Kurt Kuhlmann, the longtime Elder Scrolls “loremaster”, hasn’t revealed why he left Bethesda in 2023 after more than 20 years—until now.
His departure didn’t make headlines but it rumbled those who know the series best. Michael Kirkbride, who worked alongside Kuhlmann on Morrowind and Oblivion, wrote at the time that “Kurt was the best writer that TES ever had… his leaving will be to the creative detriment of [The Elder Scrolls] 6.”
“It was almost certainly time for a change,” Kuhlmann, who now works at the Tencent-owned studio Lightspeed LA, tells me. “There were some things that had been going on for a long time that I’d not been super happy with.”
(Image credit: Bethesda)
Some were an inevitable result of Bethesda’s boom years: with hundreds of developers across multiple studios making Starfield, communication sometimes broke down and developers felt disconnected from senior management, Kuhlmann says.
But there’s another reason—and it’s linked to a promise Todd Howard made to him about The Elder Scrolls 6.
A promise, he says, that was never fulfilled.
It was almost certainly time for a change.
Kurt Kuhlmann
Kuhlmann’s tenure at Bethesda was split in two. As a junior designer in 1996 and 1997 he worked on The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall, The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, and pre-production of Morrowind. He returned in 2003 and was involved in every major Bethesda game after that point, including as co-lead designer on Skyrim and as lead systems designer on Starfield.
He became the Elder Scrolls “loremaster” because of his longevity at the studio and his shaping of Tamriel’s history: when ZeniMax Online Studios began making the Elder Scrolls Online, Kuhlmann was assigned to field lore questions.
Over this two-decade second run, Bethesda ballooned and its culture changed, he says, particularly after 2011’s Skyrim.
In the early days, it was a close group of developers—including Todd Howard—in a basement office, making decisions and eating in the canteen together, he says. But new offices opened and other studios were folded in by owner ZeniMax Media, including BattleCry Studios and Escalation Studios (both in 2018). Zenimax was itself bought by Microsoft in 2021.
By the time Starfield shipped in 2023, “it’s four remote studios all working together on a game,” Kuhlmann says.
“When you get to that size, you can’t have people just popping into Todd Howard’s office to chat about a design point. He’s not having lunch with everybody… It’s very different when it’s 400 people, four studios, big business, and Microsoft is now involved.”
Size brought problems. Decisions that, on Oblivion, would’ve been made on the spot after a face-to-face conversation were instead filtered through layers of management. Sometimes developers couldn’t even work out who had made those decisions, Kuhlmann says.
He also describes “communication breakdowns” during Starfield’s development, where teams didn’t understand what they were supposed to be doing. “Or, you know, there would be people talking to the leads in one studio and getting an answer, and people talking to the leads in the other studio and getting maybe a different answer.”
The snowball
(Image credit: Bethesda)
Bethesda’s growth and the problems that came with it were a “slow, rolling” change, he says, and predated Microsoft’s acquisition. And these changes sound as if they’re exemplified by how Howard’s role shifted.
“Todd’s a very good project lead and fundamentally I think he’s a designer at heart, and he’s good at it, obviously, if you look back at the games,” Kuhlmann says. But “over time as he got busier and every part of this larger and larger organisation wanted him to do stuff for their project… he would get pulled away”.
Howard made good decisions, Kuhlmann says—so when he wasn’t around, games suffered. Sometimes choices made in Howard’s absence needed undoing later.
The way decisions were made wasn’t the only problem for Kuhlmann: as Bethesda grew, senior developers became more managerial and less hand-on.
Skyrim’s leads, Kuhlmann among them, were also making the game directly, for example writing and building quests. But by Starfield, the leads, overseen by Howard, included the heads of entire studios. It felt “more bureaucratic”, he says. “The expectation was… your job can’t be also making content if you’re actually managing that scope of the project.”
He doesn’t believe this set-up is necessarily wrong, and says it’s perhaps inevitable as a studio grows. He enjoyed leading other people but preferred designing. “I didn’t want to work that way, because I like making games and being hands-on,” he says. “It had gotten to a scale beyond where I was really enjoying working in that environment.”
(Image credit: Bethesda)
But what of Todd Howard’s promise?
Kuhlmann says that after Skyrim, Howard verbally promised him the lead design role on The Elder Scrolls 6 (TES6), which was supposed to be the next project after Fallout 4.
I’ve been waiting 11 years to be the lead on TES6.
Kurt Kuhlmann
“Of course, after Fallout 4 we didn’t go to TES6, we made Fallout 76, and then even then we didn’t make TES6, we made Starfield, which became this extremely long project compared to other ones. So from my point of view, I’ve been waiting like 11 years to be the lead on TES6,” he says.
“I was obviously one of the old-timers there and had a lot of experience. Bruce [Nesmith] and I had been the co-leads on Skyrim. I think most people would call it a successful project, so I thought that it wasn’t unreasonable for me to think that I could be a successful lead on TES6. It wasn’t just my expectation—I had been told that that was going to happen,” he says.
“And they made the decision, no, you’re not going to be the lead.”
(Image credit: Bethesda)
He remembers that being a “tough conversation”, and that Bethesda’s leadership hoped he’d be happy with a different position. “Todd said, ‘Well, we want you to have an important role in the project.’ But what I wanted and what he wanted were different at that point.”
Bethesda declined to comment on the topic, and Kuhlmann says he doubts Howard would acknowledge the promise—”and in any case, he could also say, well, that was a long time ago, things changed. And he’s definitely right that things changed, and the role of lead on TES 6 is very different from the role of lead on Skyrim.”
In retrospect, as much as he wanted it, he doesn’t think he would’ve enjoyed it, “and so they may have made the right decision of saying [I] shouldn’t be in this role.”
Leaving Tamriel
It was a combination of this missing out and his overall dissatisfaction with the way the studio had changed that made him think the time was right to leave, he says.
He talks about these events without malice or bitterness. It’s obvious that Bethesda, and the Elder Scrolls, still means a lot to him and that he enjoyed working with his colleagues on those games. If Bethesda was still the smaller studio it was 15 years ago, he would love to be making TES6.
He even knows what he would’ve done with the game’s story—or at least, what he would’ve liked to do.
I had in my mind that TES6 was going to be like The Empire Strikes Back.
Kurt Kuhlmann
“I had in my mind that TES6 was going to be like The Empire Strikes Back,” he says. The Thalmor, the elven supremacists who were peripheral in Skyrim’s story and ultimately wanted to control all of Tamriel, would be the bad guys who come out on top, setting up TES7.
He saw evil triumphing as a welcome alternative to the “chosen one” idea Bethesda often relied on. The player might have “secretly saved the day” at the end of TES6, he says, for example by protecting an heir to the throne, “so you’ve preserved hope for the future, but overall it looks like the Thalmor are on the march”.
(Image credit: Bethesda)
He ultimately doesn’t think Bethesda would allow an Elder Scrolls game with a “bad” ending and with the pace of its releases, a cliffhanger is “completely unfeasible,” he says. “That’s not a good way to end a game and say, yeah, we’ll see you in 10, 15 years.”
Fan theories point to Hammerfell and possibly High Rock as the locations for the next Elder Scrolls game—Kuhlmann says he doesn’t know where it will be and jokes that his friends who remain at the studio “can’t talk to me about what’s going on”.
The series’ loremaster is now, like all of us, watching and waiting from the outside.
