Bethesda has rumbled back to life. Nearly three years after Starfield and with The Elder Scrolls 6 nowhere in sight, the positive reception to the announcement of the Fallout 3 and New Vegas remasters is hardly surprising. With the help of Obsidian, between 2008 and 2011 Bethesda cemented itself as the rightful king of the open-world RPG, Fallout 3 and Skyrim bookending the kind of development run we'll probably never see again.

A long-awaited return to the Capitol and Mojave Wastelands is welcome, but while these remasters aren't quite too little, too late, they serve as a reminder of just how neglected one of the biggest and best RPG series has become.

This November will mark 11 years since Fallout 4, with Fallout 76's eighth anniversary falling just a couple of weeks before. And until last week, there was nothing to suggest another game was anywhere close to the horizon – based on Bethesda's previous release cadence, 2033 was a solid guess for a potential Fallout 5 release year. That's not far short of two full decades since the series' last traditional, single-player RPG launch – an unforgivable drought for a series that has over the past few years, been transformed into a mainstream, global franchise thanks to the critically-acclaimed Amazon Prime series.

In the last week, admittedly, the Fallout slate has filled up significantly. First up will be next year's "prequel story to Fallout 3" heading to Fallout 76. The Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas remasters seem likely to follow relatively soon after, potentially positioned around Fallout season 3 and the Fallout Shelter show. Fallout 5 is officially in pre-production, but could easily follow as many as five years after Elder Scrolls 6, which still feels a long way off. Obsidian's new Fallout project seems likely to plug that inter-franchise gap – perhaps some time in 2029 or the early 2030s.

Kick in the head

It's that last project that's currently most mysterious, but also the clearest indication of what Fallout and Xbox actually need: help from the wider ecosystem. Xbox and Zenimax are full of studios that could have, over the six years since the acquisition, been running wild in the franchise playgrounds that are currently open only to Bethesda. Clearly, the kind of AAA, open-world RPG that Todd Howard wants to make takes many years to complete, but I see no reason why no other studio has been allowed to do more than sniff in the direction of the Fallout and TES brands.

The possibilities are huge; a stealthy, Dark Brotherhood immersive sim made by Arkane Austin instead of shuttering it after Redfall; a Ghoul-led game using the State of Decay tech from Undead Labs, which just got sold off; an Age of Empires conversion from World's Edge, which has been diligently plugging away on DLC and remasters for that franchise. Xbox's affinity for beefy guys with guns across the Gears, Doom, and Halo series could have led to an amazing power armor shooter. There are certainly studios whose work doesn't mesh with Bethesda's oeuvre so neatly, but within the Xbox ecosystem, they're surprisingly few and far between. And all that is to say nothing of Obsidian, a studio that not only made one of the best Fallout games, but eventually took its fate into its own hands and made Avowed and The Outer Worlds as its own answers to The Elder Scrolls and Fallout.

That none of those studios have been given a Bethesda license is a mistake, but it's a mistake compounded by the fact that Bethesda isn't equipped to handle them at the pace that should be required. Its two most important IPs have been left to languish for more than a decade. Starfield is a primary cause for that, but so is Bethesda's size. The studio has remained deliberately small by the standards of a major studio, and at about 450 staff isn't capable of being a two-game studio, especially since switching between three different franchises means it can't pull off the kind of juggling act that the similarly-sized Insomniac - which has launched a whole suite of Marvel games over the time since Fallout 76 – has been able to achieve.

A hit of Jet

It's likely that the Fallout release cadence will pick up now. The remasters are the start of that process, and the Obsidian game and Fallout 76 expansion will help. But while Xbox's recent deluge of lay-offs have hit hard, the fact still stands that the publisher is sitting pretty on some of the industry's highest profile RPG brands and what remains of the studios that created them. With only the likes of CD Projekt Red as major competition, the question is whether new Xbox chief Asha Sharma will be able to do what predecessor Phil Spencer couldn't, even as the company haemorrhages staff. If CDPR is able to push out three major RPGs in quick succession, could the much larger Xbox be in a position to follow suit instead of squandering the opportunity? Or, is such a massive entity prone to slow manoeuvring, like trying to turn a Brotherhood of Steel zeppelin?

But, whether or not that all comes to pass, it doesn't change the fact that as a gaming series Fallout has been left behind by its creators for far too long, and no number of remasters will help speed up the ongoing wait for its next major iteration, especially as the years tick on.

The Elder Scrolls Online is struggling with "team bandwidth" after Xbox layoffs hit Bethesda and ZeniMax, leading devs to limit a store for in-game items.

Tim Cain knows better than nearly anyone that the earliest computer RPGs – like Fallout, which he helped create – had a huge advantage over their feeble brethren on consoles, which were afflicted with hardware limitations for at least two decades. After that, we were living in a post-Morrowind society.

"In the '80s, console RPGs were incredibly primitive. I'm talking, stone knives and bear skins," Cain says on his YouTube channel in response to a fan question wondering about how consoles changed the RPG market over time. "I mean, tabletop RPGs were really the way to go if you wanted really in-depth rules, but even computer RPGs had more complex rules than console RPGs, because everything from the graphics, to the system mechanics, and sound effects all had to be really, really simplified and reduced to fit in that very limited memory storage that it had, and CPU bandwidth."

"To me, console RPGs were kind of like toys that you could kind of play," Cain continues. Their controllers demanded select screens rather than the point-and-drag you could accomplish on PC, and checkpoint saves were a necessity for preserving their limited storage. But "all of this changed in 2002," when Bethesda launched The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.

"Morrowind came out on the Xbox. It was an open-world Western RPG that felt like it had none of the limitations of previous console games," says Cain. "It was a PC game playing on an Xbox."

"It stunned me when it came out, because I remember thinking, 'This…this is it,'" he adds. "Not so much because of what the game was, but what it represented, which was – from now on, there's going to be a lot more parity between these two things.

GamesRadar+'s Morrowind review apparently published in 2006 frothily declares "a new standard in role-playing games. [Morrowind is] astonishing in its depth and detail, and also sets a new benchmark in graphics."

Morrowind was an in-depth spectacle – and not easily replicated. Cain thinks that buggy launches became more common for console games by at least the mid-2000s, once the Xbox 360 and PS3 had established digital storefronts where people could directly buy and download their games, which "meant it was also easy to patch them."

"Maybe this was a coincidence, maybe it wasn't," Cain says generously, "but, suddenly, console games seemed to ship with bugs in a way they had never shipped with bugs before. They weren't as tight. Then, by the 2010s and 2020s, it felt like parity had been established and reached between PCs and consoles." With both of them covered in bugs, PC and console had reached equality at last.

"Unconscionable": The day of Bethesda's Fallout reveal explosion, its laid-off Montreal devs were told they "would receive the smallest severance legally possible" and "immediately" lose health insurance benefits, union says.

On July 17, Xbox-owned Bethesda announced a whole bunch of stuff about the future of Fallout and, more distantly, The Elder Scrolls and Starfield. That same day, studio union OneBGS says devs hit by recent layoffs at Bethesda's Montreal branch were told that their severance pay would be as low as legally possible despite the billions in profit recorded by parent Microsoft and investment in the IP they helped build.

In a post on Bluesky, OneBGS - Bethesda Game Studios Union claims, "Montreal workers are being treated especially poorly by XBOX and we won’t stand for it."

The union says that, when the layoffs were announced on July 6, employees "across the US and Canada were told via video call" that they would "remain employed until September while the company negotiated severance with our union."

The union says the "breathing room" these terms provided evaporated on July 17. Behind the Fallout info explosion, the union says Xbox "told their laid-off Bethesda Montreal employees that they would receive the smallest severance legally possible without bargaining with the union."

This news reportedly came via "termination letters" delivered via email. The union says this left affected employees with "the bare legal minimum in terms of severance: eight weeks of pay in lieu of the minimum legal notice, any outstanding vacation pay, etc."

Additionally, the union says impacted staff "were to also immediately lose their group benefits health insurance."

In response, the union has filed "yet another legal complaint against Bethesda," alleging it continues to "violate labor laws in Canada."

"Bethesda and XBOX leadership depend on our labour to make them millions, and yet when we do, we are disposed of," the union concludes. "The cycle of workers paying for the mistakes of management ends here."

This news was shared on Bluesky by Bethesda lead character artist Ben Carnow, who adds, "Microsoft did not negotiate with the Union over layoffs in Montreal as they are legally required to do. Folks lost their healthcare with zero notice. Unconscionable."

The union's post also links to feedback listed under Xbox's new "Player Voice" forum. The post collectively calls out the thousands of Xbox staff and developers that Microsoft has laid off in just a few years, demands executive penalties and accountability (like "no executive bonuses when there is a layoff"), asks for an end to layoffs, and requests "transparency for players."

The United Videogame Workers CWA union, an industry-wide organization, previously argued that the Fallout 5 and Elder Scrolls 6 news was meant to distract from the blows dealt to Bethesda employees in the background.

"The timing of this kind of press is intentional," the UVW-CWA said. "How are they going to make these games when Bethesda and Obsidian collectively laid off hundreds? Don’t fall for it."

Amid the rubble of the layoffs across Xbox, which included numerous positions at Bethesda and ZeniMax, the remaining developers on The Elder Scrolls Online are starting to struggle. The MMO is one of numerous projects impacted by Microsoft's restructuring of its games division, with only a fraction of the staff attached now as opposed to prior.

To mitigate their own workload, devs on The Elder Scrolls Online are making changes to what features are available to players. As of today, July 22, that includes in-game purchases, since the ability to do so through the official site has been removed.

"To help manage workload, we have decided to remove the Web Crown Store from the official elderscrollsonline.com website," reads a message from Kevin Gbolie, community manager on ESO, on the official forum.

"The ability to acquire crowns via the website will remain," he says, "and, of course, this does not affect the items that will be offered on the Crown Store in The Elder Scrolls Online, you will just need to login into the game to view and purchase the latest offerings."

It's noted that the blog for showing off what's in the Crown Store will change as well, due to "team bandwidth." In response to comments on these changes, Gbolie mentions that while the new version of the blog is still being sorted out, it'll definitely come with a bullet list of new items.

This is unfortunate because the high-res screenshots accompanying the items were used by the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages, and Gbolie even mentions the team is aware of that symbiosis. But alas, the time and energy just aren't there any more.

"The team responsible for the blog and those screenshots doesn't have the capacity to provide those at the scale we could before," he writes in another post. "But we will provide what we can for now and adjust from there."

It is a sad time for Bethesda, ZeniMax, this game, and the legacy behind it. These devs deserve better, but at least the game is still going – for now.

Bethesda reportedly canceled an unannounced PvP shooter, likely from Wolfenstein dev MachineGames.

A former Bethesda employee has revealed that the publisher was working on an unannounced PVP shooter which was eventually canceled.

The employee, who was included in Xbox's latest wave of layoffs that hit the publisher, included details about his 12-year tenure at Bethesda on his LinkedIn profile (via Twitter user Timur222), which included a detail from his role as an associate producer that reads: "Supported production on an unannounced PvP FPS title (subsequently canceled), contributing to scheduling and cross-team coordination."

However, that's pretty much all there is in terms of info for this title. Keep in mind the dev worked at Bethesda Softworks, not Bethesda Game Studios – the studio developing Elder Scrolls and Fallout titles – so there's a ton of possibilities.

One throughline in the resume is working with Machine Games on Wolfenstein games, and while the studio most recently released Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, there was a rumored FPS title in the works. In a Bethesda roadmap leaked in 2023, there was a title called "Project Platinum," which Giant Bomb founder Jeff Gerstmann identified as a Machine Games title in the vein of Rainbow Six Siege or Counter-Strike.

Over a year ago, Timur222 also spotted a "Canceled unannounced project" on the LinkedIn page of another MachineGames employee, giving the idea that this was Project Platinum a little more evidence, given it fits within the 2021 - 2025 timeframe.

Earlier this year, rumors emerged that MachineGames had begun work on Wolfenstein 3, after eight years and two spinoffs since Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus' ending, which felt like it was the beginning of something big (I mean, you gotta kill Mecha Hitler, right?).

Since the layoffs, word has emerged that Bethesda is set to focus on its "strongest franchises," which includes Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein. And while wanting to focus on Doom and Quake while destroying the studio behind them is certainly a move, the news does suggest that Wolfenstein 3 is safe from cancellation for now.

Doom developer id Software "is essentially dead," Duke Nukem 3D co-creator says after layoffs

Fallout 3 designer Bruce Nesmith previously shared his hopes that a remaster of the game would make the combat better than it was in 2008.

Last week, Bethesda dropped a load of info about its post-apocalyptic RPG series: Fallout 5 is "currently in preproduction," New Vegas developer Obsidian is returning to the series for a new entry, and Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are both getting remasters.

Granted, this felt a bit like jingling keys to distract from Microsoft's massive wave of layoffs – something one workers' union has already called out – but it's naturally a very exciting prospect to fans.

Speaking to FRVR around the time The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered released in 2025, Nesmith shared his thoughts about a potential remaster of Fallout 3, admitting that the gunplay in the 2008 RPG is "not good."

"It didn’t hold up to shooters at the time," he explained, "a lot of work was done on that for Fallout 4."

And it's true, Fallout 4 did feel more akin to what would be a traditional first-person shooter of that era, making it so players didn't have to rely on the V.A.T.S. quite as much.

"I anticipate seeing a lot of that work [we did with Fallout 4] go into it [Fallout 3 Remastered]," Nesmith explained. And granted, Oblivion Remastered did make some changes to the combat compared to the 2006 original, namely giving new movesets to the melee weapons. So perhaps Bethesda will end up making the shooting in Fallout 3 (and New Vegas) feel more like Fallout 4.

Modders remastering Fallout 3 in Fallout 4 are not bothered by Bethesda's official version: "Our project has been a community-driven passion project for almost a full decade"

As some fans are filled with dread following Bethesda's confirmation that both The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5 are being developed using the shiny new Creation Engine 3, words from New Vegas lead Josh Sawyer from six years ago might provide some reassurance.

Since Bethesda's flurry of news last week about its upcoming projects, there have been many concerns raised about the studio using Creation Engine 3 – an updated version of its proprietary engine – for the two biggest RPGs on its slate. Fans worry about bugs and the devs potentially prioritizing modders over the games themselves, but according to Sawyer in 2020 that's now doing the online rounds, it's actually a very easy engine to work with.

During an old stream of Fallout: New Vegas (below), Sawyer was asked if he had "a hard time" developing New Vegas thanks to Fallout 3's "buggy engine," to which he was quick to respond: "No, not at all."

He continued: "I will criticize other stuff in Fallout 3 and 4, [but] this engine is incredibly easy to make content for. Look into my eyes – without GECK [New Vegas' official editor and modding tool] and without the pipeline of this engine, we never would have finished this game in 18 months."

Sawyer reiterated that "this is the best content creation pipeline of any game that I've ever worked on, easily," but that doesn't mean it's without its issues. "It's buggy, you're right, it's very buggy. It's buggy and unstable and it's frustrating, but it's incredibly easy to make content for. Like, no one's gonna sit here and say, like, 'No it's not that buggy.' Like, yeah, it's pretty buggy, but it's fine. Like, that's a trade-off."

He went on to talk about the GECK tool, too, calling it "fast" and saying that "searching is super easy, finding references to things is super easy, scripting is very powerful," and that "iteration loops are super fast." All that made it "awesome."

In fact, Sawyer said that "the only shortcoming of the tools was the dialogue tool." He explained: "We built our own dialogue tool to sit on top of that, and that was fine. Like, it took a little bit of investment for us, but that was it."

Looking back about what Sawyer had to say about the ease of Creation Engine and how quickly things could be made with it, I can't help but wonder if that might be on Bethesda's mind today. After all, last month, it was reported that Xbox is apparently pushing for faster development on The Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises – something which might prove even more difficult now that a number of Bethesda staff have been laid off.

Needless to say, if a familiar-feeling, easy-to-use engine can help facilitate the demand for more games, it's little wonder that that's the one that's been chosen.

16 years after Fallout: New Vegas, Obsidian is returning to the post-apocalyptic RPG series and Todd Howard "could not be more excited."

Todd Howard warns he is no longer thinking of retiring, he will persist until the end of days, asking you to buy Skyrim - and to release a few more games, we imagine.

Todd Howard has been at Bethesda Game Studios since 1994, when it was creating Terminator games, making a massive splash on the studio's popularity after taking on the director's role for The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, the game that established the Bethesda RPG for years to come.

Since then, he's directed Fallout 3, 4, Skyrim, and Starfield. And while he's only in his mid-50's now, by the time his Game Director roles on The Elder Scrolls 6 and presumably Fallout 5 come to an end, he'll likely be nearing retirement age.

Speaking to Jason Schreier, Howard is asked about his eventual retirement and says, "The truth is there was a period of time a while back where I pondered what does it look like? Not is it imminent, but what does it look like? And I no longer do."

He explains, "I see the work we're doing. I just love it. I love working with these people. It's really not something I think about."

Howard adds, "Some folks in our industry that are a little older than me, they're just making great stuff, too. So, it's not something I've been thinking about."

One such name who is a "little older" is Hideo Kojima, who on his 60th birthday just under three years ago said he has no plans to retire, and wishes to create things for the rest of his life. But worry not for now, Todd Howard will be around to sell you copies of Skyrim on PS6 and Xbox Project Helix.

Elder Scrolls and Fallout boss Todd Howard says "you'd be surprised how many great ideas I get" from Reddit.

Not everyone is feeling optimistic about The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5 following Bethesda's confirmation that both are being developed using the studio's proprietary Creation Engine, albeit an updated version.

Last week, Bethesda dropped a slew of information, including confirmation that Fallout 5 is in pre-production, that Fallout 3 and New Vegas remasters are in the works, and that Obsidian Entertainment is teaming up with the studio on a whole new Fallout game. Amongst all that was the announcement that both Fallout 5 and The Elder Scrolls 6 are being built on Creation Engine 3, "a shared technology platform we've been building since Starfield's launch. It allows our teams to support multiple projects simultaneously with new tools, rendering, and systems that define our games."

Speaking to Windows Central, Todd Howard states that "I can't say enough about our tech team," calling it "incredible." He adds: "Our designers ask for so much crazy stuff, and our tech team finds a way to do it. And I think that's really defined our games where you feel like anything is possible."

Despite Howard's words, however, not all fans are thrilled about the news. "The creation engine is fun for modders but it is complete dogshit compared to most other big game studios' engines," one Reddit user responds. "Time and time again it has led to crap games that feel outdated on release day. Their games really suffer from trying to please modders above all else."

"Code for 'games are gonna release in an absolute buggy mess, and we just expect the players to fix it for us,'" another writes. "Bugs and Bethesda. A tale as old as time."

Many have specifically expressed concerns about how many loading screens the two RPGs might have, with one speculating on Twitter that the choice of engine "means they will very likely both still require loading screens when entering Interiors. I think this is one of the biggest weaknesses of Bethesda games, it really does feel outdated…"

Another on Reddit adds: "Bethesda seriously needs to get the load screens under control for TES VI and Fallout 5 (and presumably the Obsidian Fallout title). Small buildings still requiring load screens in the late 2020s would look bad, period."

With that said, not everyone is disappointed with the decision. "People hate the engine but no other game engine comes close to the modding ability," says a Reddit fan, as another comments: "This is a boon for future modders!" Meanwhile, some are just happy that it's not one particular alternative: "I'm just glad we won't see yet another studio subsumed into the Unreal ecosystem."

There's an air of uncertainty surrounding the Bethesda projects in general following the studio being hit in Xbox's recent wave of layoffs. Devs affected previously said that it's going to be "harder than ever now" for the studio to focus on those two core franchises after losing so much talent.

Bethesda says The Elder Scrolls 6 is going great, actually: "We're where we planned to be, loving how it looks, and playing it every day."

Bethesda Game Studios boss Todd Howard has revealed he's constantly lurking on Reddit and claims the team is consistently taking that feedback on board.

In a thread on r/Games, Howard chimed in with his first Reddit post since the launch of Starfield – well aside from reacting to one post six months ago that modded a cardboard cutout of him into Fallout 4 as the immortal snail – saying "Hey Reddit. I’m a professional lurker and read your comments all the time."

And given Reddit's reactions to Bethesda games at times – just look at any New Vegas thread – this may have sounded vaguely threatening, but Howard adds, "Many here do and we deeply appreciate all the passion for our work."

The thread in question was the post from Bethesda outlining the future of the studio. This post included news about how Fallout 5 is "currently in preproduction," Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are both getting remasters, Obsidian is making a new Fallout game, and an update on the production of The Elder Scrolls 6. Howard explains, "Today’s info was an attempt at changing that and letting everyone know what we’ve been working on the past several years, and a look at what’s coming. So know we’re constantly listening and keep telling us how to be even better."

Howard also added, "You’d be surprised how many great ideas I get from Reddit. So upvote your favorite and we’ll do it. Maybe."

Unsurprisingly, fans really want Oblivion Remastered to be fixed after a year. One user says, "Please get Virtuous to keep patching Oblivion and give it as much love as you guys gave Skyrim, because it feels abandoned right now, which is a shame."

Meanwhile, another has fears that the upcoming Fallout remasters will share a similar fate, saying, "Pay Virtuous whatever amount needed for the remasters to function well."

Only 16 Fallout: New Vegas developers still work at Obsidian, says RPG's original writer.

Bethesda just announced a whole lot of news about the future of Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, and if you find the timing of it all a bit suspicious, you're not alone. United Videogame Workers-CWA says the announcement is an "intentional" distraction from the layoffs happening at Bethesda.

"The timing of this kind of press is intentional," UVW-CWA says in a Bluesky post. "How are they going to make these games when Bethesda and Obsidian collectively laid off hundreds? Don’t fall for it."

UVW-CWA is a direct-join union representing game workers across the industry, but it does not represent any one specific workplace. The CWA part of the name is for the Communications Workers of America, which supports several workplace unions at various Microsoft-owned game studios, including Bethesda.

The timing of this kind of press is intentional. How are they going to make these games when Bethesda and Obsidian collectively laid off hundreds? Don’t fall for it.

— @videogameworkers.bsky.social (@videogameworkers.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-07-17T20:21:37.854Z

Employees across Microsoft's gaming divisions staged protests last week in support of those affected by the Xbox layoffs. Game Developer reports that unions are also taking legal action against Microsoft.

According to CWA Canada president Carmel Smyth, "The unions CWA and CWA Canada have jointly filed unfair labor practice complaints against Microsoft alleging the company has unlawfully fired people without giving notice to or discussing it with the union as the employer is legally obliged to do when we are in the middle of ongoing bargaining [for] a collective agreement."

For her part, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is celebrating the historic success of Bethesda's various franchises on Twitter. "The achievements of these franchises are remarkable: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has crossed 65 million units sold, becoming one of the 10 best-selling games of all time, Fallout 4 has also crossed 35 million units sold, joining the top 25, and Starfield will soon reach over 1 billion hours played," she says.

But at a certain point, you have to start asking whether the developers who actually made those games have actually seen the fruits of their success. Certainly, they're not getting royalties – come on, this is the video game industry – but many aren't even getting to enjoy continued employment. We've only gotten anecdotal details on individuals who have been laid off, but we know their numbers include Christiane Meister, a 27-year veteran of everything from Morrowind to Fallout 4, and Dane Olds, a 20-year vet with a similar list of credits.

But hey, Fallout 5 is coming! And The Elder Scrolls 6! And Obsidian's making a new Fallout game of its own, finally – never mind the reports that Microsoft canceled the studio's Avowed follow-up in order to have it build something for the far more popular franchise. I'm certain that the developers who remain at these studios are putting their all into their work, but it's tough to see today's announcement as much more than Microsoft's attempt at jingling keys in front of the eyes of gamers who've grown increasingly exhausted of the industry's most cynical business practices.

Todd Howard says layoffs at Bethesda were "really tough": "We're going through a change so that we focus best on the franchises."

As Bethesda announces what's going on with the future of the studio, director and producer Todd Howard has acknowledged the layoffs that have hit the studio as part of Microsoft's latest batch of staff cuts.

Speaking to Bloomberg, Howard calls the cuts at Bethesda Game Studios "really tough" for him and his colleagues. This latest round of cuts saw staff at the studio laid off as part of Xbox's seemingly now-yearly mass layoffs – including 18-year veterans of the company like Ray Lederer. Bethesda as a whole also got hit hard as we also saw fellow ZeniMax Studios id Software and ZeniMax Online Studios face heavy cuts.

Howard adds, "This is Bethesda's 40th anniversary, and there have been periods where we've gone through changes," referring to a portion of the 1990s where the studio was on the brink. But now, he says, "We're going through a change so that we focus best on the franchises and what we need to do to deliver for everybody."

Word over the last week is that Xbox has been pushing Bethesda to focus on marquee titles with Bethesda Game Studios on The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5, while the wider ZeniMax studios work on Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein.

Howard also spoke about his personal feelings on the layoffs with Windows Central, saying "I've been doing this a long time, whenever you've worked with people for, in some cases, many decades, and they're no longer here, that's really personally very difficult, and difficult for our teams."

These interviews have come alongside word that Fallout 5 is "currently in preproduction," that Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are both getting remasters, and that Obsidian is returning to the post-apocalyptic RPG series for a new entry. But with layoffs across Bethesda and Obsidian, as one workers union has already suggested, it's hard not to see this as Microsoft trying to change the subject.

Video game fans are currently quite unhappy with everything going on at Xbox, with thousands of developers losing their jobs, and calling into question how these diminished numbers will affect development going forward. So a big blowout of every Fallout project everyone wants to know about – with nothing to actually show from them – arguably feels more like an attempt at a distraction or reassurance, rather than it being the right time to drop this news.

Bethesda says Starfield "remains an important part of our future," teasing plans for the space RPG's third year following worries from fans that the project would be swept under the rug as part of Xbox's big reset.

Over on Twitter, Bethesda speaks about what the road ahead looks like for the studio following sweeping cuts across Xbox's portfolio of studios. As for Starfield, there's seemingly still plenty to come, as Bethesda clearly proclaims, "Starfield continues." That'll be a relief for worried fans already, but thankfully there's more information on offer.

"With over 17 million players logging almost a billion hours to date, Starfield remains an important part of our future," Bethesda says. "As we enter Year 3, we'll continue expanding the Settled Systems with new stories, targeted gameplay improvements, and additional updates, while preparing for the launch of new Starborn content next year.

"More than 40% of players already customize their experience through Creations, and we'll continue investing in creators and giving players new ways to make Starfield their own."

So, why the worry? Following news of Xbox's reset that will see 3,200 jobs chopped when all is said and done, reports surfaced that studios would focus on their key franchises – including The Elder Scrolls and Fallout for Bethesda. While there were never any claims that Starfield would be tossed into the bin, fans felt uneasy that the space RPG wasn't mentioned.

Despite it all, it seems like Bethesda is continuing with Starfield for now.

That's not all for Bethesda, either. Bethesda says The Elder Scrolls 6 is going great, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are both getting remasters, and 16 years after Fallout: New Vegas, Obsidian is returning to the post-apocalyptic RPG series. Busy day, then.

Oh, and Fallout 5 is "currently in preproduction." Definitely a busy day.

It's official: Obsidian is returning to the Fallout series. 16 years after the launch of the beloved Fallout: New Vegas, the venerable RPG studio is returning to the post-apocalypse for a new entry that appears to be entirely separate from Fallout 5. You can count Todd Howard himself among those excited about the news.

"The wasteland continues to expand as we team up once again with our longtime friends at Obsidian Entertainment," Bethesda says in its announcement about the future of Fallout. "We're happy to confirm they're working with us on a new Fallout project. We'll have more to share in the future."

"We could not be more excited to work with Obsidian again," as Bethesda boss Todd Howard tells Bloomberg. Bethesda's level of input into Obsidian's game also isn't clear, but he says "the Fallout franchise is managed out of here and our staff and our franchise teams."

Howard doesn't offer much concrete detail on what Obsidian's game will look like, but believes the "timing is right" for the project to get started. Bloomberg previously reported that Obsidian was working on an Avowed sequel which Microsoft canceled to make room for this new Fallout project.

As part of this news blast, Bethesda also confirmed that Fallout 5 is "currently in preproduction," and will presumably be released some time after The Elder Scrolls 6. The long-rumored remasters of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas were also finally confirmed, so if you're looking for an excuse to learn why these titles are ranked so highly among the best Fallout games, you're about to find one.

Only 16 Fallout: New Vegas developers still work at Obsidian, says RPG's original writer.

Bethesda Game Studios has undeniably felt the impact of Microsoft's recent plan to cut over 3,200 employees at Xbox – but according to the company, The Elder Scrolls 6 is still chugging along just fine.

The studio reveals as much in quite a lengthy new post over on Twitter, confirming that The Elder Scrolls 6 is currently Bethesda's primary focus – and the developers feel pretty confident about the new RPG, too. That and the next Fallout game, which we now know is for sure happening.

"Our teams are now developing The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5 on Creation Engine 3, a shared technology platform we've been building since Starfield's launch," writes Bethesda. "It allows our teams to support multiple projects simultaneously with new tools, rendering, and systems that define our games."

This lines up with what we know about Bethesda's in-house engine – Todd Howard said the devs are "very happy where the tech is and where it's going" early this year, describing how Bethesda has "handled" the new Creation Engine "better than we ever have" thanks to lessons learned from Starfield.

The studio's current thread continues, describing where the new Fallout and Elder Scrolls are in terms of development.

"Fallout 5 is currently in preproduction. The Elder Scrolls 6 is our primary development focus today, with the majority of our team currently working on the next chapter of the franchise. 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."

That's an understatement – but Bethesda's words here are reassuring nonetheless. It has been well over a decade since Skyrim changed the RPG genre forever, leaving us all craving the next Elder Scrolls, after all.

But, as the studio confirms, "The next chapter is on the way. We're where we planned to be, loving how it looks, and playing it every day."

It's bittersweet, with all things considered – especially amid all of the layoffs. The company's union representatives reported a big loss of "dozens of programmers, artists, designers, and testers," which would imply quite the impact on development.

Devs affected by the layoffs also said that making new Fallout and Elder Scrolls games would "be harder than ever now" following Microsoft's Xbox cuts, so... yeah.

Here's hoping Bethesda truly is cooking with The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5, and that former devs land on their feet, too.

Elder Scrolls Online is "not going to be able to put out the amount of content at the speed" it was, former dev says following Xbox layoffs.

After seemingly endless amounts of speculation and rumours, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas remasters have been officially announced by Bethesda.

This happened in a Twitter post where Bethesda Game Studios acknowledged the future of the studio following Microsoft's latest massive wave of layoffs – including the future of its big three: Starfield, The Elder Scrolls, and Fallout. While Starfield got some more proof of life and Elder Scrolls got a pretty simple "we're working on it," Fallout fans are eating right now.

Not only has Bethesda outlined the future of Fallout by confirming that Fallout 5 is in pre-production, and that the rumours are true and it will be working with Obsidian Entertainment on a new Fallout game, but the past of the series is also getting some love as Bethesda finally confirms those remasters are happening.

"We also know many players want to revisit previous Fallout experiences." Bethesda says, adding: "While we're not announcing any dates today, we have been working on remasters for both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas."

This duo of remasters has been heavily requested and heavily rumored since the release of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered in 2025, and while it's not exactly been a massive secret, this is the first time Bethesda has outright mentioned it's happening. Fallout 3 was first released back in 2008 and marked Bethesda's first outing with the franchise, while New Vegas was helmed by Obsidian Entertainment – a studio at the time filled with ex-Fallout 1 and 2 staffers – and is widely considered the greatest game in the franchise.

Only 16 Fallout: New Vegas developers still work at Obsidian, says RPG's original writer.

Fallout 5 is in preproduction at Bethesda as the studio prioritizes The Elder Scrolls 6.

Bethesda broke its silence today, releasing a lengthy look at the studio's pipeline and the plans for its biggest franchises. Fallout is a key focus, with Fallout 5 essentially simmering in the background.

"Our teams are now developing The Elder Scrolls VI and Fallout 5 on Creation Engine 3, a shared technology platform we've been building since Starfield's launch," Bethesda explains. "It allows our teams to support multiple projects simultaneously with new tools, rendering, and systems that define our games.

"Fallout 5 is currently in preproduction. The Elder Scrolls VI is our primary development focus today, with the majority of our team currently working on the next chapter of the franchise."

The Creation Engine 3 suite "extends beyond our teams to the technology, tools, and systems that will power the next generation of Bethesda RPGs," the studio adds.

Though the next mainline installment is years away, Bethesda stresses that "Fallout is one of our biggest priorities today. Fallout 5 remains our long-range destination, and we have multiple Fallout projects in active development right now."

This suite of projects includes remasters for both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, though Bethesda is "not announcing any dates today."

Partially confirming reports, Bethesda says original Fallout: New Vegas developer Obsidian Entertainment is once again working on the franchise, though it doesn't give specifics beyond "a new Fallout project." Other reports claimed a different Fallout RPG had been in development at Obsidian before Bethesda axed it a while ago, forcing it to be similar to Fallout but not connected to the IP.

The live Fallout games, Fallout 76 and Fallout Shelter, will continue to receive new content as well. A new Fallout 76 expansion, Raven Rock, is coming in 2027 and described as "a prequel story to Fallout 3." New seasonal content awaits Fallout Shelter players, not to mention "an unscripted Fallout Shelter television project is also in the works with our partners at Amazon Studios and Kilter Films."

This flurry of announcements follows quiet years for Bethesda – its biggest franchises have gone untouched in-house for more than a decade – and a recent wave of layoffs that hit the studio as part of wide-reaching cuts ordered by Xbox.

In today's statement, Bethesda says its constellation of studios is "investing in our technology, bringing teams closer together, supporting our live games, expanding into new forms of entertainment, and developing the next generation of Bethesda RPGs."

Bethesda says The Elder Scrolls 6 is going great, actually: "We're where we planned to be, loving how it looks, and playing it every day."

The shield saw, the star of last year's Doom: The Dark Ages, was my favorite weapon in Doom's entire bloody history. Not content with just sticking a parry in Doom and going for lunch early, id Software instead delivered the world's deadliest beyblade. A merciless disc of death you could frisbee into a screaming demon, or boomerang through entire hordes. The slowest, most lumbering entry of the new-Doom trilogy also starred a 'shield bash' that sent you rushing across the battlefield and slamming into Hell's finest. Slow? Please. Sonic wishes he could move like this.

The shield saw should be patched into Dark Souls immediately. Every other shield in gaming should hang its non-head in shame. What I'm basically trying to get across here is that the shield saw rules. And within the opening hour of Doom: The Dark Ages – Revelations, the FPS' new DLC, id took my shield saw away and snapped it in half.

It's a bold new step forward for the Doom Slayer, but rather than developers being able to celebrate, the studio is already losing half its staff as part of Xbox's ongoing large-scale layoffs. That includes reportedly putting the future of the id Tech engine itself in jeopardy, and leading developers to question the value of Microsoft's purchase of ZeniMax, which included id owner Bethesda, back in 2021 in the first place. That's all before we even had enough time to tell you this Doom: The Dark Ages expansion is actually super rad. Turns out, big business can be more devastating than any BFG – and that's heartbreaking.

Sawly Missed

The Doom Slayer has been sent to Hell-prison, you see, presumably on about four billion demon murder charges. He thankfully gets to keep all the spectacular guns from last year's game, including the one that sprays bone fragments of demon skulls, the shotgun that sounds like the Earth itself splitting in half when you fire it, and that wonderful chainshot that's essentially the grittiest reboot of ball-and-paddle ever.

While it's great to be reunited with all these magnificent murder-toys, the shield saw being taken away truly hurts. Last year this studio trained us to approach Doom in a whole new defensive way, and now it's ripped and torn that option out entirely. Even FromSoftware let us enjoy an entire trilogy of Dark Souls games cowering behind a shield before snatching it away with Sekiro. id barely waited a year.

So what replaces this divine disc of death? The new chain spear, which is so weedy in appearance compared to a shield/chainsaw hybrid that I thought the game was joking. It looks like the kind of thing the Doom Slayer would use as a toothpick.

The spear actually shares a surprising amount of the shield's functionality. You can hookshot onto obstacles on enemies, like the shield dash. It can parry green attacks, and it stuns enemies you lob it into – though this effect only lasts until its hookshot has finished dragging you towards your victim. Which means you'll now be standing right next to a monster who's no longer stunned and is ready to get revenge. Gee, thanks.

Ah, but I soon discover that where I land is actually in my control. This isn't your bog standard videogame hookshot, wherein you latch onto where you want to go and then simply watch yourself get yanked towards it. No, you're able to swing left, right, and above as you're hooked forward, opening up some sublime new strategies.

The cacodemon, the floating megabrain that caused me so much misery in the main campaign, is now basically a hookshot launch pad for me to ascend myself to bullet heaven. I fling myself over it then unload super shotgun blasts into its grey-going-on-red matter the whole way down, landing in a fresh pile of its giblet-y remains. Bloody bliss.

Revelations also restores the much-missed dash button from Doom Eternal. Not being able to block isn't so bad when you can hurl yourself around or keep flinging yourself into the sky. Better yet, Revelations starts rewarding daring dodges as much as it rewards parries.

Death From Above

Last-second dodges fill a meter you can spend on executing special moves. I initially opt for a ground slam that damages anything stupid enough to be near where I land. That dash works in the air, too, so I can hook myself up and get an impressive amount of kills in before my feet ever get reacquainted with the ground. Doom has rediscovered its love of sending you airborne and developed a newfound romance with keeping you up there.

Ammo scarcity, something I all but forgot about in The Dark Ages proper, constantly catches me out this time. Probably because all my ammo upgrades from the main campaign are gone, and Revelations is about as difficult as that game's third act right from the starting shot. Not being able to just rely on a couple of guns to get through an encounter, but actually properly engaging with the weapon wheel is friction I'd sorely missed. Oh, I have a weapon called the impaler! Good to see you, old friend. Sorry for, er, completely forgetting you existed. Um… has the shield saw asked about me at all?

Doom has also learnt how to keep a secret again. The Dark Ages' main campaign made the bizarre decision to put almost every collectable on the map screen. Then it had the audacity to cheer 'you found a secret area!' when you walked into the clearly signposted 'secret' area. Imagine if I showed you where my bathroom was and then bellowed "SECRET AREA FOUND" as soon as you entered it. You'd be baffled for a number of reasons. Revelations, somewhat ironically, knows to keep things under wraps so finding its secret areas and bonus pickups actually feel like achievements again.

You'll want to seek them out, too, to afford the excellent Chain Spear upgrades. There's Deflection, which makes the spear reflect back automatic weapon fire whenever you dash, the slayer twirling it like a dance baton (where was this in Lollipop Chainsaw?). Tormentor will spin you around an enemy you've got the hook of the spear buried in, perfect for filling them with lead. Upgrade Tormentor again and enemies will also drop ammo and catch fire during that process. Cowards are definitely onto something – shooting someone in the back is immensely satisfying. …What?

So, after a steep learning curve, the Chain Spear definitely won me over. But before it did, something odd happened. The saw shield came crawling back. A few hours in, Revelations returns the shield to you, and now you can switch it out with the spear whenever you want. I was really torn about this. Great as it was to have my favorite toy back, I respected the game a lot more when it locked me into a new playstyle.

Offense is the Best Defence?

The shield is essentially a safer, steadier bet. Whereas the spear, when used well, can end a brutal battle in seconds. The catch being it can also end the battle for you in seconds. Eventually, you learn when best to switch them out on the fly. Demons who fire automatic guns at me are no match for a spear which can deflect those bullets. Whereas near the end of a long, long onslaught of demons, I appreciate a quick breather behind the shield so I don't lose the last twenty minutes of progress.

Once I truly got a handle on the spear, the shield was reduced to mere cameos, but I still think the game would have benefitted from at least another hour of it being my sole option before tempting me back into the more familiar pleasures of the shield saw.

It's a minor pacing complaint with what's otherwise a terrific package, an inspired remix of Dark Ages and Eternal that's as exhilarating as Doom has ever been. It's beautiful, the story is… well, much less crap than the main campaign's, and the puzzles can actually be called puzzles this time without being laughed out of the room. Best of all, the core combat is about as good as FPS gunplay gets. Only Saros threatens this one's perch for single-player shooter of the year. I said single-player, Marathon stans. Put away your shield saws…

Imagine owning a studio that can make games of this quality, that last year got three million players on board, and then gutting them more viciously than a demon on the wrong end of a chain spear. Tragically, Xbox's cruel layoffs that are targeting 3,200 roles across several studios may have finally delivered the killing blow to the Doom Slayer. Let's hope Revelations isn't the swansong to a studio of such incredible talent.

Check out our best FPS games ranking for more blasting!

Ex-The Elder Scrolls Online senior encounter designer Morgan Goin was one of the devs let go from Zenimax Online Studios and says she can't see how the studio can maintain the same cadence of updates going forward.

Microsoft kicked off its fifth batch of layoffs since spending $75 billion on acquiring Activision Blizzard in 2023. Since then Microsoft has effectively had yearly layoffs each July, with Zenimax Online Studios – which was hit in a major way last year's layoffs, resulting in the cancellation of Project Blackbird and several high-profile departures from the company – being one of the biggest hits for of this year's wave alongside Doom developer id Software, as up to half of the devs behind Bethesda's MMO have reportedly lost their jobs.

While Bethesda did try to damage control this somewhat with a statement saying its team is the same size as in 2015, devs are painting a different story. Speaking to BBC News, Goin says she was "blindsided" by the sheer number of cuts and estimates that some disciplines at the studio have been reduced to a quarter of their pre-layoffs size. Goin adds, "We're not going to be able to put out the amount of content at the speed that we were… or anything approaching that."

Andrew Young, a senior content designer on Elder Scrolls Online from 2012 until 2024, said the MMO "basically funded other failing projects." While nothing specific was mentioned, The Elder Scrolls Blades and Legends didn't exactly light the world on fire, but it could be in reference to any number of underperforming Zenimax titles (two bad Wolfenstein spinoffs releasing on the same day, anyone?).

Like with last year's layoffs, Zenimax Online Studios is losing several high-profile staff as a result of this year's cuts, with studio head Joseph Burba, Elder Scrolls Online executive producer Susan Kath, studio game director Rich Lambert, and production director Ala Diaz all reportedly leaving the company.

Making Fallout and Elder Scrolls games will "be harder than ever now" following Xbox cuts, say laid-off Bethesda devs calling loss of institutional knowledge "staggering"

Bethesda Game Studios – and, in particular, ZeniMax Online Studios – have felt the impact of Microsoft's recent plan to cut over 3,200 employees at Xbox, with the company's union representatives reporting a loss of "dozens of programmers, artists, designers and testers."

It's no secret that the layoffs have torn through Bethesda and its Elder Scrolls Online studio, which has been hit particularly hard.

An MMO team that grew over time to quite mind-boggling figures has now been reduced to the same size it boasted over a decade ago, leaving remaining developers – and fans – concerned about the future. Those affected didn't just include devs, however… leadership has faced the chopping block, too, apparently.

We learn as much from Game File, which reportedly obtained a copy of the official notice from ZeniMax Online Studios regarding its plans to "transition" to new leadership "over the next few months" – leadership that consists of company veterans.

Leads departing include studio head Joseph Burba (who has a 14-year history at the company and was just appointed to his role last July), Elder Scrolls Online executive producer Susan Kath, studio game director Rich Lambert, and production director Ala Diaz.

They "will remain in place during the transition period to help ensure a smooth handoff," however.

As for who will step in to take the helm, head of business operations Joshua Henderson will run ZeniMax Online Studios alongside Nick Giacomini, who was just promoted to Elder Scrolls Online game director last August.

In their statement, the former leaders note that they predict "growth" for the MMO.

"We have tremendous confidence in Josh and Nick," they write, "the future of this studio, and the continued growth of ESO. With exciting experiences still ahead for our players as we wrap up work for Update 51 and beyond, we believe that your passion, creativity, and commitment to each other and the community will continue serving as the heartbeat of ESO."

It's bittersweet – especially after some 200+ losses at the studio.

Here's hoping that the affected developers are able to land on their feet, and ZeniMax Online Studios can pick up the pieces somehow – these certainly aren't easy times in the industry, and the impact is more evident than ever.

Making Fallout and Elder Scrolls games will "be harder than ever now" following Xbox cuts, say laid-off Bethesda devs calling loss of institutional knowledge "staggering"

Xbox subsidiary Obsidian got butchered along with most of the parent company's children during mass layoffs earlier this month, making the original Fallout: New Vegas team even more scarce. New Vegas writer Chris Avellone did the math, and it looks like only 16 of Fallout: New Vegas' total 73 developers still work at Obsidian.

"Some of the ex-NV developers were among those laid off last week, unfortunately," Avellone explains in a July 14 Twitter post on the topic. 21-year veteran art director Dan Alpert was impacted, as was animator Shon Stewart, and assistant art director Paul Fish. "Shon in particular was a big surprise when I heard about it," says Avellone, "he's a great animator."

But many New Vegas developers had already been long gone from Obsidian. Character artist Kevin Manning has spent the last seven years at Riot Games, for example, junior artist Megan Morse hasn't worked at Obsidian since 2012 and is currently an artist at Exodus studio Archetype, and Avellone himself left Obsidian – which he co-founded – in 2015. He's currently fiddling with secret "other projects, including RPGs," he says on Twitter.

Obsidian is now toiling over a new Fallout game – which may or may not be the new Fallout game we already knew about, Fallout 5 – after Xbox canceled its planned sequel to 2025 action-RPG Avowed. So while it isn't exactly thrilling news that only 20% of Fallout: New Vegas developers have jobs at Obsidian after 16 years of layoffs, game cancellations, new opportunities, and plain, old life, it's not a big surprise to me, either.

Fallout co-creator Tim Cain returned to Obsidian in 2025 for an unrevealed project, and co-creator Leonard Boyarsky has spent the last decade at Obsidian. This doesn't satisfy the people on Twitter who begged Avellone for his Obsidian stats to begin with, but so little does.

"I wasn't sure about a few people on the list, so this may get revised," Avellone adds on Twitter. "Still, better than nothing and a lot better than yelling back and forth."

Fallout: New Vegas writer says he feels "embarrassed" by some of the Fallout TV show dialogue, but has no notes for "really cool" Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.

Bethesda Game Studios has been feeling the impact following Microsoft's plan to cut over 3,200 employees at Xbox, with the company's union representatives reporting a big loss of "dozens of programmers, artists, designers and testers."

Unsurprisingly, these layoffs will likely have an impact on Bethesda's ongoing and future projects – like The Elder Scrolls 6, which fans have been eagerly waiting nearly 15 years for now.

Former developers affected by the widespread cuts from Microsoft report as much, too, with such sources telling Game Developer that Bethesda will feel the blow of the situation in its work on such new games.

"Bethesda Game Studios lost a lot of talent this week," one ex-dev says. "Xbox says they want to focus on their core franchises like Fallout and Elder Scrolls, but that's going to be harder than ever now."

In other words, this is a large setback for Bethesda, as the remaining folks working on the big series struggle to balance the shockwaves from the layoffs with a quick enough recovery so that development might move along.

It's not just Bethesda, either. As another source tells the outlet, "The institutional knowledge that has been lost or will be lost completely as individuals leave the gaming industry all together is staggering. Those that are left must be scrambling to pick up the pieces."

That's a troubling thought to try and stomach, to say the least, but it does seem to reflect the current industry's climate. Things are undeniably turbulent.

This all lines up with what Bethesda has recently been saying, too – that The Elder Scrolls 6 will be hurt and potentially delayed by the Microsoft layoffs, and that they've "had a crushing effect on morale" at the company.

We can already see this with The Elder Scrolls Online, which has been hit particularly hard by the Xbox debacle. Who knows how it might impact new Fallout and Elder Scrolls titles?

I just hope the affected developers are able to land on their feet, and Bethesda resurfaces despite the layoffs – the book isn't closed for good here yet, after all.

As Elder Scrolls Online fans fear for the MMO, Bethesda reportedly confirms its team is the same size it was when it delivered some of its best content.

The Elder Scrolls Online team is unfortunately part of Microsoft's ongoing plan to cut 3,200 employees at Xbox, leaving the developers behind the Bethesda MMO far fewer in number than before.

In fact, the team is apparently as small as it was about a decade ago, when the game only really began to take off after its shaky launch – or, at least, that's what prominent community figure Baratron, who helps run the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages and its Discord, reports.

He reveals as much in a new message, explaining that he learned the news from associate design director Jason Barnes and associate director of community management Jessica Folsom.

It came during the past weekend's Elder Scrolls Online Tavern event in Hesse, Germany, where fans and developers gathered to celebrate the MMO.

"This is important," writes Baratron. "According to both Jason Barnes (Associate Design Director) and Jessica Folsom (Associate Director of Community Management), Zenimax Online Studios is now at the same size as it was when they made both Wrothgar and Summerset."

That's shocking, to say the least – but he doesn't seem to think it's a bad thing. After all, "both are highly acclaimed DLCs," as the UESP admin puts it. "So while the layoffs are extremely upsetting for everyone involved (of course including players), this is not necessarily the end of new content or the game going into maintenance mode."

Baratron assures that there's more reason to think the end of Elder Scrolls Online isn't near, too.

"Also Nick Giacomini (Game Director) and Susan Kath (Studio Executive Producer) are specifically not at the ESO Tavern because they're working on the new Roadmap of when content will be released," he states. "It really is not the end yet."

It's a bit of bittersweet, good-and-bad news, all things considered – the layoffs, obviously, are not nice to hear about… but it's reassuring that they don't spell the demise of the MMO.

Here's hoping any and all affected developers are able to land on their feet, and The Elder Scrolls Online proves to have a brighter future than fans expect following the upsetting news circulating recently.

"There's really no one left": Former Elder Scrolls Online dev says the MMO "basically funded other failing projects" as Microsoft guts the studio

Xbox studios are hemorrhaging generational talent amid Microsoft's layoff wave, with one Bethesda veteran highlighting the loss of an artist responsible for so much of the studio's history that, "If you've played a BGS game you've had his art on screen 99% of the time."

Ben Carnow, a Bethesda veteran of nearly 20 years himself, puts a spotlight on former lead weapon artist Dane Olds in a Bluesky post.

A LinkedIn post from Olds confirms, "I have been laid off alongside so many passionate and talented colleagues."

Like countless game developers now facing a horrible job market after layoffs, Olds indicates he may leave the games industry altogether, even after 20 years at Bethesda. "I'm now looking for work inside and outside of the game industry. If you can use my expertise in weapon art, character art, team building and management please reach out to me," he says.

Carnow says "Olds is my truest friend" and "an artist of legendary skill." He outlines just some of the key contributions Olds has made over the years, including: "Too many Skyrim weapons to count. All the Dwemer creatures. MUD CRABS. Like half the guns in Fallout 4. Loads of weapons in Starfield."

"Laid off by Microsoft," Carnow concludes.

In 2023, Bethesda ran a developer spotlight featuring Olds and discussing his work. "Fallout 3 was my first big AAA game so that's very special to me," Olds said at the time. "Skyrim was an amazing experience because I got to help define the look and feel of the Dwemer art in the game as well as getting to make all of the steel weapons and many artifacts like the Mace of Molag Bal. Oh! It also features one of the few creatures I've gotten to make – the mudcrab."

Olds was also pivotal in the development of Fallout 4's expanded weapon system. "On that title Todd [Howard] came to me one day and told me he had this crazy idea to make all our weapons moddable and that he wanted it to change the way they looked and played. So, I started in on the pipe weapon set and the rest is history. It was a lot of fun figuring out how to make that system work and I learned a ton working on that game."

Much like Olds, Bethesda also laid off 27-year veteran Christiane Meister, a core artist who made major contributions to Skyrim, especially the Khajiit and Argonian designs, as well as Oblivion, Morrowind, Fallout 4, and Fallout 4.

Cases like these are precisely why remaining Bethesda developers expect work on The Elder Scrolls 6 to be impacted by Microsoft's layoffs, fearing crunch, quality dips, or delays for the already long-awaited game.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is reportedly so desperate for another Fallout game that it's reassigned Fallout: New Vegas maker Obsidian to the series at the expense of a planned Avowed sequel and other projects.

Fallout and Elder Scrolls union says Bethesda layoffs didn't hurt Microsoft's "14 layers of management" – "We lost dozens of programmers, artists, designers and testers."

It's no secret that Bethesda Game Studios has felt the impact following Microsoft announcing its plans to cut around 3,200 employees at Xbox over the next fiscal year, with the company's union representatives saying "we lost dozens of programmers, artists, designers and testers" following the 1,600 Xbox job cuts earlier this week.

What isn't as clear, however, is the impact these layoffs have had and will continue to have on the production of The Elder Scrolls 6 – an RPG that arguably stands as one of the most hotly anticipated games to date.

In new statements to IGN, however, current Bethesda staff say the impact is evident and worrying. The loss "will have a substantial and cascading effect on the game and morale of this studio," as one developer puts it.

"It's been a mix of every discipline: programmers, artists, and designers," another chimes in. "One person who's been at the company since Morrowind was cut."

They might be referencing 27-year veteran Christiane Meister there, who worked on every Elder Scrolls entry since Morrowind, including Skyrim, and both Fallout 3 and Fallout 4.

What of new Elder Scrolls games, though – namely the sixth entry?

"There is a fear that we are going to be replaced by cheaper, contracted labor, or we will 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," one dev admits.

Another explains that, concerning The Elder Scrolls 6 in particular, this has all been "crushing" to it the team.

"We've all been very excited and hyped for TES 6, and this has had a crushing effect on morale," they state. "We were already running a tight ship and are worried about this delaying the game (though a final release date was not yet chosen as far as we know)."

That's… concerning, to say the least. Both for the developers and the future of The Elder Scrolls 6 – a game that fans have eagerly been waiting nearly 15 years for now.

It doesn't help that, in terms of updates, the community has received few from Bethesda. The last actual trailer we got was a whopping eight years ago at E3 in 2018, after all. Even Todd Howard himself said to "just pretend we didn't didn't announce it" – so, um, yeah. He also admitted The Elder Scrolls 6 is still "a while" off, which adds another layer of uncertainty to this entire debacle.

Between the layoffs and all this… who knows?

Only time will tell, I suppose. I do just hope the affected developers are able to land on their feet, and Bethesda resurfaces despite the Microsoft upheaval – this is sadly not a rare reality in the industry anymore.

"There's really no one left": Former Elder Scrolls Online dev says the MMO "basically funded other failing projects" as Microsoft guts the studio.

Xbox is in the midst of an aggressive recalibration. CEO Asha Sharma is pursuing a "reset" of the content portfolio. Compulsion Games and Double Fine have regained their independence, Ninja Theory and Undead Labs have been sold; thousands of jobs have been cut across Activision Blizzard, Bethesda, and Xbox Game Studios. We're still getting a grasp on how severely individual studios are impacted, although some appear significant.

Reportedly, id Software has lost 50% of its staff. It's a shocking development, leaving a pioneering developer – the stewards of the id Tech engine, and creators of Doom and Quake – with drastically lowered capacity. Bethesda Game Studios, id, MachineGames, and ZeniMax Online have apparently been given a mandate to refocus on Bethesda's "strongest franchises", but it's difficult to know where id goes from here.

Doom, Eternal, and The Dark Ages performed admirably, but didn't necessarily rip and tear the market to shreds. Quake Champions launched out of early access in 2022 but failed to gain momentum – arena shooters remain a challenge in an environment dominated by battle royale, extraction, and hero shooters. It's been over seven years since Rage 2.

Common sense would dictate that id shifts to support MachineGames – long rumored to be developing a sequel to 2017's Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus. This would make sense: MachineGames has collaborated with other Bethesda studios around Wolfenstein in the past, having launched Cyberpilot and Youngblood with Arkane Lyon in 2019.

There's also external pressure to consider. A live action Wolfenstein television series is in development at Amazon MGM Studios, and given that Asha Sharma recently outlined a trans-media vision for the future of Xbox, it's unlikely that she will want to repeat the mistake made with Fallout: two hugely successful seasons of the show landing without a new Fallout game to meet raised interest.

Speaking of Fallout, id Software could help Xbox pursue its ambition of getting players back into the wasteland a little faster. Given the palpable appetite within the Xbox community for Obsidian to deliver New Vegas 2, I'd rather see id's expertise placed elsewhere. The studio is world renown for making the best feeling shotguns in video games – that would be wasted on V.A.T.S.

Xbox owns arguably the greatest catalogue of shooter franchises in the video game industry. Brink, Call of Duty, Doom, Gears of War, Halo, Overwatch, Perfect Dark, Prey, Quake, Rage, Singularity, Soldier of Fortune, StarCraft, and Wolfenstein to name but a few. If Xbox is serious about wanting to deliver more of its biggest franchises faster, it could do far worse than transition id to Gears or Halo.

Halo 3: ODST proved that Halo can thrive under tonal shifts; perhaps a faster, more furious id instalment would work wonders as Halo Studios gets its arms around the future of the mainline series. But really, id and Gears are a match made in heaven. The series could do far worse than an FPS experiment.

The gritty setting is perfect territory for a grounded, viscerally violent FPS. Don't just take my word for it, Cliff Bleszinski (designer of the original trilogy) toyed with taking Gears in this direction before Epic sold the IP to Microsoft. "I can tell you I wanted to actually consider going first-person with it," he told XboxEra. "I mean, can you imagine chainsawing a Locust in first person?"

I can imagine it, Cliff, and I want to play it. And there's no studio more equipped to make it a reality than id Software. Whether it will be given the opportunity under this new era of Xbox remains to be seen.

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The new Doom: The Dark Ages DLC is being received well on Steam as it releases on the same week Microsoft reportedly laid off around half of the staff at developer id Software.

Doom: The Dark Ages wasn't the most well received game in the series, as its pivot to a slower, more deliberate style of gameplay put off some players that were accustomed to how fast Doom Eternal was (myself included). id Software clearly took this on board as the first look at Doom: The Dark Ages' first big expansion, Revelations (nothing to do with the upcoming Final Fantasy 7 game), seems to speed things right up, with a far more aggressive style.

Over on Steam, the DLC currently sits at a "Very Positive" rating, with one dubbing it "What base game should've been from the start." Another review says: "It's like Dark Ages and Eternal had a child. This doesn't even feel like a dlc this feels like a full on sequel."

Unfortunately, this DLC's release date has come at the worst time, as id Software has been hit hard by Xbox's seemingly endless spree of layoffs – the fifth since Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard – with roughly half of the legendary studio reportedly laid off.

Naturally, a lot of the reviews for the DLC are acknowledging the layoffs, with the current top review saying: "Sending my love and support for ID software after this release, and having half their studio laid off. Nobody deserved this." Meanwhile, the second highest says: "Cherish this DLC with every second you spend playing it. It may very well be the last piece of good DOOM content that we ever get. I see no purpose in review bombing it. It will not change Microsoft's mind." Review bombing the DLC, they add, would not give any laid off staff "their jobs back."

Doom developer id Software "is essentially dead," Duke Nukem 3D co-creator says after layoffs reportedly cut almost half of the studio.

As Bethesda is reportedly hit hard with layoffs from Microsoft, president Jill Braff has apparently told staff of the plan to focus on the company's strongest franchises going forward.

This week, Xbox announced its fifth wave of layoffs since purchasing Activision Blizzard, with this ongoing wave set to see 3,200 staff laid off over the next year. From the sounds of things, Bethesda is going to be one of the most affected targets of these layoffs, with former Bethesda project lead Jeff Gardiner reporting that 35 staff at Bethesda Game Studios are losing their jobs, while id Software is being gutted, reportedly losing 95 staff members.

On top of that, ZeniMax-owned studio Arkane is in the process of "beginning required consultation with its Works Council to review potential strategic options," while Ninja Theory, Undead Labs, Double Fine, and Compulsion Games have broken off from Xbox during this latest restructuring, with the latter two going independent.

The layoffs at id Software are a major surprise, as they come alongside reports that Bethesda is set to change focus to its biggest franchises, which reportedly features Doom and Quake – two franchises primarily developed by id Software – alongside the expected push for The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5. While these were first reported by Bloomberg, an internal email from Braff acquired by IGN seems to back this up.

"These shifts also reflect the realities of our industry and business – and our responsibility to ensure Bethesda is operating from a more stable foundation." Braff says, adding: "To be successful in the future, we need to change course. We must strengthen our business, return to sustainable growth, and ensure we can continue investing in our franchises and our players."

She continues, "To best position Bethesda for future growth, we are shifting from a planning model primarily centered on what's next for each independent studio to one that focuses on our strongest franchises." Braff adds, "By working more closely across the organization, sharing expertise and capabilities, and focusing our investments on the opportunities with the greatest potential, we believe we can better support our franchises and IP with meaningful long-term potential."

Of course, one wonders why Microsoft took this long to shift Bethesda's focus and work on getting the next Fallout and Elder Scrolls games out as soon as possible. However, with a significant portion of the talent at id Software affected – which reportedly is focused on the coders working on the id Tech engine – it feels almost antithetical to the studio's plan to focus on its first-person shooter franchises, and evidence of the poor planning from Xbox management that has led us to this point.

Despite rumors that Xbox was looking to have Bethesda owner ZeniMax focus on Fallout and Elder Scrolls, the company will reportedly also be working on other franchises as part of an overhaul amid Xbox's major restructuring.

While Xbox is considering "potential strategic options" for Arkane, Ninja Theory and Undead Labs have been purchased by currently unknown buyers, while Double Fine and Compulsion Games are going independent. As part of its ongoing wave of layoffs which will see 3,200 staff laid off over the next year (the company's fifth wave of layoffs since the purchase of Activision Blizzard) – Bethesda owner ZeniMax is reportedly also going through an overhaul to see it focus on the biggest franchises under its banner.

Last month, rumors emerged that Xbox is reportedly pushing the company to get the likes of The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5 out sooner, but other franchises are reportedly set to be worked on alongside them. As reported by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, ZeniMax will apparently pivot to focus on its biggest franchises, including Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, alongside its iconic FPS trio Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake, amid a significant overhaul.

Notably, Quake and Wolfenstein haven't had new entries in around a decade, since Quake Champions and Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus released in 2017 (although two Wolfenstein spinoffs did release in 2019 to a negative-to-mixed reception).

However, despite the news that these franchises will be developed, Schreier reports that Quake and Doom developer (as well as one-time Wolfenstein developer) id Software will be cutting "a significant number of staff" today alongside ZeniMax Online Studios – which faced a game cancellation alongside layoffs almost exactly a year ago.

It's unclear whether the franchises will be worked on by other studios under the ZeniMax banner, however Wolfenstein developer Machine Games is seemingly unaffected by today's wave of layoffs.

As Bethesda Game Studios plans for the Switch 2 release of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered, it reassures fans that the RPG remake will indeed be "available on a physical game card" – an assertion that catches the eye, to say the least.

In case you're out of the loop, fans of physical media have had a heck of a week. Yesterday, Sony announced that it's ending physical disc production for new games on PlayStation consoles in 2028, stating "general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs" – and, boy, did that cause a stir.

Unsurprisingly, folks aren't thrilled… and it's not too difficult to see why. The move away from discs and cartridges has been a hot topic. Bethesda, however, isn't dipping out of producing physical copies of its games just yet – and it's reassuring players that Oblivion Remastered on Switch 2 is no exception in that regard.

A new post from the company (which, mind you, went live mere hours after Sony announced its plan to axe physical disc production for PlayStation) reads that "The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered Deluxe Edition is available on a physical game card."

You know, "for those seeking to add to their collection!" The attached video shows the cartridge itself being waved around front and center, just to get the message across. That's totally just a conveniently timed coincidence and most definitely not a jab at Sony… right? Well, it's not like Bethesda names any names here or anything – but it does appear the community finds the timing amusing.

"This after Sony announces that they'll end disc production in 2028," as one fan's reply puts it. Another jests, "Alright, Bethesda. You got my attention!"

Honestly, I'm glad – joke or not – that Bethesda is still letting fans choose between going digital or physical. It's not as though Sony is the only big name to make moves away from the latter, anyway, with Nintendo having sparked similar controversy with its introduction of game-key cards on the Switch 2 last year.

That wasn't a complete wipe of physical copies for Nintendo's console, however, but it shows that times are certainly changing.

As someone who enjoys collecting games myself, I do hope more companies follow suit here and let consumers choose whether or not they want digital or physical releases. Choice is the key here, I'd say – and stripping that away is the core of the contention.

"Pretend we kept patching Oblivion. What would we have done if we kept supporting it?" – Todd Howard explains the "thought exercise" Bethesda went through for its remaster.

Josh Sawyer isn't taking any credit for Fallout: New Vegas's conception, despite the fact that he directed the beloved RPG at Obsidian.

Like most games, Fallout: New Vegas was a collaborative effort with various leads at Obsidian spearheading different elements of the world and story, but in terms of the initial concept, it's fairly established history that studio co-founder Chris Avellone came up with the idea for the starting incident, which is the courier getting shot in the head and being buried in a shallow grave. Sawyer, as director, set the overall vision of the project, but he makes clear in an interview with The Examined Game that he wasn't involved in the initial discussions at all.

"I wasn't part of any of those early conversations," he says. "When I was at Obsidian around 2009, I had been a lead designer on an Aliens project that went very badly," he adds, referring to the canceled horror RPG Aliens: Crucible, "and it was the owners who had been talking to Bethesda. I had no idea that any of this stuff was going on.

"But then Feargus Urquhart, who's the studio head of Obsidian, he came to me and he said 'hey, we're talking to Bethesda about making a Fallout game – I think it was called Fallout 3: New Vegas or Fallout 3: Sin City – but it was a proposal that I believe [Obsidian co-founder] Chris Avellone had written, and I was completely unaware that they were doing this really, but basically he said, 'would you be willing to direct it?', and I was like, 'yeah, what? Of course.'"

Hearing this, I can't help but be reminded of a recent video from Sawyer's old Obsidian co-worker and fellow Fallout royalty Tim Cain, in which Cain explains how he "fumbled" his way through his early career, including his time at Interplay in which he created the Fallout series. According to these two generational RPG developers, the trick to success in this industry is just to really make sure you're in the right place at the right time.

"I didn't pitch New Vegas. New Vegas almost literally fell in my lap, because Feargus just sort of said, 'here you go', and yeah, it was just luck. It was just pure luck, like most things in my career," Sawyer adds.

There's a good reason Fallout: New Vegas remains on our list of the best RPGs to play in 2026.

Bethesda has finally confirmed the release date for the Nintendo Switch 2 Edition of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered, but it's not inspiring a huge amount of confidence based on Skyrim on Switch 2 and Oblivion Remastered everywhere else.

Bethesda Game Studios closed out the Nintendo Direct Partner Showcase earlier this year with news about its library coming to Switch 2, including the announcement of Fallout 4 Anniversary Edition and news about Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, but the big finale was that Oblivion Remastered would also be coming. And despite a Nintendo Direct no-show earlier this month, Bethesda has released a new trailer confirming the port will release on August 11, and despite word it would be a game-key card release, it will release on a proper cartridge after all.

The trailer is mostly a live-action segment showing the iconic Adoring Fan NPC from the 2006 classic following a man around, before showing a teeny-tiny bit of gameplay from the port at the end. Now, considering Skyrim's Switch 2 port was described as running "like wet ass" at launch (which, surely a wet ass would be smooth… Not important…) before getting a fix a few months later, the lack of gameplay isn't exactly inspiring confidence.

That's not to mention the fact that Skyrim is a game from 2011 with minimal improvements, whereas the remastered overhaul of Oblivion still has pretty terrible performance on PC, so how will the handheld handle it? "Will it actually work though?" one YouTube commenter asks, as another speculates: "There is a reason 80% of this video doesn't show any gameplay at all."

On top of Oblivion Remastered running poorly on other platforms, it hasn't been updated in some time, so some are hoping this new port will result in love for other versions. The YouTube comments on the trailer focus on this, with one user saying, "Please fix the performance issues on other consoles first," while another asks: "Does this mean it’ll get some patches for other consoles? I was bummed by how little post-launch support this got."

As Fallout 3 and New Vegas remake hopes and rumors persist, Bethesda's Todd Howard says he's actually "anti-remake" and prefers remasters like Oblivion's instead.

Time has been kind to Fallout: New Vegas, Obsidian's ambitious spin-off action RPG. These days, players appreciate the nuances and sense of place wandering the desolate Mojave desert, but back in 2010, the game lived in Fallout 3's shadow. Once those comparisons faded, director Josh Sawyer believes the release got a fairer look.

"The reception of New Vegas, when it launched, by professional reviewers was positive, but kind of lukewarm," Sawyer says on The Examined Game podcast (below). "People were not jumping out of their seats like, 'This is amazing.' And some reviews were pretty critical."

He notes there were comments that New Vegas "feels like a mod," or "feels almost identical to Fallout 3," or "it feels like an expansion pack." My personal recollection is frustration over bugs and glitches, but viewing Obsidian's project as glorified DLC sounds about right too.

As Sawyer notes, there's a significant overlap in assets and visuals, and coming two years after Fallout 3, it would've been a difficult descriptor to avoid. He clarifies he's "not saying everyone hated it," just the sci-fi adventure didn't land quite as the team hoped.

"It was only over time that there was this sense that people were appreciative," he recalls. "It's kind of like they forgot about the fact that they were annoyed that we reused so many assets and the gameplay was largely the same."

The modding community helped here as well. You can now find a hearty mix of improvements and tweaks that make New Vegas smoother and more enjoyable to play. In any case, if you haven't already played through it, I recommend you do. Just maybe not right after a run of Fallout 3.

Fallout: New Vegas lead says Obsidian has a "Karma Police" force to make sure "however you built your character" in their RPGs, "it's not gonna be the same experience" twice.

Before there was Fallout 3 in 2008, there was Van Buren – the sadly canceled, Black Isle Studios-led third Fallout – and even though it never came to fruition in the end, it could've been one heck of an RPG.

Or, at least, it sounds like it might've been. Obsidian Entertainment's Joshua Eric "Josh" Sawyer, now best known for his work on genre gems like Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity, seems to think it was shaping up to be quite a game.
He explains as much in a new interview with The Examined Game on YouTube (below), first noting that he "wasn't the lead" on Van Buren, that role belonged to Chris Avellone. He was the lead system designer, however.

Things were complicated over time after the team was stripped and left with a "skeleton crew," though, as Sawyer puts it. Resources "got taken away to work on another project outside of Black Isle." Considering the work that had been done on Van Buren, it was disappointing.

"This is such a bummer because we made a cool demo," as Sawyer recalls. "It looks very dated now, but… it was like 2003 when this demo was finished."

He notes that you can find said demo online, and after a quick search myself, I'll admit it does look pretty dated… but also pretty dang solid. It certainly fits the vibe of the first Fallout games a bit more than Bethesda Game Studios' own Fallout 3 does.

As Sawyer says himself, "I thought it was a really cool demo, and it showed that we were doing some pretty neat things." But, of course, nothing ever came from it, unfortunately.

According to Sawyer, however, publisher Interplay eventually did see it. "They said, 'Well, if we had known that you had made this, maybe we wouldn't have canceled it.'"

It's a frustrating consideration for the Obsidian dev and his former coworkers, as they "repeatedly" asked for acknowledgement of Van Buren. "We invited you over and over and over again, and you never came," he recalls. Sadly, as Sawyer concludes, "they weren't interested in it."

This all lines up with what others have said in the past. Fallout co-creator Tim Cain stated that the original canceled Fallout 3 could've shipped and been "a really good game," for example.

It's upsetting to know Van Buren won't ever see the light of day properly, I suppose – but for the time being, we do have fan-led projects like the Nexus Mods version of Van Buren that are playable for free.

Fallout designer Tim Cain "fumbled" through his career and "didn't think about a sequel" to the first apocalyptic RPG or Arcanum while making them.

Fallout: New Vegas rumors have been floating across the internet for longer than a tumbleweed takes to roll across the wasteland, but those previous reports are apparently credible, at least according to the prominent leaker who routinely reveals Nintendo news before Nintendo can get to it itself.

Leaker NateTheHate's been a big name within Nintendo circles for a while now. He first tipped everyone off on the exact random evening the Nintendo Switch 2 would be revealed. More recently, he also leaked the existence of the upcoming Star Fox revival and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's remake well before those games were formally announced.

And, now, he's thrown his hat into the ring of countless Fallout rumors. Asked about the credibility of whispers proclaiming a Fallout: New Vegas remake does in fact exist, the leaker simply says, "The previous reports have merit."

Hopes for a rebuilt Fallout: New Vegas first kicked off years ago when improperly redacted court documents from Microsoft and the FTC's court battles mentioned remasters for both Oblivion and Fallout 3 were in the works. The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered eventually came to pass, but fans have since been hoping that New Vegas latches on to its older brother's unofficial remaster plans. The Fallout TV show's deep references to the fan favorite game didn't hurt, either.

Windows Central also this year reported that both Bethesda's Fallout 3 and Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas were getting the remake treatment, citing anonymous sources in the know. Recent toy listings related to New Vegas, a 16-year-old game, mind you, added more fuel to the fire.

It's still worth taking it with a pinch of salt, but given NateTheHate's recent track record, there's no doubt that some fans are now going to be feeling extra confident that a remake is going to surface eventually.

Fallout: New Vegas designer says don't hold your breath for an Oblivion-style remaster: "I don't think Bethesda has the engineering knowhow."

Today marks exactly eight years since Bethesda revealed the Elder Scrolls 6 teaser from 2018, and all this time later, we've seen virtually nothing else from the project. Bethesda and Xbox's silence on the long, long, long-awaited follow-up to Skyrim is remarkable, but Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty has broken his silence with the tiniest of updates on one of the biggest games on the release date calendar.

BGS executive producer and game director Todd Howard has gone on the record to say Elder Scrolls 6 was announced too early, which seems like a bit of an understatement as we approach 10 years from that infamously vague teaser, but Booty tells Variety that the decision to reveal such a massively anticipated project is one of the trickier parts of his job.

"I would say one of the more challenging balancing acts of someone in a job like mine is balancing that you want to go show the world all the cool stuff you're working on, and you want to get them excited early, but we also know that we want to wait till the right moment," says Booty. "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."

Booty seems to be directly acknowledging the aforementioned premature reveal of The Elder Scrolls 6 here. With every day that passes without a significant update on the game, the big green elephant in the room at Xbox gradually swells, as does frustration from the RPG community who's been waiting almost a decade. That said, Booty assures that what he's seen from gameplay footage will be worth the wait.

"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," he says. "And we'll make sure to announce it and really reveal it at the right time."

"The majority of this building is working on The Elder Scrolls 6": Todd Howard says Bethesda's full focus is on the RPG it announced in 2018, and "it's so different than Starfield, so different than Fallout"

Rumors of the demise of Marvel's Blade from Arkane Studios are, apparently, greatly exaggerated. A development lead's cryptic tweet suggests all is still well at the company, and the team just needs a bit more time to show off what they've been up to.

The vampire hunter's new release was nowhere to be found at Summer Game Fest 2026, prompting concerns about whether it's still happening. It's actually been years since we heard anything of substance about the daywalker's latest digital venture, a trailer at The Game Awards 2023 being the last proper showing.

Spotted by PC Gamer, in response to a fan's worries on Twitter, Jean-Luc Monnet, lead concept artist and art director assistant provides a small note of reassurance. He doesn't say anything, he just posts a GIF of Walter White from Breaking Bad saying, "Let us cook."

In other words: give us time to put this thing together, and when we're ready, you'll get to see what we've been working on. Really, I suspect it's confirmation the devs are quietly working away on the project.

We're in a precarious time for the industry, as layoffs routinely hit publishers and studios big and small. Arkane Austin was closed in 2024, and it's been a while since one of the outfit's games really shook the industry. Anxiety accompanies teams for which we haven't seen many obvious signs of life, and a couple of years without an update can feel like a death knell now.

Not so much for Arkane, thank the dark lord, and we can only wait and see what bloody concoction the studio has involving Blade. Alas, it's not the only place where he's encountering problems: his headlining movie into the MCU's been in production hell for seven years now.

If Arkane can at least beat Marvel Studios to our screens, then that'll be victory enough. Just keep one eye on the shadows.

Be sure to keep up with all the other new games on the horizon in our handy roundup.

The end of Summer Game Fest 2026 is upon us, and Bethesda Game Studios was a no-show in most fans' minds as it (once again) gave us nothing about The Elder Scrolls 6.

Yes, that's – sadly – right. The Elder Scrolls 6 did not, in fact, make an appearance during last night's Xbox Games Showcase, despite many of us huffing on the hopium that it would.

It comes as no surprise that reactions to the event, which saw only evergreen Bethesda titles like Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online get some screen time, aren't exactly positive. Heck, it's been a whopping eight years since The Elder Scrolls 6 debuted at E3 in 2018... If you can call it "debuted," anyway, seeing as it was just a sub-minute teaser

Xbox showcase just wrapped up, still no TES VI from r/ElderScrolls

Over on Reddit, the conversation is taking off, with one person writing, "The one thing I was hoping for, even if it was just something small, was TES 6, and we still have nothing after eight years. I don't want to be negative, but at this point, I'm sick of waiting to hear nothing."

A comment jokes, "I can't wait to be a gaming grandpa to play this." I mean, I was a teenager when Bethesda unveiled its "trailer" myself, and now I'm 26… so, yeah.

Over on a separate thread, someone declared they"re "so depressed" after SGF. "It's been almost 15 years since the last Elder Scrolls game and nine years since the teaser for the new game. I'm so tired, man.... I'm at an all-time low." Replies see folks agree, with one reading, "I hate that I feel this way now, but I almost don’t care about it anymore."

Give it up for year 9 from r/ElderScrolls

That's how long it's been – and, as one user puts it, "At this point, it is more likely we will get the announcement of Skyrim for PS6 before TES 6." A painful but increasingly possible reality, I'd say… We did just get Skyrim on the Nintendo Switch 2, after all.

Another tired Elder Scrolls fan sums the entire situation and vibe up perfectly in their own post: "Give it up for year nine." They then jest: "See you all next year."

Will we see anything next year? I'm not sure, honestly, and I'm losing hope. Even Todd Howard himself told us to "just pretend we didn't didn't announce it" – so, um, yeah. He also admitted The Elder Scrolls 6 is still "a while" off, shooting down our hopes and dreams.

It's rough out here as an Elder Scrolls fan, honestly, and I'm growing tired of browsing the best Skyrim mods in hopes of spicing up the fifth entry for the hundredth time.

Fingers crossed that we get something… anything… soon from Bethesda. I'm not sure that the community can hang on much longer without more Elder Scrolls 6.

Searching for something else to wishlist? Here are the best new games coming this year and beyond to look forward to.

Summer Game Fest 2026 draws ever closer, and this might be GamesRadar+'s longest Wildcard Wishlist yet. The Summer Game Fest 2026 schedule grows more detailed by the week, with an Xbox Games Showcase and Gears of War special confirmed so far alongside Day of the Devs and a Wholesome Direct. But instead of being rational when it comes to specific game predictions, I've enlisted my most trusted dreamer colleagues in outlining all the new games we hope to see – no matter how out-of-pocket they might be. (I mean, I was right about Resident Evil Requiem's reveal last summer, after all.)

This is our third year of putting our hearts before our heads in the leadup to the showcase season. Here, you'll find everything from announced upcoming PS5 and upcoming Xbox Series X games we'd love to see more of, like The Witcher 4 and GTA 6, to upcoming Ubisoft games that have yet to be revealed despite reportedly entering development. They're all alike in one way: we have no real reason to be hoping for a major update from them at Summer Game Fest this year… but man, would we love to see it. Get the hopium ready, people. Here are the GamesRadar+ team's most-wanted wildcard games of SGF 2026!

1. Assassin's Creed Codename Hexe

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Platform(s): TBC
Release date: TBC

The leaks are out there now, which means I'm just waiting for some official Assassin's Creed Codename Hexe news to validate it. It's been a busy time for Ubisoft, with Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynched launching mere months from now, but what can I say? I'm a sucker for a rich, gloomy setting, and a game set during the European witch trials would definitely tick that box. After all these years jumping between RPGs and stealth action, it's high time Ubisoft injects some much-needed provincial magic into the mix. I saw Ezio Auditore with the devil!

2. Divinity

Developer: Larian Studios
Platform(s): TBC
Release date: TBC

We only just learned of Larian's new RPG at The Game Awards 2025, so maybe I'm greedy to hope for another peek so soon at Summer Game Fest. But can you blame me? The stunning reveal trailer introduces a far grislier side to the Baldur's Gate 3 studio than we've ever seen before, with a man getting burned alive inside a wicker effigy while townspeople celebrate around the pyre with rapturous glee. All eyes are on Larian as it quietly works to bring this sinister medieval fantasy to life, and while I'm more than happy to wait patiently, I really hope the studio doesn't leave too long before our next glimpse.

3. Haunted Chocolatier

Developer: ConcernedApe
Platform(s): PC
Release date: TBC

I know, I know, ConcernedApe (aka Eric Barone) has told us time and time again that he's still wrapped up in Stardew Valley and won't be showing off his upcoming RPG anytime soon. But it would be remiss of me not to include the elusive Haunted Chocolatier on this list, even as someone with admittedly little knowledge of his other works. The combination of its quirky setting, social sim elements, and a greater focus on combat this time around in this "way bigger" game is what grips me about it, and the fact that it's still so shrouded in mystery only piques my interest further. C'mon, Mr Barone - break off a square for us at Summer Game Fest?

4. Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet

Developer: Naughty Dog
Platform(s): PS5
Release date: TBC

It's been two years since Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet was revealed at The Game Awards 2024, and Naughty Dog has been quiet for far too long. The Last of Us developer's latest looks like a stunning sci-fi adventure, with a brief cinematic reveal trailer the only thing we have to go on for now. It's the studio's "wildest, most creative story yet" according to Neil Druckman, but I'm most keen for a better look at its combat after a glimpse of its third-person melee action. Here's hoping SGF 2026 sees Naughty Dog reminding us of its upcoming PS5 exclusive in style – maybe even with a release window?

5. Marvel's Blade

Developer: Arkane Lyon
Platform(s): PC, Xbox Series X
Release date: TBC

The coolest vamp slayer in the Marvel universe is past due a temperature check, but with such little news of late, I'm not feeling confident we'll be seeing Marvel's Blade at Summer Game Fest 2026. Studio Arkane's upcoming Marvel game has been in the works for years now, and save for some stills shared in 2025, we really haven't learned much since its first reveal in 2023. But maybe that silence is soon to end, should Arkane appear during an Xbox showcase this summer to give the PS5's upcoming Marvel's Wolverine a run for its money? Again, I have no grounds for this supposition except… what if?

6. Mass Effect 5

Developer: BioWare
Platform(s): TBC
Release date: TBC

After Dragon Age: The Veilguard tied a bow on Dragon Age for what will likely be a long time to come, I have my sights firmly set on my other favorite BioWare series: Mass Effect. With Mass Effect 5 in the works, there's always a small part of me that hopes we'll learn more about the next space-faring adventure. With only crumbs to go off of so far – which amounts to cryptic teasers here and there – there are so many questions I have about what's in store. As the developer is busy working on the next entry, I don't expect we'll actually see it at Summer Game Fest this year… But hey, there's always N7 Day in November.

7. Cyberpunk 2

Developer: CD Projekt Red
Platform(s): TBC
Release date: TBC

What else is this list for but to wish for the day CD Projekt Red unveils Cyberpunk 2 for real? We've known about the existence of the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel for some time now, with some rumors (or leaks, considering they came from the IP creator himself) that it will be set outside of Night City in Chicago instead. This is about as wildcard of a wishlist item I could possibly think of, and there's as much likelihood of it being shown at Summer Game Fest as there is of Keanu Reeves breaking into my house to offer me a cigarette. But both are things I'd quite enjoy, so leave a girl to her dreams.

8. Far Cry 7

Developer: TBA
Platform(s): TBC
Release date: TBC

While I'm still high on complete fantasy, we need to talk about Far Cry 7. Ubisoft has been especially quiet about the followup to 2021's Far Cry 6, so much so that it hasn't even been revealed yet. The rumor mill suggests that it could be coming as soon as next year, but as Ubisoft goes through a period of restructuring, there's never been a murkier time to be a fan of its top IPs. Still, if a Ubisoft Forward is on the cards for this summer, maybe it's not so wild to imagine a Far Cry 7 reveal after all? Not sure how I feel about the 24 hour time-limit, though…

9. The Witcher 4

Developer: CD Projekt Red
Platform(s): PC, Xbox Series X, PS5
Release date: TBC

More than a decade after Geralt hung up his swords, The Witcher 4 seems tantalisingly close yet remains just out of reach. Last summer's tech demo suggests CDPR has been quietly making major strides, but since then we've heard almost nothing about Ciri's upcoming adventure beyond a promising series of hiring announcements. Unfortunately, we're not expecting to return to The Continent before 2027, which means a major announcement is unlikely, but a new trailer setting up Ciri's story or her adventure in the new region of Kovir could be the start of a major 18-month hype cycle.

10. The Elder Scrolls 6

Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
Platform(s): TBC
Release date: TBC

After a whopping 14 years of… well, not much of anything, I'm still unwaveringly hopeful we'll see The Elder Scrolls 6 make an appearance at another event, even if it hasn't since its very first reveal at E3 back in 2018. Sure, Todd Howard himself has joked that we should all "just pretend" that Bethesda never announced its long-awaited next RPG, but that's far easier said than done. I'd love to see a sneak peek of the setting – whether or not it's truly the ever-rumored Hammerfell or High Rock – or perhaps get an idea of when it's set. Will it take place after or before Skyrim? Will we see playable races we've never seen before, like the Falmer? I doubt it, but hey, a girl can dream – and dreaming is exactly what I'll be doing.

11. Grand Theft Auto 6

Developer: Rockstar Games
Platform(s): PS5, Xbox Series X
Release date: November 19, 2026

With Grand Theft Auto 6 set to launch on November 19 and no further delays in sight, expect to hear a lot more from Rockstar in the coming months. Although the game's two existing trailers have been released with little build-up or fanfare, Summer Game Fest 2026 could be the perfect stage for Rockstar to open the floodgates as the run-up to launch begins. After all, we still don't know much about what we'll be getting up to in Leonida, nor what to expect from GTA 6's multiplayer. Will anything from our GTA 6 wishlist come true at SGF 2026? Time will tell!

12. Persona 6

Developer: Atlus
Platform(s): TBC
Release date: TBC

As Persona 5 fast approaches its tenth anniversary, having complete silence on the next proper game in the RPG series is starting to make me sweat, but Persona 6 news might come soon. The fifth game propelled this teen drama series into the spotlight like never before, and as a (mostly) anthology-style series the big question is just how what will Persona 6 do next? Stick with its predecessors urban, Tokyo vibes? Return to a rural small town, like Persona 4? Will they age up teens to college students? Will it still be set in Japan, or span multiple locations? Will it be green?! It could be anything. Which also means, at the moment, it's nothing. I simply have to know what direction they'll be taking, so even a small teaser will do. But, like everyone else waiting, I demand to be impressed. No pressure now.

13. Wolf Among Us 2

Developer: Telltale / Adhoc Studio
Platform(s): PC, PS5, Xbox Series X
Release date: TBC

It's somehow been nearly seven years since The Wolf Among Us 2 was first announced at the Game Awards back in 2019. Fast forward to today, and we've seen a few trailers, screenshots, and story details. But after a string of delays and some radio silence, I have no idea what's happening when it comes to Bigby's longwaited return. Even so, I still yearn for the sequel to my favorite Telltale game to finally see the light of day. With Adhoc Studio's – who penned Bigby's return – releasing a fantastic episodic story-driven experience in Dispatch last year, my appetite for Wolf Among Us 2 only intensifies. May Bigby huff and puff this year down.

14. Witchbrook

Developer(s): Chucklefish, Robotality
Platform(s): PC, Switch, Switch 2, Xbox Series X
Release date: TBC 2026

Witchbrook has been at the top of every cozy gamers most anticipated list since it was officially announced back in 2018. However, it's almost been eight years now and we still don't have a firm release date for the magic centered life-sim. The good news is that after it was delayed last year, the new 2026 launch window hasn't moved from the game's store pages. And, considering that we haven't got any new dev blog entries via the title's website either since December, I have my fingers crossed that we'll see it make an appearance during the Wholesome Direct on June 6. I'm craving to live out my cute pixelated witch fantasy and after a decade of waiting, it's time that we all get our hands on this one.

As the wait for new games from Bethesda Game Studios like The Elder Scrolls 6 continues, talented fans of older RPGs like Fallout 4 are figuring out ways to, erm, make Skyrim run in them…? Yeah, you know what, that checks out.

In case you missed it – because there's a pretty big chance you have, as it's incredibly random – a Fallout 4 player known as "RPGKING" on YouTube has managed to play Skyrim in the 2015 post-apocalyptic gem after somehow getting it to run… albeit admittedly with "a few bugs definitely to work out" before releasing it as a mod to the public.

"Obviously, this won't be available" until everything is fixed, he notes in his aptly-dubbed "Beat Todd to it" video.

It's amusing to watch – I mean, how could Skyrim running on a Pip-Boy in Fallout 4 not be? The iconic "hey, you" opening scene in static-y black and white is truly a sight to behold, and even the mouse and movement controls seem to work.

It's still in rough shape for now, however, with "some lag to fix" and other issues, but RPGKING reports that "everything else works perfectly." Here's hoping it does, because I can't wait to see it up for download.

Although hilariously enough, the creator concludes his video saying he's "pretty happy with this" – only to then admit it "looks like I've got a lot of bugs to flush out still."

Regardless, fans (it's me, I'm fans) can't get enough of the chaotic idea as a whole, with folks unsurprisingly blaming the lengthy wait between Skyrim and The Elder Scrolls 6 for such Frankenstein-y mods. "This is what 15 years without a sequel does to a fanbase," one comment reads.

Another jokes, "It's a Bethesda game within a Bethesda game; I imagine bugs will be part of the experience every step of the way." My favorite reply of all, though, jests, "It's what Todd Howard would've wanted." It might just be, anon. It might just be.

Skyrim mod has you slay dragons "by debating them on the geopolitics of Tamriel," turning Bethesda's RPG into an absurd game of Civilization.

Somewhere in the ether, there's evidence of the Generic Universal Role Playing System, or GURPS, version of Interplay's Fallout, in which franchise co-creator Tim Cain dumped every adjective he's ever heard of before a botched licensing deal ultimately led the 1997 game to the SPECIAL ruleset current developer Bethesda still uses. Cain is missing most of that evidence – or he thought so, before unearthing a fat list of advantages, disadvantages, quirks, and skills he shares in a new YouTube video giving us a rare sniff of what Fallout development was like 30 years ago.

"I thought these were lost," Cain says in the video posted May 13. "Well, I found written notes of the final advantages, disadvantages, quirks, and skills had it been selected to be used in the GURPS version of Fallout."

Interplay had Cain destroy his archive of the project after he left the company, and the developer apparently misplaced the separate archive Cain handed over before shipping Fallout in 1997. But that's in the past – Cain finally has some proof of the elaborate wasteland GURPS Fallout, and he's eager to share each exhausting detail.

In terms of attributes, strength, health, IQ, and dexterity are a given. "We were of course using all four of those," says Cain, but then there was a whole separate spice cabinet of advantageous and disadvantageous characteristics players could use.

He lists ingredients in a large pot of soup: "Acute hearing, acute taste and smell, acute vision; alertness; [...] ambidexterity; animal empathy; appearance attractive, appearance handsome, and appearance very handsome.

"Charisma; combat reflexes, common sense, danger sense; eidetic memory, high pain threshold, intuition; literacy, luck; night vision, peripheral vision; rapid healing," and you could have good reputation in various Fallout factions, including, in your Vault, Shady Sands, Junktown, the Hub, Brotherhood of Steel, and so on.

"We also added strong will, toughness, and voice," says Cain. These advantages would have all cost character points to purchase, and, "in essence, made the game a little easier in some small aspect," Cain adds. The disadvantage list gleefully kicks up the seesaw and balances that out.

In addition to a number of bad or enemy-level reputations you could earn among all of Fallout's major groups, including your Vault, GURPS Fallout also let you develop "Alcoholism. Odious personal habit: Bad breath. Odious personal habit: Pick nose," says Cain. "Color blindness, hard of hearing, low pain threshold, no sense of smell or taste – it's also called anosmia. One eye; overweight, skinny – those are both disadvantages in GURPS. Stuttering."

GURPS Fallout would have also made you vulnerable to various addictions, including to "physical adders" that adjusted your strength, dex, and hardiness of your health, "mental adders" that boosted IQ, or combat-specific drugs Cain calls "berserk drugs."

These, of course, are all separate to the "bad temper, berserk, blood lust" you could incur, or "code of honor – it's called, 'You Never Break Your Word,' combat paralysis; compulsive lying, delusion: hears voices; gullibility, honesty; lecherousness; pacifism: cannot kill, pacifism: self-defense only; phobia of insects, phobia of monsters, phobia of reptiles, phobia of darkness; sense of duty to the Vault, truthfulness, unluckiness; weak will." Phew. These disadvantages are starting to sound like the reasons for my therapy bill.

Cain says there were additionally three levels of ugliness, from mildly unattractive to, "You're the most disgusting thing ever born in the Vault," Cain explains. "You're lucky they didn't kill you as a mutant." And because this is GURPS Fallout we're talking about, you could also have so many quirks, they might have eventually cast Zooey Deschanel to play you in a movie. Two of my favorite options Cain lists are "hates cows" and "boisterous walker," which would make your footsteps fall like anvils.

As for skills, some highlights GURPS Fallout would have launched with are "jumping," "sex appeal," and Cain says, "savoir-faire, one of my favorite ones, the skill of good manners and getting along in a social setting."

"We had all of those in the game at some level of implementation in early 1997," Cain concludes.

"Tim, not to be too dark," quickly replies one fan on YouTube. "Can you release the source code for Fallout as your last will and testament?"

Not missing a beat, Cain says, "I'd have to have it first."

Xbox studio accidentally gave away the RPG that led to OG Fallout for free, so now it's giving everyone a way to play it legitimately.

After spending a few days exploring The Vatican and beyond with everyone's favorite adventurer, I'm happy to report Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is another winner on the ever-growing list of impressive Nintendo Switch 2 ports.

Not even a full year into its life cycle, the hybrid console has proved surprisingly solid for huge third-party video games. From Cyberpunk 2077 to Star Wars Outlaws and day-one current-gen releases like Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata, it's managed shockingly well. Now, the Bethesda-published blockbuster has officially landed on the latest Nintendo hardware to put it through its paces too.

Much like my experience of a flawed yet impressive Night City on Switch 2, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle proves how much power the unsuspecting hybrid has beneath the hood. Even if, yes, there are some caveats holding it back from like-for-like performance next to the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

"I understand its power now"

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was probably my favorite among the best games of 2024, a truly delightful rollercoaster that dared to tinker with immersive sim design while avoiding a few tricks pulled off by Nathan Drake and Lara Croft elsewhere. It's also a fantastic Indy adventure, speaking as a fan of the IP in general - perhaps the third-best ever made (movies included).

The striking attention to detail across character models and environments is key to meeting that cinematic Lucasfilm quality, and the Switch 2 port avoids watering it down. Like in all the aforementioned ports of recent releases now arriving to the new Switch, you're getting something with lower settings, resolution targets, and FPS caps compared to the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions. However, thanks to being built with the Motor by id Tech 7 engine, the overall experience is impressively preserved on Switch 2 (which makes me hopeful about a potential Doom: The Dark Ages port later down the line).

Shadows and the draw distances for smaller objects and geometry, like foliage, are the obvious cuts here, though never to the point of being overly distracting or altering the full artistic vision. In interiors, the results are even more convincing, with ambient occlusion and ray-traced global illumination that grounds every room I've raided so far with dark corners and light interactions that look especially good when using the console's (very limited) HDR capabilities. Character models and textures are the more preserved aspects of the ensemble, facilitating stunning in-game cutscenes that don't differ much from those on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, or PC with path tracing-less settings.

As previously reported, the game targets 1080p docked and 720p in its handheld mode. Here's where the console's unique DLSS capabilities elevate the results, which look much sharper than Xbox Series S' soft image output when docked and generally fine in handheld play. Dynamic targets mean busier areas like The Vatican can hurt the internal resolution, but DLSS is making sure it never becomes an overly blurry mess, even if the finer details and textures take a noticeable hit as seen above when comparing docked versus handheld modes. There's a clear gap, but motion blur and a smaller screen can mask many of the imperfections when undocked.

As for the 30 FPS target, it feels generally solid, especially if you're using the console's own 120Hz VRR display. The Great Circle isn't a fast-paced game, and despite its first-person nature, I didn't find it difficult to go from +100 FPS on PC to a much lower target most of the time. The few annoyances come from split-second dips when shots change in a cutscene (a common issue in other games) and short hiccups while traversing some of the game's more complex areas. I'd imagine the CPU and RAM simply have a rough time loading assets in and out in those scenarios, as the more linear levels behave better.

"Fortune and glory, kid!"

All this comes at the expense of a file size - if you're also getting the Order of the Giants DLC (yes, it's sold separately) - of around 60 GB. While far smaller than the game's original iteration, it's on the chunkier side of the Switch 2's bigger ports, so I'd recommend one of the best Switch 2 microSD Express storage cards if you don't want to get rid of most of your game installs to play Indy's latest. Of course, you can just grab the physical cartridge release to negate most of its impact on storage, too.

Gameplay-wise, MachineGames' port makes good use of the console's alternate control options, with motion gyro controls offering more precise aiming if you can get used to them (I've never been a big fan, personally) and mouse controls that feel way smoother than they should at 30 FPS. This feature can come across as little more than a tacked-on afterthought elsewhere (not you, Metroid Prime 4), but the input lag in The Great Circle is minimal, especially when using the console's own screen. I was genuinely surprised by how good it feels, even if I'd rather use the Switch 2 Pro controller while sitting on my couch.

Ultimately, I'm more than impressed. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on Switch 2 feels just a couple of notable post-launch patches away from porting perfection, if the more annoying hitches can be improved and there are further optimizations to handheld mode's slightly fuzzier image quality. The team at MachineGames has expertly navigated the console's limitations and plays to its many strengths, and after the mixed experiences on Steam Deck and its relatives, it's safe to say that Indy is feeling right at home on Nintendo's current-gen hybrid.

Looking for more of the best Switch 2 games to add to your collection? We've got you covered.

We might not have The Elder Scrolls 6 yet, but that's all right – a talented Elden Ring modder is working to get one of Bethesda Game Studios' classics to us instead, bringing Morrowind to FromSoftware's own fantasy RPG.

In case you've not heard of the big project yourself, legendary Halo and Elden Ring modder InfernoPlus has been working to port Morrowind to Elden Ring for quite some time now – heck, he first unveiled his plans in 2025, explaining that he was "about halfway done."

A good while has passed since then without much word from the creator, but a new update from InfernoPlus proves the mod is indeed still happening. Explaining the current state of the project in a YouTube video, he dubs it "the most complex mod ever created" – and, yeah, I can see why. Morrowind is 24 years old, and Elden Ring is, you know, a completely separate game.

"It's been some months since the last update, and we have made tremendous progress on the mod," InfernoPlus says. "Many things that I thought would be impossible have taken shape, and the game has entered a fairly playable state."

That's good news, to say the least – but that doesn't mean the mod is ready. "It's still got a ways to go before it's done, but what we have built here is actually really quite interesting," as InfernoPlus states.

He goes on to show it off, from the functional combat to spells and gear, and it's certainly a sight to behold. There's plenty to anticipate, but he does clarify that it's not been easy. Elden Ring doesn't provide too much to work with.

For example, crime and punishment are big in The Elder Scrolls. Guards will arrest you – a system that's not actually in Elden Ring itself. So, InfernoPlus and his team of modders have had to do everything from coding to scripting to bring the decades-old Bethesda RPG to life in the FromSoftware game, and they're still working on it.

He leaves a call for volunteers in the video, too, asking for artists and voice actors to hop on board the project.

That's not to say the mod isn't chugging along well, however – InfernoPlus reiterates that it's "progressing quite well," all things considered. So, we might just get to replay Morrowind in Elden Ring soon… sooner than The Elder Scrolls 6, I'd wager, anyway.

A new Elden Ring world record was set just 2 weeks ago, and like everyone else I keep rewatching the same part of the 52-minute speedrun.

Warhorse Studios co-founder Daniel Vávra once wrote a scathing article listing over 100 reasons why The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim sucks. Years later, the Bethesda RPG apparently went on to become a massive inspiration for Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

Asked about the open-world influences behind the two Kingdom Come: Deliverance games during a recent Reddit AMA, studio content director Ondřej Bittner says "that huge inspiration for Dan" was "Skyrim even though he wrote famous article where he listed 100 reasons that he hates about that game." Bittner's favorite game in the genre is Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, for what it's worth.

Vávra's Skyrim takedown is an absolutely brutal read (at least with the machine translated version I was looking at). His 116-point list rips apart small details, like the fact there aren't any toilets in Skyrim, or that most merchants don't stock lockpicks, to more sweeping complaints aimed at how the game looked and felt back in 2011.

Aside from the pokes at Todd Howard, the article is quite an enlightening look at what might have been going through Vávra's mind while working on the first Kingdom Come game. He seems particularly aggravated by the little things that don't add up in Skyrim: How do three-pound pieces of iron create a 12-pound sword? How does our character float in water wearing a suit of solid armor? Why does an imperial soldier simply go to bed when you're clearly trespassing in their home at night? That isn't to say you can't poke similar holes in Kingdom Come: Deliverance's internal logic, but it's a game that seems more fixated on the 'realism' of it all.

Most of all, Vávra's biggest lesson here is probably a crappy one. More toilets equals better game. Last month, he tweeted that Crimson Desert has usable toilets so it "must be a good game." It's an important metric, game devs, don't forget it.

Elsewhere in the AMA thread, design director Martin Ziegler says he's "always admired the philosophy of Fallout: New Vegas and both of the older Fallouts of just allowing everything to happen and taking whatever happens in stride." The team apparently wanted Kingdom Come: Deliverance "to be more restrictive in order to keep the quests more tightly on rails towards their key moments, but the freedom and responsivity of these games was certainly inspiring in a lot of ways."

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 devs won't confirm or deny making a Lord of the Rings game, but are definitely making an "immersive RPG rich with details" that's "hopefully not so buggy."

ZeniMax Online Studios founder and former The Elder Scrolls Online director Matt Firor left the company after parent studio Microsoft canceled his MMO Project Blackbird in 2025, but even a year later, he takes it personally when people compare ESO to World of Warcraft.

It "still gets under my skin," Firor tells MinnMax host Ben Hanson in a new interview, when anyone refers to ESO as "a WoW clone" – partly because he flat-out disagrees, and partly because approaching Elder Scrolls Online that way makes the game experience worse for anyone expecting World of Warcraft in Tamriel.

"All of the feedback that we got was, 'This game isn't like WoW enough,'" Firor continues, "and it's like, 'No, it's not a WoW clone. Yes, it's multiplayer fantasy game. So is Dark Age of Camelot, right? Is WoW a Dark Age of Camelot clone? No.'"

Firor is an expert on what MMO is or isn't like another. He served as Dark Age of Camelot's producer in 2001, he has nearly 30 years of credits on some of the most influential massively multiplayer online games in history, including 1997 MMO Silent Death Online, 1998 MMORPG Aliens Online, and more. So when it comes to a relatively more modern game like ESO, he can say confidently, "Every game takes things that the games before them did and mixes them together in a different soup, and it's awesome."

"We had Elder Scrolls, and so we were fantasy," Firor continues, "built to be a multiplayer game – like that was the mandate when I got hired, was make the Elder Scrolls MMO, and I did. But, systems-wise, it is so different from WoW."

It does, at least, seem like most people who still play both games agree. In one popular Reddit thread comparing the two, the top comment summarizes what seems to be the general consensus: play ESO for the story, and WoW for the power progression. Another comment says the mere act of pitting the two against each other is as useless as contrasting "tea and coffee" to "absinthe and Mt. Dew."

Firor expresses similar indifference. "WoW's a fantastic game," he says. "It's probably my second-most played game of all time." It just makes no substantial impact on The Elder Scrolls Online, he insists.

"If you sit down and play it like it's a WoW clone, you're not going to have fun at all," he warns. "If you sit down and play it like an Elder Scrolls game, like Elder Scrolls Online, it's a fantastic game."

Elder Scrolls Online director still secretly plays the MMO, even after he left the studio when Microsoft killed his dream game: "I'm in guilds, and they don't know who I am."

Elder Scrolls Online director Matt Firor has made no secret of the reason he left Zenimax Online Studios, the developer he founded way back in 2007: he wasn't going to stick around if he couldn't keep making his dream MMO, Project Blackbird. He's convinced it could've been a hit, but he understands Microsoft's reasons for cancelling it.

"I think it's a missed opportunity for me, for [Zenimax Online Studios], for Bethesda, for Xbox. I think it would have been a fantastic game," Firor says in an interview with MinnMax. "But I understand the reasoning that went into it. This is why making games is always a heartbreaking business. No matter what happens, you'd be at the best studio in the world, and decisions happen that impact people. I didn't agree with what happened, but I understood the reasoning behind it."

Host Ben Hanson then asks if the decision was influenced by Microsoft's market tests. "I don't even know if it was that deep," Firor responds. "It's more, we're a number on a ledger and if that number is large, it is ripe for 'analysis,' shall we say. That number was always large, and over the years we always explained why we were frontloading a lot of cost and what they were going to get for it."

In other words, Project Blackbird's cancellation wasn't really about the game – it simply didn't look good on a balance sheet to the higher-ups at Microsoft. "Eventually, the industry just got to a point where it looked to the people there, and elsewhere in the industry, that that was just a very large bet and they needed to hedge their large bets," Firor explains. "I think that's what happened."

Project Blackbird was technically in development for seven years, but Firor emphasizes that it was not in full production that entire time. There were initially a handful of developers trying to shake out the game's backbone – what engine it should use, for example – and "then COVID happened" right as the hiring push for the MMO was supposed to get underway, Firor says, suggesting that it wasn't as if seven years of full-scale production had gone by with nothing to show for it.

Around the time that Project Blackbird was cancelled, a report from Bloomberg suggested that then-Xbox boss Phil Spencer loved the game, which made its cancellation all the more incongruous. In this interview, Firor simply acknowledges, with a smile, "Bloomberg did say that." Either way, he doesn't have any hard feelings towards Xbox at large – clearly, since he's still playing ESO in secret these days.

"In general, the people at Xbox were awesome," Firor says. "It's not a personal vendetta or anything. Everyone there was mostly good to interact with on a human level. It's just, big business is big business. It's like Microsoft is Microsoft, right? A giant successful video game on the Microsoft level was frankly not that stimulating to them. They want a business that they can look at that has numbers that go up, reliably, every year by a certain amount. This isn't Xbox – this is all public companies. They want reliable, forecastable business. Entertainment like the video game industry just doesn't work that way sometimes."

Firor compares the Xbox of today to the EA of 2008 or the Activision of 2004 – eras when each publisher had gone on acquisition sprees, only to ultimately turn around and shut down many of the studios and game projects which they'd acquired. "It's a business and it's terrible sometimes," Firor says. "I don't agree with some of the decisions, obviously, but the reasoning behind them makes sense on a ledger somewhere."

"A single-player MMO is almost like cheating": Crimson Desert is "awesome," former Elder Scrolls Online director says, even if "I don't know what the hell I'm doing."

Zenimax Online founder and Elder Scrolls Online director Matt Firor left the studio in 2025, confirming months later that his departure was a direct result of Microsoft's cancelling his dream MMO, Project Blackbird. You might think that colors his feelings about ESO, but no – it's apparently still one of his favorite games, and he's continuing to play it to this day, even as his guildmates have no idea who he is.

"I did take two or three months off just to get away mentally, but I started playing again," Firor says in a new interview with MinnMax. He says he's quite enjoying experiencing the game purely as a player rather than a developer, since he no longer needs to jump into Slack to report every bug he sees when playing on live servers.

"I don't have that anymore," Firor says. "and not having that is actually very freeing, because I can actually just concentrate on the game and not on the problems. It's such a different mindset just to jump in. I'm in guilds, and they don't know who I am. So I just play and it's a lot of fun. I'm having the best time since probably 2017 or 2018 in the game right now."

Firor is perfectly willing to acknowledge the irony of hyping up his own game even when he's no longer responsible for it. "I was on a podcast last year where they wanted me to name my five favorite games," Firor says, "and I named ESO. I actually semi-apologized for it in the podcast because it's such a loser move nominating your own game for your favorite game. But it is. It's a really, really good game. And I've spent so much of my life building it and living in it that I appreciate it for what it is even today."

He admits that he still texts the devs who remain at the ESO studio about the game on occasion, "but I do it a lot less than I used to." Even now, he's still seeing some of the fruits of his own labours, since it takes "probably up to 12 to 16 months to make content in ESO. So they're still shipping stuff that I knew about, that I knew was coming and I was involved in the planning with. But they've changed it in subtle ways that I think is fantastic and really smart."

It's easy to understand why Firor feels so strongly about Elder Scrolls Online – after all, he founded Zenimax Online way back in 2007 and spent 18 years with the company, shepherding ESO through its early development and a rocky launch as it eventually became one of the most successful modern MMOs. That's a substantial chunk of a lifetime to devote to one game, and it's clear Firor takes pride in that game's success.

It's also pretty obvious why somebody who takes so much pride in their work might be so distressed about having their dream project killed. "Project Blackbird was the game I had waited my entire career to create," Firor said at the time, "and having it canceled led to my resignation." At least he still has ESO.

Elder Scrolls Online is still one of the best MMOs you can play today.

It seems Starfield could've been a watershed game for Bethesda beyond just being the studio's first new IP in decades. According to a former developer on the RPG, serious consideration was given to changing engines on the production, before it was decided the team should stay on the well-worn Creation Engine.

Heather Cerlan, now CEO and creative director at NEARstudios, but formerly an artist who worked on Starfield for several years, reveals as much in her recent conversation with Kiwi Talkz. "There was a lot of pressure internally to push to Unreal [Engine 5], especially when Nanite and Lumen and all these amazing features were coming out," she says.

"People were like, 'Why don't we just use Unreal?'," she recalls. Although development had been happening on Starfield for some years prior to Unreal Engine 5's preliminary launch in May 2021, it was still two years out from release, providing some runway for transition.

The upgrades and features were and are enticing, and this would've been before the performance inconsistencies came to light. Of course, Bethesda games aren't without their problems to begin with, so that's something of a moot point, and there are plenty of games that run just fine using the latest Unreal Engine.

But Bethesda had put years of iteration into its own framework by then, the Creation Engine. Used since Skyrim, it'd get an upgrade to the Creation Engine 2 for Starfield, and it was the versatility for the community surrounding Bethesda releases that settled the discussion.

"The real reason that Bethesda holds onto the Creation Engine is because of all the modding capabilities," Cerlan reveals. "The whole modding community that's built around those tools and those systems, it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense for Bethesda to switch over to any other engine, because they've already built up a whole community that sustains the success of their titles."

Truly, if ever there's an argument against changing engines for Bethesda, it would be potentially alienating modders. They're a huge part of the studio's longevity, breathing life into and sustaining Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallouts 3, 4, New Vegas, and beyond.

In a prior chat with us, Todd Howard mentioned that aspects of Unreal's tech have been incorporated into Bethesda's methodology. "There are workflows, and as we're hiring new people, we're often looking at those workflows, like, how does an Unreal Engine do this from an editor standpoint?" he told GamesRadar+. "So we are starting to borrow some workflows or things, but we're doing it in our own way, so that we're serving what we need for our games."

The Elder Scrolls 6 is confirmed to be using Creation Engine 3. We'll see what the future holds for Fallout 5, but I wouldn't expect any kind of rash pivot.

Starfield "was the best-selling video game of the week" in US for first time in nearly 3 years, reports analyst, despite Bethesda's rough PS5 port of the RPG

Warm beignets and cold Nuka-Cola – these simple pleasures could be yours if Fallout 5 rumors are true and the upcoming Bethesda game is set in swamp city New Orleans. Or, they could be yours if you go back in time and kiss Todd Howard's feet 900 times, convincing him to release the Fallout game Obsidian veteran Chris Avellone hoped to set in the Louisiana wasteland.

Avellone, who served as a senior designer on New Vegas in 2010, reminisced to YouTuber TKs-Mantis in a chunky new interview about the time "we still thought we'd be able to do New Vegas 2, or whatever the title would be" at Obsidian, along with vague plans for a Fallout New Orleans. Avellone now says, with a little bitterness, that those thoughts about New Vegas 2 "quickly evaporated," and he doubts Obsidian would return to the project any time "in the next six years, at least – if ever." But he still has hope for New Orleans.

"One of the designers-slash-producers on our other projects suggested New Orleans as a location, and I was so stoked for that. It's going to be a weird reference, but there is an old comic franchise started by this author-slash-artist Matt Wagner called Grendel, and a lot of the Grendel stories are very post-apocalyptic," says Avellone about a noir series first published in 1983, whose antihero explores his vengefulness in stories often painted in only black, white, and red. It shares a cyanide sense of humor with the Fallout series in how it discusses power and those who wield it, so I'm not surprised Avellone found it magnetic.

"There was one that was written in New Orleans. It was called, like, 'Four Devils, One Hell,' and it's a fantastic story," he continues to say about the 1993 Grendel Tales run whose first issue synopsis could easily be mistaken for a Fallout TV show episode logline: "Montovani is hired by Batiaque to find his brother's murderer and tangles with a Dulac. Batiaque is also murdered. Bixby kills vampires, thinking himself a king's knight, but he is really Grendel's accountant. Gloria preserves art in England and goes on treasure hunt."

"As soon as I read it – while I was doing Fallout research, ironically enough – I'm like, 'Man, this makes me want to do a Fallout New Orleans so bad,'" Avellone says.

He continues, "The vibe was so cool. The flavor was so cool, and it's still Fallout, but it's in a different area that felt different. Yeah, there's still a lot of potential there." Avellone isn't alone in dreaming about Louisiana's heat meeting Fallout's fire – plenty of people are enthusiastic about Fallout 5 in New Orleans, including Fallout 76 lead artist and ex-Bethesda dev Nate Purkeypile, who said earlier this year, "Fallout 5 in New Orleans? I mean, that would get my vote for sure." I just wonder what Todd Howard thinks about crawfish.

Bethesda "lectured" Fallout New Vegas designer for saying the RPG would run at 30 FPS: "'Why do you have a f***ing engine that can't run 30 frames per second?'"

Starfield has suffered a rough couple of weeks following its so-called "unplayable" PS5 port and subsequent disappointing fixes from Bethesda Game Studios, but it's not all doom and gloom for the space RPG – in fact, things might be a lot better than they seem.

Veteran analyst and Circana games lead Mat Piscatella reveals as much in a new online post, explaining that Starfield was actually "the best-selling video game of the week in tracked physical and digital US full game dollar sales during the week ending April 11th" – the same week Bethesda launched its divisive space game on PlayStation 5 and released its Free Lanes update, as well as the Terran Armada DLC.

Starfield was the best-selling video game of the week in tracked physical & digital US full game dollar sales during the week ending April 11th.It's the first time Starfield has led the weekly US best-selling titles chart since week ending Sept 2, 2023.Source: Circana Retail Tracking Service

— @matpiscatella.bsky.social (@matpiscatella.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-04-20T16:32:49.248Z

Furthermore, though, this is apparently the first time this has happened since September of 2023 – nearly three years. As Piscatella writes, "It's the first time Starfield has led the weekly US best-selling titles chart since week ending Sept 2, 2023."

That's no small feat, especially when we've got other analysts saying Crimson Desert is "on track to overtake Starfield's total lifetime copies sold by the end of the year" thanks to the "not fantastic" PS5 port.

Rhys Elliott, head of market analysis at Alinea Analytics, for example, stated, "In the context of a Bethesda budget and a decade-long development cycle, Starfield has likely barely broken even."

It's hard to take a stance here, but I do personally wonder how things will continue to change – particularly now that it appears Starfield is coming to Switch 2 at some point. I'm not sure it'll go smoothly after the PS5 port, but its sales might similarly prove otherwise.

Only time will tell, I suppose. For now, at least, it's good to see that Bethesda managed to hit some sort of high the week ending April 11, considering everything that preceded the stellar sales numbers Piscatella reports.

Todd Howard says that Starfield's New Game Plus was "us asking you this weird, deep question that I actually think got lost on a lot of people."