For fifteen years, The Elder Scrolls faithful have circled the same question. Fallout, a franchise of comparable stature, was handed to an outside studio and came back with Fallout: New Vegas, a game many consider the finest entry in the entire series. So why did Skyrim and its predecessors never receive the same treatment? Why has The Elder Scrolls, a flagship role-playing property with a ravenous audience, produced nothing but a live-service MMO and mobile titles since 2004?
According to one of the people who helped build Skyrim, the answer has two sides. One is corporate. The other is personal, and it involves the most scrutinized rivalry in Bethesda's history.
Kurt Kuhlmann, who served as quest designer on Oblivion, co-lead designer on Skyrim, longtime Elder Scrolls "loremaster," and lead systems designer on Starfield, left Bethesda in 2023 after more than two decades at the studio. He now works at Tencent-owned Lightspeed LA. In a wide-ranging interview on the FRVR podcast, Kuhlmann offered the most detailed public explanation yet for the franchise's spin-off drought.
This article draws on Kuhlmann's FRVR interview and subsequent coverage from Eurogamer, PC Gamer, GamesRadar, and VGC. Everything that follows is attributed to Kuhlmann. Bethesda has made no official statement on the matter.
Who Is Kurt Kuhlmann, and What Did He Actually Say?
Kuhlmann's résumé gives his remarks weight. He was a quest designer on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, a co-lead designer on Skyrim, and a lead systems designer on Starfield. He also spent years informally acting as the franchise's loremaster, a role he partly assumed to field lore questions once ZeniMax Online Studios began developing The Elder Scrolls Online. He departed Bethesda in 2023.
His explanation for the spin-off drought rests on two factors, which he presents as complementary rather than competing. The first is a personal dynamic between Bethesda and Obsidian Entertainment. The second is a live-service MMO that kept the franchise active while the main studio worked on other things.
It is worth being precise about what Kuhlmann did and did not claim. He never confirmed that an Elder Scrolls spin-off was ever discussed internally, and the FRVR interview notes that such discussions seem unlikely to have taken place at all. His explanation is retrospective context, not a leaked internal memo. The same interview also contained a separate observation, that Starfield is unlikely to receive a sequel, which speaks to how candid Kuhlmann was willing to be about the studio's internal priorities.
The New Vegas Problem: Why Todd Howard Guarded the IP
The more personal half of Kuhlmann's explanation centers on Bethesda's director, and on a comparison the studio has never escaped.
Fallout: New Vegas was developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Bethesda, released on October 19, 2010, on a famously compressed 18-month schedule. Despite that constraint, it sold an estimated 11.6 million copies and is now widely regarded as one of the best Fallout games ever made. That reception created a persistent narrative: Obsidian, not Bethesda Game Studios, made the better Fallout.
Kuhlmann said that dynamic generated a perceived "who makes a better Fallout game?" rivalry, one that favored Obsidian in the eyes of many players. According to him, Todd Howard is "very protective" of The Elder Scrolls and did not want to recreate that situation within the series.
That protectiveness, in Kuhlmann's telling, is one reason the mainline IP stayed in-house. It is a human explanation for a corporate decision, a steward unwilling to hand his flagship to an outside team and risk the same narrative that followed New Vegas.
How ESO Filled the Gap While Bethesda Moved On
The second half of the explanation is structural. Kuhlmann frames The Elder Scrolls Online as Bethesda's "we're doing something with Elder Scrolls" move, a way to keep the franchise active in the public eye while the main studio turned its attention elsewhere. Specifically, that meant Starfield.
His central claim is direct. "I do think The Elder Scrolls Online took the heat off," Kuhlmann said. "There was a new Elder Scrolls product, and it was ongoing. It was creating new content constantly."
The numbers support the strategy. The Elder Scrolls Online, developed by ZeniMax Online Studios and released in 2014, had sold over 15 million units by 2020 and generated more than $2 billion in revenue by 2024. It shifted to a seasonal content model starting in 2025, a structure that keeps new material flowing on a regular cadence. That ongoing output is precisely what Kuhlmann describes as taking the heat off.
The cultural effect may matter even more than the revenue. Kuhlmann observed that many players now treat The Elder Scrolls Online as their primary Elder Scrolls experience, a genuine shift in what the franchise means to its audience. For a sizable portion of the player base, "Elder Scrolls" no longer means a single-player, mainline RPG released once a console generation. It means a persistent world with regular updates.
That shift makes the franchise's development drought all the more unusual. The last Elder Scrolls RPG developed outside Bethesda Game Studios was 2004's The Elder Scrolls Travels: Shadowkey, an N-Gage exclusive that few players ever touched. An Oblivion spin-off for the PSP was scrapped. In the two decades since, the only non-mobile Elder Scrolls releases have come from the MMO.
Read together, the two factors are complementary rather than competing. The Elder Scrolls Online absorbed demand for a new Elder Scrolls product, while Howard's protectiveness kept the mainline IP in-house. Kuhlmann presents them as dual causes, and coverage of his remarks has tended to lead with one or the other depending on the outlet's framing, Eurogamer foregrounding the ESO angle, FRVR and GamesRadar leading with Howard's protectiveness. Neither, on its own, tells the full story.
The Irony: Obsidian and Bethesda Are Working Together Again
There is a notable twist to all of this. Obsidian was recently confirmed to be working on a new Fallout game in collaboration with Bethesda, the very kind of partnership Kuhlmann suggests Howard was wary of repeating for The Elder Scrolls.
Where things stand now: The Elder Scrolls 6 was announced in 2018 but only began active development in 2023, and it still has no public release target. Kuhlmann also said that most of the studio wanted to make The Elder Scrolls 6 after Fallout 4 before Howard redirected the team to Starfield, a decision that, in retrospect, shaped the franchise's long silence.
With no official comment from Bethesda, all of this remains one former insider's perspective, not studio policy. Kuhlmann is offering his read on how decisions were made, not announcing a roadmap.
A Question Answered, and a Future Still Open
The question fans have asked for fifteen years may finally have an answer, and it is less dramatic than the speculation suggested. There was no dramatic rejected pitch, no public falling-out, no lost Obsidian Elder Scrolls game sitting in a vault. Instead, a live-service MMO kept the franchise warm while Bethesda pivoted to new horizons, and a protective steward kept the mainline series close to home.
Whether that calculus could ever change is the open question. The Elder Scrolls 6 remains years away at best, and the Obsidian-Bethesda Fallout collaboration shows the studio is not categorically opposed to outside partnerships. For now, though, the franchise's future rests with the team that has always made it, and the spin-off that never came remains a road not taken.
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