this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2026
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Yesterday’s layoffs at Bethesda Games Studios were not a cut of “14 layers of management”. We lost dozens of programmers, artists, designers and testers. Many of whom worked at BGS for decades.

If Bethesda fans are worried this will harm the quality of our future games, like TES VI, let Microsoft know! One way you can do it is here through the XBOX Player Voice feedback platform: https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/69b8ec0b-7479-f111-9b47-6045bdbd0989

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[–] cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 38 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I was worried about the future of Bethesda games long before they were acquired by Microsoft. Xbox is just an easy scapegoat here.

[–] BigBananaDealer@lemmy.world 6 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

i think the problem is they dont know how to manage big teams and todd howard is bouncing around way too much. still got hope for es6 but that has impossible hype/hate to get past

[–] cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 2 weeks ago

The Elder Scrolls VI has the same issue GTA VI has, getting over the hype. GTA VI likely will. I doubt The Elder Scrolls VI will. I mean, sure, it'll sell, but will it be good? The last good Fallout game was New Vegas, and Todd Howard had nothing to do with it. They bought the IP, made one good one, licensed it out to Obsidian, then half-arsed the next one and still haven't fixed game-breaking bugs that make the game impossible to complete (at least on Xbox).

They say Fallout 5 and The Elder Scrolls VI are coming, but with the way Fallout 76 and The Elder Scrolls Online are printing money, I have little hope for their single-player adventures. Then there's Skyrim. They ported it to ARM64 for Switch, which is the platform all the phones use. But instead of putting Skyrim on iOS and Android (pro tip: if your phone is made after 2018, it's most likely more powerful than a Switch; if it's an iPhone and it came out in 2016 or later, it absolutely is), they made this free-to-play trash riddled with microtransactions. They still haven't put Skyrim on iOS, Android, or macOS, despite having already ported it to the ARM64 platform they all use. Oh, and when they did put Skyrim on Switch, they didn't include any of the bug fixes found and published by the community years earlier. They're porting Fallout 4 to ARM64 for the Switch 2, so yes, your phone can probably run that, too. But they're not going to do it (or macOS) because it wouldn't make them enough money. This is Bethesda now. They aren't focused on experiences, they're focused on monetisation and microtransactions. And they've been this way for 10-15 years, before the Xbox acquisition. Bethesda is trash now, and has been for a long time.

Starfield was kind of their chance to prove that they still had it. The game shipped without a map function and a lot of things were broken. They patched exploits that made the purely single-player game easier, but steadfastly refused to fix bugs, despite running an official Discord community and soliciting bug reports from the community. They then made a ship-building contest with real-world prizes, but they patched out a glitch people were using to make ships look a little cooler, but they let the people they'd already pre-selected to win use those very same glitches. Like the guy in Fallout: New Vegas told you in the beginning, the game was rigged from the start. There were quests most people couldn't complete and they just didn't care. They added land vehicles to the game, but they were buggy. People didn't get out of your way, and if you hit anybody, the whole settlement turned against you. Fair, I suppose, but the NPCs not reacting to the vehicle isn't. Fine if you deploy on a planet without people, but it was given to you on that main planet where your team is located. And speaking of your team, they would all turn against you if you took out certain enemies. We (the testing community) were able to narrow down the problem, and they still didn't fix it. That said, despite the game being a rubbish fire, I still beat it 10 times to maximise all the powers, and I enjoyed the hell out of the Vanguard and pirate quest lines (the latter of which gives you the best gun in the game). Some parts of it were really fun. But like anything else Bethesda made, breadth of an ocean, depth of a puddle of lukewarm piss out behind the pub, left by someone who cared more about Starfield than Todd Howard's team did. (And yet, I still wanna replay a few of those quests.)

[–] Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

Honestly I think Bethesda has always had the same problem. They have an unhealthy relationship with feature creep.

Sometimes if you love an idea, you have to let it go...

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 21 points 2 weeks ago

All of those people are replaceable in the eyes of Microsoft. They do not understand creative talent, they only see cogs in the machine. Bethesda knee this going in.

[–] IEatDaFeesh@lemmy.world 14 points 2 weeks ago

"Let Microsoft know"? Like that'll change their trajectory. 🤣 Nothing short of their company collapsing will shake them up.

[–] Hadriscus@jlai.lu 9 points 2 weeks ago

I don't give a shit about Elder Scrolls anymore. I do give a shit about workers however

[–] mrfriki@lemmy.world 7 points 2 weeks ago

See, when the next game released by these studios laying off employees left and right flop big time, they'll put a surprised Pikachu face and blame gamers for it.

[–] BigBananaDealer@lemmy.world 6 points 2 weeks ago

quick note, this is i believe only the second time BGS has ever had layoffs

If Bethesda fans are worried this will harm the quality of our future games

No worries. Your quality can't possibly drop any further.

[–] RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I'll be honest, I think Bethesda is too big. They hired too many employees for the studio to handle.

Most AAA studios have too many people. It gets to a point where these huge teams take too long to make something because they cannot be as flexible as game development requires with so many people.

That they held onto so many people for this long is pretty impressive, actually. I thought certainly it would have happened sooner.

Morrowind was made by less than 75 people (including the voice actors) and was an absolute banger. Starfield came out and, while I like parts of it, it is nowhere near Morrowind and how many people worked on Starfield? Way more than the <75 of the Morrowind team, that's for sure.

[–] DarkMetatron@feddit.org 1 points 2 weeks ago

Starfield is, in many regards, Elder Scrolls Daggerfall in Space. Many, mostly unconnected, game systems and mechanics, a huge mostly procedural generated world with only a few handcrafted dungeons and places. So there is hope that Starfield 2 will be Morrowind in space 🤤😄