Since this comes from someone who was very close to the fire, perhaps we should take his words seriously…
It has been a long time since Bethesda Game Studios released a new The Elder Scrolls or Fallout game. Fallout 4 is already 11 years old, while nearly 15 years have passed since The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim launched. That is exactly the same amount of time that passed between Skyrim and 1996’s Daggerfall.
It is astonishing that two of gaming’s most popular franchises have been left aside for so long. One of Microsoft’s less controversial goals is now to bring these games out faster. However, a former Bethesda Game Studios designer has urged caution about that plan.
Bruce Nesmith, the lead designer of Skyrim, who also worked on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Starfield, believes rushing the process could ultimately disappoint fans. In his view, one of the central problems for modern AAA developers is that major studios already have enormous resources.
Modern game development teams often consist of hundreds of people, while their budgets run into hundreds of millions of dollars. Starfield, for example, reportedly had a core team of around 500 people and an estimated budget between $200 million and $400 million. Nesmith believes that adding more money or manpower to a project of that scale only makes it harder to manage.
According to him, if players want Bethesda Game Studios to make games faster, the only real option would be to reduce the scope of available resources. A more obvious alternative would be to assign different franchises to different developers. Microsoft owns both Bethesda Game Studios and Obsidian, the latter of which developed Fallout: New Vegas.
Nesmith acknowledges that this can be a good solution when the right studio is available, but those franchises cannot simply be handed over to anyone. He also believes it can be beneficial to let a series rest for a while.
“There is an old saying in software development that the process has three corners: resources, time, and quality. The studio decides on two of them, and that determines the third. If you lock down resources and schedule, that determines the quality you can achieve. If you lock down quality and schedule, that determines the resources needed to finish the project. Those three corners need to remain roughly balanced.
You cannot ask for a project to be completed in a month by assigning one million people to it. If you give a project ten years, that can create a cycle of endless reinvention and eventual failure. In my view, the greatest risks of shorter schedules are lower quality, reduced features, a lack of polish, and bugs. The things that are completed last are ultimately pushed aside so the game can ship on time.
Of course, shorter development cycles would lead to faster sequels. But that is the wrong question. Those sequels risk disappointing fans. A franchise that releases too many titles too quickly risks turning fans away. Naturally, too much time between releases can also become a problem.” Bruce Nesmith said.
These games cannot be developed faster simply by throwing more money and people at individual projects, even if a company has resources comparable to Microsoft’s. Managing a project of this size is already a huge challenge. Nesmith believes that even if each series had its own full team, at least five years would probably still pass between the beginning and the end of development.
