Despite recent reports to the contrary, The Elder Scrolls 6 developer Bethesda said that work on the upcoming role-playing game won’t be impacted by the 3,200 Xbox layoffs, half of which have already taken place.
YouTuber MrMattyPlays sent the studio questions about a number of topics, and shared the answers in a new video (via PCGamer). In response to an Elder Scrolls 6 question, the developer simply said: “The roadmap [for TES6] is unaffected”.
This may be a little hard to believe, given that several current staff members at the studio recently claimed the layoffs will have a “substantial and cascading effect” on the game’s development.
The main Bethesda Game Studios team reportedly lost 50 staff, which included “key, high-performing people in the trenches”. Indeed, sister studio ZeniMax Online said it’s altering a previously published roadmap for The Elder Scrolls Online after the studio lost hundreds of its workers.
The YouTuber also asked about Oblivion Remastered, which Bethesda surprisingly revealed hasn’t been forgotten about. The game only received two post-launch patches on PC, before the developer seemingly abandoned it. Performance issues and other bugs continue to exist on PC and consoles, but it sounds like at least one of those aspects will be improved.
“The team working on remasters is focused on the Switch 2 launch,” Bethesda is said to have told MrMattyPlays. Part of that work, of course, involves getting it optimised for Nintendo’s platform, and some of these optimisations “we hope to bring to console/PC.”
Interestingly, the developer also touched on its recent, multi-game announcement blog post where it confirmed Fallout 5 is in pre-production, Fallout 3 and New Vegas remasters are in the works, and that a new Fallout game is in development at Obsidian. According to Bethesda, that rush of reveals is simply part of a new way of communicating to fans, something the developer said it’s been working on for some time – and definitely not because Xbox boss Asha Sharma wanted the studio to do it.
“Look, we read the internet too,” the studio reportedly told the YouTuber. “All of our fans and plenty of creators have been asking for us to lay out our road map for a long time. As bits of info or announcements come out individually, they get lost in the larger picture of all we’re doing as a studio.”
“So, we felt it was best to do it all at once and paint a clear picture for everyone,” it added. “This is a shift in our approach to communication that Bethesda Game Studios has been contemplating for some time now.”
The Elder Scrolls 6 remains without a release date, eight years after it was initially announced.
