Staff at Bethesda are concerned The Elder Scrolls 6 could face delays amid studio layoffs, which have seen the loss of a 27-year veteran.
It’s been eight years since The Elder Scrolls 6 was originally announced, but it sounds like the sequel is still a distant prospect.
Earlier this week, a reliable insider claimed the sequel wouldn’t be out until 2028 at the earliest. Last year, the game’s director, Todd Howard, described it as being ‘still a long way off’, although a playable build does exist.
However, following this week’s Xbox layoffs which impacted 1,600 people, there’s concern among Bethesda Game Studios’ remaining staff that The Elder Scrolls 6 will be substantially affected by the cuts.
According to IGN, over 50 employees have been let go from the studio as part of the layoffs. This includes senior character artist, Christiane Meister, who was at the studio for 27 years and had worked on every Elder Scrolls game since 2002’s Morrowind.
‘I have recently been laid off from Bethesda Game Studios and find myself in the novel position of looking for a job,’ Meister wrote on LinkedIn. ‘I thought I would stay there forever because I loved making those games. Life had other plans as it so often does.’
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The Bethesda Game Studios Union account on Bluesky has shared photos of memorials to the fired team members, described as a ‘Celebration Of Service’.
Following the layoffs, Bethesda staff have spoken out under anonymity, and expressed concerns about delays, being replaced themselves, and crunch.
‘There is a fear that we are going to be replaced by cheaper, contracted labour, 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,’ one employee told IGN.
Another staff member said: ‘We’ve all been very excited and hyped for The Elder Scrolls 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 (though a final release date was not yet chosen as far as we know).’
One staff member claims the company wants to make up for the losses by outsourcing to other studios, while another said colleagues from The Elder Scrolls Online studio, ZeniMax Online Studios, will fill in the gaps. However, according to a public layoff notice, that studio lost 213 employees recently, so it’s unclear how that’d work.
It all paints a pretty bleak picture for The Elder Scrolls 6, and considering Bethesda Game Studios is on the backfoot after the failure of Starfield, these conditions don’t exactly sound like a thriving environment for the kind of comeback the developer needs.
There’s a possibility Bethesda Game Studios could be affected by more layoffs in the future too. Xbox has confirmed it will cut around 3,200 people by the end of the financial year, so if anything, things might only get worse from here.
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