When Skyrim launched in 2011, nobody expected the wait for a sequel to be this long. Surely, Bethesda would capitalize on the series’ newfound success as soon as possible? A little Fallout 4 detour in 2015, sure, but then the pendulum would swing right back to The Elder Scrolls. That’s not how it worked out.
In 2018, Bethesda announced Starfield as its next game, a brand-new space-faring RPG. Sure, we got a teaser trailer for The Elder Scrolls 6 to tide fans over, but you can only bleed so much out of a nondescript mountain range for eight years. What’s interesting, however, is that this change in direction wasn’t just a surprise for fans; even the studio was shocked.
“We all expected it to be directly after Fallout 4,” Skyrim co-lead and former loremaster Kurt Kuhlmann said on the FRVR Podcast. “Why wouldn’t it be? That’s what we did, and that was kind of the expectation. And then Fallout 76 came along.”
Kuhlmann explained that Fallout 76 was supposed to be handled entirely by BattleCry Studios, now Bethesda Austin, but that the project ended up pulling Starfield devs away from early production.
“It wasn’t originally supposed to...
