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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.
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.
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.
