The Elder Scrolls 6 is still who even knows how far off, but former Bethesda animator Jeremy Bryant doesn't believe the studio will get any bigger for it, unlike Rockstar which has "3,000 people, maybe, working on GTA 6."
In an interview with Kiwi Talkz, Bryant, who worked on Skyrim, Fallout 4, Starfield, and more, and the host discuss how Bethesda acquired several smaller studios wholesale to get bigger as quickly and efficiently as possible.
"Todd [Howard] has the vision for the game that he wants to make and he knows he needs X number of people to do it," Bryant explains. "When you road map out what you're going to do you can see if you need more devs, and it was obvious that we did. Probably the only way, really, to grow that fast is to kind of wholesale absorb, you can't hire that fast I don't think. It would be hard to hire onesies twozies and get up to the scale you needed."
However, when asked if he thinks Bethesda will grow anymore to support the Elder Scrolls 6, he replies, "I wouldn't think so." So whatever the head count is now, that could be everyone working on the game, which we haven't had much real news about it apart from Bethesda resharing an old picture.
Bryant goes on to praise Rockstar, a company with a huge number of employees. "[Rockstar] are such masters," Bryant says. "Their games are so polished. You always wonder, 'how do they do it?' GTA 6 yeah it's taken like 10 years, I get it, but I went and looked at the credits for Red Dead and they had like 500 animators. There was like 80, 85 just gameplay animators and another 80 cinematic ones and another 100 face ones. Those team sizes, it's bonkers. I think the overall dev size they said was around 1,600 I think on Red Dead 2."
He then speculates, "They conceivably have 3,000 people maybe working on GTA 6." But, Bryant doesn't think it sounds like the best place to work, despite the amazing games Rockstar makes.
"How do all those people communicate and form any kind of bond at work when it's just a random thousand people sitting shoulder to shoulder like on an assembly line," he asks? "I don't know, that doesn't sound all that great to me. It sounds terrible."
Check out the work of all those people by reading our list of the best Rockstar games ever.
