The person allegedly once earmarked for the role of lead designer of The Elder Scrolls 6, Kurt Kuhlmann, has said that if they had their way, the game would have been like the beloved Star Wars movie The Empire Strikes Back.
His idea – he who spent 20 years working at Bethesda Game Studios on nearly every Elder Scrolls game, including being co-lead designer of Skyrim – was the elven supremacists the Thalmor, the game’s baddies, would temporarily win, Kuhlmann told PCGamer. Evil would triumph and there’d be something of a cliffhanger, and you’d get a chance at revenge in the next instalment, The Elder Scrolls 7.
“I had in my mind that TES6 was going to be like The Empire Strikes Back,” Kuhlmann said. The player might have “secretly saved the day” by rescuing an heir to the throne, say, preserving hope for another day, “but overall it looks like the Thalmor are on the march”. It would be a welcome change from the ‘chosen one’ storyline The Elder Scrolls games always use, he believed.
Bethesda Game Studios boss Todd Howard allegedly verbally offered Kuhlmann the lead designer role on TES6, Kuhlman said, when work finished on Skyrim. The studio’s plan then was apparently to make Fallout 4 and return to the famed fantasy series afterwards. But this didn’t come to be. Fallout 76 diverted the studio’s attention and then Starfield preoccupied it for several years afterwards, meaning it would be 11 years before Bethesda Game Studios returned properly to the next Elder Scrolls game.
“It wasn’t just my expectation – I had been told that that was going to happen”
Kuhlmann, who’d been a lead systems designer on Starfield in the meantime, was ready for his call-up. “I was obviously one of the old-timers there and had a lot of experience,” he said. “Bruce [Nesmith] and I had been the co-leads on Skyrim. I think most people would call it a successful project, so I thought that it wasn’t unreasonable for me to think that I could be a successful lead on TES6. It wasn’t just my expectation – I had been told that that was going to happen. And they made the decision, no, you’re not going to be the lead.”
Bethesda apparently offered him a different role on the project instead – “an important role”, Kuhlmann said Howard called it. “But what I wanted and what he wanted were different at that point,” he said. There was no indication Howard remembered the alleged verbal promise made years earlier and no reference was ever made to it. This, coupled with the ways in which the studio had changed during the development of Starfield, as it ballooned across multiple studios, contributed to Kuhlmann’s decision to leave Bethesda Game Studios in 2023.
Nevertheless, Kuhlmann – once considered the loremaster of Elder Scrolls – acknowledges that leading the Elder Scrolls today is a different proposition to leading the studios back in 2011. “The role of lead on TES 6 is very different from the role of lead on Skyrim,” he said. He also doesn’t think his Empire Strikes Back idea would ever have flown with the team. Ending on a loss and a cliffhanger? “That’s not a good way to end a game and say, yeah, we’ll see you in 10, 15 years.”
The Elder Scrolls 6 is now, blessedly, properly under way, having been announced ridiculously early back at an E3 in 2018, before Starfield was anywhere near made. Todd Howard said last November that the game was still “a long way off”, but it sounds like a lengthy pre-production process is done and the majority of the studio is working on it. I can’t wait to play it in 2030. Stop it, Bertie, stop it.
