Skyrim's lead designer reckons releasing Elder Scrolls and Fallout games faster risks 'disappointing fans'

Skyrim's Lead Designer Warns Against Rushing Elder Scrolls and Fallout Games

It's been a long time since we last saw an Elder Scrolls or Fallout game from Bethesda. Fallout 4 is now 11 years old, while it's been nearly 15 years since Skyrim—the same timeframe between that game and the release of Daggerfall in 1996. It's wild that two of gaming's most popular series have been left on the shelf for so long, and one of Microsoft's few understandable decisions lately is a resolution to make these games quicker. However, not everyone is convinced that speeding things up is the right move.

Bruce Nesmith, the lead designer of Skyrim and former designer for Oblivion and Starfield, thinks that going too hard on fast development could end up disappointing fans. In an interview with FRVR (via GamesRadar), Nesmith emphasized the balance required in game development. "There's an adage in software development about the process having three corners: resources, time, and quality," he explained. "The studio decides two of them, which determines the third. If you lock down the resources and the schedule, that decides the quality you will achieve. If you lock down the quality and the schedule, that determines the resources you will need to complete the project."

Nesmith also noted that the three corners need to be roughly balanced. "You can't ask the project to be done in a month by throwing a million people on it," he said. Likewise, "allowing ten years for a project creates a cycle of endless reinvention and ultimate failure." He argues that modern game developers, particularly in the triple-A space, face unique challenges in balancing these factors.

The Challenge of Scaling Up

The problem faced by modern game developers—at least in the triple-A space—is that "resources in most big studios are already quite large." Modern game dev teams are typically in the hundreds, while budgets are in the hundreds of millions. Starfield, for example, had a core team of around 500 and an estimated budget between $200-400 million. At that scale, pumping more money or people into the project is only likely to make it more unwieldy.

Consequently, in Nesmith's view, if you want Bethesda to make its games faster, the only solution is to cut resources. "In my opinion, the biggest risk of shortened schedules is quality, reduced features, polish, or bugs," he explained. "The things that are done last end up getting set aside to complete the game on time. And, of course, faster dev times would result in faster sequels. But that's the wrong question. Those sequels risk disappointing fans."

Exploring Alternatives

The obvious solution would be to hand the various licenses to different developers. Microsoft, for example, owns both Bethesda and Obsidian—the developer of what most fans consider to be the best 3D Fallout game. Nesmith concedes that "if the right studio is available, it's a great solution." But that "you can't just hand it to anyone."

He also believes that it's good to let a series "lie fallow" for a while. "A franchise that releases too many titles too quickly risks fan fatigue. Of course, too much time between releases can also be a problem." At present, neither Elder Scrolls nor Fallout is at risk of receiving new games too regularly. But I nonetheless appreciate Nesmith's points here. You can't make these games happen faster just by throwing more money and people at specific projects, which could well be viewed as the solution when you have the resources of a company like Microsoft. Managing a project like that is a huge challenge, and even if you had an entire team dedicated to each series, it would still probably take five years minimum between the start of the project and its end.