"Most people" at Bethesda wanted to make Elder Scrolls 6 before Starfield, claims Skyrim co-lead, but Todd Howard dragged them aboard his rocketship

"It was very much, ‘guess what, team? We’re making this space game.’"

What came first, the chicken or the egg? I know, it's a tough one. I'll put it another way. What came first, Todd Howard's lone desire to make a space RPG or what the devs working under him had initially anticipated they'd be working on once Fallout 4 shipped? Well, according to a fresh account given by long-time Bethesda developer and Skyrim co-lead designer Kurt Kuhlmann, those among the latter who'd mentally prepped to be making The Elder Scrolls 6 right away were rather whisked along on an interstellar journey Todd seemingly charted a course for without much of a heads up.

Speaking to FRVR's Lewis White, Kuhlmann recalled his version of the chain of events which followed Bethesda finishing up on 2015's Fallout 4. A spell working on Fallout 76 came first, with the main studio having been roped into the multiplayer entry's troubled development, but Kuhlmann suggested that assumption among devs was that The Elder Scrolls 6 would be their next major port of call.

It makes perfect sense - Skyrim had directly preceded Fallout 4 and come right after Fallout 3, itself preceded by Oblivion. So, heading back to Tamriel certainly makes sense as the expectation if normal service resumed. Instead, Starfield happened, with Kuhlmann painting the picture that not only was it an unexpected move for a lot of the studio's staff, but one they might not have been as big a fans of as just getting on with The Elder Scrolls 6.

The dev described getting on with TES VI as "what I think most people wanted", counting himself among that number. That's not too suprising, given Kuhlmann claimed in another interview earlier this year that Todd Howard had verbally promised him the lead design role on The Elder Scrolls 6 following the release of Skyrim.

That feels like it's potentially important context for how Kuhlmann went on to characterise the arrival of Starfield into the Bethesda team's lives. "That’s what most people wanted to do, you know," he said of working on the Elder Scrolls 6. "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.'"

Howard being the foremost advocate for jumping onto Starfield isn't hard to believe in the slightest, as the man hardly hid his giddy personal excitement at getting to make a space RPG. "We felt doing something like Starfield...we'd been wanting to do something else for a long time and play in a new universe, so if not now — I'm going back in time, we started right after Fallout 4, so 2015 — if not now, when? It felt like, if we didn't do it then, the 'when' could be 'never'," was how Howard described the decisionmaking process which spawned Starfield during a 2021 chat with IGN.

Regardless of where the truth lies, and it's probably somewhere in the middle, I can't help but feel that the dismissal of Starfield as something Howard imposed on a Bethesda rather than something that grew out of collective passion is also probably inextricably linked to its status as a critical flop, relative to its incredibly lofty hype. Had it hit Skyrim and Fallout 4-level heights, I reckon even the initially sceptical like Kuhlmann might not now be looking back on its birth as a moment defined by the game they were pushing back as a result.

Instead, much in the same way that when Bethesda still had a reputation as a studio whose work on Fallout 76 was the exception to the rule of everything they touched turning to gold, people were lining up to write bizarre things like "Todd Howard is to games what Tom Cruise is to cinema" about the diminutive auteur, the studio's current reputation makes it a lot easier to park the onus for complex failures at the door of one person.

In the end, I come out of it all feeling a bit sorry for both Howard and Kuhlmann. It seems neither really managed to or got the chance to make the game they desperately wanted to during that phase of their lives.