Dragon Age veteran says sequel announcements like The Elder Scrolls 6 can be "kind of misleading" because most studios don't make multiple games at once
Jun. 25, 2024Mark Darrah has thoughts on why games like The Elder Scrolls 6 are announced so early
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Talking on his ‘Mark Darrah on Games’ podcast (timestampedhere), Darrah spent some length of time explaining why it feels like AAA games take way longer to make than before. He argued that, in some big-name cases at least, they’re simply being announced long before development really begins in earnest because most major studios are only equipped to fully develop one project at a time. He used Bethesda games andThe Elder Scrolls 6, specifically, as examples, but he implied it’s an issue not limited to any one game studio.
“Most studios are a lot more serial than they are parallel,” Darrah explained. “What I mean by that is they really only work on one, or a little bit more than one, title at a time. So when Skyrim ships, and they’ve done the patching and they’ve done the DLC, that team, for the most part, is moving on to something else. It might be moving on to Fallout, or Elder Scrolls Online, or Starfield. Very few people are actually staying on the sequel to that game that just released. In the case of Bethesda, the key leadership is moving on and is spending very little of their attention on that sequel. There might be a small, nascent seed of a team, but really there isn’t any work being done for quite a long time.”
“And studios can be kind of misleading on this front, because they’ll say things like ‘We’ve started work on Elder Scrolls 6’ or they might even release a trailer for the game even though the current team size is under 10 people,” Darrah said. “So they’re getting the impression that this is parallel development, that the team is working on this game, when in fact it’s a few people having a few meetings and not much is being done.”
Darrah did qualify his apparent criticism somewhat by acknowledging two big reasons video game companies announce their biggest games so early in their development cycles. Naturally, the reason will vary greatly depending on whether it’s the development or publishing side pushing the reveal, but it’s rarely because they simply want to mislead fans.“It might be because the publisher feels like its slate is a little weak and it wants people to remember that it still has some important games in its back pocket. It might be because the studio wants the game to be announced because it’s worried the publisher is going to kill it otherwise” Still, he added it’s “not usually the best strategy from the perspective of building up attention and hype for the title itself.”
Sign up to the GamesRadar+ Newsletter
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more
Find out which Bethesda games and which BioWare games made our list of thebest RPGsto play today.
After scoring a degree in English from ASU, I worked as a copy editor while freelancing for places like SFX Magazine, Screen Rant, Game Revolution, and MMORPG on the side. Now, as GamesRadar’s west coast Staff Writer, I’m responsible for managing the site’s western regional executive branch, AKA my apartment, and writing about whatever horror game I’m too afraid to finish.
Todd Howard “rolled his eyes” at the idea of Troy Baker playing Indiana Jones in the Great Circle, but the Bethesda boss later told him “you’re doing a hell of a job”
