
I mean yeah, the only reason people have to believe elder scrolls 6 is in development is that teaser from 2018, and honesty they probably only made that teaser to temper expectations.
As I recall Tod Howard went on an interview almost immediately after that trailer and outright said that any real development on the next Elder Scrolls wasn’t happening yet and wouldn’t be till Starfield was done. Now that Starfield is almost out the door I’m sure more resources will be shifting over towards ES6 soon but that means development is barely beginning. They did claim they put Starfield development on pause to build a feature they wanted to include in ES6 though so they likely have at least some basic concept work done on some level.
