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.
