Bethesda is Expanding to Meet the Challenges of Starfield and Elder Scrolls VI
Bethesda Game Studios is the branch of Bethesda directly responsible for their core RPG titles; Fallout 3 and 4, the Elder Scrolls series, and so on. The studio branch of Bethesda is also working on Fallout 76, Starfield, and The Elder Scrolls VI. For over two decades, the studio’s model has seen the team develop one game after another, but Todd Howard recently stated that the studio has been expanding rapidly to meet new demands.
The Expansion of Bethesda Game Studios
During Todd Howard’s interview with Geoff Keighley at the annual Gamelab conference, the veteran director addressed the challenges which the studio was faced with and the different studios which comprise BGS. “There was a period that was very challenging. Now we’ve settled in. We’ve grown the studios a lot. We have the studio in Maryland, the one I work at. A lot of us have been there a long time. We have the studio in Montreal. A lot of them worked on Fallout 4 and Fallout Shelter. Now we have the studio in Austin, which was Battlecry Studios. We’ve worked with them for three years now. They’ve become part of Bethesda Game Studios.”
“That amount of people all working together…” continued Howard; “we’re juggling a little more than we used to. We always overlapped, but there are more people involved, which I knew we needed to do. We looked forward to Starfield and Elder Scrolls VI, what we had in mind for those games, and we realized it was going to take more people than the typical 100-person studio that we had for a long time.”
The expansion of Bethesda Game Studios to a studio which now, according to Howard, boasts over 400 people, may explain in part why Starfield has already been in development for years; alongside Fallout 76. Expanding from 100 developers to 400 is certainly a dramatic upscale. With a much larger team, Bethesda can work on bigger projects and even simultaneous projects. From the perspective of the fans, that can only be a good thing.