Xbox is undergoing another major overhaul. As a new round of layoffs begin at studios like Compulsion Games, Microsoft’s gaming division is reportedly aiming to double down on its flagship IP with faster, safer sequels.
Alongside the continued development of Halo, Gears of War, and Forza, Xbox is reportedly looking to ramp up development of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout titles. Aiming for a faster release structure, this would mean that fans get more of Bethesda’s killer RPGs faster, but how realistic is this?
At the time of writing, the majority of Bethesda Game Studios is working on The Elder Scrolls 6 while a small team works on continued Starfield support. Bethesda’s Austin team is working on years of additional Fallout 76 content. The Elder Scrolls 6 recently passed a major milestone, and remasters of Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas are reportedly in the works.
As Xbox reportedly looks to increase the speed of production for Elder Scrolls and Fallout, we talked to Bethesda veteran and Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith about the potential change. Nesmith, who worked on Daggerfall, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield believes that faster sequels “risk fan fatigue”. The designer, who left at the tail-end of Starfield’s development to write fantasy series Loki Redeemed and LitRPG series Glory Seeker, believes faster sequels could also risk disappointing fans more than longer development times would.
Nesmith explains that, in the past, “three years felt like the right amount of time to meet fan expectations”. However, the Skyrim designer explains that “this is a moving target” as “what is the expected level of quality last year is not the expected level of quality this year”.
“There is an old adage in software development about the process having three corners, resources, time, and quality (which includes both features and polish),” Nesmith tells us. “The studio decides two of them, which determines the third. If you lock down the resources (staff, equipment, etc.) and the schedule, that decides the quality you will achieve (number of features and polish). If you lock down the quality and the schedule, that determines the resources you will need to complete the project. You can’t dictate all three, only two. 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.”
Nesmith explains that shorter dev times means “either increasing resources or reducing features, or both”, but “resources in most big studios are already quite large, and it takes time to on board them”. The Bethesda veteran didn’t speak to the scale of BGS, but it’s well known that the studio is much, much larger now than it was during the development of Fallout 4. Resources are already quite large, and speeding up development risks introducing issues that players are no longer willing to accept.
“In my opinion, the biggest risks of shortened schedules is quality, reduced features, polish, or bugs,” Nesmith says. “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.”
Starfield’s development saw the longest bug-fixing process of Bethesda history largely due to the shift in gamer perception towards bugs since the release of Skyrim. This adds development time, and games as complex as large-scale open-world RPGs with massive simulations will have more bugs to fix than any other type of game.
The obvious answer to many, then, would be to create Fallout or Elder Scrolls spin-off games at different studios. Bethesda has already done this with Fallout New Vegas, a title that was developed in just 18 months by Obsidian Entertainment with heavy asset reuse. While Fallout has been handed off before, a mainline Elder Scrolls game has never been created outside of Bethesda Game Studios, and it would be a major surprise for another studio to have a crack at the iconic fantasy RPG.
“Every situation is different,” Nesmith says. “Not every studio has the option to delegate a franchise release to a quality partner. I would be reluctant to make a blanket statement. If the right studio is available, it’s a great solution. But you can’t just hand it to anyone. I also think that it serves a franchise well to let the ground lie 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.”
There’s also the reality of asset reuse. Starfield has been criticised for its reuse of certain Fallout animations, fans have criticised the use of updated game engines instead of new tools. Even outside of Bethesda, Xbox’s upcoming Halo: Campaign Evolved has been criticised for kit-bashing Halo Infinite assets that were made only a few years ago. The reality is that asset reuse is already prevalent and necessary for faster dev times, but there has been a heavy backlash to it in recent years.
“In my opinion, the fan base has a limited tolerance for heavy asset reuse,” Nesmith says. “If the new game has a rich set of new features and provides an exciting new experience, it will be forgiven. But otherwise you risk get[ting] complaints that it feels old and tired.”
Nesmith concludes that “the industry has painted itself into a bit of a corner” as it focuses on expansion rather than refinement. “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.”
There’s already a lot of Elder Scrolls and Fallout in the pipeline, and Bethesda’s slew of releases has only really slowed down for one release: Starfield. The game’s eight-year development was unusual for the studio, and hindered by a rapid increase in staff, a company acquisition, and the worldwide COVID pandemic where 500 developers had to learn to work from home in an industry that rarely allowed that.
The reality, then, is that Elder Scrolls and Fallout are largely being made to capacity. These are huge games and, outside of Starfield, Bethesda has continued development at a fast clip. While fans have been waiting for a new single-player Elder Scrolls since 2011, Bethesda has largely not been working much slower than usual, and Fallout fans are likely next on the list for a new mainline entry after Elder Scrolls 6 wraps development.
Perhaps a faster rate of releases means more asset reuse, perhaps it means less post-launch expansions and less updates. If Xbox wants faster releases and more releases, something has to give, and it’s important to remember that the current wait in releases is an outlier to Bethesda’s output, not the norm.
