It’s been almost 15 years since the original launch of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. Feel old yet?
No? Well, it’s also been over eight years since Bethesda announced The Elder Scrolls 6, the game has not been heard from since, and recent developments make it seem like it won’t be coming any time soon, either. That’s enough to make even the freshest faces feel ancient.
To make matters somehow even worse, this week’s thunderous wave of layoffs across Xbox will have serious repercussions on TES6’s development, according to a new report by IGN.
One Bethesda staff member said that layoffs across several of the studio’s locations “will have a substantial and cascading effect on the game and morale of this studio,” while another said that those laid off are “a mix of every discipline: programmers, artists, and designers.” The losses were so sweeping that it even includes someone “who’s been at the company since Morrowind.”
The level of turnover inside Xbox that began this week has been unfathomable, but the sources inside Bethesda say that “key, high-performing people in the trenches” working on TES6 were part of them, and this has “shattered morale, raised the risk of future development crunch, and increased the likelihood that the game’s already far-off completion date will be delayed.”
It’s hard to think of a worse case of “announced too early” than TES6. It has been eight years, EIGHT years, almost a full decade since the announcement, and there has been nothing to show or even talk about since then. And now, with Xbox’s “reset” laying off over 3,200 people over the next year, it’s looking bleak.
It seems like the best-case scenario at this point is that TES6 may come to Project Helix, the next Xbox console, and that’s not great news for anyone considering the presumed price of any console in the near future will likely cost $1,000 or more. It’s hard to imagine the game launching within the next few years on Xbox Series X|S.
