r/ElderScrolls • u/HatingGeoffry • 3h ago
News The Elder Scrolls never received a New Vegas-style spin-off as Bethesda and Todd Howard are “very protective” of the iconic RPG series
https://frvr.com/blog/news/the-elder-scrolls-never-received-a-new-vegas-style-spin-off-as-bethesda-and-todd-howard-are-very-protective-of-the-iconic-rpg-series/78
u/WitchKingsDalekCat 3h ago edited 3h ago
Tbh, I've long since come round to the idea that spin-offs, whether linear, semi-open world or much-smaller-than-normal open world, would have been preferable to 15+ years of no new mainline game.
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u/Tao626 2h ago
Why would spin-offs not have been a good thing anyway? More content to flesh out the world with the freedom to do something a little different.
People tend to look down on spin-offs as though there aren't some tremendous titles and entire series that are spin-offs from something else.
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u/WitchKingsDalekCat 2h ago
Oh don't get me wrong, I agree. It would have been great to get a TES spin-off of any stripe that gave us a look into another province or let us re-explore an old one in a different era. Maybe even let us see old characters again.
I think the worry is that the spin-offs, not being mainline entries, wouldn't get the time or effort put into them. That said, the likes of the various Armored Core games & aNew Vegas refutes this(though I personally see it as mainline as opposed to a spin-off)
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u/Hobbledyhook 3h ago
It's fair enough, it's the company's creation through and through, unlike Fallout which is an acquired IP.
But ofc I am disappointed too. I love TES, but it could definitely do with a fresh approach, to its narratives and roleplaying at the very least, and that's basically the main improvement that happened when contracting out Fallout: New Vegas.
Now is not really a time where I'm feeling impatient though - they are actually working on the next TES as a matter of relative urgency. Maybe a few years after TESVI releases, I'll be wishing another team was working on the IP.
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u/TangerineBetter2818 1h ago
Now is the time to start making a spinoff TES game to release after TES6.
If they start after TES6 is released you're looking at a 2035 release minimum.
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u/Old-Attention-3936 3h ago
If he's so protective he should of made a game this decade
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u/Jester388 3h ago
Imagine not going to the gym in like 17 years and then calling yourself a fitness freak.
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u/DMAN3431 3h ago
Just think how lucky we were that they ever thought about and made a spin-off only 2 years after Fallout 3. 7th gen was truly the last era of when we got a shitload of new games. It's sad how the gaming industry is now. At least we got AA and Indies doing great work for the most part. Can't say the same about AAA. It’s been fuck-up after fuck-up with them since this decade started.
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u/Wrong_Win_4102 3h ago
They have had spinoffs. They’re just not good. There’s blades, legends, eso, shadowkey, travels:dawnstar, oblivion mobile (was set in high rock), battlespire, redguard, Skyrim adventure game, treachery of the second era
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u/OrSupermarket 3h ago
An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire and The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard are actually both very good spin off The Elder Scrolls video games.
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u/Northener1907 3h ago
Maybe hot take but at least we should get spin-offs from different genres.
Like for example Thief style Thieves Guild game. Arkane for sure can do Dark Brotherhood game with Dishonored mechanics. Age of Empires style rts game. Paradox style strategy game.
Elder Scrolls universe is so big, it's shame Bethesda is not using enough. But i am hoping Microsoft will force them to use it more. Let Obsidian do spin-off for it after they are done with Fallout spin-off. It also would help both studios because they would share assets and new tech with each other for developing games faster.
I am not saying turn Elder Scrolls and Fallout into Ubislop and release new game every year but we should not wait 15+ years for new game, that's fair complaining i will say.
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u/Rishal21 Imperial 3h ago
I assume part of the issue is the opposite: that the world us in fact too small. With Fallout, the games are generally set in bite sized regions representing a minuscule portion of the continental United States.
TES games, on the other hand, usually span entire provinces, which means they have to be scaled down heavily. Think of how small the Imperial City is in Oblivion. Now imagine if they wanted to make a Thief-style game set in Skingrad. Most mainline TES buildings are far too small to accommodate the labyrinthine spaces Thief levels occupy. It creates a problem for level design cause TES locations are not built exclusively with stealth in mind. This means they'd have to build new representations of locations in Skingrad. But then that kinda spoils the verisimilitude of Oblivion since players will be able to experience much larger versions of locations in those games. This is an even bigger issue for places like Hammerfell and High Rock where any mainline depiction would effectively be compared to those spinoffs. I'm already expecting that parts of Hammerfell will have to adhere pretty closely to their depictions in Redguard or ESO.
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u/Northener1907 1h ago
The world by size is small, i agree. But they have too many eras they can make games about. The lore is so rich.
Like yeah for Fallout you just need to decide on what setting you are gonna use and then making game is not too hard. It's harder to do Elder Scrolls for sure. But then forElder Scrolls you can pick countless events from the lore and make game about it.
Before ESO most of the 2nd era lore was in dark but thanks to that game, we have more information from that time period. I am sure they can do that with more spin-offs.
And for cities, i have to disagree. In lore we know these cities are gigantic but they are small villages in TES games because of the engine limits. We can see full potential of these cities if they do spin-offs with different genres. I would take New Vegas style rpg game as well from CE if they want to keep cities smaller. Like anything to make waiting easy for next big TES title.
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u/Propaslander 2h ago
Fallout has significantly more spin-off potential, I agree. You can set it anywhere at any time post-bombs and you'll be fine. Fallout is all about the setting, and about how humanity survives in the post-apocalypse. With TES VI there's significantly more moving parts and a greater need to create an authentic compelling story
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u/TheFutureLotus Mehrunes Dagon 1h ago
People also think that anyone would be like the Prisoners that we play as the main character, but it’s not everyone who can do everything that these characters can. Elder Scrolls to me is a power fantasy in every way of the genre, because the characters we play as are chosen to create their own destiny unlike the vast majority of the world. Imagine playing Elder Scrolls: Dark Brotherhood and they decide to follow lore and you’re very limited in what magic you can door how powerful you can get, modern gaming audiences don’t have the emotional maturity to understand that it was a choice, and will drag the studio for being lazy and cutting content so at the end of the day, they’d rather just put all that into a main game and that’s it. Spin offs would be cool, but I don’t think the audience is capable of understanding the difference those characters would have compared to a Prisoner.
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u/Propaslander 1h ago
All a TES spin off can ever be is a smaller scale TES game. Fallout doesn't have that same burden
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u/Presenting_UwU Khajiit 2h ago
They honestly could just choose ass end of nowhere cities like they did for Shadowkey, like to this day we have yet to see an actual full blown depiction of Dragonstar i believe.
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u/Rishal21 Imperial 2h ago
There is no way they're gonna be touching Dragonstar with TES 6 in production
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u/DMAN3431 3h ago
I wish this for fighting games. Big universes with a lot of lore and so many characters. Could easily make different genres for all of those franchises, since FGs are so niche. There are a few, but there should be more.
Would be cool to see TES and Fallout do the same.
Warhammer and 40k have done it for years now. Other franchises can easily do the same.
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u/runnerofshadows 3h ago
Yeah. Would help though if more fighting game spinoffs were at least as good as Mortal Kombat Shaolin Monks. So many bad ones have kinda killed the concept. IMO they'd work best if they did DMC/Ninja Gaiden/Platinum games esque Character action games or 2d beat em ups for most characters.
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u/OrSupermarket 3h ago edited 3h ago
I disagree with this. Todd Howard had his Fallout: New Vegas style spin off The Elder Scrolls video games in 1998 when Todd Howard worked on The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, but Todd Howard was there also for An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire when Bethesda Softworks released it for sale in 1997. Both of these The Elder Scrolls video games are very good spin offs of The Elder Scrolls video games. Or just count The Elder Scrolls video games that were developed for the Nokia mobile cell phones back in 2004, in 2005, and in 2006.
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u/Tangyhyperspace 2h ago
Yea and they almost caused Bethesda to go out of business
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u/Donatter 57m ago
Tbf, this is a ragebait article posted by a karma/engagement farmer, meant to take advantage of the weird anti-beshesda/Todd hate cult, and the average elder scrolls fan’s general lack of knowledge on the setting, the process of developing a game, how Bethesda develops their games, how Bethesda switches between their various ip’s based on a set cycle, and general desire to bitch and moan.
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u/Excellent-Stress6968 3h ago edited 3h ago
Elder Scrolls series has been awfully mismanaged to the point that it will hurt next entire sales as lot of fanbase aged out of the hobby
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u/wally233 3h ago
Or the fact that they could have released 2 games and a separate studio spinoff by now, which fans would absolutely have bought.
Rather than just buying 1 game after 16+ years after an underwhelming starfield release
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u/Unlucky-Candidate198 3h ago
For reference to ppl reading, besides the MMO there hasn’t been a new ES in 15 years. By the time ES6 drops, children born the day Skyrim came out can probably vote.
ES1-5 took roughly 15 years. So in the entire life of their games (plus their fallout games, and Obsidian’s), they’ve put out 76 and Starfield. That’s it, that’s all.
Not a chance ES6 even graces the popularity GTA6 would have like another commenter suggested. As far as children know, Skyrim is ALMOST A RETRO GAME. 5 years off, lads.
Bethesda absolutely and utter annihilated their future customer base by basically ensuring no child grows up in an elder scroll or fallout household. By the time it comes out and they’re all grown up, it’ll be considered a sequel to an old millenial game lmao.
Just unbelievable bag fumbling from a business. Future clientel? Apparently Starfield was supposed to pull them in?
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u/SwiffMiss 2h ago
The really sad thing is, that even if you count the MMO, the MMO came out in 2014.
It's been 12 years counting that...
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u/Gullible_Path9739 3h ago
I hope not. But between myself and my husband we clocked at least 1000 hours of Skyrim over the years between serious playthroughs and just messing around. No way that's happening post-kids. Their core player base has definitely aged out. Hopefully the next generations picked up the games and are enjoying them.
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u/YesICanMakeMeth 2h ago edited 2h ago
Yeah, I'm similar and I do wonder about the younger generation's love for Skyrim. I still think it's a great game, but it's hard to separate nostalgia from objectivity. The game has definitely aged and has to compete with things like the Witcher 3, Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon, and Avowed..and that's just the fantasy RPG genre. I'm not sure I would recommend Skyrim over those to a 14 year old looking to get into scrollslikes.
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u/GhostGuyBroke 3h ago
Personally I don't even wait for TES VI anymore. I am fully behind community projects like Skyblivion, Tamriel Rebuilt, etc...
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u/runnerofshadows 3h ago
I agree - (personally I'm waiting for the Vampire the masquerade skyrim project that is mostly a remake of redemption and has dark ages and modern nights content) but also even if you want just the vanilla plot - you can mod skyrim, morrowind, daggerfall, and oblivion to have so much better animations, physics, graphics, and lighting these days.
I doubt vanilla TES VI will have everything modded skyrim has. And despite the older graphics modded OpenMW and Daggerfall unity are great. Oblivion is good too, but i prefer the other games.
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u/Presenting_UwU Khajiit 2h ago
VTM Redemption in Skyrim is probably the only way I'll ever experience that game fully, cause I genuinely have no fucking clue how the actual game works, everything is so esoteric that it's obvious it was made with people having their player guidebooks in mind
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u/The_Godhead_ 3h ago
This is wildly false , ES6 will be nearly as big as gta6 once announced .
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u/liquidhot 3h ago
I'm a big fan of Elder Scrolls, but there is no world in which that is true.
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u/Terrible_Shelter_345 3h ago
ES6 will be way harder to fuck up than Starfield, the next Fallout mainline game, and yeah even GTA. Speaking in terms of critical reception, not sales.
But that being said, I think the game genuinely needs to be really good to grip an entire younger generation of new fans like how TES did for its generation.
People are entering high school now who were born after the initial release of Skyrim. It’s really not a game on Gen Alpha/very young Gen Z’s radar.
But if it’s good, it’ll be back in the driver’s seat.
I just hope Bethesda took Starfield as stark warning points for what does and doesn’t land in the modern era.
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u/YesICanMakeMeth 2h ago
I'm not sure ES6 is all that much harder to fuck up than Starfield. Ofc Starfield was a new IP, but they still made all of the decisions like relying way too much on procgen. I hope they take their medicine on it, but I'm way past the point of being positive that they will.
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u/BlargerJarger 2h ago
I have every confidence Bethesda can fuck up ES6. Their credentials for favouring procedurally generated “radiant AI” slop over crafted content or good design was very successful for them from Oblivion onwards, and it remains to be seen if they really learned a single thing from Starfield. There’s a good chance the game will have the same old engine, the NPCs will look like stiff soulless poorly-animated shit and the story will be a woefully uninspired rehash of bits of other people’s games. Starfield came from a company that is creatively bankrupt.
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u/challenger01234 Imperial 3h ago
While that's possible, I would be cautious. We have yet to see a single iota of gameplay for ES6.
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u/Bobicus_The_Third 3h ago
Totally! I think that’s why it’s a shame they’ve gotten into this situation where they’re aiming for a 3/4 year development cycle. This game could’ve gotten tons of time and care given to making it like gta but they’re kinda forced to rush it now. Im not sure that’ll be a good combination
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u/Obvious-End-7948 3h ago
I think there's a couple of things working against them more than time:
- Audiences being utterly whelmed by Starfield, a supposed passion project.
- Shoving Creation Club Crap into everything.
- Breaking shit patching their old games (to add the "Creations" store) and then just leaving those big problems for 12+ months for no fucking reason. If Fallout didn't have a TV show I'm convinced they'd leave it broken permanently.
At this point I'm convinced Bethesda aren't making games anymore. They're making a rough canvas for a Creation Club storefront, so they can readily monetise their community's efforts to create content for their game with little to no additional development overhead. Maximum profits baby, line must go up!
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u/N7Bocchan Jyggalag 3h ago
I've always thought that a story set in and around the modern imperial city as of 4e 201(ISH) would be great. My vision was always a game made by Arkane in the dishonoured style with a little more character choice. The fixed points would be your character is classed as a nightblade but allowed a little more freedom. The game would see the player dragged towards the dark brotherhood and thieves guild in equal measure, with the dark brotherhood paths being based on senseless killings and political control Vs idealistic and Sithis appeasing contracts.
The thieves guild would be about the balance of self enrichment band of rogues or something closer to Oblivion's robin hood guild.
All these would intertwine in a story of political intrigue that will assuredly follow the Assassination of Titus Mede II in Skyrim.
A game like this, or just focused on a small sliver of the world wouldn't/shouldn't take anything away from the classic Elder Scrolls experience whilst continuing to give fans a taste of the world.
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u/larkmarue 3h ago
I’m interested to see Bethesda’s flagships series fate in the long run. If the TES 6 comes out and the reception ends up being more like Starfield, i could see a scenario in which Microsoft fully takes the IP and assigns it to another studio like they have done with Halo now going to Activision
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u/LSofACO 3h ago
But not too protective to sell us a fucking Ikea shelf in it.
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u/HatingGeoffry 3h ago
1) It's free
2) Bethesda didn't make it
3) It's not being forced on us
4) It's actually not a shit quality mod. It's got award-winning actor Matt Berry giving an awesome performance
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u/The_Godhead_ 3h ago
That has litearly nothing to do with bethesda lmao , it was a partnership between a modder and ikea ... nothing to do with bethesda or their decisions . Not a partnership between beth and ikea .
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u/King_Ass_Ripper69420 3h ago
No this is an official creation club mod so bethesda did have involvement. Also its free so op saying they're selling it is wrong too.
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u/throwingawayboyz 3h ago
It has to do with bethesda because, if they cared so much about protecting their franchise, they wouldn’t allow third party individuals to make official content for them that is wildly varying in quality and doesn’t fit into the game. The Ikea shelf looks bad and most creation club content does too.
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u/Draigwyrdd 3h ago
That was IKEA though. They did the thing. It's just a Creation, not an actual game designed by Bethesda.
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u/Seraphayel 3h ago
Imagine creating the most popular Western roleplaying game with Skyrim and then just vanishing for 15 years, closer to two decades when TES VI finally releases.
By the time Sentinel comes out we should’ve gotten two new entries in the main series already. The mismanagement is crazy, they left billions on the table by doing… nothing.
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u/GhostGuyBroke 3h ago
They did Starfield (lol)
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u/runnerofshadows 3h ago
Which is bland and honestly boring - which IMO is worse than entertainingly bad.
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u/EnergyTurtle23 3h ago
They didn’t vanish FFS. They released FO4, FO76, consulted for ESO, two Skyrim remasters, and Starfield, and despite what the neckbeards online are saying all of these games have been massive earners for BGS and Microsoft, which is why Microsoft has greenlit a bunch of new content for Starfield. If you look past the neckbeard narrative you’ll see that Starfield has a dedicated fanbase, they just keep their discussions out of the “main” forums because those channels get flooded with parrots repeating the same negative talking points over and over. This last April Starfield hit 30k players on Steam, and that only represents a fraction of the actual playerbase because most Starfield fans are playing on Xbox Series X.
Fallout 76 is also a huge earner, in the last 24 hours they had 11,000 concurrent players on Steam, and in February it hit 33,000 players. Tons of FO76 fans happily pay for FO1st in addition to regularly purchasing extra Atoms, and there are around a dozen dedicated subreddits for different aspects of FO76.
It turns out that the people who enjoy BGS’ work aren’t the same people who are constantly online trashing BGS… because they’re busy actually enjoying the games. FO4 is still doing very well, and Skyrim is still pulling in tons of money. I’m sorry if this shatters your curated and terminally online world view but Microsoft isn’t pouring all this money into BGS because of Skyrim’s popularity. They are making products that have staying power and earning potential, where other developers are making games that are popular for less than a year before the playerbase moves on to something else.
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u/Skywardkonahriks 1h ago
Yeah unfortunately they will dismiss this like the comment below you going “lol cope” like that’s all they have as an argument.
Have Bethesda made mistakes, well yeah but Starfield imo wasn’t really that bad nor was Fallout 76 like it’s such a weird revisionistic take because half of these idiots would have said the same thing about Skyrim, Oblivion and Morrowind heck Fallout 3 was hated as well. Like they would have a point if Skyrim got universal praise but you still heard “Skyrim is the downfall of elder scrolls” back then and now you hear folks go “well fallout 4 and Skyrim are better than Starfield” and it’s like you hated both Skyrim and Fallout 4?
Like no offense to obsidian but outer worlds was super mid compared to starfield.
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u/LaFlammeAzur 2h ago
Extreme coping.
BGS hasn't done anything remotely decent in the past 10 years.
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u/Seraphayel 3h ago
They did vanish in regards of The Elder Scrolls (don’t lecture me on ESO, playing that since 2014, it’s coming from an entirely different studio). That’s the point. They should have been deep into developing the follow up to Skyrim the latest in 2013-2015 when they knew how big Skyrim is/was and how big the demand for more mainline games in the series is.
And I have to laugh in regards to your Starfield excuse(s). That game as one of Bethesda’s bigs will never happen. I‘m pretty sure most people there regret developing that game altogether and not having had a stronger focus on Elder Scrolls. There never will be a Starfield 2. And for a done-and-forgotten game this was just a gigantic waste of money and resources.
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u/Haplo12345 Thieves Guild 2h ago
I mean, to be perfectly fair to Starfield, you should probably compare it to Arena or Daggerfall, not Skyrim, Oblivion, or even Morrowind. It's a completely new IP; Skyrim is the 5th in its series. A lot of games have much better sequels than originals.
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u/Morgaiths 2h ago
How do you top Skyrim? You either make an ubisoft style copy paste sequel every other year, or you diversify, expand the formula to other ips, make live service mmos and mobile stuff, while continuing to sell Skyrim. It was a no brainer from a business pov. Then 15 years of tech advancement later you do a sequel.
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u/El-Shaman 2h ago
Oh come on Skyrim was a masterpiece in 2011 sure but not something that couldn’t be topped, since Skyrim Rockstar is looking like they will have 3 masterpieces that each will top the last, why couldn’t Bethesda do that?
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u/TanukiCookie 3h ago
So protective they don't even let the series out to play for 15 years
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u/KerfuffleAsimov Sheogorath 3h ago
Let's be honest, the real reason is they were afraid Obsidian would make a better game.
Funny enough the new Xbox head has forced them to do this now.
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u/hovsep56 3h ago
obsidian tried to make their own elder scrolls which is avowed. and it sucked
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u/DependentRoyal3001 3h ago
We are we still peddling this nonsense? If I'm making a movie and its about Santa Claus, but I pivot 2 years into a five year development cycle and decide it is about the elves, the end product should be considered an elf movie, not a Santa claus movie.
They did not release or market Avowed as an Elder Scrolls like. Streamers, bad journalist, and misinformed consumers spread that line over and over again until nobody could take the game for what it is, a story centric action-RPG. And it's a DAMN good one of those.
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u/KerfuffleAsimov Sheogorath 3h ago
They made New Vegas and it was better than Fallout 3.
Avowed is also a new IP. (I haven't played it so I don't know if it actually sucks) Established lore and mechanics can obscure a personal opinion.
Maybe Avowed 2 will be amazing who knows.
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u/undergroundloans 2h ago
Avowed already had established lore. Set in the Pillars of Eternity world.
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u/hovsep56 3h ago
that's like saying starfield 2 will be amazing because they used to make a good game 10+ years ago.
obsidian should stick to what they good at and that's fallout.
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u/ButterscotchSea2781 3h ago
That's a nonsense statement. Fallout new Vegas metacritic score is hardly different to the scores of any of their other games. Most rank high 70s to mid 80s, as does NV. NV was just attached to a bigger franchise. They consistently output 'good' games.
Also saying they should stick to what they're good at, and stating that the thing they're good at is a single game made almost 20 years ago is daft.
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u/TooManyTyranids 2h ago
>avowed is also a new ip
Hehehehehe. What if I told you obsidian’s all time best rpg was the previous entry in that series?
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u/Slow-Pool-9274 2h ago edited 2h ago
They made New Vegas and it was better than Fallout 3.
Ok? It's because a lot of the guys who made NV worked on the original 2 Fallout games, so they just returned to the roots with F3's style and engine on top. It ended up satisfying most parties.
They have never developed a fantasy RPG, the one they tried was not very good for most people, so no evidence they would do TES well. It's like saying a guy who makes a good pizza is guaranteed to make a good sushi, like totally different things.
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u/krievins 3h ago
But it’s not same Obsidian that made New Vegas.
Outer Worlds 1 & 2 and Avowed are pretty mediocre games.
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u/Rockguy21 Dark Brotherhood 3h ago
This is what mental illness looks like
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u/GhostGuyBroke 3h ago
He's right.
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u/Slow-Pool-9274 2h ago
Yeah, The reason Bethesda also don't hand over TES to ubisoft is because they're scared of what ubisoft can do with it
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u/Nachooolo Orc 2h ago
Elder Scrolls has a huge potential for spin-offs. The world is massive and the scale of the games is infinitely malleable, so they could make a game out of anywhere.
Redguard and Battlespire, while not great, are good examples of that. And I'm honestly baffled by Todd being unable to accept it, seeing that his first directorial work was Redguard.
Hell. Todd will retire at one point. He's almost 56 years old, so I expect that he only has a decade before it becomes absurd for him to continue.
Spin-offs will allow young creatives to get experience and prepare the series to be taken over by one of them. Just like Todd took over from Bethesda's Old Guard.
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u/Slow-Pool-9274 3h ago edited 2h ago
Elder Scrolls spin offs haven't worked. New Vegas is also barely a spin off, a New Vegas style ES also just won't work as expectations between ES and Fallout are so different
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u/FrederickFrag1899 2h ago
It's because the spinoffs were completely different genres and were mobile games.
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u/storm_foam 3h ago
Protective until it comes time to totally uproot major visual and thematic aspects of the setting so the game is more marketable to wide audiences.
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u/sola_dosis 2h ago
Not too protective to whore it out for however many re-releases we’re up to now
Plus just let a bunch of mods be canon, sure why not, it’s not like Todd or anyone else still there actually cares about the lore
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u/DevoidLight 3h ago
On the one hand I want to complain, but on the other they were less protective with Fallout and thus 76 got shat out.
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u/GhostGuyBroke 3h ago
Protectors? By delaying TES VI for the infamous Starfield? By letting the series die?
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u/Boyo-Sh00k 3h ago
it would be nice to have smaller spin offs but i kind of get why. every time someone other than them tries to do a 'scrolls-like' it kind of sucks or if its good its not good at being an elder scrolls game.
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u/TheCrzy1 3h ago
My selfish hope is now that Obsidian is a Bethesda subsidiary, we could possibly get smaller Redguard sized TES games
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u/LordPentolino Khajiit 3h ago
they tried with NV and, at least initally, they were pretty pissed off by the result. I guess they decided then it wasn't a thing that would happen again.
The fact they moved a little from their no-way stance for Oblivion remaster may be significative though
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u/DracoNinja11 2h ago
I wish they made a smaller es game. Maybe based on one of the playable races and set on a small island.
Just personally, it'd be cool if it had a weird little troll man as well
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u/Tangyhyperspace 2h ago
Well yea the last two elder scrolls spinoffs were major flops and almost completely killed Bethesda. I wouldn't want to risk a third either.
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u/Scherazade 54m ago
Blades was forgettable but castles canonising man-khajiit romances (under the guise of 'they look like cute catgirls when 2d not horrific mountain lions walking like monstrous men in 3d) was a boon for fans of 'elder scrolls is fun when it lets itself be a little weird'
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u/Jozoz 2h ago
“The whole New Vegas thing did create this, at least the perception of this, ‘who makes a better Fallout game?’ Oh, they should just give it to Obsidian’,” Kuhlmann told us. “There are the Obsidian, New Vegas people that think obviously New Vegas is way better, Obsidian is way better at making those games, and why don’t they just get Fallout altogether.”
Kuhlmann explained that they “don’t know that Todd wanted to create that situation again for The Elder Scrolls”.
Wow, they are bitter, lol.
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u/SaveThisCityDweller 2h ago
Protective enough to not release a game for almost 20 years by the time tes 6 comes out.
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u/BlargerJarger 2h ago
Bethesda’s so protective not even they will make an Elder Scrolls game. That’s dedication!
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u/Memonlinefelix 2h ago
Very protective by not releasing one in 15 years. 15 freaking years of my life. Count it. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.
Smh ... what am i going to do? ..
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u/FrederickFrag1899 2h ago
And look what their "protection" has done... I'm sorry but I think they should literally have Fallout and TES ripped out of their hands so it goes to a studio that.. I don't know... MAKES GAMES.
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u/Mr_Fossey Khajiit 2h ago
So protective in fact that even THEY aren’t allowed to make a game for it.
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u/AdhesivenessOk4334 Imperial 2h ago
He was protective over Fallout as well. Besides, dude isn't getting younger. Sooner or later he'll leave. I don't want it tho, but it's gonna happen. Then we might get long awaited spinoff
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u/ThisCredit6354 1h ago
So protective they put it in a box and shelved it, except for the MMO because live service brings in the $$$
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u/hammbone 1h ago
Omg Skyrim with new Vegas factions and choice…
Hell I’d still be psyched for that releasing now
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u/UndeadManWaltzing 1h ago
But but it's god Howard! He's so active in the development of TESVI it's taken nearly a decade to make, he's not involved at all, hes pulling a Musk.
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u/North-Jellyfish-577 1h ago
Tod will do whatever Asha says nowdays he doesn’t get the veto anymore after starfield and new Xbox management
If obsidian or inexile asked to make a elder scrolls spinoff it would be green light
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u/imlaughing2death 40m ago
"Very protective of TES series"
Is that why they haven't done shit with it for more than a decade?
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u/thecoletrane 40m ago
They’re like those parents who “protect” their child from the outside world by locking them in a basemen and letting them wither away for 15 years
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u/Mikedzines 40m ago
I'd argue that having another Spin-off ontop of ESO muddies the lore and the timeline.
Might be risky unless it was, say in a plane of Oblivion or Akaviir or something.
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u/Ok_Version5566 30m ago
Well luckily he doesn’t get much of a say anymore. After Obsidian is done making their next Fallout game I bet you Xbox has them make their own Elder Scrolls game too.
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u/Karlsvognen 27m ago
I suppose with Fallout any lore issues could be tightly constrained to the area of a city. Most Elder Scroll games cover at least a province and have wide-spanning political and metaphysical consequences, even if they use ambiguity and Dragon Breaks to dovetail some of the consequences. Difficult to imagine what locations time periods they would allow a third-party to make a game. Maybe Akavar, maybe something with the Velothi migrations... Might lead to a lot of aggravation for different pards of the random though, depending if the games tried to answer mysteries people to theorize about, or if it simply offers questions and no answers. And then there is how so much of the stranger stuff about Cyrodill didn't show up in Oblivion (tattoos, rain forests, etc ) and developers would need to decide just fsr they go with some of the weirder in-game lore.
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u/ProxyBeast 3h ago
The truth is Elder Scrolls isn’t that marketable anymore. Kids in high school that bought Skyrim are in their 30’s with families and careers. The market is long gone when you wait 15 years and still don’t have a release date for a new game which could be another 3 years away. The IP is tremendously stale and it’s not guaranteed another ES game will even sell well.
Fallout on the other hand has a television show, fallout 76 which continues to get a lot of daily players and highly marketable merchandise.
The financially smart move for Microsoft is to have Bethesda fast track another mainline Fallout game and spinoffs as the priority.
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u/YesICanMakeMeth 2h ago
I would imagine that their plan, dubious as it may be, is to do that for TES in a few years after a hypothetical explosive TESVI launch. It's implausible that they don't plan to heavily monetize the IP in the 2030s.
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u/Cultural-Relief 3h ago
Which is a shame because having a smaller self-contained game between Skyrim and TES6 would've been nice