The Elder Scrolls VI Development: Inside Look at Team Size Expectations
Okay, let's get realistic. We've been talking about The Elder Scrolls VI for ages, it's been what feels like forever since that initial announcement. Despite the long wait and the assumption that "full development" hasn't really begun yet, the hype is real. And naturally, folks are already speculating about everything, including how Bethesda is going to make this next epic iteration.
An Inside Look (From a Former Developer)
A recent conversation on the Kiwi Talkz YouTube channel offered a neat insight from a person who knows Bethesda: Jeremy Bryant. He worked as an animator on massive titles like Starfield, Fallout 4, and even The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim before departing the studio way back in 2019.
During the podcast, Bryant also commented on how Bethesda would possibly staff up for TES VI. His suggestion? Don't necessarily expect them to always go on a massive hiring spree, like studios like Rockstar Games, who would severely scale up for their huge games.
Todd Howard's Vision and Team Size
Bryant explained that, in his view, Bethesda director Todd Howard has a very clear concept of what game he wants to create. Along with that vision is a pretty good idea of how big a team he requires to realize it. While you might think that the fastest way to finish a game is just to hire more and more people, Bryant said that, for Bethesda, bringing on large quantities of new people, or even entire teams, can be a more complicated and time-consuming process than you might anticipate.
Enough Staff Already? And the Giant Team Debate
Despite this expectation of not necessarily increasing dramatically, the former developer seems to be confident that Bethesda already has enough talented people on staff to create The Elder Scrolls VI. He also remarked on his general thought on the possibility of developing with completely enormous teams – like teams that have over a thousand people.
Bryant conceded that big teams can definitely achieve incredible feats (just look at the scope and level of detail in a game like Red Dead Redemption 2, which involved hundreds of animators). But personally, he found the idea of working on a team of a thousand individuals to be quite daunting, even "awful."
Therefore, the hope from at least one former insider is that The Elder Scrolls VI might be built by a team that, while certainly large and veteran, may not balloon to the truly enormous sizes of some other big studios. Time will tell how it all shakes out as development continues.
