Post-Skyrim and pre-Fallout 4 was a glorious time at Bethesda, devs say: "When we made that game, it was like World Series Red Sox"

Bethesda Game Studios developers have reminisced about the company's glory days following the widely successful launch of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim.

The mammoth RPG's senior designer and writer Emil Pagliarulo tells Game Informer that by the time Fallout 4 "rolled around, our team was so tight" because of everything they had learned from Skyrim's production.

"When we made that game [Skyrim], it was like World Series Red Sox," he says. "I used the term that the studio is a starship full of Rikers [Star Trek: The Next Generation reference]. Everyone could captain this ship, that's how good everyone is. We were really tight. We really communicated well. We moved fast on things. We had a good groove. We had been working together for a long time, and I think that was really instrumental as we moved forward."

"When I look at that transition between Fallout 3 and Skyrim, and then Skyrim to Fallout 4, I really look at how we, as a development team, worked together and improved our craft and the process," producer Angela Browder adds. "I think with every project, I can absolutely, with 100-percent certainty tell you that we, as a studio, got better. Our process – the process of making a game – got better with every single one."

Browder then mentions that the team could have just rested of their laurels after Skyrim's massive sales, near universal acclaim, and endless shelf life, but all of that success didn't "negate any of the learnings that we need to take from the development process." So the studio was still apparently thinking about how to improve its development process with Fallout 4 and beyond.

Todd Howard likes "to start over" on every Elder Scrolls game, and as we approach Skyrim's 15th anniversary I don't know that Bethesda needed to start over that hard