A group DM, gone 11pm, after the Texas layoff filings turned the rumours
into paperwork.
RYUU: Fifty-plus people gone off The Elder Scrolls 6, one of
them apparently at Bethesda since Morrowind, and the official Microsoft line
is that none of this touches the release schedule. We are actually meant to
nod along to that.
ANGE: Studios lose people. That is the industry, sadly. My
worry is which people, because there is a version of this that is genuinely
fine, the version where they trimmed some duplicate producers and a bit of
corporate overlap and nobody enjoys reading about it but the game itself never
feels a thing. This was not that version. This was engine programmers and
gameplay designers and artists and QA, the people who actually make the thing
run and feel right, cut mid-flight on the biggest RPG of the decade, and you
do not carve that out of a project this far along and call it trimming fat.
That is cutting into muscle and hoping the patient does not notice.
RYUU: And read the tone from the top. The new Xbox boss, Asha
Sharma, called it the “most significant” restructure in Xbox history and said,
out loud, that the gaming business “is not healthy.” Sixteen hundred people.
Then the same company that bought ZeniMax specifically to own Fallout and
Elder Scrolls turns around and fires chunks of the teams making Fallout and
Elder Scrolls. I keep waiting for that to make sense.
ANGE: The bit that keeps me up is not the delay everyone is
shouting about. It is the crunch. The people left now do the same enormous job
with fewer hands, on a game that has already been in development long enough
to become a running punchline. Fewer people, same mountain.
RYUU: The devs said it themselves. A “crushing effect on
morale.” You cannot build a convincing Tamriel, the kind you lose a hundred
hours to without noticing, out of a room full of people who just watched their
friends get walked out. Elder Scrolls lives and dies on that texture, the
hand-placed weirdness in every cave, and that is the first thing that dies
when a team is scared and stretched.
ANGE: Bethesda swears the schedule is untouched. And I want
to believe the PR, I do.
RYUU: But?
ANGE: But the paperwork lists gameplay designers and engine
programmers among the cut, and “no impact on the schedule” and “we removed the
people building the schedule” cannot both be true. I came in thinking the
internet was catastrophising, the way it does. I have talked myself onto your
side, which I resent.
RYUU: Welcome. It’s grim over here.
ANGE: I’m going to go reinstall Skyrim for the ninth time and
pretend the sequel is fine. Night.
