Former Bethesda dev Bruce Smith doesn’t see The Elder Scrolls 6 ditching Skyrim’s minimalist UI and going back to the RPG series’ early days of “fiddly character sheets” despite the popularity of more technical games like Baldur’s Gate 3.
Skyrim made a big shift away from the traditional Dungeons and Dragons-based RPG format when it overhauled and in some cases straight up abandoned many of the Elder Scrolls series’ core mechanics, most notably its leveling and attributes systems. Looking at the trajectory of RPGs, Baldur’s Gate 3 is something of a reversion back to classic tabletop mechanics, and although it was an indisputable and gargantuan success, Nesmith doesn’t reckon Bethesda will take any massive cues.
“I don’t think [Baldur’s Gate 3’s success] necessarily presages a complete change over back to more numbers and more fiddly character sheets and things like that,” Nesmith told VideoGamer. “Whether or not the rest of the industry will follow suit, I don’t know. I’m not smart enough to say that, but I think that through Skyrim, Bethesda has wanted to have the game get out of its own way.
“You see that everywhere in Skyrim,” he continues. “Todd [Howard] is a big proponent of the interface vanishing if you’re not doing something that needs it to be visible. So all you see is the world. That’s it. You just see the world.”
Nesmith is a bonafide RPG legend, having served as creative director for original D&D publisher TSR and then moving to PC game development in 1995 for The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall. He went on to become senior game designer at Bethesda Game Studios and have a heavy hand in the direction of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion and, of course, Skyrim. He retired from the studio in 2021, so it’s likely he isn’t as privy to The Elder Scrolls 6, but he’s definitely still an authoritative figure in RPGs.
He’s also been pretty vocal about his time at Bethesda and specifically his relationship with Howard, recently revealing that Howard would sometimes work on “two dozen” projects at once and saying he’s the face of Bethesda partly because he’s “incredibly photogenic”.
Even more recently, he admitted “Bethesda games could have a higher degree of polish”, but some jank “could be forgiven” because of how much you can do in the RPGs.
