Starfield Is the Present and Future of Bethesda Game Studios…at Least for a While

ign.com:

After years of waiting, Starfield has finally arrived. I recently called it the most important launch for Xbox since at least Halo 5, and now it’s here and on your Xbox console or PC. I hope you enjoy it! But being the previews lead at IGN, it’s my job to live in the future; I’m always looking ahead to the next big thing. And the next big thing for Bethesda Game Studios isn’t The Elder Scrolls 6. At least, not for a while. The next big thing for Todd Howard and his team is still going to be Starfield! Let me explain.

Naturally, the bulk of BGS will move on to Elder Scrolls 6. In fact, we know that with Starfield shipped, the follow-up to Skyrim has completed pre-production and moved into full production. But for us, the players of Bethesda’s expansive games, Starfield will remain our focus for quite a long time. Like, a long time. This is for a couple of reasons.

First, not only is Starfield a gigantic game by any metric, offering hundreds of hours of role-playing adventure – including a high degree of replayability in which you can make different choices both for your character and out in the universe – but it’s also going to be supported by Bethesda for years (not months) to come. BGS has walked the walk on that with their previous RPGs; we’re going to get patches, content updates, DLC, and full-blown expansions for Starfield, further fleshing out and polishing the worlds the team has built.

And second, the fact is that modern AAA games take a very, very long time to build. Despite the advancement in tools available to developers, project durations are, by and large, getting longer, not shorter. Sure, The Elder Scrolls 6 may have been announced back in 2018 – before a single line of code had been laid down – but it’s