“There is an old adage in software development about the process having three corners: resources, time, and quality,” Nesmith explained. “The studio decides two of them, which determines the third. If you lock down the resources and the schedule, that decides the quality you will achieve. If you lock down the quality and the schedule, that determines the resources you will need to complete the project.”

“A less well-known aspect of this is a rule of diminishing returns. The three corners need to be roughly balanced. You can’t ask the project to be done in a month by throwing a million people on it. Over-committing to any one of the corners increases friction and becomes less effective. Allowing ten years for a project creates a cycle of endless reinvention and ultimate failure.”

To reduce development times would mean “either increasing resources or reducing features, or both,” explained Nesmith, who went on to say that “resources in most big studios are already quite large, and it takes time to onboard them.” However, while shorter development times may have benefits, such as more frequent releases, they can lead to lower-quality sequels, resulting in fan disappointment.

“In my opinion, the biggest risks of shortened schedules are quality, reduced features, polish, or bugs,” he said. “The things that are done last end up getting set aside to complete the game on time. And of course, faster dev times would result in faster sequels. But that’s the wrong question. Those sequels risk disappointing fans.”

As for whether Bethesda could potentially mitigate these issues by getting other studios involved in the development of The Elder Scrolls 6 or Fallout 5, Nesmith didn’t want to make any blanket statement on the matter, since he doesn’t work at the company anymore. He did, however, note that “you can’t just hand it to anyone. I also think that it serves a franchise well to let the ground fallow for a while. A franchise that releases too many titles too quickly risks fan fatigue. Of course, too much time between releases can also be a problem.”

Ultimately, Nesmith believes that “the industry has painted itself into a bit of a corner” due to its emphasis on expanding on its games with bigger sequels rather than refining what it already has. “Each new release has to be bigger, better, and more,” he says. “Which requires more time, resources, and features. Publishers demand it. The fans demand it. But bigger isn’t linearly harder to make. It’s geometrically harder. To put it more simply, you get diminishing returns by adding staff and time. Twenty percent more staff or time gets you less than a twenty percent improvement.”

In the meantime, Bethesda employees who aren’t currently working on The Elder Scrolls or Fallout are rumored to be at risk of impending layoffs at Xbox.

While he didn’t go into too many details, he referred to it as “our biggest project right now” and has confirmed that it’s what “the majority of the studio” is working on. He went on to say, “We know we need to get it right, and it’s been a long time.”

The fact that most of Bethesda is currently working on The Elder Scrolls 6 should come as no surprise, since Howard had already spoken about this back in March.

“The majority of this building is working on The Elder Scrolls 6,” he said. “It’s amazing for us to come back to it. I gotta be honest, right? Being in that world after not developing in Elder Scrolls – it’s so different than Starfield, so different than Fallout – it feels great for us.”

At the time, he also discussed how Bethesda uses The Elder Scrolls and Fallout games as follow-ups to each other with regard to the engine improvements each title tends to bring with it.

“We feel we’re in a really good place with these franchises,” he explained. “Obviously, we’re around Fallout stuff as well, and we feel good about that. The trick is still we have three big audiences, and in some ways, three big franchises – and in a lot of ways, the franchise is the studio. Skyrim is somewhat the sequel to Fallout 3. Fallout 4 is somewhat our follow-up to Skyrim.”

Aside from Howard’s general silence on the subject, earlier this month, Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty was asked a similar question. He noted that the title is “coming along well,” and that it will be showcased “at the right time.”

“I would say one of the more challenging balancing acts of someone in a job like mine is balancing that you want to go show the world all the cool stuff you’re working on, and you want to get them excited early, but we also know that we want to wait till the right moment,” he said.

And when you decide to show it, you want it to be the best you’ve got. And also, that when you show the game, you’re also giving them a promise of, hey, it’s coming soon. So, I can tell you, having visited Bethesda and sat with Todd and seen ‘Elder Scrolls’ playing, it looks amazing, and it’s coming along well. And we’ll make sure to announce it and really reveal it at the right time.”

Howard had previously confirmed that The Elder Scrolls 6 is being developed with Creation Engine 3 – Bethesda’s in-house game engine that it has iterated upon for more than a decade. The last iteration of the game engine – Creation Engine 2 – was seen in Starfield. The director had noted that the studio had spent “the last several years” on continuing the engine’s development to make sure that it could handle the needs of The Elder Scrolls 6.

When asked how Bethesda could potentially freshen the Fallout series up by changing its formula, Carter said that it might just be time for the company to sell the IP to another developer. “With the greatest respect to Bethesda, I feel like they’ve probably gone one game too far, if I’m honest,” he said.

“I feel like it’s time to go off into the sunset and look at selling off your IP because people like the franchise, I’m just honestly not sure it’s in the right hands, and it really hurts me to say that because I love Bethesda.”

Chief among his complaints about Bethesda’s run at the Fallout franchise has been the downward trend of the quality of its writing. He similarly also brings up The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, noting that he doesn’t think it’s the “best game of all time like some people,” and that instead “it’s a very, very good game.”

“I reckon if they could inject in the quality of some good writers, then the next Elder Scrolls game will be great and the next Fallout game will be great but they need better writers, honestly,” said Carter. “Everything has its own pros and cons but the one thing we agreed on with Fallout: London is that we wanted to make it more dark and gritty because that’s what Fallout actually is, and I think Bethesda are taking it in the opposite direction.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Carter also spoke about the Fallout franchise revisiting the settings and atmosphere of the original Fallout. Noting that, while he enjoyed Fallout 4, he prefers the approach that the 1997 classic took to its setting and tone to the more slapstick style that Bethesda has taken since Fallout 4.

“I would love to see the Fallout 1 setting again. I think it would be great because that’s where it all started and to really go back to it would be something,” he said. “I actually like the Fallout TV show. I know a lot of people were saying that the second season isn’t so good or whatever but I feel it’s definitely got a Fallout 4 vibe to it, which is fine.”

“I like Fallout 4 but I would like more of a Fallout 1 vibe and I feel like if you want a Fallout 1 vibe in terms of a show, you should probably watch Silo. I think Silo is a good shout for that. It’s a bit darker and grim,” Carter continued, bringing up comparisons between Prime Video’s adaptation and Apple TV+’s Silo.

“I prefer Fallout to have that sort of tone rather than going all slapstick. It’s a bit more humorous but the humour in the first series was dark humour. The slapstick stuff needs to stop because that’s not what Fallout is.”

This is the second update for Starfield that will be bringing with it important PC-related features. Back in October, an update brought with it the ability for players to adjust their field of view in the game thanks to an FoV slider. The update also brought with it performance and stability improvements.

Despite these problems, Starfield has been quite successful for Bethesda. According to Microsoft’s Q1 2024 earnings, over 11 million players had played Starfield. CEO Satya Nadella also noted that nearly half of the hours spent playing Starfield were on PC.

Starfield is out on PC and Xbox Series X/S. For more details, check out our review.

We've been hard at work on @StarfieldGame updates and will be putting our next one into Steam Beta next week.

This update will feature Nvidia DLSS support with frame generation, display and HDR controls for supported systems, and other optimizations and improvements. You'll be…

— Bethesda Game Studios (@BethesdaStudios) November 1, 2023

Much has been said about Fallout 76’s online-centric nature, but Bethesda has also iterated on multiple occasions that though this is a game with multiplayer focused title, you can still enjoy the experience while playing completely by yourself. While speaking with Engadget, Fallout 76 design director Emil Pagliarulo recently gave a bit more info on how those two aspects of the game will work with each other.

The phrase he used to describe the experience was “solo, but together”, talking about how the stories and scripted quests in the game, including the main quest involving the Overseer, are all “individual” to each player.

“The stories and quests are individual to each person playing the game, and that includes the main quest – following the Overseer’s journey as she ventures out into Appalachia to secure the missile silos,” said Pagliarulo. “So when you’re in a team, the goal is to help each other in any way you can. ‘Solo but together’ might be a good way to look at. If you play the game with the same group from the beginning, you’ll be experiencing these stories at relatively the same time. Events are an exception -they can be solo’d, but are intended to be done as a group – and that includes your own team.”

However, Pagliarulo also mentioned that in spite of this, the game is definitely harder if you play it solo, citing some end game activities specifically being more suited to co-op play.

“That said, certain things are easier if you work in a group,” Pagliarulo said. “Definitely. Especially the end-game content, where you’re trying to collect and decipher nuclear codes. So we encourage joining up, but we don’t require it. What I’ve generally found is that even if you’re solo’ing the game, the fact that there are other players in the world with you means you always have help within arm’s reach if you need it. For example, recently I was solo’ing a pretty early event that has you killing waves of Scorched. It was difficult, but I was doing it. But I was expending a lot of ammo and Stimpaks in the process. Out of nowhere, another designer who was playing wandered into the event and started helping me out. It was a huge relief. So those moments are common, a little assist when you need it the most.”

Fallout 76 launches on November 14 for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC, with its beta kicking off later this month. Recently, we got to see a solid 2 hours of gameplay from the game. You can take a look through here.

At E3 2018, Bethesda announced The Elder Scrolls 6 with little more than a short teaser and a title card that didn’t tell us much (though we can always speculate) about what the game is going to be about. However, based on the little that we saw, we’ve been able to piece together that the game might possibly be set in Hammerfell.

New evidence has emerged, courtesy of Reddit user kaylenivy, that seems to strengthen that possible theory even further. They’ve uploaded four images, two from the trailer, and two from The Elder Scrolls Online, that, when viewed next to each other, seem to suggest that the locations depicted in the Elder Scrolls 6 teaser are from Hammerfell indeed.

For instance, an image of Sentinel City, as shown in The Elder Scrolls Online, does seem to bear resemblance to a coastal city that was shown in the trailer (especially when zoomed in and viewed up close), while a map showing the location of Volenfall in the Alik’r Desert in The Elder Scrolls Online, is strikingly close in location to a similar looking fort that was seen in the teaser as well.

It’s looking more and more likely each day that Hammerfell is indeed going to be the setting for The Elder Scrolls 6. Of course, Bethesda themselves have confirmed no such thing, but there is certainly enough evidence to hint at that. We probably won’t know for a while though, since The Elder Scrolls 6 is many, many years away. Fans are going to have to be patient to learn more about the game, even if Bethesda themselves have already decided on what the setting is going to be.