The Elder Scrolls 6 is hotly anticipated—and has been for a full eight years following its announcement at E3 2018 and complete silence on it ever since. Instead, Bethesda worked very hard at trying to push Starfield which, for a studio that was once the pinnacle of open world RPG makers, just wasn’t quite up to snuff.
The setting was a little dull and boilerplate, the procedurally-generated planets didn’t have much on offer, it looked a touch dated, and so on. It was left out to dry at The Game Awards, was thrashed by reviews on Steam, and it had the misfortune of coming out in the same year as Baldur’s Gate 3, which is one of our highest-scoring games of all time.
According to Bethesda veteran Kurt Kuhlmann, most of the developers at the studio were surprised to be working on Starfield instead of The Elder Scrolls 6. And it’s not as though Kuhlmann was some small fry who wasn’t in the know: He joined the company in 1996, wrote the main questline of Oblivion, and was the co-lead designer on Skyrim before leaving the studio in 2023.
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Speaking with Frvr, Kuhlmann says that “we all expected [The Elder Scrolls 6] to be directly after Fallout 4. Why wouldn’t it be? That’s what we did, and that was kind of the expectation. And then Fallout 76 came along.”
Fallout 76 sidelined the studio for some time, as the project “wasn’t originally supposed to involve our whole studio. But then, I mean, 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.”
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He then describes Todd coming in with the Starfield-shaped steel chair: “Todd 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, who it should be noted left due to a “tough conversation” wherein he was refused a lead role on TES6, theorises that Todd Howard “had maybe the opportunity and the ability to go to the people running ZeniMax and say, ‘I want to not do TES 6′” after the successes of Fallout 4. “Which seems like a pretty hard sell, right? And it must have been.”
Kuhlmann, understandably, “would’ve much rather have been making TES 6 instead of [Fallout] 76 and Starfield, personally. And I think that would probably be true for the majority of the studio. That’s what most people wanted to do, you know?
“It wasn’t like Starfield was this big internal like, ‘Hey, we all want to make this space game, Todd.’ It was very much, ‘Guess what, team? We’re making this space game.'”
This picture of Howard as an accidental force of nature in the studio does track with other accounts from former Bethesda employees, including character artist Dennis Mejillones, who said—while comparing him to George Lucas—that “a lot of people were afraid to say no to Todd, and I think that hurt him.”