The decision to delay The Elder Scrolls 6 to make room for Starfield and, somewhat distantly, Fallout 76 came as a surprise to many at Bethesda, according to former Skyrim co-lead Kurt Kuhlmann.
Chatting with FRVR, Kuhlmann recalls the comfortable rhythm that Bethesda had established in its production: Fallout, then Elder Scrolls, then back to Fallout. Switching series and genres like this gave the team a welcome change of pace, Kulhmann says, so after the release of Fallout 4, “we all expected” The Elder Scrolls 6 would be next.
Instead, Fallout 76, which was not “supposed to involve our whole studio,” became a much bigger project that extended the latest Fallout phase of the cycle. But more impactfully, Starfield happened.
“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,” Kulhmanns says. “And then Todd [Howard] 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 reckons Fallout 4’s success gave Howard the leeway to successfully pitch an offbeat game like Starfield to the higher ups at Bethesda and Zenimax (just don’t ask how Fallout 76, another experiment, launched). “I would’ve much rather have been making TES 6 instead of 76 and Starfield, personally,” he reiterates, “and I think that would probably be true for the majority of the studio.”
But Starfield did indeed happen, and it took many years to come together. In 2023, Howard said “I thought we would find the answers faster” after it took seven years just for Starfield to reach a state that it could be called fun to play.
“It wasn’t like Starfield was this big internal like, ‘Hey, we all want to make this space game, Todd,'” Kuhlmann says. “It was very much, ‘Guess what, team? We’re making this space game.'”
Today, eight years since its announcement, The Elder Scrolls 6 still doesn’t have a release date or window. New Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is reportedly pushing Bethesda for faster releases, and said just last month that a “live playthrough” of The Elder Scrolls 6 showed “incredible” scale.
As part of its big Fallout 5 and The Elder Scrolls 6 information drop, Bethesda said Starfield has reached 17 million players. Those players can also look forward to Year 3 of post-launch support, with Bethesda eying more Starborn content, gameplay improvements, and additional story quests.