While plenty of developers at Bethesda might be worried about the need to crunch for the development of The Elder Scrolls 6, the studio itself has said that its roadmap for making the game hasn’t been affected by recent Xbox-wide layoffs. In a statement to YouTuber MrMattyPlays, the company said: “No, the roadmap is unaffected.”
It is worth noting that the layoffs across Bethesda as a whole, which includes teams from ZeniMax Online Studios and Bethesda Game Studios, have been quite extensive, with the former losing 213 of its employees. As for the latter, in an official statement, the company has said that its “primary development focus” is the long-awaited The Elder Scrolls 6.
“With over 65 million copies sold, players are still exploring Skyrim 15 years later, but we know it’s been a very long wait for the sequel. We’re where we planned to be, loving how it looks, and playing it every day.”
Previous reports have indicated Bethesda Game Studios has lost more than 50 of its employees due to the layoffs, which included “key, high-performing people in the trenches” across “a mix of every discipline: programmers, artists, and designers” that were working on the open-world RPG. “Their loss will have a substantial and cascading effect on the game and morale of this studio,” said one employee.
While these current and former Bethesda employees aren’t quite sure how the studio will continue developing the game going forward, one has expressed worries about being “replaced by cheaper contracted labor.” Some also believe that Bethesda might “hire folks to replace them that will need to be onboarded (our tools are proprietary, other devs aren’t going to know how they work), resulting in more delays, and we’ll need to crunch to make up the time.”
Bethesda, for its part, has been generally quiet about the release window for The Elder Scrolls 6. In a recent Q&A session, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier has posited that it might still be at least two years away. Even director Todd Howard hasn’t revealed much, simply saying that it’s “our biggest project right now” and that the team knows “we need to get it right, and it’s been a long time.”
The closest idea we’ve gotten about the state of The Elder Scrolls 6’s development has been a statement by Xbox CCO Matt Booty from back in June, when he said that it was “coming along well.” He went on to say that the team wants to “wait till the right moment” before it reveals more details.
“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.”
For more on The Elder Scrolls 6, take a look at our thoughts about how troubled it seems.
