Former lead artist at Bethesda—Nate Purkeypile—has expressed a belief that the studio is currently in a “no-win situation” when it comes to upcoming projects like The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5. In an interview with Esports Insider, he noted that this situation arises from the expectations of quality that were set with titles like The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim and Bethesda’s run with the Fallout franchise. While Fallout 4 itself was considered by fans of the franchise to be a disappointment, Skyrim still managed to hang on to a strong perception of quality.
When asked about this “no-win” situation for the studio, Purkeypile said: “Yes, and that definitely factored into me leaving because Skyrim being one of the top 10 games of all-time, how do you beat that?” He went on to acknowledge that Bethesda has the potential to beat expectations with its future games. However, he did note that just simply meeting expectations wouldn’t be enough for the developer.
“If they do, great! And I hope it’s a great game, but even if it’s just as good as Skyrim was, you’ll still get so many people throwing out hateful comments. I’m sure there will be more death threats again. All of that stuff. It’s really unfortunate that that’s the way things have gone,” he said.
Further discussing The Elder Scrolls 6, Purkeypile was also asked his thoughts on where the next entry of the open-world RPG franchise should take place among its fictional world of Tamriel. He said that we would likely end up seeing an entirely new location, but that the scope of the game would likely revolve around a singular region of Tamriel. Comparing it to the much larger scale of sci-fi RPG Starfield, he noted that games can often benefit from being a bit more constrained.
“I probably shouldn’t guess on that, other than not one of the regions that they’ve already done recently. Outside of Daggerfall. That doesn’t count,” he said. “My hope would be that they would just pick one region of Tamriel because that’s part of why I was not super into Starfield. It was the scope above all else.”
“I think there is something to be said for going a bit more constrained. I always thought that was a weird goal anyway. No one before was saying I wish there were more of a Bethesda game! It’s like, dude, people are playing that like a decade plus later. Do you really need it to be bigger? You can always dig deeper and deeper within that space because it’s already so big.”
In the same interview, Purkeypile also revealed that The Elder Scrolls 6 was announced incredibly early just to make sure that fans of the studio weren’t angry at it for not having done anything with the franchise since Skyrim.
“My assumption was always that we were announcing Starfield, and it had been so long already since Skyrim that we needed to make sure people were not just pissed at us. It’s a very expensive way to do that, though. Those trailers are not cheap,” said Purkeypile when asked about The Elder Scrolls 6‘s announcement.
