Former Bethesda Design Director Confident The Elder Scrolls 6 Will Keep Skyrim's Levelling System

A former Bethesda veteran says that all decisions at the studio “run through” director Todd Howard.

The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall, released way back in 1996, was the second installment in what went on to become Bethesda’s beloved, genre-defining RPG series, but it sounds like it was a particularly tricky one to get off the launchpad - and that if it hadn’t come together it could have meant the end of the studio itself.

Stop for a second and picture your favorite video game developer or publisher. It doesn’t matter their “scale” as long as they’re prominent. More than likely, you can name-drop at least one or two people who are the “faces” of that company. For example, Nintendo has Eiji Aonuma, Shigeru Miyamoto, Doug Bowser, etc. Microsoft has Phil Spencer, Sony has/had Jim Ryan, and on it goes. For Bethesda, they have/had many people who have helped define them over the years for one reason or another. Easily, the one that most people know is Todd Howard. He’s the guy who honestly makes the biggest announcements for the company and helps crank out their best games.

If Todd Howard up and left Bethesda, it would "leave a big hole," says Skyrim's lead designer, insisting that the Starfield director has "an attribute that none of the rest of us did."

Skyrim design lead Bruce Nesmith, who's now ex-Bethesda after leaving the studio during Starfield's development, reckons the iconic RPG largely kickstarted the open-world-ification of games.

The lead designer of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim has discussed the difference in design philosophy between Bethesda games and Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3.

Former Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith left Bethesda, and his updated role as senior systems designer, partway through Starfield's development, so he was as surprised as the rest of us when the massive space RPG was released in remarkably good condition. 

A former Bethesda developer who served as Skyrim's lead designer predicts The Elder Scrolls 6's full reveal will mirror Fallout 4's, in the sense that we probably won't hear much else about the RPG until about six months before launch.

One of Starfield's senior developers has been reflecting on the game after launch, revealing in a new interview that they reckon the space RPG could have benefited from going into greater detail on fewer planets. One of the reasons is that "some of the exploration stuff didn't come through as well as it could've."

Liked Starfield? Hated Starfield? You probably have Todd Howard to thank. A recent chat between MinnMax and Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith shed some light on Bethesda's structure and organisation, and it sure sounds like pretty much every choice the company makes needs Howard's stamp of approval before it can go ahead, even as it's grown bigger over the years. To be fair to Howard, though, it seems like that's in spite of his own wishes.

In Starfield,there's a quest where you get to betray a major player. I'm going to keep the details vague to avoid spoilers, but in a lot of other RPGs this would be a massive story moment. If you walk down this path, you'll never be able to interact with that faction again. You're signing up for this life over that one.

At this point, it’s safe to say that people are ready for The Elder Scrolls 6. While we’re likely still years away from playing it, it feels as though Bethesda will start putting more stock into the Skyrim follow-up now that Starfield is out.