Laying off the people making The Elder Scrolls 6 while desperately tr…

Kurt Kuhlmann became a central figure for The Elder Scrolls in the two decades and change he spent as lore expert and world builder at the studio, and, from where he's standing now, Bethesda owner Xbox's decision to cut veteran devs from the team working on The Elder Scrolls 6 doesn't make a lick of sense.

Kuhlmann discusses his experience at Bethesda with FRVR, noting that layoffs didn't happen until after Microsoft acquired the company and Zenimax. He echoes criticism from the Bethesda union, arguing that the layoffs didn't hit the "14 layers of management" decried in Microsoft's plan to streamline Xbox. Rather, dozens of experienced, hands-on developers were cut.

"They weren’t laying off the people managing things," he says. "They were laying off people that were creating the game." He describes the impacted devs as "very senior and longtime, like, the best people you can imagine." freshyourfeel.com

Devs impacted by layoffs at Bethesda include 27-year veteran Christiane Meister, a core artist for Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind, Fallout 3, and Fallout 4; Ray Lederer, the last Skyrim concept artist still at the studio, and a Bethesda artist of 18 years; and Ben Carnow, whose weapon and creature designs are a fundamental part of Fallout and Elder Scrolls lore.

"I can't say I understand it, even from a pure just business money point of view," Kulhmann says of the layoffs. "If you want the money from [The Elder Scrolls 6], why would you fire people who are working on that and are going to make it happen, and make it better, and get it done faster? Why would you do that?"

The layoffs followed a report that new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is pushing Bethesda to speed up production for new Fallout and The Elder Scrolls games, stoking fears that the "do more with less" management mentality afflicting many companies had finally come for the studio.

"These aren't people that screwed up, were slacking off, or bad at their jobs," Kuhlmann adds, having worked with many of the people affected. "That means anyone could be laid off. That means you have no way to know. You can’t just be good and work harder and know you’re safe."

In August, Sharma, amid an executive visit that saw union members protest outside the studio campus, said she'd seen a "live playthrough" of The Elder Scrolls 6.

"We shouldn't have made it," says former Starfield lead, because something more than "Skyrim in space" was too much even for Bethesda.

While server issues stalled the start of Diablo 4's new season for many players, a few were able to get in and discover something Blizzard carefully left out from official materials.

The focus for Diablo 4's Season of Hell's Legacy is celebrating the series' 30th anniversary. Blizzard went back to Diablo 2 and brought back Deckard Cain (in a dream) and three of its most iconic bosses: Diablo, Baal, and Mephisto. Each of them have updated versions of their old models and attacks, too.

Blizzard didn't indicate that it would be doing more than just a nostalgic storyline for season 15—but it is. Diablo 4 streamer Dioxide was able to squeeze past the login issues and found a number of new Runes available. Normally, these slot into your gear and give you passive bonuses, but Dioxide discovered there's more to them than that.

When he dropped two specific runes and a low-quality chestpiece into Diablo 4's crafting table, the Horadric Cube, it showed "???" as the recipe instead of one of the many listed on the side of the interface. When he clicked the transmute button, out popped the Stealth chestpiece, a Unique item from Diablo 2.

It turns out Blizzard added some of the Rune word item recipes from Diablo 2 without telling anyone. The Stealth armor is created exactly as people did more than two decades ago. It has different stats than the original, but carries the same relative power in Diablo 4 because it has two more stats than a normal Unique.

Now everyone is eager to see what other recipes are available and what other things Blizzard has hidden in the new season. The recent trailer has a pretty obvious hint for Diablo 3's rainbow-colored Whimsyshire level near the end with a creepy teddy bear: It isn't clear how to access it, but I'm sure someone will figure it out before the end of the day.

Ever since the release of the Lord of Hatred expansion for Diablo 4, Blizzard has been intentionally leaving stuff for players to find on their own. Nobody knew they would actually add the cow level, for example. I think it's a great approach when so many previous seasons felt kind of solved before they even began, and it maintains some of the mystery that the older games always had.

It seems to me that no one is ever convinced that Game Pass deserves an oxygen tank while it's dying, not even Xbox executives. Having experienced what it's like to actually have your game on the sickly subscription service, Doom veteran Andrew Willis – who was impacted by the enormous job cuts at id Software in July – suggests a simple reason for all the confusion.

The former producer candidly tells Kiwi Talkz in a new interview that Game Pass is "poorly managed. Extremely poorly managed." He adds, "I think it was executed with so little foresight and so little attention to detail or understanding of the consumer market."

"So little sight there," Willis continues to say about Microsoft. "I think they just got caught in the trap of, 'Well, let's just make everything Netflix.'"

Microsoft could never decide how to measure Game Pass' success, Willis thinks. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma herself said in May that lowering the service's price to $23 was simply "a good first step" in improving it, and that Xbox staff would otherwise "have to outwork the problem in front of us in our path to restore durable growth." We know now that Microsoft's plan to "outwork the problem" includes a total of 3,200 layoffs at Xbox and, I guess, opportunistically deciding to publish another Hideo Kojima game.

Still, Sharma said as recently as July that "our business today is not healthy," partly because, "To grow, we bet on Game Pass, multi-platform, and a broader portfolio of content."

"While those businesses have created meaningful value," Sharma added at the time, "they did not grow at the pace we expected."

Willis could have predicted this. He says, "When you start making decisions about commercial art that are investor-driven rather than consumer, or even developer driven, you're eventually going to make some pretty big mistakes. And I don't think Microsoft was ever able to figure out exactly how to measure the success of Game Pass."

"Was it hours played?" Willis wonders. "Was it games installed, was it user retention? I and many of my colleagues certainly never heard anything, like, metrics that we needed to hit. Is this a game you just want people playing in perpetuity? Do you want it to be super long? Do you just want people to see it and, like, want to install it right away, and you don't care if they play?"

This is why Doom: The Dark Ages had no business being on the platform. Willis says, "Doom should not have been on there. That was a stupid idea." While he was never explicitly told that its underwhelming commercial success contributed to id Software getting bludgeoned during Xbox layoffs, Willis wonders anyway if the game would have sold better had it not been available to Game Pass subscribers to play for free.

After The Dark Ages' 2025 launch, IP holder Bethesda was glad to tell fans, "Thank you for making DOOM: The Dark Ages the biggest launch in id's history - 7x faster to 3 million players than DOOM Eternal." But The Game Business reported at the time that a huge chunk of those 3 million players were on Xbox – over two million of them, actually – compared to just half a million fans on PS5.

"I know that sales didn't do as well as they were expected to," Willis says, "but I would suspect that's probably a huge part of Game Pass. And I guess whatever tradeoff from buying the game outright, to being on Game Pass, and whatever that metric was – installs, playtime, whatever – I guess maybe that wasn't good enough."

"I can only speculate why id was treated the way it was," the veteran producer adds. "I don't really have a good idea as to why id got chopped in half."

Unpopular and underperforming, Xbox doesn't have any answers, either.

Id Software dev says Microsoft's layoffs prove "they fundamentally don't understand" art, games, the entire business, or the destruction they just caused.