Lead Skyrim designer revealed how Todd Howard forced Bethesda to make Starfield instead of The Elder Scrolls VI

Bethesda veteran Kurt Kuhlmann says the decision to make Starfield instead of The Elder Scrolls 6 caught the studio completely off guard. According to Kuhlmann, the team was confident that Fallout 4 would be followed directly by the sixth Elder Scrolls entry.

Kuhlmann joined the company in 1996, wrote the main questline for Oblivion, and served as one of the lead designers on Skyrim. He left the studio in 2023 after a "tough conversation" in which he was refused a lead role on The Elder Scrolls 6.

Speaking with Frvr, he described a situation where plans shifted without any real internal discussion:

We all expected [The Elder Scrolls 6] to be directly after [Fallout 4]. Why wouldn't it be? That's what we did, and that was kind of the expectation. And then Fallout 76 came along.

Kuhlmann noted that Fallout 76 wasn't originally meant to involve the whole studio, but it ended up pulling in a large chunk of the staff anyway. Even after it wrapped up, there was still no return to The Elder Scrolls 6 on the horizon.

Todd was like: 'No, we're doing Starfield. I got that approved. It's going to be a new IP. It's going to be this ambitious [game]. It's going to be the greatest space RPG ever made.'

The former designer suggests that after the commercial success of Fallout 4, Todd Howard gained both the leverage and influence to approach ZeniMax leadership and ask to delay The Elder Scrolls 6. Kuhlmann calls that a tough pitch to make, adding that convincing the publisher clearly wasn't easy.

Personally, he would've much rather been working on The Elder Scrolls 6 instead of Fallout 76 and Starfield, and he believes that was true for most of the studio too.

It wasn't like Starfield was this big internal like, 'Hey, we all want to make this space game, Todd.' It was very much, 'Guess what, team? We're making this space game.'

This picture of Howard as someone whose word inside the studio rarely gets challenged lines up with accounts from other former Bethesda employees.

Character artist Dennis Mejillones previously compared him to George Lucas, noting that a lot of people were afraid to say no to Todd, and that hurt him.

The Elder Scrolls 6 was announced at E3 2018 with a short teaser, and Bethesda hasn't shown any gameplay or given a release window since. Starfield, meanwhile, launched in 2023 and met a cool reception thanks to its procedurally generated planets, dated tech, and flat setting, while also getting overshadowed by Baldur's Gate 3.