Elder Scrolls 6 Could Face Delays Thanks to XBOX Layoffs

This has been a pretty wild week for anyone working under the XBOX banner. Not only has the company entered the most drastic period of restructuring in its history, but the road ahead is long, and nobody is out of the woods – perhaps not for another year or more.

We’re now learning of the ripple effect of hundreds of layoffs that have impacted almost every area of the business, including at the many studios under the XBOX banner. Naturally, that includes Bethesda Game Studios, and recently, some developers at the firm have voiced major concerns about the future of The Elder Scrolls 6, Bethesda’s most anticipated game right now.

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Bethesda’s Layoffs Could Impact The Elder Scrolls 6

The Elder Scrolls 6 was revealed several years ago, but by today, nobody outside of Bethesda Game Studios has the foggiest idea what the game looks like. We don’t know where it’ll be set, what kind of gameplay it’ll feature, or, most importantly, when it will be released.

In a recent report from IGN, Bethesda developers left behind after a wave of layoffs washed over the studio revealed their innermost concerns about the future of The Elder Scrolls 6.

The driving worry is that core developers will be replaced by ‘cheaper, contracted labor’ unfamiliar with Bethesda’s proprietary tools, which will inevitably slow down development even more. One developer said to IGN:

We’ve all been very excited and hyped for TES 6 and this has had a crushing effect on morale. We were already running a tight ship and are worried about this delaying the game.

Another explained, echoing the above:

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.

Elder Scrolls 6 has already been many years in the making, slowed down by Bethesda Game Studios’ development of Starfield, and to a lesser extent, Fallout 5. The latter title likely won’t be in our hands for another decade at this rate, but this is why Asha Sharma’s XBOX wants to boost the development speed for these franchises at studios like Bethesda.