November 11, 2026—that's today—marks the 15^th anniversary of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. And if you thought Bethesda might use the big birthday to drop a surprise update on the state of The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel, sorry, but it's not happening.

The wheels of hope began turning a couple days ago, when Reece Reilly of the Kiwi Talkz podcast took to X to tease "an awesome announcement happening in the next 2 days that gamers will be happy about."

That, naturally, led to a thread on the TESVI subreddit speculating that something Sentinel-related would be happening on the Sentinel front—despite Bethesda specifically saying when Sentinel was made official that it will be "some time" before it was ready to share more information. Hey, eight days is "some time," right?

Well, yes, fair enough. But not enough time: Reece clarified on November 10 that "this announcement has nothing to do with Bethesda, Skyrim, TES:VI or even Mass Effect," and eventually Bethesda felt compelled to do the same.

"Hey everyone, wanted to pop in to say that we aren’t going to have any big announcements tomorrow," the official Bethesda account posted in response to the Reddit speculation. "We’re excited you’re excited but we will not be sharing anything new on Sentinel for some time."

Naturally, Sentinel subredditors took it exactly as you'd expect:

There's a little bit of frustration visible in some replies over the fact that Bethesda insists on remaining silent about Sentinel after all this time—eight years since The Elder Scrolls 6 was announced, 15 since Skyrim released.

For the most part, though, everyone seems to be taking it all in stride: Comically twisted theories, hopes for Skyrim 2, and widespread pride that the community managed to force Bethesda to directly intervene.

It's too bad, but on the other hand Bethesda was quite clear that Sentinel isn't going to be one of those announce-and-launch games: Frankly, I'll be surprised if we see it drop before 2030. That said, this is in fact the 15^th anniversary of Skyrim, and it's not going entirely unremarked: Bethesda shared commemorative art by fantasy artist Karl Fitzgerald to mark the big day, and over on X it's giving away three limited edition Skyrim anniversary posters.

On this day 15 years ago The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was released. Since that day the community has continued to grow into something truly special. Thank you for being a part of it.This beautiful artwork was created by legendary artist Karl Fitzgerald to mark the occasion. #Skyrim15

— @bethesdastudios.com (@bethesdastudios.com.bsky.social) 2026-11-11T20:12:31.682Z

I spend way too much time on wikis reading about spin-off games made for handheld and mobile devices I will probably never play (there was a whole trilogy of Silent Hill: Orphan games that have lived up to their name by being orphaned on old phones). The Elder Scrolls Travels are a prime example—games made in the gap between Morrowind and Oblivion. The third in the series, Shadowkey, came out on Nokia's N-Gage handheld—a cross between a GameBoy Advance and a mobile phone that lasted two years before being discontinued in 2005.

This first-person RPG is about to return thanks to Dan Whelan, whose Shadowkey Reforged project will let us play Shadowkey in widescreen with controller support and upscaled graphics. You can choose to play in classic or modern mode, but you can also toggle individual features one by one. Modern mode isn't just a graphical upgrade as it also adds features from the later mainline Elder Scrolls games like stamina-based sprinting, stealth, and ragdoll physics.

This is one of those times where I prefer the original game's look, as the brutally abrupt draw distance leaves a lot to your imagination while the modernized version seems to show enemies looming unresponsively in the near distance. And it's not like the upscaled character models actually look good, despite being beyond what Nokia's taco phone was capable of displaying.

While Shadowkey was never particularly well-ranked in the pantheon of Elder Scrolls games, people did praise its use of the Morrowind soundtrack, which Shadowkey Reforged will continue. Point it to your Morrowind install and it'll borrow both music and sound effects from the best Elder Scrolls game.

To answer the obvious question, Whelan says in the FAQ: "I used AI to assist with coding and building the engine, and with debugging. I used AI image generation combined with Photoshop and some manual sprite editing to create most of the modern, higher resolution artwork."

Whelan plans to release Shadowkey Reforged on November 11, which is just 18 hours away at the time of writing. You'll be able to download Windows, Mac, and Android versions from the website, though you'll need the original game's files from your Nokia N-Gage as well, or whatever abandonware site you frequent.

Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith had a wide-ranging chat with The Examined Game recently, touching upon topics like the importance of institutional knowledge, what he liked about Baldur's Gate 3, and what he wants to see in The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel. But he also dropped a pithy maxim (and less pithy explanation) about his—and Bethesda's—approach to design in general. Here's what he said.

I don't know about you, but I'm not a huge fan of the way YouTube encourages everything becoming a video that's over an hour long and doesn't have a text version available. There's a recent video putting the original Pool of Radiance into the greater context of the history of CRPGs that's almost 10 hours long, and the odds of me watching more than 10% of it are perishingly low.

Fortunately for you, we're here to convert video to text for your edification, as with The Examined Game's comprehensive interview with Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith. Asked how a game as successful as Skyrim came to be, Nesmith emphasized the importance of keeping the team together.

Speaking on a new episode of The Examined Game, Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith shared his big takeaway from Baldur's Gate 3, and contrasted the approaches Bethesda and Larian have taken in their respective RPGs.

PC gaming isn't short of multiplayer fantasy adventures these days, but there is still something alluring about the idea of playing Skyrim with pals. Some mods have facilitated small-scale Skyrim multiplayer in the past, like the cooperative mod Skyrim Together. But Aurbis goes several step further, converting Bethesda's RPG into a persistent online roleplaying server—essentially a Skyrim MMO in all but name.

According to its ModDB page, Aurbis transforms Skyrim's solo adventure into "a persistent world where player actions create lasting consequences", snythesising Skyrim's existing experience with a bunch of multiplayer and MMO-like systems. It's designed with roleplaying in mind, though the mod's creators stress that RP is not mandatory, and players can focus on other elements like cooperative dungeon runs or PvP play if they so choose.

The list of changes and additions to Aurbis is impressive, running from character creation outward. The retooled character builder is designed to let avatars "develop over time instead of becoming powerful immediately", though it also lets players start with vampirism or lycanthropy for roleplaying purposes.

Those roles are heavily defined by the player's choice of Birthsign, which affects how efficiently skills develop. Crafting professions are supported by a player-driven economy that factors in bank accounts, property ownership and player-created quests, while activities like combat are designed to be dangerous and reward "preparation, equipment, specialisation and teamwork."

Alongside these changes are entirely new, multiplayer specific systems. Players can form their own groups called Cohorts, designed to act as a "strong foundation for MMO-style social gameplay". This ranges from establishing parties and guilds to aligning yourself with Skyrim's existing factions, combining "familiar Skyrim content with custom multiplayer mechanics".

The list doesn't end there, either. There are more nuanced survival systems, complex horse management, MMO style death penalties, and much more. There's even a fully-fledged language and literacy system whereby players "do not automatically understand every conversation or know every location", so mastering language and literacy can provide a genuine roleplaying advantage.

It sounds wild, and this only represents an early access release. If you fancy investigating Aurbis, all you need is a legitimate copy of Skyrim that's downgraded to version 1.6.1170. The beta is invite-only, but a session key is listed on the ModDB page that should grant you access, while Aurbis has a custom launcher that downloads and maintains all required mods.

Todd Howard is one of the most recognisable names in game development, yet despite this, the Bethesda director's overarching thoughts on game design remain something of an enigma. Howard has admitted that he doesn't like talking about his games. As such, we rarely get much insight into his broader design philosophy.

Yet according to Bruce Nesmith, lead designer of Skyrim, Howard certainly has a specific set of skills when it comes to game design. In a wide-ranging interview with The Examined Game, Nesmith discussed his time working with Bethesda. During the chat, Nesmith was asked what it was like working with Howard, and he credited Howard with a knack for seeing things from the player's point of view:

"Part of what Todd has, historically for Skyrim and Fallout 3 and everything, been very good at is putting himself in the seat of your typical player," Nesmith explained. "As a developer, I sit in an ivory tower. It's inescapable … I think more deeply about games, definitely, than your typical player. And he's able to cut through that and see 'Oh yeah, they're looking for a little bit of joy here. Don't get in the way with your math and your complex decision here'".

When working up close with code and the day-to-day design of things, Nesmith pointed out that developers can overcomplicate things. "I would try to make things a little more complex, and he was more than willing to say 'No, no, that's not what the players are going to want. They're going to want something simple and more digestible here.'"

Nesmith clarifies that this isn't Howard's only talent and that he "thinks very deeply about games", while Nesmith himself can also "think from the player['s perspective]. But he says that both designers had a "bias" to see things from a particular direction, and in game development, it's often good to "find other people who have a counterbias to bounce your ideas off of so that you can get the well-rounded opinion."

On this subject, Nesmith cites an example of working with an artist who had an issue with the way The Elder Scrolls' 'detect life' spell worked in Oblivion. "He said, 'Look, this spell is cool. It does this really functional thing, but do you realise it ruins all the art? We take all this care in making these creatures and people and whatnot and making them highly detailed and look really great, and all you see is this smudge when you turn on that spell.'

"Well, in Oblivion it just stayed on for long periods of time. Look what we did in Skyrim. We made it a really expensive-to-maintain spell, so the way to use that spell properly was just keep it on for a second … we listened to what the artists were saying because they had a perspective we hadn't considered before."

This approach of seeing things from the player's perspective has certainly worked for Bethesda in the past. While it may not be everyone's favourite game in the series, Fallout 3 did an excellent job of making the RPG more approachable for players unfamiliar with the workings of oblique CRPGs. I do wonder, however, whether Bethesda took this design philosophy too far by the time Starfield rolled around, as the sci-fi adventure had such a simple roleplaying core that it lacked much of the dynamism and emergence that made the studios' previous RPGs so appealing.

Psst, hey kid, what are the big changes you'd like to see in The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel? Because all have them, don't we? We've all got our big lists for Todd Howard: Five Easy Ways to Turn This Enormously Profitable Ship Around.

You know who else has some changes he'd like to see in Sentinel? Bethesda alum and Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith, who recently sat down with The Examined Game and said that the things he'd really like Bethesda to knuckle down on in TES 6 are mounts and ladders.

"I'd like to see a much better implementation of mounts," said Nesmith. "That's been a common complaint; I'm not alone in that." But mounts can be hard to get right. "They're really tricky, there's a lot of hard decisions to be made in those.

"You can ride a horse, but that's all you can do in Skyrim. That's it, you just ride the horse. Well, I should be able to do some other things too, maybe fight on the horse, or have it fight with me, you know, stuff like that." In fairness, Skyrim does have some fairly rudimentary mounted combat—though players had to wait for it to be added in a patch back in the day—but I suspect Nesmith would like to see something a bit less awkward in future Elder Scrolls games.

I imagine a lot of players would echo Nesmith on mounts. I'm less sure they share his concern about ladders, which strikes me as a very charming and very game-designer-y fixation to have. "You don't climb up and down ladders [in current Elder Scrolls games]. It seems simple, it seems stupid, but you don't climb up and down ladders!"

But you know what? I'm on board. Not having proper ladders, says Nesmith, "really limits the art team in terms of how they can do multi-layer things. You know, all the ladders in Skyrim, you click on the ladder, poof you're at the top, or you have to climb a stair."

Advanced ladder tech has its costs, though. "To do ladders, you have to deal with a whole host of questions, which our programmers very legitimately put in front of us, and said 'You gimme answers to these, I'll tell you how much programming time it's gonna take to make them'. And that caused problems, right there".

There are, it turns out, a whole lot of ladder questions that arise if you try to implement them in your game. If two people use a ladder at once, what happens? How do NPCs make strategic decisions about them? How do you create animations and behaviours for characters getting hit while climbing, or dying while climbing? All these things and more pile up, which is why Bethesda decided to spend its time on other stuff, historically.

Now, of course, it's not Nesmith's problem, and the man wants his mounts and ladders. Bravely, as someone else who also does not have to design The Elder Scrolls 6, I say give them to him.

Yesterday, after eight years of waiting, Bethesda finally gave The Elder Scrolls 6 a title: Sentinel. It then warned that, after eight years of waiting, more waiting is in store because "it'll be some time before we're ready to share more." Then Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, one of the industry's best-known and most reliable reporters, weighed in, saying the game is "still more than two years away."

You know what comes next, right?

Schreier's 'two more years' statement, echoed by Jez Corden of Windows Central, attracted quite a range of comments, not all of them of the polite sort. That led Schreier to Reddit, where he could elaborate on his statement.

Pointing out his record of accurate calls on previous Bethesda releases Fallout 76 and Starfield, Schreier wrote, "I'm a reporter. I am not telling you this because I enjoy watching people get mad about having to wait for sequels to their favorite video games. I am telling you this because it is true, and because my job is to report accurate facts and clear up misinformation. TES6: Sentinel is more than two years away."

Did this clarification calm the roiling waters? Well...

Many of the replies are understanding, grateful, and sympathetic to Schreier's plight, but there are plenty that express doubt or distrust, suggesting that the two year window was pure speculation. Others want to know why Bethesda would drop the title announcement yesterday if the game really is that far out, given that Todd Howard has previously expressed regret about revealing The Elder Scrolls 6 so prematurely in the first place. Why repeat that mistake?

A few optimistic souls are holding onto the dream of a 2027 release that emerged from the reveal trailer for Skyrim on the Nintendo Switch 2:

And then there are the Elder Scrolls fans operating on a whole different level from the rest of us. Redditor Reacryoum, for instance, thinks Bethesda is leading up to a surprise trailer drop on November 11—that's actually one of the more grounded theories to emerge over the past 24 hours. Casting back to one of Bethesda's old Twitter posts, Jayehemcee speculated that the theme of the game is "time," and that this is all part of the game's marketing. I'm not sure how that one works in practice, frankly, but I respect the ambition.

Minimum-Act-7571 put forth the idea that Bethesda is actually messing with Schreier by intentionally feeding him false information, because it's super mad at him spilling the beans all the time—although they also admitted that it's a "new copium theory," and so perhaps not meant to be taken entirely seriously.

I think the best of the bunch, though, is this one from Any-West7160, who believes the Sentinel title reveal contains the actual release date: November 11, 2027. I don't believe it, but I like it.

Here's the video in question—what do you see in the stars?

The best videogame conspiracy theories are always the most bonkers, but what complicates the situation just a wee little bit for Sentinel is that one such theory was actually correct: The Sentinel subtitle was stashed away in a Starfield easter egg for years before anyone noticed. Maybe it was just a coincidence, sure, but the numbers don't lie, as the saying goes—and those numbers said Sentinel. And they were right!

So there's precedent there, pretty certainly, but it's also a lot easier to drop in a reference to a locked-in-stone game title than it is to do the same with a relatively far-off launch date that's subject to disruption and delays. And as others have pointed out, including Schreier, it's extremely unlikely that anyone is just lying about the far-off release window for a little bit of PR pop: Evasion and word games are one thing, but straight-up dishonesty will leave your credibility in shreds pretty much instantly.

What it all adds up to, ultimately, is this: Two more years of waiting and maybe more, plenty of hopium and copium along the way, and a wise piece of advice from Vanquisher_84 which will almost certainly go unheeded:

See you in 2029?

When the Greybeards invite you to High Hrothgar in Skyrim, you have to climb a mountain to reach them. There's a messenger called Klimmek waiting in the village of Ivarstead at the bottom to warn you what an arduous journey this is going to be. To get to the top of the Throat of the World, he says, you have to work your way up The 7,000 Steps.

It's well-documented that there aren't actually 7,000 steps carved into the side of the mountain. Some of them are buried under the snow, making an exact count impossible, but the actual number is closer to 700. And even if you argue that The 7,000 Steps refers to the number of footsteps it takes to ascend the mountain, according to the dedicated researchers at the Ultimate Elder Scrolls Portal it only takes "approximately 2,400 footsteps" to get there.

As part of Bethesda's 40th anniversary, which included the reveal of The Elder Scrolls 6's subtitle, the studio reminisced about their previous work, which is how we know they really did try to get 7,000 steps into the side of the mountain.

Of course, like most open world games, Skyrim isn't designed to scale—otherwise the capital city of Solitude would have a population of less than 100 people. But in the same way that for every named NPC we should assume there are a bunch of people off-camera, distances are compressed so that it doesn't take a week to get anywhere. For every step we watched the Dragonborn climb there are another nine implied steps we don't see, and even more frost trolls.

You might be thinking, if you're the optimistic sort, that today's official unveiling of The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel means that wheels are turning and things are happening and you're going to be off to Hammerfell soon—or at the very least, learning more about what's coming in Bethesda's next big RPG. Alas, in a follow-up post on social media, the studio made it clear that you shouldn't start holding your breath just yet.

"Thank you for 40 years of shared memories," Bethesda wrote. "We can't wait to make even more together with The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel. Development continues, and while it'll be some time before we're ready to share more, it feels great to finally reveal the name and location with you."

Thank you for 40 years of shared memories. We can’t wait to make even more together with The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel. Development continues, and while it’ll be some time before we’re ready to share more, it feels great to finally reveal the name and location with you.

— @bethesdastudios.com (@bethesdastudios.com.bsky.social) 2026-11-03T19:25:45.598Z

"Some time" is obviously not a defined span, but I find that generally speaking it's a nicer, more politic way of saying "long time"—for instance, you could say it's been "some time" since Bethesda first announced the Elder Scrolls 6, and yeah, that's true. It was also eight freakin' years ago, and we've heard basically nothing since.

That is, very roughly, the same amount of time Bethesda needed to make the first Elder Scrolls game, Arena, as well as Daggerfall, Morrowind, the Morrowind expansions Tribunal and Bloodmoon, and the spinoff games Battlespire and Redguard. If you're (relatively) new to the series, eight years represents the span between Oblivion and The Elder Scrolls Online, a stretch interspersed by Skyrim and five major expansions: Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles for Oblivion, and Dawnguard, Hearthfire, and Dragonborn for Skyrim.

Of course, Bethesda's had other things on the go over the past eight years too. Todd Howard said shortly after The Elder Scrolls 6 reveal that it was in pre-production, while Starfield was in full production. Starfield was Bethesda's top priority in the years leading up to its 2023 release; Howard later said that they'd just wanted to answer the fan question (are you making a new Elder Scrolls?) that came up every time they announced something else, like Starfield.

"Just pretend we didn't announce it," he joked. "Doesn't exist. No one's heard a word."

How long Sentinel will take to get from here to launch is anybody's guess, although Bloomberg's Jason Schreier said on Bluesky that it's "still more than two years away." When questioned about his prediction, Schreier asserted that it's not a prediction at all, and that he knows "the time frame the game is targeting."

This week, Bethesda Game Studios is celebrating its 40th birthday—a celebration that included the full name reveal of The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel, successfully completing the eight-year task of adding a word to a thing.

In addition, Bethesda is commemorating the occasion with the launch of a 40th anniversary site collecting the anecdotes and favorite memories of studio staff, including one Alan Nanes. Now a design director, Nanes was originally hired at Bethesda as one of its first full-time QA testers—and by his own description, he got the job by being a pleasant fellow to spend time with.

According to Nanes, his history with Bethesda started during Morrowind's development. He was close friends with Bethesda devs in multiple departments, and it was an era where that was enough to get you in the building.

"Things were a bit 'Wild West' back then, and my friends allowed me to hang out (yes, before I was an employee) there, playing multiplayer games with them and just getting to know everyone," Nanes wrote. "Eventually, Todd Howard noticed my presence in the studio and asked if I wanted to test out their new game."

In time, his impromptu testing sessions started attracting an audience of Bethesda developers who would pick his brain about their design choices, scribble notes, and debate with each other about potential tweaks to the game while watching over his shoulder.

"It was an extraordinary feeling, the first time I felt like I was contributing to the creation of an actual videogame (I believe you can find my name in the Morrowind manual's credits under 'Special Thanks')," Nanes said. "After this became a regular occurrence, Todd Howard and Ashley Cheng seemed to decide having full-time, in-studio QA would be a valuable addition to the team, and I took on that mantle."

Nanes later graduated to a quest designer position for Oblivion, and was more recently credited as lead companions designer on Starfield. But while his tenure at Bethesda might've had a storybook trajectory, the history of QA workers at the studio has been a contentious one in the years since Nanes was hired.

Driven by frustrations surrounding compensation, advancement opportunities, workload, and more, QA workers at Bethesda's parent company ZeniMax initiated a unionization vote in 2022, officially forming ZeniMax Workers United - CWA—then the largest videogame union in the US—when the vote succeeded in January 2023.

Those frustrations remained unaddressed as contract negotiations with Microsoft stalled for over two years, driving the QA union to vote overwhelmingly in favor of authorizing a strike in April 2025. Its contract was ultimately ratified in June 2025. When a number of those QA workers were affected by Xbox's July 2026 layoffs, that contract allowed the union to enter into an "effects bargaining" process to negotiate severance terms for its impacted members, culminating in "a significant agreement" in September 2026.

Eight years after it was announced, it's finally officially official: The next RPG in Bethesda's long-running Elder Scrolls series is called Sentinel.

The title was revealed in a video celebrating Bethesda's 40th anniversary, narrated by Todd Howard (of course), who cast back to the studio's first game, Gridiron—Bethesda was big on sports games back in the day—before moving into The Elder Scrolls series, the games that would take it to the big leagues, in the early 1990s.

"As we're here in the 40th anniversary, we think about all of the games we've made," Howard says as the video draws to an end.

"And so even though yes, we're looking back,we're also looking forward to all we're doing, particularly with the Fallout franchise and obviously The Elder Scrolls. You know, everybody's always asking about Elder Scrolls 6. And we thought, hey, given the moment, what a perfect time to tell you what The Elder Scrolls 6 is actually called."

And thus is the title revealed: Sentinel.

There's an interesting quote after the title is revealed: "The scroll offered only a shimmer, a veil thinly lifted to my eyes. A future lost. A victory undone. Sands of time scattered by fate." Those words were uttered by Yazar, Moth Priest of High Queen Iradne of Hammerfell in the year 4E 206, which was UESP pointed out puts Sentinel at least five years after the events of Skyrim.

No other details are revealed, but the title (and that quote) presumably also reveals the setting: Hammerfell, home of the redguards. Sentinel itself is one of Hammerfell's major kingdoms and capital of the Alik'r Desert—reflected in the teaser's sandy backdrop. It's something of a geographical shift from the flyover of the generic mountains seen in that 2018 reveal, although the Alik'r is bordered by the Dragontail Mountains, so who knows.

But, for those who like to dig deep in search of clues, here's the best image I could get of the jewelled whatsit revealed under the sand, just before it disappears. Mean anything to you?

So there you have it! The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel. Hopefully it won't take another eight years before we hear anything more about it.

If you are playing Morrowind in 2026, my recommendation is that you do so using OpenMW, its 18-year-old fan-made and open-source engine reimplementation that makes it run smooth as butter on any modern machine you point it at, whether you're running Windows, Linux, macOS or, hell, FreeBSD if you wanna get really sicko with it. It's simply the most convenient way to get a cromulent version of Bethesda's best game running on modern systems.

And now it has a new version. Or rather, a new release candidate that will prove the basis of its upcoming 0.52 version. Released a couple of days ago, OpenMW 0.52 RC1 contains a bunch of fixes, some new features, and one minor alteration to the fundamental forces of the universe. It's not the doozy of, say, OpenMW 0.50—which added gamepad support and thereby made Morrowind on Steam Deck dizzyingly easy—but it's still pretty meaty.

For instance, consider: "Water-walking actors now drown when knocked out" and "Implemented terminal velocity". Say what you like, but the second of those seems pretty meaningful for a game that contains Scrolls of Icarian Flight and the first is quite a funny sentence. The terminal velocity fix contains, within itself, a sub-fix for the basic laws of reality: "fixed gravity being 0.01% off"). We are free of our shared hell.

The biggest new feature in OpenMW 0.52 is probably the lighting stuff. It's called clustered lighting and it removes "the normal per-object light limit". I don't really know what that means either, but the short and tall of it, per an explanatory August blog post, is that "it has a dramatically lower performance impact than raising the limit to Aetherius. In fact, the performance can in some cases be better than with the regular light limit."

Morrowind, one of the best videogames ever made, continues to get better.

The case as presented by Rebelzize seems fairly open and shut: A volunteer team being sued by a former volunteer over contributions excised from the project? There are potential material benefits to consider: Skyblivion has a level of scope and popularity that could leave participation in it as strong a resume line as shipping a commercial game. Fallout London's developers even pivoted to being their own indie studio.

But that's not a clear-cut monetary incentive, and the clout of participation is contingent on productive contribution to the project. While it is worth noting that we only have Rebelzize's accounting of events, I think there are green flags pointing to his trustworthiness:

• The call to action is for pro bono legal aid in line with the project's overall volunteer nature, not fundraising.
• The former volunteer is not named, and Rebelzize urges against the sort of Reddit gumshoe sleuthing you see so often in these situations.
• Skyblivion as a whole has run for a long time without major scandal.

Unless you, the reader, are or know a lawyer with expertise in IP/GDPR cases⁠—check out Skyblivion's website to contact them, in that case⁠—there's not much for a given fan of the project to do. Rebelzize noted that he has paid legal help lined up should the call for volunteers fail. Even if a lawsuit is filed, it does not sound⁠—at least from this vlog⁠—like it could imperil Skyblivion's release. I have questions, but ideally this whole situation will resolve cleanly enough that we never know exactly what happened:

• What, specifically, did this volunteer work on in the game?
• Did redoing this work have any bearing on Skyblivion's delay from 2025 into '26?
• What happened here interpersonally? Was there an issue of crediting the work done? Are there any missing details that, if they don't justify the volunteer's legal threat, at least make it more understandable?

At last call, Skyblivion was still scheduled to release this year, but time is running short for that goal. We Elder Scrolls-likers at PC Gamer have been excited about it for years. Skyblivion promises a more ground-up remake of TES 4: Oblivion⁠—complete with radically redesigned dungeons and biomes⁠—in Skyrim's engine. This is in contrast to the more graphics-focused Oblivion Remastered we got in 2025.

Ghostwire: Tokyo, Tango Gameworks' spooky, neon-drenched action-adventure game, is now officially a good old game. Granted, it's not that old, but 'good' seems about right given that contributing writer Imogen Mellor scored it a 72 in her review. But what I mean is that it's joined GOG's Preservation Program.

If you're wondering why a game from 2022 would need to be preserved already, well, it kind of doesn't. You may be thinking the game is finally free from its seemingly arbitrary implementation of Denuvo, but that was actually removed shortly after it was added. What this release does is remove Bethesda.NET integration (providing any extra goodies on your first launch of the game) and come with a promise from GOG that any stability issues that arise as decades pass and operating systems change will be addressed in future patches.

That may just come into play given that Tango Gameworks would be closed right now if Xbox's sudden closure of the studio hadn't been canceled out with an acquisition by PUBG owner Krafton. It's worth noting that the game still appears to be published by Bethesda Softworks, so if you're trying to avoid Microsoft products for any genocide-related reasons, you'll have to weigh that as a consideration.

As for Ghostwire itself, it proved surprisingly popular with over 6 million players. We called it a great game that Elden Ring overshadowed around release alongside the quietly adored Teardown and Sifu. Like its left-field follow-up Hi-Fi Rush, Ghostwire seemed to hit pretty hard for the cult it attracted. Hopefully Tango can capture some of that juice in the games it's currently developing under Krafton.

There are mods for Seamless Grav Jumps and for Seamless Planet Takeoffs. But when you arrive at a planet in Starfield you still have to choose a landing spot, and then watch a loading screen and an animation. It's another thing that contributes to the feeling your spaceship is more like a house that can teleport.

When you're in space, Starfield's planets are basically just textures you can fly right through if you put in the hours to try it, as Alanah Pearce discovered back when the RPG's boundaries were still being explored. It seemed like one gap modders would never be able to paper over, but Frederik Wessberg has apparently managed it.

The video of his work-in-progress mod shows a planetary approach, complete with heating effects on the ship during atmospheric entry, a moment of white as he hits a layer of clouds, and then the ship just lands. It seems like the clouds are there to mask a moment of loading, but Wessberg says "the cloud cover is in fact not a fancy loading screen."

He goes on to explain, "The clouds are not covering loading – they're helping make the seam as minimal as possible right at the point when we do the final cell switch, in terms of lighting and exposure, and terrain color. For airless moons and planets, I just do the switch with no veil, which is fine in that context as the lighting and exposure won't change as much between the two cells (although there I do some extra exposure matching). The underlying loading mechanism is entirely done in the background, while the game is still interactive. We just wait until the assets are finished loading in, and then we do the swap."

To make that work, the floating textures had to be replaced with actual models of the planets and moons. "I had to completely reimplement Starfield's planet rendering in space in 3D," Wessberg says, "in a way that looks detailed and sharp at every altitude.

"Thankfully, Starfield is actually amazingly physically accurate, and in many ways a true space simulator – it just doesn't ever reveal this to the player, but I could leverage it in my design here. So, the planet rendering is based upon Starfield's biome data and exact surface maps, including climate data, atmospheric composition data, and takes into account things like orbital phase, distance to the sun, distance to the moon(s) orbiting the planet and how they contribute moonlight, and so on. The philosophy is: Starfield's data is the 'truth', but we then modulate it by real physics."

The finished version of the mod, which will be freely available on Nexus Mods, will let players fly manually in low orbit, or turn on the autopilot and walk around the ship as you descend from orbit, and land anywhere you like—even on water. There's a post on Wessberg's Patreon with the details.

Given the legacy it created, it's easy to forget The Elder Scrolls wasn't a big deal right out of the gate. The original game in the series, The Elder Scrolls: Arena, wasn't badly received—our reviewer, Andy Butcher, gave it an 87 in his review at the time—but it didn't set the world on fire immediately.

In a retrospective on the making of Daggerfall over at Time Extension, Ted Peterson, designer on both the first two Elder Scrolls games, recalled the trouble Arena had moving copies when it first arrived on shelves in 1994.

"Game stores ordered a certain number of copies," he said, "and when we didn't ship on time, they started cancelling. To give you some context of how badly it did, the very, very first game I ever worked on was a retail pack for Terminator 2029, so you had to own the original game. That shipped more copies than Arena did early on. But we were lucky: word of mouth got out, and people started playing and enjoying the game. It was a disaster in a lot of ways and somehow built a billion-dollar franchise."

To help put that in context, Time Extension tracked down an interview Bethesda president Christopher Weaver gave in November of 1995 to some crusty old magazine called "PC Gamer" in which he was quoted as saying, "We were in unknown territory with Arena, and nobody seemed to believe that a company known for its sports games—no matter how good they were—could possibly break into a genre as insular, even fanatical, as RPGs. The word we were getting from buyers out in the field was: 'Hey, you guys can't do that!"

While Bethesda had released games in other genres, like the aforementioned FPS Terminator 2029, in the early 1990s Bethesda wasn't a name you looked to for RPGs. It was the studio responsible for Wayne Gretzky Hockey 3 and Gridiron!, which was why it was hired by Electronic Arts to help finish John Madden Football. (A relationship that ended in court when Bethesda sued EA for failing to publish a promised rerelease of Gridiron!)

Shifting Bethesda's reputation from "sports guys" to "RPG guys" took some doing, but Arena certainly managed it. I can only imagine the outcry today if Todd Howard announced we'd have to wait a bit longer for The Elder Scrolls 6 because the studio wants to finally get Wayne Gretzky Hockey 4 out the door first.

I don't typically have much love for billion-dollar corporations dropping the 'meet our legal department' hammer on no-budget modders who are just trying to exercise their creative muscles, but in this one instance I'm willing to let it slide: Bethesda has issued a cease-and-desist order to an "AI creator" who made a Fallout game set in New York City that runs in browsers.

That's actually overstating it: As Chris First explained in his X feed (via RPS), he "directed Claude and a studio of AI agents" to make the game for him. Nor was there any new creative thought injected into the process, First continued, saying he asked for a game that was "not inspired by" Fallout, but that was "exactly like Fallout."

This is the result.

I know that being playable in a browser is a limiting factor, but this is really just something I'd rather not play at all. It stands in such sharp contrast to mods like Fallout: London or Skyblivion, efforts that reflect genuine passion, commitment, and creativity—and yes, those mods are massive undertakings that require years of effort from hundreds of volunteers, but they also don't suck and I feel like maybe there's a lesson to be learned there.

Anyway, whether I want to play it or not is now a moot point, because yesterday First said he received a message from ZeniMax Media telling him to knock it off—specifically, that the domain name he registered for the project, fallout.nyc, infringes on the studio's IP rights.

I don't know if First was expecting sympathy for his plight, but he doesn't seem to be getting much of it. Some responses criticize him for calling the project "Fallout," which is just about daring Bethesda to do something, but there's also plenty of heat over the use of AI to make the thing. A few optimists suggest First would be fine if he just changed the name, but he doesn't seem inclined to pursue that course.

That's probably for the best: Maybe I'm being overly harsh here (although I don't think so) but the one clear drawback to that plan is that changing the name doesn't change the fact that it looks like garbola. Playing a low-poly Fallout in a browser isn't an especially impressive technical feat—you can do the same with Morrowind, and it actually looks like Morrowind—and if you just want some really cheap Fallout, Fallout 3 is $2.49 in the Steam Autumn Sale, or you can snag New Vegas for a fiver.

I do sympathize with First's urge for a proper new Fallout game: I'm a little tired of the formula, but it's been 11 years since Fallout 4 and that's too damn long. But this ain't it, as the kids say, and while I'm never going to sign up for the corporate cheerleading squad, I can't say I'm sorry to see this one consigned to the dustbin, where it belongs.

Speaking on the FRVR Podcast last week, former Bethesda writer and designer Kurt Kuhlmann was asked about the concept of "Dragon Breaks"—time getting all weird on account of magic and stuff⁠—in Elder Scrolls lore. The biggest Dragon Break as far as Elder Scrolls fans are concerned: "The Warp in the West," the series' post-facto determination that every ending of The Elder Scrolls Chapter 2: Daggerfall happened at the same time. On account of magic and stuff, you see.

I love this story: Simple serendipity, a workplace oopsie, accidentally setting in motion the continuity and story beats of a billion-dollar franchise. Kirkbride is memetically famous among Elder Scrolls fans as a boundary-pushing loremaster who added a lot of weird flavor to Morrowind, so his affinity for the timey-wimey, fucky-wucky potential of the Dragon Break absolutely scans.

As far as I can tell, it doesn't seem like the series timeline Kuhlmann mentioned was ever publicly available⁠—this must have been an internal lore bible sort of thing. While TES Arena and Daggerfall designer Ted Peterson would write the in-game book, "The Warp in the West," for Oblivion, Kirkbride and Kuhlmann appear to have introduced the concept in Morrowind with the books "Where Were You When the Dragon Broke" and "Dragon Break Re-Examined" respectively.

Kuhlmann noted in the podcast that he attempted to introduce more grounded, historiographic ambiguity with his treatment: What if the confusion was a matter of bias, transcription, and record-keeping, rather than metaphysical forces? Of course, Dragon Break Re-Examined also deliberately references events in Morrowind's future as the past, implying the skeptical book itself is yet another example of timey-wimey shenanigans⁠. An all-timer bit, for my money.

Elder Scrolls aside, the problem of preserving and representing RPG choice across multiple games in a series is something no studio has managed to fully "solve," if such a thing is even possible. I've always appreciated Bethesda's "fuck it, we ball" approach to the continuity with stuff like The Warp in the West. See also how Larian's Divinity: Original Sin 2 almost completely contradicts the story of Divinity 2: Ego Draconis (sans Original Sin) from eight years prior. I love RPGs so much, man.

I want to establish my old school RPG sicko bona fides really quick: My favorite Fallout games are 1 and New Vegas. My least favorite is 3 (4 is better than it gets credit for in critical circles). I really did not like Starfield and did not make it past the first planet. Obsidian is one of my favorites to ever do it. Troika Games forever.

With that out of the way, it is deranged how a lot of fans talk online about Bethesda as a studio, and Todd Howard as a guy. I have no doubt as to the accuracy of Kuhlmann's assessment of his former boss.

And I don't blame Howard one bit for being protective of the series in this way⁠. It's pretty relatable, and I'm sure it wasn't the only consideration around avoiding mainline-style spinoffs, as Kuhlmann's thoughts on ESO indicate.

Reading this in bad faith, you could parse it as an admission of weakness or insecurity, but I don't see it that way. I've spoken to senior Bethesda devs myself and watched them in other interviews: They're proud of their own work, speak positively of New Vegas, and seem to respect their peers at Obsidian. I think it's YouTubers impugning their character or calling for their coworkers to be fired over a perceived mishandling of the series that gets on their nerves.

Fallout memers seem to have gotten what they wanted, but in a monkey's paw kind of way. Obsidian is making a new Fallout game now, but with a gun to its head. Given all the layoffs and studio closures Xbox has under its belt, with more no doubt on the way, it doesn't feel like anybody's winning.

Listen, you can say what you want about Avowed—I wouldn't even blame you if you didn't like it, or much of what has come out of Obsidian's recent catalogue. There's even a tiny, selfish scrap of my gamer heart that's secretly very glad that Obsidian is working on a new Fallout game, again.

But this is pretty rich, given the grinder that Obsidian's been put through in the past few months. As a reminder, in July, 25% of Obsidian's staff was laid off during Xbox's ongoing, brutal "reset", totalling around 52 employees. When this happened, a sequel to Avowed was cancelled, along with multiple unannounced games. More recently, Obsidian's being folded into Bethesda.

Now, in fairness to Braff, it's entirely possible that this particular merging did not ruin Obsidian's ability to express itself. It's entirely possible that the post-bloodletting Obsidian we were left with in July and the one currently under Bethesda now are pretty much interchangeable.

However, the idea that Obsidian's creative identity has been respected by these moves overall is laughable—cancelling multiple projects is the opposite of that, actually. Making it work on a franchise it hasn't really touched in 16 years is the opposite of that, actually. And pushing it into a get-along t-shirt with Bethesda? I have a suspicion that time'll prove this move the opposite, too.

After nine years, Quake Champions is a live-service game no more: The free-to-play arena shooter is now even more old school as a regular $10 product on Steam. All champions are unlocked from the jump, so you don't have to buy characters piecemeal like way too many games were asking us to do in the mid-2010s. Recently purchased premium currency will be refunded, but if you spent years dropping cash on skins, it might be a little awkward that everybody else now gets those at no additional cost.

This is a nicer ending than I expected for id's live-service experiment, which has received mostly cosmetic updates in recent years for the few hundred people that continue to love it. Though no longer free, it's easily a better game with its loot boxes and store tab gone, and one I'll be happy to fire up occasionally for a few rounds of instagib.

Also, these classic skins for Quake Ranger and Doom Slayer come stock now, so that's good stuff:

The brands are at it again but this time I'm inclined to let it slide, because it's so nonsensical (which is a nice way of saying dumb) that I can't help but be charmed. Ikea, the Swedish furniture-and-stuff giant, has released a mod for Skyrim called Kallax Storageborn: A new companion who is also a shelf, who is also voiced by Matt Berry.

If you think that sounds weird, it gets weirder, because this mod doesn't just add a companion, it includes an entirely new questline built around the character. Becoming encumbered in the game, as will inevitably happen eventually, will give you the opportunity to visit an abandoned dwemer emporium, where you'll embark upon a quest to "unravel the origins of a mysterious master."

During this quest, you'll assemble Kallax Storageborn, a companion "with unfathomable storage capacity," who can be summoned with a newly-added Thu'um—Skyrim's famous voice of power—even when he's not your active companion. Your ultimate goal: Tidy up the clutter plaguing the realm of Nords and Dragonborn.

The mod also adds new loot including the Meatball Helmet, which sadly I don't have an image of, and the mighty Allenblade, which I do:

The Kallax, for the record, is an actual series of Ikea shelves, while Matt Berry once did a Movember voiceover for Hockey Night in Canada.

He's done a few other things you may have heard of, too.

The whole thing is obviously a marketing stunt, but it's worthy of a few minutes of my attention for two reasons. One, as I already said, it's dumb enough to be charming; and two, some real effort went into it.

The quest is an actual quest—we're not talking Witcher 3 levels of complexity here, but it's a real thing to do—and Matt Berry speaks more than you might expect. Why Ikea would invest this much effort into such a silly mod? This I cannot say, except—well, here I am, writing about Ikea in a positive light. Oh no, I've fallen into their trap!

Hey, at least I'm not crying over an old lamp.

If all this isn't enough to convince you to reinstall Skyrim again, you can get a look at the entire Kallax Storageborn experience from YouTuber ESO (via Kotaku), who recently streamed a playthrough of the whole thing. And if it is, you can snag the Kallax Storageborn mod, free, from Bethesda's Creations page.

The Elder Scrolls 6 is hotly anticipated—and has been for a full eight years following its announcement at E3 2018 and complete silence on it ever since. Instead, Bethesda worked very hard at trying to push Starfield which, for a studio that was once the pinnacle of open world RPG makers, just wasn't quite up to snuff.

The setting was a little dull and boilerplate, the procedurally-generated planets didn't have much on offer, it looked a touch dated, and so on. It was left out to dry at The Game Awards, was thrashed by reviews on Steam, and it had the misfortune of coming out in the same year as Baldur's Gate 3, which is one of our highest-scoring games of all time.

According to Bethesda veteran Kurt Kuhlmann, most of the developers at the studio were surprised to be working on Starfield instead of The Elder Scrolls 6. And it's not as though Kuhlmann was some small fry who wasn't in the know: He joined the company in 1996, wrote the main questline of Oblivion, and was the co-lead designer on Skyrim before leaving the studio in 2023.

Speaking with Frvr, Kuhlmann says that "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."

Fallout 76 sidelined the studio for some time, as the project "wasn't originally supposed to involve our whole studio. But then, I mean, what we were supposed to be working on next—it wasn't ever that we were about to suddenly work on TES 6, even though that's what I think most people wanted."

He then describes Todd coming in with the Starfield-shaped steel chair: "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.'"

Kuhlmann, who it should be noted left due to a "tough conversation" wherein he was refused a lead role on TES6, theorises that Todd Howard "had maybe the opportunity and the ability to go to the people running ZeniMax and say, 'I want to not do TES 6'" after the successes of Fallout 4. "Which seems like a pretty hard sell, right? And it must have been."

Kuhlmann, understandably, "would've much rather have been making TES 6 instead of [Fallout] 76 and Starfield, personally. And I think that would probably be true for the majority of the studio. That's what most people wanted to do, you know?

"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 an accidental force of nature in the studio does track with other accounts from former Bethesda employees, including character artist Dennis Mejillones, who said—while comparing him to George Lucas—that "a lot of people were afraid to say no to Todd, and I think that hurt him."

Last week, the Communications Workers of America and the Bethesda Game Studios OneBGS union took part in the Save Our Devs rally across the United States and Canada (and on Twitch) "to call out layoffs and corporate greed across the industry and to demand fair first contracts across Microsoft’s gaming studios." Speaking to Kotaku, Bethesda artist Alex Nguyen talked about how things changed after Bethesda was acquired by the tech giant.

"Since we’ve been under Microsoft… it feels like something has changed. We didn’t have layoffs before, and now all of a sudden we have yearly layoffs," he told Kotaku, saying teams were feeling the effects of cuts which eroded institutional knowledge. “If only five people knew how this thing worked and you let all five of them go, that’s a morale killer because it’s like we already knew this, and now we have to learn it again.”

According to that article, Nguyen pointed out that fixer-uppers like Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online don't get a chance to bloom into successful fan favorites without sufficient labor and time. He also noted that there used to be a shared sense of long-term commitment among the staff at Zenimax and Bethesda—a commitment being smothered by Microsoft's current corporate tactics.

“That’s why a lot of people had such a long tenure here," Nguyen told Kotaku. "And they were like, ‘yeah, this is the place I’m gonna retire at,’ or ‘this is the place where I’m gonna finish out,’ or ‘I love being here because I want to stay in the industry for a long time.’ That was basically one of the benefits of being at Bethesda or a Zenimax studio in general.”

Last year, ex-Xbox head Phil Spencer said that "nurturing and protecting creative teams that want to go take risks" was of the utmost importance less than two years after Xbox's acquisition of Blizzard called for 1,900 layoffs. Current Xbox head Asha Sharma has sung a similar tune so far, suggesting that Xbox ought to be entertaining over a billion people each day while also announcing the "reset" necessitating 3,200 job cuts in the very same blog post. It's plain to see why workers might balk at conditions that continue to raise the bar for achievement while more and more developers lose their livelihoods.

Aw dang we cropped out my favorite sign from the Minnesota rally

— @mouseatreides.bsky.social (@mouseatreides.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-08-23T16:43:09.232Z

Bethesda Game Studios is warning owners of Fallout 4 to either log into a save or manually save their mod load order, because a new patch "focusing on general Creations improvements" is incoming.

Bethesda's got a bit of interesting history when it comes to Fallout 4 patches. 2024's "next gen" update didn't really improve anything but did manage to break quite a lot, and the best solution to come out of that whole thing was simply to roll it all back with a "Downgrader Tool." A year after that, Bethesda did it again, although on a somewhat smaller scale, except that ended up causing a surprise new round of headaches, resulting in much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and of course another update.

All of which is to say that if you're a Fallout 4 fan, you should probably pay heed to Bethesda's latest heads-up.

"As a precaution, prior to these updates we encourage players to log into your game save if you haven't done so in a while or manually save your load order," the studio wrote (via Polygon). "Once your load order is saved, you'll be able to re-download your entire Creations list at once when the update is live."

The response to the post is an interesting mix of gratitude that an 11-year-old game is still being actively supported, concern about the damage that ongoing support might cause, and bemusement/outrage that Bethesda is dicking around with Fallout 4 instead of working on Elder Scrolls 6. My guess is that the studio is capable of doing both, but sometimes you just have to get this stuff off your chest.

In any event, this will hopefully not cause any major headaches, but it's still good advice. And speaking of The Elder Scrolls, Bethesda also said that it's working on a new Skyrim update, details of which will be revealed later. You might as well take that as a warning to back up your Skyrim saves too: Bethesda's recording on breaking mods in its fantasy RPG series is pretty much in line with its post-nuclear one.

While union members outside Bethesda's Maryland office celebrated a recent Microsoft visit by positioning a field of red flags representing laid-off workers and a giant inflatable rat on the lawn, inside the building CEO Asha Sharma was apparently having a delightful time watching a playthrough of The Elder Scrolls 6. So that's nice.

"The scale and grandeur are incredible", Sharma said, referring to the game and not the huge blow-up rodent covered in scabs.

Sharma was careful to refer to the game's subtitle with a string of asterisks—eight asterisks to be precise, which sent us down a rabbit hole of trying to guess what eight-letter name it could have.

Coming in with 14% of the votes in our subsequent poll on the subject was Sentinel, which is the name of a prominent city on the Iliac Bay and also the kingdom it's the capital of. Sentinel is a strong contender because the rumored development codename for The Elder Scrolls 6 is Guardian, a synonym for Sentinel, and naming the game for a city would make for a nice throwback to The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall—which was also named after a city and is still beloved by hardcore fans of the series.

It's now an ever stronger contender thanks to an easter egg in Starfield, as unearthed on Reddit. During character creation in Bethesda's sci-fi RPG, your employee number is displayed on the bottom of the screen: 190514-2009140512. Divide those numbers into pairs and you get 19, 05, 14, 20, 09, 14, 05, and 12. The 19th letter of the alphabet is S, the fifth letter is E, the 14th letter is N, and you get the idea. Yep, it spells Sentinel.

This might not be the only hint hidden in Starfield. Eagle-eyed watchers noticed a suspicious scratch on a spaceship console in the trailer, and suggested it was shaped like the Iliac Bay, sometimes called Starfall Bay all the way back in the first Elder Scrolls game, Arena. To find any more easter eggs we'd have to go back and replay Starfield, though. Er, you guys have fun with that.

I’m supposed to be stealing keys from several merchants in Leyawiin, but things haven’t exactly gone to plan. I accidentally wore my Grey Fox mask, a piece of armour that immediately marks me as a wanted criminal to every guard I pass. Even after finally sorting out my armour situation and making my way into Southern Books, the shopkeeper Bugak gro-Bol isn’t in bed when I enter and won’t stop following me around and trying to kick me out of his shop, because it’s midnight and I look like exactly the kind of shady character who might be breaking in to steal from him.

These are the same hapless adventures that I remember going on in Oblivion, but this time my Khajiit character isn’t out thieving at the behest of Cyrodiil’s Thieves Guild. I’ve already worked my way to the top of that organisation and become the Grey Fox myself. I’m back at the bottom of the totem pole now, working for a brand-new guild based in the modded territory of Elsweyr.

Meet the Khajiit

Wherever game developers leave loose lore on the ground, modders are always sure to pick it up and incorporate it. Khajiit lore in the Elder Scrolls games is varied and colourful, but has almost always been relegated to tomes and dialogue from cat-like merchants. Although the Khajiit homeland did appear in The Elder Scrolls: Arena, it didn’t show up again in a proper Elder Scrolls game until an expansion to The Elder Scrolls Online in 2019. In the meantime, modders have soaked up all the spare Khajiit facts available and designed the territory themselves.

One of the earliest fan-made forays into the Khajiit homeland is Elsweyr The Deserts of Anequina, originally published in June of 2009 by a Nexus Mods user called Iliana and including the work of dozens of other modders. I didn’t play Oblivion in 2006 when it released, but even 13 years later I can still intensely feel the awe that its opening fanfare and drawn-out 3D pan around the Imperial City must have inspired. In the same way I can appreciate how great a feat Elsweyr Anequina’s giant open expanse and huge cast of NPCs and quests are, despite playing through them 10 years later.

Anequina begins with a book, as plenty of mods do. It appears in my inventory to describe all the cities and quests available to me in the new territory. I also have to make sure I’ve turned off Oblivion’s default in-game borders that prevent me from exploring beyond the normal bounds of Cyrodiil. With that done, I’m able to wander across the southern border of the world and directly into Elsweyr over a bridge west of Bravil.

The first town I travel through is Riverhold, just over the southern border. It’s not immediately different from Cyrodiil—still lots of green, with bushes and waterfalls like other areas of Oblivion’s base game. Inside town though, I’m quickly face to face with all the various ‘furstocks’ of Khajiit. Most had never been seen in an Elder Scrolls game before, only described, and were left up to the imagination and resourcefulness of modders involved with Anequina.

Riverhold is full of Khajiit that lore-buffs will recognise, though they can’t possibly compare with the renditions from Bethesda’s own creations in The Elder Scrolls Online. Cathay, one of the playable races of most Elder Scrolls games, mingle with Ohmes, which have physical and facial features of Bosmer elves, just with fur on top. The house cat-like Alfiq and big cat Senche both seem to be based on the same cougar-esque large cat model, but scaled down and up respectively.

Whether by design choice or technical concern, neither Alfiq nor Senche can be spoken to. Other Khajiit speak plenty, though of course their voiced lines are only greetings like “Hello there!” and other small phrases that already existed in Oblivion’s base game for its Khajiit characters. Their more specific lines for quest giving are all text only. Elder Scrolls lore suggests that the scholarly Alfiq dislike speaking in front of outsiders, creating rumours that they are actually mute. I suppose my Khajiit thief is an outsider to them after all.

Local Color

Other mods that pair well with this dish

Beyond Riverhold, green shrubbery gives way to the arid desert that the northern region of Elsweyr—Anequina, as the mod is named after—is known for. Grassy hills quickly turn into steep sand dunes ringed with narrow walking paths that, to Anequina’s credit, feel as if they belong with the rest of Oblivion’s topology. Thanks to its notoriously floaty physics, it’s easy to break a leg stumbling down a dune while pursued by one of the many new monsters added in the mod.

The desert is dangerous, it turns out. In true Oblivion fashion, I learn the region’s fauna by running away from them at full tilt, turning back every so often to fire arrows into their knees. The desert is swamped with giant tarantulas, aggressive Alfiq, elephants that seem majestic and calm but absolutely are not when you get close enough, orc bandits, and many other things that want to kill me. It brings back fond memories of being chased by two very persistent wolves all the way from Bruma to Skingrad. Even a few remote villages of tribal Khajiit are hostile as soon as I got near their gates.

In between running from oversized arachnids, Anequina’s fully featured towns each have their own distinct design. In Dune there are camels for sale, and giant golden towers that look like a mosque on a postcard presiding over the open market in the lower half of the city. Riverhold is a treetop city of wooden homes all climbing the same waterfall topped with a modest lodge that calls itself a palace. Corinthe is a small town maze of back streets all branching from a central market, and its mostly single-story architecture crisscrossed with makeshift plank bridges between rooftops is the perfect hunting ground for the local Thieves Guild.

Compared with the Elsweyr I know from The Elder Scrolls Online, Anequina offers something a bit different. ESO’s wide-open world and detailed cities are beautiful, but all give me architectural fatigue. The steeply curved roofs that I’ve come to associate with the Khajiit thanks to that game are a constant presence in all of its cities in Northern Elsweyr.

Anequina features so much more contrast and more varied sources of inspiration thanks to all the different modders contributing to the buildings and city designs of the area.

Khajiit has quests

It isn’t all just exploration, of course. There are two dozen new quests and a few guilds to join. As in Oblivion, not all quests are of grand scale. In Riverhold my first encounter is with a man looking for his lost child. Solving this small mystery involves asking around town and using Oblivion’s odd speechcraft minigame to increase residents’ disposition towards me to eventually pry information out of them.

Outside town is a Khajiit highwayman not so committed to his task who simply gives up when I refuse to hand over the 400 gold coins he demands. Further into the desert I stumble over the dead body of a Khajiit lying next to a golden lamp. Having learned no lessons from pop culture whatsoever, I pick up the lamp and a dremora genie pops out to offer me a wish. Apparently I’m not averse to deals with demons because I wish, of all things, for love. I’m granted a random NPC friend for my trouble and the genie, now contractually freed from caring about my wants or needs, proceeds to attack.

With that problem behind me, I pull out my Anequina guide book again, the tome that started it all. I seem to remember seeing mention of the Thieves Guild. As the Grey Fox of Cyrodiil I find it only right that I should visit the local chapter and see what dark work needs doing. That’s where my great struggle lifting keys from the pockets of merchants in Leyawiin begins. In all my time traipsing about Elsweyr I’ve entirely forgotten how to be a proper thief. I do eventually manage to steal all three requested keys and return them to my new dispatcher Jinsiraga in Corinthe. After that I’m off to steal some horses, naturally.

These are only the beginning of my adventures in the Oblivion version of Elsweyr. Anequina understands Oblivion’s playfulness with its lazy highwaymen and desert genies. If not for having to install Anequina, I’d have never known it wasn’t part of Oblivion in the first place.

Oblivion Remastered has led a rather odd post-release life. The closest we've got to a new Elder Scrolls since 2011 released in April last year, received a fair amount of acclaim, then essentially went silent. It twitched into activity a couple of times in the months following its release for patches 1.1 and 1.2, but since then? Nada, and the game still has its fair share of performance woes and missing quality-of-life features.

But take heart, because a year after its last patch, Bethesda has remembered it released an Elder Scrolls game. In the wake of Oblivion Remastered's Switch 2 release—which reportedly runs rather well—the studio took to X to promise players that it's working on getting the improvements it made for the game's Switch version ported over to other platforms.

"We've heard your feedback asking for an additional patch for Oblivion Remastered," wrote Bethesda. "The Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game has a number of optimizations that we are looking into bringing to other platforms and we will share more when we are able."

Which is good, of course, but it is a touch absurd that an Elder Scrolls release has spent a full year in stone-cold silence, with fans unsure as to whether anything was going to happen to the game ever again. Bethesda even maintained a 'suggestions for Oblivion Remastered' channel in its official Discord that whole time, which gradually went from earnest suggestions for new content and improvements to players imploring the studio not to abandon the game entirely.

I would hope, but not expect, that porting over the optimisations from Oblivion Remastered's Switch 2 version would not be the last we hear of the game. Oblivion's a classic—and one of the funniest games ever made—it deserves more care and attention than it's getting right now.

Good news for the Bethesda RPG-starved: The Elder Scrolls 6 is significantly more corporeal now than it was eight years ago, when Todd Howard appeared at E3 (RIP) to announce it with nothing but a logo, a mountain range, and some rousing music. A couple months after Xbox CCO Matt Booty said the game "looks amazing," CEO Asha Sharma went to Bethesda to watch a "live playthrough" that she has now called "incredible."

This praise may come as a shock to the approximately zero people who expected the head of Xbox to publicly say the publisher's one guaranteed upcoming blockbuster looked like doggy doo doo. (Xbox's CEO also notably did not address the hundreds of flags placed outside the office by the Bethesda Game Studios union, each representing a worker from the studio laid off in Xbox's recent, brutal cuts).

Sharma praised the "scale and grandeur" but said "the story is even greater," which feels like a borderline preposterous statement to make after a brief live demo of an RPG destined to be dozens of hours long. Her tweet offers no actual new information about the game, but does reaffirm that the head of Xbox is going to rizz up Xbox games whenever the opportunity arises.

But wait... does her tweet actually contain a tiny scrap of new information about The Elder Scrolls 6? That depends on what you make of the eight asterisks that follow the name and colon. Do they merely symbolize a placeholder for the title, or do they represent a cryptic clue that whatever the game's subtitle is, it's exactly eight letters?

PC Gamer's Elder Scrolls loremaster Jody Macgregor took his best guess as to where TES6 will be located back in 2018, with High Rock and Hammerfell the two leading theories. With those in mind, we've got a few of our best guesses at the title in a poll for your approval.

If you're not up on your Elder Scrolls lore, allow Jody to explain the meaning behind a few of these candidates:

• Dominion: The Aldmeri Dominion was heavily foreshadowed as a future threat in Skyrim, and the name Dominion nicely mirrors Oblivion.
• Sentinel: The rumored codename for The Elder Scrolls 6 is Guardian, a synonym for the name of this city (capital of a kingdom of the same name) on The Iliac Bay.
• High Rock: As teased in Starfield, a strong candidate for TES6's setting.
• Redguard: While already used as the subtitle of a spinoff, the name of the people who inhabit the area it's set in would fit here as well.
• Evermore: A city in High Rock close to the border of Hammerfell, it would make a convenient starting location and its name sounds cool.
• Balfiera: These islands in the Iliac Bay might be part of The Elder Scrolls 6, but as a videogame name it doesn't look great on the page.

That's all we've got until the next cryptic clue comes down the pike. If you've got your own idea, let us know below.

In a new episode of The Examined Game podcast (spotted by GamesRadar), longtime Bethesda environment artist and The Axis Unseen dev Nate Purkeypile spoke about his time at the legendary studio, including what he found to be Starfield's biggest design misstep.

Purkeypile had the title of "environment artist" at Bethesda, but his work seems to have extended into what would traditionally be considered level design. In addition to setting up the layout for Starfield's city of Neon⁠—which remained largely the same in the released game, according to Purkeypile⁠—the dev spoke about his contributions to Little Lamplight and Diamond City in Fallouts 3 and 4. He left Bethesda a year into Starfield's development, and released his first solo game, The Axis Unseen, in 2024.

Purkeypile spoke about the importance of deliberate design and points of interest in making areas late in the interview. "I think it's good to spend as little time as possible in menus, especially when it comes to exploration like that," said Purkeypile. Host Steven Lake asked if this was an issue Purkeypile saw coming in Starfield's development, a more disjointed, menu-driven system of travel.

"It's very accurate that if I was in charge of Starfield, I would not have done it that way at all," the developer asserted. "I would have done a handful of planets with bespoke layouts," something that sounds like Obsidian's approach to The Outer Worlds. "Even early on, I was drawing parallels to Mass Effect 1 and how those procedural planets with repeated dungeons panned out.

"I was like, I don't think this is a good idea. If you're going to do the thousands of planets thing, you really need to go the full No Man's Sky route and have it actually be generating unique content all the time, not just stitching stuff together in slightly different ways. That's not procedural. You go to like the major city in Starfield and it's huge, but then like outside the city, there's nothing. And it's like this doesn't even make sense as a world."

This is certainly a big stumbling block I encountered playing Starfield, but I'm bummed to see Mass Effect 1 catching strays⁠—it feels like I'm the only person in the world who liked ME1's uncharted worlds. But even here, I see a distinction from Starfield. There were maybe two dozen procedurally generated planets in Mass Effect, and they contrasted sharply with the more structured gameplay in the main story.

Back to Starfield, this has been a frequent topic of conversation on the PC Gamer team: There's not really a Starfield equivalent to being on your way to Riften, only to get distracted by a dozen different sidequests en route. It's a problem that, hopefully as a matter of basic structure, we won't encounter in Fallout 5 or The Elder Scrolls 6. Elsewhere in the same interview, Purkeypile talked about how he's looking forward to how the Fallout 3 remaster will change the game.

Bethesda is currently running a 40th anniversary sale on Steam until August 13, just in time for this year's QuakeCon. The sale covers the studio's entire catalogue, including the offerings of subsidiaries id and Arkane.

That's where the real heat is, if you ask me: The recently-released Doom: The Dark Ages expansion, Revelations, is on sale for 50% off, 10 bucks to a typical 20. If you've missed out on the main game as well, Dark Ages itself is 67% off, or $23.

It's been a month since Revelation's July 7 release, and it's a beast of a shooter. Former PCG guides writer Rory Norris awarded it a 90% in his review, while staff writer Morgan Park, who was more cold on Dark Ages' base game, argued that Revelations redeems the whole endeavor.

Aside from Revelations, there's bound to be something in here to strike your fancy⁠—it's hard to argue against 10 buck Skyrim, if you somehow don't already have it. I'm a huge Arkane freak, personally, so the studio's whole catalogue for $54 gets a hearty recommendation from me.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is weirdly not discounted in this sale, possibly related to its publishing and copyright situation, but it's also only $10. So taking the plunge on the bundle probably comes out in the wash versus buying things piecemeal.

The sale is an undeniably great opportunity from a customer perspective, but comes at a fraught time for Bethesda. The studio and its subsidiaries were hit hard by Microsoft's "reset" at Xbox: Layoffs at Bethesda Game Studios, Zenimax Online, and id Software, while Arkane is getting spun off with an uncertain future. It also makes me nervous to see a game as good as Revelations get a 50% off discount after just one month⁠—you'd think Bethesda would have protected its value with a more token discount if it was selling really well.

Just a smidge over 30 years after its original release date, Quake just got a big update. MachineGames has added a new chapter to id Software's landmark 1996 successor to the Doom games, dubbed Dawn of the Machine.

The 19 new levels, which join two previous MachineGames expansions, see Quake's protagonist trapped in "a dimension of endless illusion." I'm most curious about some promised new weapon variants: "the Super Axe—unleashing lightning on successive strikes—and the Laser Cannon, firing ricocheting projectiles that tear through enemies from every angle."

The update also adds a gallery of archival material from Quake's development, including a handful of playable levels that were created early in development and never finished.

The creative process on display is decidedly relatable, with level names like "Tim" "Tim10A," and "Tim14," and notes like, "Lots of tight hallways make navigation tough, and similarly there are many dead ends that were not completed, so it is not entirely clear what the idea was."

The update was revealed at QuakeCon today in a panel which included id Software co-founder John Romero, who noted with laughter that the announcement was occurring not on the 30th anniversary of Quake, which released in June of 1996, but on the 30th anniversary of the day he left id Software.

Quake famously marked the end of an era for id: Romero, American McGee, Michael Abrash, Sandy Petersen and others left the company after its development. Petersen said recently that "Quake ruined id Software."

But ruined or not, the studio carried on and released two of my favorite games, Quake 2 and 3, and everything else that came after, including the much lauded run of modern Doom games.

Id now faces a new kind of adversity following substantial layoffs imposed by Microsoft as part of its plan to "reset" the Xbox business.

"This is certainly going to dampen the mood of the founder reunion at QuakeCon next month," id Software co-founder John Carmack said in reaction to the news.

Romero, John Carmack, Adrian Carmack, and Tom Hall are all scheduled to appear at a founders reunion panel on Saturday for "a rare conversation about the company's earliest days, and the friendships, challenges, and innovations that have forever changed gaming."

During his time at Bethesda Nate Purkeypile was an artist on Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Starfield, as well as lead artist on Fallout 76. Now independent, he's responsible for stealth-archer bowhunting FPS The Axis Unseen, but when he spent some time talking to YouTube channel The Examined Game recently, his tenure at Bethesda was the main subject.

With Bethesda finally making the long-rumored news of a Fallout 3 remaster official, naturally that came up. Purkeypile is excited about the idea of seeing one of his children be taken over by someone else. "I'm personally looking forward to that," he said, "because we were like super tech-constrained making Fallout 3. And you could only place so many lights."

The Fallout 3 Bethesda released wasn't really what they'd hoped it would be at the time, he went on to say. "It's not like it's exactly how we intended," he said. "I get why people are more upset over like movie remakes and stuff, but in the case of games and particularly the art side of it, it's 100% not what we intended, and it was very, very constrained."

Fallout 3's concept art has always been a tantalizing glimpse at what we could have had, but even a simple change like extending the draw distance to give a better sense of the Commonwealth Wasteland's scale would be an improvement. Purkeypile is in favour of the kind of modern remaster that goes a bit further into remake territory, though.

"I think a lot of these remakes have been done frankly better lately too," he said. "Like the Resident Evil ones and stuff, those were fantastic. Whereas for a while I think a lot of those updates were just like, 'Oh, we made the textures a little bit bigger, and like threw a sharpen filter in Photoshop,' and it doesn't really look that much better, or actually as good as other games that are coming out."

Oblivion Remastered releases on Nintendo Switch 2 in August, which normally would be wholly irrelevant to PC Gamer. We've been merrily exploring revamped Cyrodiil for well over a year at this point. But you might want to hide your stealth archer in the corner of whatever dungeon you're exploring and check out Bethesda's latest promotional video for the Switch 2 launch. It's a little different from the usual fare of game footage and dramatic voiceovers.

To herald the Switch 2 version's imminent release, Bethesda brought back veteran Elder Scrolls voice actor Wes Johnson—who plays many characters across the series including Oblivion's default Imperial males—to reprise his most colourful role in the series, the mad, cheese-loving god Sheogorath.

In the video, Johnson—dressed as and in the role of Sheogorath—records lines in a sound booth and causes general mischief with the aid of an exasperated audio technician. As the video progresses, the Prince of Madness becomes increasingly baffled as to why he has to record lines he's already done before.

It's a shameless bit of marketing fluff, but it's nonetheless entertaining to see Johnson in full swing as Sheogorath. It's also a relief that he has apparently made a full recovery from the life-threatening medical emergency he suffered 18 months ago, during which he was hospitalised and put into an induced coma.

The responses to the video are similarly pleased to see Johnson in action. But there is an undercurrent of discontent to many of the comments. These mainly centre around the remaster's widely reported technical issues on PC. Not only do many Steam reviews report performance hitches while exploring Cyrodiil, but the game also suffers from a wide array of bugs. Some of these have been around since the original Oblivion released in 2006, while others are entirely new.

What doesn't help is that Bethesda and Virtuos appear to have abandoned the PC version. While Oblivion Remastered received a couple of patches after launch, the last one—update 1.2—arrived over a year ago. Consequently, recent Steam reviews have dropped down to Mixed, though the game still has a Mostly Positive rating overall. Let's hope the Switch 2 launch brings a bit of PC TLC too.

New ZeniMax Online Studios co-head Nick Giacomini says that despite deep cuts at the studio as part of the most recent round of Xbox layoffs, The Elder Scrolls Online "is here to stay." But those layoffs, which saw more than 200 people let go including Giacomini's predecessor Joseph Burba, mean that previously announced timelines are no longer workable, and things are being moved.

"Instead of rushing to hit a previously announced deadline, we are giving our teams the runway they need to do things right," Giacomini wrote in today's update, invoking the same term—"runway"—Xbox used when it dumped Compulsion and Double Fine. "Some of our upcoming additions, like the Class and Combat Refresh and our new Trial, are highly complex, and we want to ensure they hit the mark before we put them in your hands."

What this means in practical terms is that Update 52, which had been scheduled for Q4 of 2026, will instead arrive in January of 2027, and season 1's new Crimson Veldt trial is also being bumped to '27. Less certainly, from the sounds of it, ZeniMax is now "targeting 2027" for TESO's promised class and combat refresh, although it is "discussing some interim options for the classes still awaiting their full refresh to improve your player experience in the meantime."

As for 2026, Update 51 will launch on September 27, one week later than planned, with a new challenge, "Rumors" game system, and "player experience improvements," while TESO season 2 will debut on October 21.

The impact of the Xbox layoffs are obviously being felt at ZeniMax, but Giacomini said in his missive that "we are not looking to just 'maintain' the game. We are looking to grow it."

That's appropriately upbeat for a new studio boss, but the reality remains that ZeniMax has been gutted by layoffs over the past two years. Original TESO director Matt Firor, who helped launch the studio in 2007, also departed following the 2025 layoffs and was replaced by Burba, who lasted only a year before he was let go in this latest round of cuts.

A few weeks ago Bethesda Studios hit the big red button and announced that both Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas remasters are in pre-production, but that wasn't all—there was also news of Fallout 76's next major expansion.

"Fallout 76 continues to be home to millions of players exploring Appalachia together," an official news post from Bethesda explains. "With nearly 70 free updates released to date, the journey is far from over. In fact, we have a major Fallout 76 expansion planned for next year; Raven Rock, a prequel story to Fallout 3."

The last major expansion for Fallout 76 saw players venture to Ohio for the first time in Fallout lore in the Burning Springs expansion. Released around the Fallout TV show's season 2, Burning Springs was meant to marry the game with the show and its Fallout 3/ New Vegas inspirations; aka, "desert, deathclaws, and raiders."

But if Raven Rock is going to be a Fallout 3 prequel then, first off, it's going to be a very early one: 76 takes place over 100 years before Fallout 3. Secondly it'll venture over to the other side of the map, as it'll probably head to the Capital Wasteland—which is east of Vault 76—specifically to Raven Rock or Site R, a former military base and shelter built into the mountains.

If I had to guess what we'll be doing here, I'd say it'll likely have something to do with the Abraham Lincoln AI superfan ZAX since it would've been active at this time around the years Fallout 76 takes place. But we'll have to wait quite a while longer to get any solid information on the expansion as it's not set to release until next year.

I'm all for exploring more regions in Fallout 76, and while I'm a little sad we won't be seeing any more of Ohio for the foreseeable future, a Fallout 3 prequel ahead of the remake is exactly the kind of expansion I'll head back to Appalachia for.

Bethesda is eager to reassure you that its house is not, in fact, on fire in the wake of 3,200 layoffs (1,600 that already happened, 1,600 that are still to come) at Xbox that claimed numerous devs at the studio, including the artist responsible for designing The Elder Scrolls' khajiit and argonians. Thus, its recent announcement that it currently has Fallout 3 and New Vegas remasters in the oven as well as an incoming, Obsidian-made Fallout.

Now, in response to questions from YouTuber MrMattyPlays, Bethesda has said that the layoffs also won't affect its plans for The Elder Scrolls 6. "The roadmap [for TES6] is unaffected," said the studio. That's all you're getting. No, really.

Bethesda was ever-so-slightly more chatty about its plans for Oblivion Remastered. Yes, Bethesda has plans for Oblivion Remastered. I'm as surprised as you are.

Since a one-two punch of patches the game got shortly after it released last year, the UE5-ified re-do of one of the funniest games ever made seems to have been largely forgotten, despite still having its fair share of performance hitches and bugs. MrMattyPlays also asked if Bethesda planned to remember Oblivion Remastered on other platforms when it gets its Switch release in August. Apparently it does!

"The team working on remasters is focused on the Switch 2 launch," said Bethesda, but take heart: that version "has optimizations we hope to bring to console/PC." I also hope that. I had a good time with the Oblivion remaster despite its issues, but I'd quite like to be able to enjoy it, you know, not in spite of anything.

Anyway, Bethesda has said a few times now that it would like to be a bit chattier and more open with fans going forward, and it reiterated that here. It also said its new Glasnost policy isn't because Xbox boss Asha Sharma is making the studio do it: "Look, we read the internet too," said the studio.

"All of our fans and plenty of creators have been asking for us to lay out our road map for a long time. As bits of info or announcements come out individually, they get lost in the larger picture of all we're doing as a studio. So, we felt it was best to do it all at once and paint a clear picture for everyone. This is a shift in our approach to communication that Bethesda Game Studios has been contemplating for some time now."

I'll be honest, I can't say I completely buy that, given the timing of all this, but I suppose I welcome a more communicative Bethesda anyway.

The Bethesda Game Studios Union says it is filing a legal complaint against Bethesda for "continuing to violate labor laws in Canada" by prematurely terminating Canadian employees on July 17—the same day it dropped a huge announcement about the future of Fallout and other games.

The timing of the Bethesda infodump was suspect, to put it politely. Less than two weeks after Xbox announced that it is laying off 3,200 people and dumping four studios, Microsoft-owned Bethesda suddenly decided that it was time to confirm that Fallout 3 and New Vegas are both being remastered, that Obsidian is working on a Fallout game of its own, and on top of all that, that Fallout 5 is in early development too.

Good news as far as it goes, although as I noted at the time, the obvious intent was to reassure (or convince) followers that the loss of hundreds of employees wasn't all that big a deal, and so maybe just don't think about it so much.

The OneBGS union implied that the announcement was a more purposeful smokescreen, however, saying that Bethesda "flooded news sites announcing every expansion, remake, and sequel they could" while simultaneously blindsiding employees at its Montreal office by terminating them months ahead of a previously promised date, and with no negotiated severance.

"Previously, on Monday, July 6th, dozens of employees from Bethesda Game Studios across the US and Canada were told via video call that they were being laid off," the union said in a message on Bluesky. "They were told they would remain employed until September while the company negotiated severance with our union; this at least provided some solace and breathing room.

"However, at the end of the day on Friday July 17th the affected Canadian employees (part of the Fallout and Elder Scrolls teams) received termination letters via email. This was contrary to what they had been told in the Monday calls. These letters stated that the Canadians are to receive the bare legal minimum in terms of severance: eight weeks of pay in lieu of the minimum legal notice, any outstanding vacation pay, etc. They were to also immediately lose their group benefits health insurance."

CWA Canada president Carmel Smyth confirmed with PC Gamer that the termination letters took effect that day: "Those laid off were told in writing their employment ended effective July 17 (which was also the date of the letter that told them)."

Bethesda Games Studios’ Montreal workers are being treated especially poorly by XBOX and we won’t stand for it. Here are the details.If this upsets you let Microsoft know: feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/ide...

— @bethesdaunion.bsky.social (@bethesdaunion.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-07-23T13:29:26.941Z

The Communications Workers of America and CWA Canada unions, of which the Bethesda union is a part, had already filed a joint complaint against Microsoft prior to July 17: Smyth told Game Developer last week that Microsoft had "unlawfully fired people without giving notice to or discussing it with the union as the employer is legally obliged to do when we are in the middle of ongoing bargaining a collective agreement."

Smyth added that the union would continue to file legal challenges against Microsoft as necessary, and the OneBGS union said in today's message that it has done just that.

"Bethesda and Xbox leadership depend on our labor to make them millions, and yet when we do, we are disposed of," the union said in today's message. "The cycle of workers paying for the mistakes of management ends here."

One of Starfield's big problems is that its core fantasy runs contrary to the tech it's built on. Bethesda's space RPG is meant to evoke the majesty and scale of the cosmos. It's about exploration, curiosity, and wonder.

And yet, it exists in an engine that necessitates a whole lot of loading screens, and so the final frontier feels like a series of small rooms. In particular, the game's takeoff and landing sequences drew criticism for shoving in loading screens where games like No Man's Sky had seamless transitions.

Well, no more! Sort of! A modder named 0xBobby is hard at work to rid Starfield's takeoff sequences of the loading screen scourge. Seamless Planet Takeoffs is a mod for Starfield that makes departing its planets an at least somewhat immersive experience. Rather than cutting to a third-person view of your ship as it jets away, you remain in the cockpit, watching the planet's atmosphere give way to the void as you ascend.

It's not perfect, which is probably why it's in beta. It's not removing the loads so much as it is masking them, which means that you can still kind of identify the point at which the game shunts you from one cell to another.

0xBobby writes that "the seamlessness of the transition will depend on the atmosphere and weather of the planet," and that they're "working on making the transition even smoother." Still, even in its current state it's much better than the default experience.

Alas, your landings aren't going to be seamless. Not now, maybe not ever.

"It probably won't ever happen, at least not from me," says 0xBobby. "Yes, I know of all of the tricks I could use, hiding the loading through clouds or entry flames etc, but even that would be way more complex than what this mod or seamless grav jumps do." I guess landings are just too heavy a load to carry.

Sorry.

Well, it turns out that Bethesda's executive producer Todd Howard and I have at least two things in common—we're both roughly 5 feet 6 inches tall, and we're both chronic Reddit lurkers. Admittedly, I only have IMDB to go by when it comes to the height thing. Maybe it's wrong! But the Reddit thing is 100% true, because he went ahead and said it himself.

Howard gave the folks of r/Games a surprise jumpscare last week, making only his second public comment on the site in the last three years. It was, unsurprisingly, under a post sharing Bethesda essentially vomiting out every single thing it's currently working on, which came shortly after the announcement of parent owner Xbox's catastrophic layoffs.

"Hey Reddit. I'm a professional lurker and read your comments all the time. Many here do and we deeply appreciate the passion for our work," Howard wrote. "I know I don't really post, and we're usually very quiet. Today's info was an attempt at changing that and letting everyone know what we've been working on the past several years, and a look at what's coming. So know we're constantly listening and keep telling us how to be even better."

Howard then goes on to say: "You'd be surprised how many great ideas I get from Reddit. So upvote and we'll do it. Maybe." Well, huh. I do have to wonder if Howard is taking screenshots of comments and projecting them onto the wall during meetings, or simply jotting down little comments he reads here and there. I wonder what ideas Reddit is churning out that were so smart Howard felt the need to take note of them in the first place.

More importantly, what subreddits is our man lurking in? Does he just cycle through all the Bethesda-relevant ones? Is he sneaking looks at what people think of the competition? Is he also getting fed posts for subreddits he's never even heard of, like r/GirlDinnerDiaries? Seriously, why am I getting so many r/GirlDinnerDiaries posts in my feed?

Whatever he's getting up to over there—and whatever calculated business decision was behind him cropping up in the comments of a random Reddit post to begin with—is a secret that will remain between him and his Google Chrome history, I suppose.

Bethesda's gone and done it again. It's reconfirmed that Fallout 5 is in development even though it's still years away from Reclamation Day. As we once knew about the next Elder Scrolls' place in the development pipes relative to Starfield, Fallout 5 will launch after TES6, and this time we've not even got a logo on a mysterious unidentified bit of scenery to obsess over.

I can't gloss over how Bethesda firehosed out an announcement of pretty much every single thing it's working on right now as either a distraction from, or refutation of, the impact that the massive Microsoft layoffs will have on its projects. Fallout 5 certainly is in development, but we don't know what its plans were prior to the layoffs and how they'll inevitably change the scope or direction of Fallout 5 after.

When might the Fallout 5 release date be?

What we know for sure is that Fallout 5 will release after The Elder Scrolls 6, which we still don't know even a release year for. Maybe it won't be as long as the still-widening gap between Starfield and TES6, though.

In its July 2026 announcement, Bethesda said that TES6 and Fallout 5 are both being developed in Creation Engine 3, "a shared technology platform" it's been building since Starfield's launch. "It allows our teams to support multiple projects simultaneously," Bethesda also said. So there shouldn't be any reinventing the wheel between releases this time.

Fallout 5 setting speculation

What's been (mostly) confirmed about the Fallout 5 setting:

• "Fallout 5 will be existing in a world where the stories and events of the show happened or are happening," Todd Howard said of the Amazon TV show
• "Our plan is to predominantly keep it in the US," Howard told Kinda Funny when speculating about Fallout series locales

At this point, any specifics on when and where Fallout 5 will be set are total speculation. Todd Howard has said that the "Fallout schtick" is intertwined with "Americana naivete," so any official Fallout London probably isn't on the table, though jaunts up into Canada (in Fallout lore, it was annexed as the 51st state before the war) maybe could be.

Where in the post-nukes US might Fallout 5 be set though? Honestly I just don't want it to be Florida since I'm going to get enough of that from GTA 6 (and there's already a Fallout 4 mod in the works set in Miami). Say what you will about Fallout 76, it certainly has a vibe in chasing the Appalachian geography, folklore, and history. I'd bet on Fallout 5 attempting an equally strong pitch with a location that's really easy to sell the spectacle (or maybe just the accents) of.

Having already been to some iconic east coast and west coast locations, maybe Fallout 5 could take us into the midwest. Somewhere like Detroit would have a lot of potential for classic Fallout storylines about corporate industry tomfoolery. Somewhere up north like Montana would allow for some really striking scenery just like West Virginia did for Fallout 76.

How long has Fallout 5 been in development?

Fallout 5 hasn't been in development long, but what Bethesda has said so far makes it sound like it hopes to drastically cut down on the years between its major RPG releases.

Way back in 2021, Todd Howard said Bethesda has a "one-pager" on Fallout 5 and what it wants to do. Fallout 5 has likely been some excited scribbles on a whiteboard for most of the five years since then, honestly.

As of July 2026, Bethesda says "Fallout 5 is currently in preproduction" which means it's more than a twinkle in Todd's eye but still probably far out from any kind of playable version.

"Our teams are now developing The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5 on Creation Engine 3, a shared technology platform we've been building since Starfield's launch," Bethesda also said in July.

If there's one thing we know about Todd Howard, it's that he doesn't hate Obsidian. We know this because he keeps telling us. He keeps telling us because Fallout fans won't stop speculating that secretly, deep down in his heart of hearts, Todd Howard hates Obsidian.

How often has he denied hating Obsidian? A quick and non-comprehensive list:

• 2024: Todd Howard says Fallout: New Vegas "is a very, very important game to us."
• 2025: Todd Howard expresses "huge respect to the folks at Obsidian."
• 2026: Todd Howard says that when it came time for someone else to make a Fallout game, Obsidian was "the only choice."
• And in case you think this is an entirely new phenomenon, 2018: Todd Howard says "the Obsidian guys did a fabulous job" on Fallout: New Vegas.

Now, with a new Obsidian-led Fallout officially underway, he's back to say it again.

"I appreciate some of the fan chatter, but behind the scenes, there's a huge amount of mutual respect [between Bethesda and Obsidian]," Howard told Windows Central. "We're always kind of wondering if we could find a way to work together in the right way. And when those things come up, I … look at the franchise all up, as you see in the note, everything that's happening with Fallout [and] say, is there a way or a window or a pocket where we could do something together that really, really made sense? And so we're super excited about the opportunity, working together."

"The note" Howard mentioned is the sprawling infodump Bethesda put out today that lays out its plans for the future, which despite the recent, sweeping layoffs at Xbox includes a lot of Fallout. The Obsidian partnership was made official, as were long-awaited remasters of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout 5 is in pre-production.

It is amusing how often Howard finds himself delivering some variation of this message—initially because some Fallout fans speculated that he's envious of the much-loved New Vegas, and later over even wilder speculation that he was using the Fallout TV show on Amazon to retcon New Vegas out of existence. Howard actually brought Obsidian developers onto the set of Fallout season 2 so they could see the show's take on New Vegas for themselves, but did that settle the matter once and for all? Apparently not.

I like to think, though, that Howard is in on the joke too, as he seemed to suggest with his remark about appreciating "fan chatter." It's a fine line to walk, because there is a tendency sometimes, among some people, to take things more seriously than they should. But it can be fun to play up an obvious exaggeration or misconception, and the more ridiculous, the better. I'm sure at some point in the past it was a genuine concern for Howard, but at this point I really do hope he's just rolling with it for kicks.

Windows Central. "We're always kind of wondering if we could find a way to work together in the right way. And when those things come up, I … look at the franchise all up, as you see in the note, everything that's happening with Fallout [and] say, is there a way or a window or a pocket where we could do something together that really, really made sense? And so we're super excited about the opportunity, working together."

"The note" Howard mentioned is the sprawling infodump Bethesda put out today that lays out its plans for the future, which despite the recent, sweeping layoffs at Xbox includes a lot of Fallout. The Obsidian partnership was made official, as were long-awaited remasters of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, and Fallout 5 is in pre-production.

It is amusing how often Howard finds himself delivering some variation of this message—initially because some Fallout fans speculated that he's envious of the much-loved New Vegas, and later over even wilder speculation that he was using the Fallout TV show on Amazon to retcon New Vegas out of existence. Howard actually brought Obsidian developers onto the set of Fallout season 2 so they could see the show's take on New Vegas for themselves, but did that settle the matter once and for all? Apparently not.

I like to think, though, that Howard is in on the joke too, as he seemed to suggest with his remark about appreciating "fan chatter." It's a fine line to walk, because there is a tendency sometimes, among some people, to take things more seriously than they should. But it can be fun to play up an obvious exaggeration or misconception, and the more ridiculous, the better. I'm sure at some point in the past it was a genuine concern for Howard, but at this point I really do hope he's just rolling with it for kicks.

Less than two weeks out from massive Xbox layoffs that will put 3,200 people out of work, Bethesda Softworks has laid out its plans for the future, including confirmation of a new Fallout game from Obsidian and that remasters of both Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas are happening.

The full message covers pretty much everything Bethesda does, including a confirmation that Starfield, despite a middling reception and flagging player numbers, will continue to receive updates. There's also a nod to "more planned for the future" for The Elder Scrolls Online, even though the game and the studio making it both look pretty rocky right now.

But Fallout is the focus, and there is a lot going on. "Fallout is one of our biggest priorities today," Bethesda wrote. "Fallout 5 remains our long-range destination, and we have multiple Fallout projects in active development right now."

Included among those projects is a Fallout 76 expansion scheduled for 2027 called Raven Rock, which will serve as a prequel to Fallout 3, and as mentioned, the Fallout 3 and New Vegas remasters—no dates were revealed, but simple confirmation that they're both in development is long overdue.

The previously reported Obsidian collaboration is also confirmed in the announcement, and to my reading at least, it sounds like it will be another non-numbered entry to the series, as New Vegas was. Following the mention of Fallout 5, Bethesda seemed to reference the Obsidian game as an entirely separate thing: "The wasteland continues to expand as we team up once again with our longtime friends at Obsidian Entertainment. We're happy to confirm they're working with us on a new Fallout project. We'll have more to share in the future."

It also sounds like Fallout 5 is much further out than the Obsidian joint: Bethesda said that game is currently in pre-production, while the majority of the studio is focused on The Elder Scrolls 6. There's still no date on that either, although Bethesda at least acknowledged that "we know it’s been a very long wait for the sequel."

While the layoffs aren't referenced directly, Bethesda said it will be "bringing our teams closer together so we can get our games into your hands sooner," although to me it sounds more like a straightforward consolidation of studios that were hit hard by layoffs: "ZeniMax Online Studios will partner closely with Bethesda Game Studios on The Elder Scrolls franchise, while continuing to deliver incredible new experiences for The Elder Scrolls Online."

All told, it's quite the infodump, despite being short on specifics, and clearly aimed at reassuring fans that the wounds suffered by Bethesda in the Xbox cuts are not mortal, or even seriously damaging—beyond the hundreds of people who find themselves out of work, that is. How it all actually works out, we'll just have to wait and see.

I'm somewhat prone to pessimism in this column, though that's not without cause. MMOs aren't exactly a dying breed, per se—we've got Guild Wars 3 to look forward to, and most of the old guard, while a little grey in the beard, have respectable playerbases and are thrumming with things to do.

But it's hard not to feel my blood pressure notch up a few numbers at this week's Xbox layoff news for… well, a number of reasons, really. I'm irate in particular, however, at the current state of Zenimax Online Studios (ZOS), developers of The Elder Scrolls Online, who seem to have become Microsoft's punching bag.

Left hook

I'm hard-pressed to think of a more depressing set of facts than Zenimax's past couple of years—back in July of 2025, Microsoft put thousands of people out of work, including those at ZOS and, more to the point, the cancelled Project Blackbird.

Blackbird was Zenimax's next major project, and while I can't say for certain it would've revitalised the MMO market or anything, we sure as hell need more new MMOs. It was in development for over half a decade, something the then-founder Matt Firor had described as, admittedly, a bit of a "large bet."

Still, the odds weren't bad. The then-CEO of Microsoft Gaming Phil Spencer reportedly had to be torn away from it, and it was slated for a tentative 2028 release. And listen, even if you've got a cynical heart—five years of work from a development team of around 300 people getting flushed right down the toilet, along with 62 jobs (per a WARN notice), is a damn shame.

It was something that shook Zenimax to its core—but the studio did manage to pull through. I actually spoke to some of them back in January, speaking with executive producer Susan Kath who said that "the team has very much rallied … I see a lot of enthusiasm from the team as we're going forward. Folks are excited about their work. I'm excited for them to be doing this. We're looking forward."

Game director Nick Giacomini also echoed: "We are excited by what we're doing. We're excited by this transformation, this change, this evolution. It's like a second wind, and we've definitely got our eyes on the future, because this is our home. We are determined to make it continue to be so for us, for our players, for as long as we possibly can."

Indeed, things were looking up for ESO. It had found itself in a bit of a rut, as most MMOs do from time to time—but a new commitment to a seasonal model and a whole heap of reworks seemed dedicated to addressing long-held quality-of-life complaints and shaking things up.

The air, to me, felt like a smaller-scale version of the turnaround that World of Warcraft had after the disasters of Shadowlands, commitment to roadmaps and all.

Right hook

Fast-forward less than half a year later—an unconscionable amount of time in shareholder land, I have to imagine—and Zenimax Online Studios has been all but gutted. As PC Gamer's own Ted Litchfield figured out earlier in the week, an estimated 60% of the studio has been laid off between 2025 and 2026, with 213 of those layoffs happening this week.

That's a reduction of 275 developers at the studio in a year and a half, and, look—I don't want to cry that the sky is falling for ESO. Quite the opposite, I am hoping against hope that it'll manage to find a second wind somewhere down the line—but you simply cannot lose the contributions of 275 people without a massive dip in quality.

It's a response echoed by employees at the studio itself. Andrew Young, who left it in 2024, wrote: "There’s really no one left and no changing it now". Other employees were sent reeling, stunned at the absence of teams they'd been working with for years and forced to pick up the pieces.

I want to point out that Xbox saw fit to lay these people off literally as its first season launched—with layoffs occurring on Monday July 6, and the season launching on July 8.

Just imagine it—you work on ESO, the layoffs from last year hit you hard, but you're determined to turn things around. You're using words like "rallied" in interviews, you're finally getting to sort out complaints players have been having for years, you're trying new things. And after a year of work, your first season of the new era of your game is coming out. Two days before it arrives, Microsoft lays off 213 of your team. That, or you're shown the door yourself.

This is despite the fact that your game has brought in over $2 billion in revenue over its lifetime. That figure, posited in 2024, was touted 10 years after the game's launch. That means that ESO was raking in an average of $166 million a year.

Now obviously, that figure's going to have dips and peaks, that's just the nature of doing business—but the sheer boneheaded, next-quarter blinders you have to have on to believe that a game that historically brings you in $166 million annually somehow isn't profitable seems absolutely absurd to me.

And sure, maybe this reaction holds water if the fanbase wasn't liking your new changes—except they did! Here's just a few quotes from the Elder Scrolls Online subreddit:

• "What the fuck man. ESO was really getting a second wind," says u/PompeiiSketches.
• "The game seemed to be on the up and up, what happened?" says u/Crimsonmaddog44.
• "Absolute insane behavior to make cuts to the team that has gotten tons of players (myself included!) back into engaging with the game" says u/Ion_bound.

In a post on the game's forums, understandably stating that Zenimax'll have to be shifting its schedule around a bit, support is present, too:

"I just came back because of your roadmap for the future, and knowing now the people working on it are getting cut by a company that's billions in the green is really heartbreaking," writes one user, "know we haven’t always been happy with you all but those affected, whether they remain or not, did not deserve this. Especially in an era where things were finally looking up again. I am horrified," writes another.

This really does paint a picture of an MMO that was finally getting its sea legs back, just for Xbox to sweep in and knock it right off its feet again.

Holding shares

I will state it plainly: I think the way that Zenimax Online Studios has been treated is cruel, senseless, and short-sighted. There's no capitalist argument to be made about shareholders or prices or changing industries that's going to reach my ears on this one—it's downright unconscionable.

This is a studio that was making a profitable MMO with big dreams for the future, one that had somehow, miraculously, recovered from having a massive project that'd been in development for half a decade shuttered overnight. One that was just about to release the first proper season of its new imagined identity for the game that earned Microsoft over $160 million a year for the past decade.

It has been sacrificed almost wholesale on the altar of growth, by a company that spent over $68 billion on Blizzard, with Microsoft itself spending over $80 billion in 2025 on AI pipedreams. Its developers have been laid off to support a fantasy of getting 1 billion daily players, somehow, in a portfolio that's down 1,600 working roles and will be down 1,600 more by 2027.

More than that, this is an MMO we're talking about. If ESO takes a nosedive from here on out (and god, I am hoping it doesn't), that'll be one less game in an already-dwindling genre that's struggling to put up a fight amongst the unhealthy ambitions of the current industry's gluttony. ZOS deserved better.

Xbox's 'reset' layoffs have hit Bethesda hard, with long-term institutional talent shown the door—Zenimax Online Studios, which is part of the same studio family as Bethesda and works on the Elder Scrolls Online, was also particularly dismantled by Xbox, with over 60% of its staff laid off in the past year.

Understandably, Bethesda developers are irate. Partially because in some studios HR forced them to take down tributes to their laid off colleagues, but also because these layoffs seem to—as the Bethesda Game Studios Union (OneBGS) put it earlier this week—be part of a "stressful annual routine" for Microsoft.

And with 1,600 layoffs yet to come, a sword is left dangling over the rest of Xbox's studios, wondering who's to come next—prompting OneBGS to action. In a statement (shared here by Kotaku), the union said: "The company wants us to accept this as a done deal and quietly disappear. We won’t let that happen. Our next steps are to mobilize. We need every single member visible and unified.

"To that end, we are announcing our Save Our Devs March across all studios on Wednesday July 15th."

The objective, it seems, is to make sure that Microsoft understands it can't just keep doing this without adverse impacts on the developers left, who have the technical power to leave Xbox without one of their flagship studios:

"We need to show management right now that we mean business, so they will properly take care of our fellow co-workers today and think twice before ever attempting something like this again. Stay strong, look out for one another, and we look forward to seeing us all marching together on the 15th."

The scale and damage of these layoffs is yet to be properly tallied, but we know at this point that they include a near-hollowing out of id Software, the aforementioned ransacking of Zenimax Online Studios, and multiple hits to accessibility leadership.

It's a waste of talent and legacy, by all accounts, but not one that's unprecedented, mind. In addition to similar layoffs and project cancellations that occurred last year, Xbox has closed studios that've landed major hits before, including Hi-Fi Rush and Prey.

As reported by MMORPG, we now know the full scope of the layoffs at ZeniMax Online Studios (The Elder Scrolls Online) and ZeniMax Media, parent company of Bethesda Game Studios. A Maryland WARN Act notice shows 213 employees laid off from ZeniMax Online, and 166 from ZeniMax Media, for a total of 379.

ZeniMax Media and Online have two listings at separate offices on the WARN notice. There is no separate WARN notice for Bethesda Game Studios, indicating that the 166 layoffs at ZeniMax include those at BGS⁠—Bethesda and ZeniMax Media share an office address.

Further supporting this, the 136 layoffs at id Software were reported as "ZeniMax Media Inc. (Richardson Texas)" in a separate Texas WARN notice. It is unclear how many of the 166 people laid off from the ZeniMax Rockville office were Bethesda developers, and how many came from the ZeniMax publishing side of the business.

As for ZeniMax Online, we've already heard substantial anecdotal evidence that the studio was devastated by these layoffs, and the numbers add further perspective. Game Developer reported the ZeniMax Online Union as containing 461 members at the end of 2024⁠—mostly based in the Rockville offices, though some were spread across the country.

ZeniMax Online has lost 275 employees between July 2025 and '26⁠—a WARN notice last year for "Zenimax [sic] Media, Inc." using ZeniMax Online's office address put last July's layoff count at 62. Assuming no other significant sources of attrition and that the union accounted for a majority of employees, that means ZeniMax Online now consists of 186 people, or 40% of the manpower it had just a year and a half ago.

A September 2024 Twitter post by user Timur222 shared a since-amended LinkedIn experience entry by former ESO UX lead, Gary Boodhoo. In it, Boodhoo cited ESO as bringing in "$15M in monthly revenue for over 10 years." Now, I'm no businessman, but that sounds like a team you'd want to support, rather than laying off at least 60% of them in a year.

Back when Microsoft acquired Bethesda, our first thought was, 'I wonder if this will be bad,' but our second thought was, 'Ooh, maybe now Obsidian will make Fallout: New Vegas 2.' And when the Fallout TV show turned out to be a hit, we scratched our heads over the continued absence of a new Fallout game.

Now it looks like a new Obsidian-made Fallout RPG may actually happen. Word on the street is that Microsoft has put Obsidian's Josh Sawyer—who directed Fallout: New Vegas—at the helm of a new Fallout game as part of the "Xbox reset" shakeup, which will see 3,200 people lose their jobs.

The situation is "still in flux," according to the Bloomberg report that broke the news, and could change. But supposing that Obsidian and Sawyer do dive into this project, are you excited? There's a poll below, and the comments are open.

I'm feeling ambivalent. I like Obsidian and Sawyer, and a new Fallout game seems like a perfectly good pursuit for the developer and director, and a good thing for fans of the series who've been asking for just this for years.

But the news comes alongside thousands of layoffs across Xbox, including a substantial number at Obsidian itself, which has reportedly cancelled an Avowed sequel and other projects to make way for Fallout. It's not exactly an auspicious way to kick off a new project, and it's hard to sustain feelings I'd describe as positive after a bunch of people were just put out of work.