Skyrim lead designer warns speeding up Elder Scrolls and Fallout releases could disappoint fans
Bruce Nesmith, Skyrim's lead designer, cautions that rushing Bethesda's next Elder Scrolls and Fallout games risks lowering quality, cutting features, and introducing bugs. He stresses the trade-offs between resources, time and quality, and the need for balance.
It's been years since Bethesda released a major Elder Scrolls or Fallout title — Fallout 4 is 11 years old and Skyrim nearly 15 years since its predecessor. With Microsoft pushing for faster turnarounds, former Bethesda designer Bruce Nesmith urges caution. Speaking to FRVR (via GamesRadar), Nesmith warned that compressing schedules can hurt quality. "There's an adage in software development about the process having three corners: resources, time and quality," he said. "The studio decides two of them, which determines the third. If you lock down the resources and the schedule, that decides the quality you will achieve. If you lock down the quality and the schedule, that determines the resources you will need to complete the project." He added that the corners must be balanced — you can't finish a project in a month by throwing a million people at it, nor does allowing ten years avoid problems like endless reinvention. He notes modern AAA teams and budgets are already very large, with development teams often in the hundreds and budgets in the hundreds of millions.
