Bethesda devs love switching between The Elder Scrolls and Fallout because going from fantasy to sci-fi "keeps things fresh": "All of these things just get your creativity flowing"

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Bethesda devs love switching between The Elder Scrolls and Fallout because going from fantasy to sci-fi "keeps things fresh": "All of these things just get your creativity flowing" News By Anthony McGlynn published 23 January 2026

And Starfield's in the mix somewhere, too

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While Bethesda juggles a lot of pressure these days, between working on both The Elder Scrolls 6 and whatever's happening in Fallout, it's also a creatively nourishing environment, because the devs get to enjoy two distinct flavors of storytelling.

Flipping between the properties is a challenge, but it gives people much-needed breaks, too, as two creatives recently told the PC Gamer magazine.

"It keeps things fresh. It keeps you from getting bored," Istvan Pely, an artist at Bethesda, says. "You have the opportunity to have some distance from a franchise for a few years, and that's enough time to sort of develop a hunger: 'All right, I want to go again.'"

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This kind of relay is incredibly valuable when you're entrenched in an upcoming release the way Bethesda developers have to be. Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallouts 3 and 4 were massive undertakings, and the next installments of each respective series will be bigger again. That's without mentioning Starfield, the latest new IP from the studio. As much as you might love science fiction or fantasy, that kind of work can be tiring.

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"You work on the same thing for long enough, sometimes it can become – not boring – but it can become monotonous," Angela Browder, studio and production director at Bethesda, adds. "The transition, to go from Fallout to Elder Scrolls, and then back to Fallout, and then to Starfield, all of these things just get your creativity flowing."

Having such versatility is a rare thing in the industry, especially at Bethesda’s level. While anticipation is sky high, there's a lot of space for the teams to experiment and throw around ideas, because the next Elder Scrolls and Fallout games have colossal assured install bases.

Of course, it would be nice if we knew more about what's going on in either, but that's a different conversation. Todd Howard's been teasing something to do with the wasteland for some time, and it seems like no amount of bottle caps can get us any more information until the company's good and ready. We'll keep you informed.

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Fallout 3 "went hard on the gloomy despair of the post-apocalyptic world" to differentiate it from Oblivion, but one dev thinks Bethesda went too far: "We just drained the color out of the world"

TOPICS Bethesda Game Studios Bethesda Softworks CATEGORIES PC Gaming PS5 Xbox Series X Platforms PlayStation Xbox Anthony McGlynnSocial Links NavigationContributing Writer

Anthony is an Irish entertainment and games journalist, now based in Glasgow. He previously served as Senior Anime Writer at Dexerto and News Editor at The Digital Fix, on top of providing work for Variety, IGN, Den of Geek, PC Gamer, and many more. Besides Studio Ghibli, horror movies, and The Muppets, he enjoys action-RPGs, heavy metal, and pro-wrestling. He interviewed Animal once, not that he won’t stop going on about it or anything.

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