While Bethesda has likely been hard at work on The Elder Scrolls 6 after having shipped Starfield back in 2023 and Shattered Space DLC in 2024, according to a former animator for the studio, Jeremy Bryant, the studio will likely not expand to work on the highly-anticipated RPG.
In an interview with Kiwi Talkz, Bryant spoke about Bethesda’s system of acquiring smaller studios wholesale for more efficient game development rather than rapidly hiring a large amount of its own developers. For context, Bryant has previously worked on major Bethesda titles, including The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Starfield.
“Todd [Howard] has the vision for the game that he wants to make and he knows he needs X number of people to do it,” said Bryant (transcription via GamesRadar). “When you road map out what you’re going to do you can see if you need more devs, and it was obvious that we did. Probably the only way, really, to grow that fast is to kind of wholesale absorb, you can’t hire that fast I don’t think. It would be hard to hire onesies twosies and get up to the scale you needed.”
When Bryant was asked if Bethesda would then scale up its headcount for the development for The Elder Scrolls 6, he responded, “I wouldn’t think so.” Bryant goes on to compare Bethesda’s process with that of Rockstar Games, which has traditionally hired several developers across various teams from animation to programming in order to ship its games.
“[Rockstar] are such masters,” he said. “Their games are so polished. You always wonder, ‘how do they do it?’ GTA 6 yeah it’s taken like 10 years, I get it, but I went and looked at the credits for Red Dead and they had like 500 animators. There was like 80, 85 just gameplay animators and another 80 cinematic ones and another 100 face ones. Those team sizes, it’s bonkers. I think the overall dev size they said was around 1,600 I think on Red Dead 2.”
“They conceivably have 3,000 people maybe working on GTA 6,” he continued. “How do all those people communicate and form any kind of bond at work when it’s just a random thousand people sitting shoulder to shoulder like on an assembly line? I don’t know, that doesn’t sound all that great to me. It sounds terrible.”
Bethesda had announced The Elder Scrolls 6 all the way back in 2018. The game was announced with a short teaser trailer that, while not giving us any hints about its setting or gameplay, worked to confirm to the larger audience that yes, the studio will be working on the next game in the franchise at some point.
Bethesda exec Pete Hines has referred to the project as a big and ambitious game in the past. He has stated that the title is still quite some time away. More recently, in 2023, current Microsoft Gaming head Phil Spencer said that The Elder Scrolls 6 was still more than 5 years off from release.
