Key Takeaways:
- Former Skyrim lead developer Kurt Kuhlmann spoke on the FRVR podcast about why Bethesda never outsourced an Elder Scrolls RPG to another studio
- Kuhlmann says Todd Howard was “very protective” of The Elder Scrolls franchise during his time at Bethesda
- The Fallout: New Vegas situation — where fans began debating whether Obsidian made better Fallout games than Bethesda — is reportedly exactly what Bethesda wanted to avoid with Elder Scrolls
- Kuhlmann believes The Elder Scrolls Online “took the heat off” Bethesda during the long TES VI wait
- No specific cancelled Elder Scrolls spin-off was revealed — this is Kuhlmann’s recollection of Bethesda’s philosophy, not an official statement
- Kuhlmann left Bethesda in 2023, so his insights are historical rather than current
- The irony: Obsidian — the obvious New Vegas equivalent candidate — is now under the same Xbox/Bethesda organizational umbrella
- The Elder Scrolls VI was announced in 2018 and still has no confirmed release date
This is one of those questions that’s been floating around Elder Scrolls fan communities for years and nobody ever gave a satisfying answer to. After Skyrim launched in 2011, Bethesda spent the better part of a decade working on other things — Fallout 4, Fallout 76, Starfield — while TES VI sat in the distance. The obvious question kept coming up: why didn’t Bethesda just do what it did with Fallout and hand The Elder Scrolls to another studio for a spin-off? Let Obsidian make a New Vegas-style Tamriel game while Bethesda built whatever it wanted to build.
We finally have something close to a real answer, and it comes from someone who was actually inside Bethesda when these decisions were being made.
Kurt Kuhlmann — a former Skyrim lead developer and one of the people most associated with Elder Scrolls lore across the franchise’s history — appeared on the FRVR podcast and explained his understanding of why that never happened. And the explanation is more about franchise psychology than business logistics.
The Fallout: New Vegas Problem Bethesda Didn’t Want to Repeat
To understand Kuhlmann’s explanation you need to understand what Fallout: New Vegas actually did to the franchise’s perception.
Bethesda Game Studios developed Fallout 3. Then Obsidian Entertainment — a studio packed with former Black Isle developers who had worked on the original Fallout games — developed Fallout: New Vegas, published by Bethesda Softworks. The result was a game that became genuinely beloved by a massive chunk of the Fallout fanbase, with Obsidian leaning hard into faction politics, branching quests, reputation systems, dialogue choices and consequences in ways that gave New Vegas a completely distinct identity from Fallout 3.
Over time, a debate emerged that has never fully gone away: which studio actually makes the better Fallout game? And from that debate came a natural extension — why doesn’t Bethesda just hand Fallout to Obsidian entirely?
Kuhlmann says that dynamic is precisely what Bethesda didn’t want recreated around The Elder Scrolls. His words on the podcast were direct:
“I don’t know that Todd wanted to create that situation again for The Elder Scrolls.”
He described Todd Howard as “very protective” of the franchise during the years Kuhlmann spent at the studio. And when you think about the logic, it actually makes sense. Imagine Bethesda licenses The Elder Scrolls to a celebrated RPG studio, that game comes out to enormous critical acclaim, and suddenly you have half the internet saying the outside developer’s version of Elder Scrolls is better than Bethesda’s own. That’s an uncomfortable position for a company that built the franchise from the ground up.
Why Elder Scrolls Felt Different From Fallout to Bethesda
There’s an important distinction Kuhlmann drew between the two franchises that helps explain the protectiveness.
Bethesda acquired Fallout. It didn’t create it. The original Fallout games came from Black Isle Studios, and Bethesda bought the IP and rebuilt the franchise in its own image with Fallout 3. So in a sense, Fallout was always something Bethesda inherited and then shaped — which perhaps made it easier to conceptually share with another developer.
The Elder Scrolls is a completely different situation. Bethesda created it. Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim — that entire lineage was built internally. The lore, the world of Tamriel, the design philosophy, the tone — all of it developed within Bethesda’s own walls over decades. Handing that to an outside studio wouldn’t just be licensing an IP. It would mean giving another developer the keys to something Bethesda considers a core part of its own creative identity.
That context matters when you’re trying to understand why Bethesda drew a harder line around Elder Scrolls than it did around Fallout.
The Elder Scrolls Online Was the Actual Solution
Here’s the part of Kuhlmann’s comments that I think is the most genuinely interesting — and the most overlooked in the broader conversation about TES VI’s absence.
Bethesda did let another developer work on Elder Scrolls. Just not a traditional single-player RPG. The Elder Scrolls Online was developed by ZeniMax Online Studios rather than Bethesda Game Studios, and Kuhlmann believes it played a crucial role in buying Bethesda the time it needed.
He said on the podcast:
“I do think ESO took the heat off.”
The logic is straightforward. As long as ESO was active and receiving new content, Bethesda could credibly say the Elder Scrolls franchise was alive and being served. Fans wanting to spend time in Tamriel had somewhere to go. That reduced the urgency to either rush TES VI into production or hand the IP to an outside studio just to keep the franchise present in the market.
And there’s another layer to this that Kuhlmann pointed out: ESO became the primary Elder Scrolls experience for a significant number of players. For those people, Tamriel isn’t defined by Skyrim or Oblivion — it’s defined by ESO. That’s not a minor side effect. That’s ESO genuinely expanding what the franchise means to its audience, which is considerably more valuable than just being a stopgap between mainline entries.
What Bethesda Actually Wanted to Do After Fallout 4
Kuhlmann has also spoken previously about what happened internally after Fallout 4 shipped in 2015, and that context fills in another piece of the picture.
According to his recollection, many developers at Bethesda expected to return to Tamriel after Fallout 4 wrapped up. The assumption internally was that TES VI would be the next major project. That didn’t happen — Todd Howard pushed the studio toward Starfield instead, a completely new science-fiction IP that ended up taking years to develop before launching in 2023.
Kuhlmann has said that he and many other developers at the time would have preferred working on The Elder Scrolls VI rather than Starfield. That’s a significant admission about internal priorities during a stretch of years when fans were wondering where TES VI was.
So the situation Bethesda found itself in wasn’t “we have no Elder Scrolls plan.” It was more like: “we have a long-term plan for TES VI, we’re choosing to do something else first, and we’re trusting ESO to keep the franchise active in the meantime.” That’s a very specific strategic choice — one that deliberately avoided the New Vegas model as a solution.
The Spectacular Irony of Where Obsidian Is Now
You genuinely cannot discuss this topic in 2026 without acknowledging how funny the current situation is.
Obsidian Entertainment — the studio that created Fallout: New Vegas, the studio that represents the entire “what if another developer made Elder Scrolls” hypothetical — is now under the same organizational roof as Bethesda. Microsoft’s Xbox restructuring has moved Obsidian under Bethesda’s umbrella, with the studio retaining its creative identity but sitting much closer organizationally to Bethesda Game Studios than at any point in its history.
Obsidian is reportedly working on Fallout projects. The studio that created New Vegas is back in the Fallout world, now as part of the same broader organization as Bethesda.
The corporate and organizational barrier that made a “New Vegas-style Elder Scrolls” feel impossible is now basically nonexistent. Whether anyone at Xbox, Bethesda, or Obsidian is actually discussing an Elder Scrolls project is completely unknown — there’s no confirmed announcement of anything like that. But the structural situation in 2026 is radically different from the one that produced Fallout: New Vegas in 2010.
Speaking of Xbox restructuring and how it’s reshaping the gaming landscape, our breakdown of Satya Nadella’s comments on Xbox layoffs and the future of the platform has the full picture of what Microsoft is doing with its gaming organization right now.
What Kuhlmann’s Comments Are and Aren’t
It’s worth being precise about what we actually learned here because some of the coverage around these comments has overstated things slightly.
Kuhlmann did not reveal a cancelled Elder Scrolls spin-off. He did not name a specific studio that Bethesda turned down for an Elder Scrolls project. He did not say Todd Howard explicitly told him “we will never let Obsidian touch Elder Scrolls.” What he described is his understanding of the philosophy and attitude within Bethesda during his time there — a sense that the franchise was held more closely than Fallout, and that the New Vegas comparison situation was something the studio wanted to avoid repeating.
That’s valuable firsthand context from someone deeply embedded in the franchise’s history. But Kuhlmann left Bethesda in 2023, which means everything he’s describing is historical recollection rather than insight into current decision-making. Bethesda’s thinking in 2026 could be completely different from what it was during the Skyrim and Fallout 4 era.
The Bigger Question — Could an Elder Scrolls New Vegas Still Happen?
Given everything Kuhlmann described, is there any realistic path to an Obsidian-developed Elder Scrolls game at some point?
The organizational barriers are lower than they’ve ever been. Microsoft owns everything. Obsidian is under Bethesda’s umbrella. The competitive friction that might have made Bethesda reluctant to see another studio succeed with their IP is different when both studios are on the same team working toward the same corporate goals.
But Kuhlmann’s core point isn’t really about organizational structure. It’s about Bethesda’s relationship with its own flagship franchise and how much of that IP’s identity they’re willing to share. That’s a cultural and creative question, not a corporate one. And until The Elder Scrolls VI actually ships and Bethesda maps out what comes after it, there’s no reason to expect any public movement on a spin-off arrangement.
For now, the legendary “Obsidian Elder Scrolls” remains exactly what it has always been — the most interesting what if in modern RPG history. Kuhlmann’s podcast appearance is the closest we’ve come to an official explanation for why it never happened, and honestly his answer makes a lot of sense once you sit with it.
The studio that built one of the most beloved fantasy RPG worlds in gaming history didn’t want to find out whether someone else could build it better. That’s not an unreasonable instinct — it’s just one that cost Elder Scrolls fans a decade of wondering.
If you’re following the broader 2026 gaming landscape, check out our piece on why GTA 6 mathematically can’t sweep the 2026 GOTY awards and our coverage of Splatoon 3’s Splatoween 2026 Splatfest — two very different stories that show just how wide the gaming conversation has been this September.
