Bethesda’s former Elder Scrolls loremaster says he quit the company after it allegedly reneged on a promise to make him lead designer on The Elder Scrolls 6.
Kurt Kuhlmann, who left Bethesda in 2023 after more than 20 years at the company, including acting as co-lead on Skyrim, made the claim in a new interview with PC Gamer.
According to Kuhlmann, director Todd Howard had verbally promised him the lead designer role on The Elder Scrolls 6, which was initially planned to start production following the completion of Fallout 4 in 2015.
“Of course, after Fallout 4, we didn’t go to TES6, we made Fallout 76, and then even then, we didn’t make TES6, we made Starfield, which became this extremely long project compared to other ones,” he said. “So from my point of view, I’ve been waiting like 11 years to be the lead on TES6.
“I was obviously one of the old-timers there and had a lot of experience. 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,” he continued. “And they made the decision, no, you’re not going to be the lead.”
Kuhlmann says he remembers the conversation being “tough”, and that Bethesda’s leadership hoped he’d be content with a different position on TES6. “Todd said, ‘Well, we want you to have an important role in the project.’ But what I wanted and what he wanted were different at that point.”
Bethesda declined to comment on Kuhlmann’s claims, and the designer said he doubts Howard would acknowledge the promise. “In any case, he could also say, well, that was a long time ago, things changed. And he’s definitely right that things changed, and the role of lead on TES 6 is very different from the role of lead on Skyrim.”
The writer and designer eventually decided to quit Bethesda, which he said was due to a combination of missing out on the Elder Scrolls 6 role, plus dissatisfaction with the way the studio had changed as its teams grew ever larger.
Kuhlmann revealed that, had he been able to shape the direction of The Elder Scrolls 6, he would’ve made it “like The Empire Strikes Back”.
“The Thalmor, the elven supremacists who were peripheral in Skyrim’s story and ultimately wanted to control all of Tamriel, would be the bad guys who come out on top, setting up TES7,” he said.
However, he doubts if Bethesda would have allowed an Elder Scrolls game with a “bad” ending and admits that, with the modern games industry’s lengthy production schedules, a cliffhanger would have been “completely unfeasible”.
The Elder Scrolls 6 was announced at E3 2018 with a brief teaser trailer, which confirmed it was in pre-production at Bethesda Game Studios. Nothing has been seen of the game since. However, Bethesda Game Studios director Todd Howard recently provided a rare update on the project, claiming that development was “progressing really well”.
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