Bruce Nesmith is a guy whose name you may never heard even if you’re a big fan of Bethesda’s games. He got his start working with famed Dungeons & Dragons publisher TSR on Apple II games, and joined Bethesda as early as 1995, where he was credited as a designer on The Elder Scrolls: Chapter II – Daggerfall. Nesmith stuck around at Bethesda until 2021 when he left to become an author.
Long before that, though, he was the Lead Designer on mega-hit open-world RPG The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, originally released in 2011. (Yes, it’s been 13 years since Skyrim.) Speaking to YouTuber KIWI TALKZ in an hour-long interview, Nesmith talks quite a bit about the tyranny of expectations and how very few people ever consider things objectively; according to Nesmith, almost all value judgments are done in the context of people’s expectations, whether or not that’s fair or makes any sense. In light of that, he says:
KIWI TALKZ: With Elder Scrolls 6, the name alone just raises expectations, and because Skyrim was such a landmark in open-world games, and sold like fifty million units, or whatever it did?
Bruce Nesmith: This is a problem that games that came after Skyrim had. This was the problem that, y’know, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, Starfield had — because you aren’t always in charge of those expectations. […] The fans who want to buy Elder Scrolls 6; their expectation is going to be almost impossible to meet. Marketing departments just put their heads in their hands and weep at this, because it’s like, ‘if it isn’t perfect, if it doesn’t get a 95+ on Metacritic, we’re a failure.’
He’s not wrong. As Skyrim was the fifth entry in the series, Bethesda had been doing the open world RPG thing for over 15 years at that point. Even still, Skyrim was really the title that brought the company’s signature style of free-roaming exploration-focused stab-‘n-grab gameplay to a mass-market audience in a way that Morrowind and Oblivion hadn’t before. It was a bit of a right-place, right-time effect, but the end result is that Skyrim became a nearly impossible act to follow up.
Love it or hate it, it’s impossible to deny the cultural impact of the Elder Scrolls franchise and Skyrim in particular. Nevermind the knock-offs, the parodies, the references in other games, and the piles and piles of lovingly-crafted fan-made tributes—all we really need to tell you is that The Legend of Zelda series patron Eiji Aonuma personally acknowledged Bethesda’s title as a major influence on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a title that is itself a masterpiece video game.
The interview is pretty fascinating and covers a lot of topics, so check it out!
The interviewer remarks on the immense pressure that Todd Howard and his team must be under, and Nesmith brings up the example of Larian Studios as another game developer who is likely facing similarly stark expectations for its next title. Larian is of course the developer for the mega-hit D&D-based RPG Baldur’s Gate III, and the Belgian game company, known for its transparency, recently admitted to its fans that it passed over the chance to do another big D&D RPG in favor of increased creative freedom.
Bethesda arguably attempted to do something similar with last year’s spacefaring RPG Starfield, but while the game launched to modest critical acclaim and rapid sales, many gamers’ opinions on the title soured soon as it became clear that Starfield was all too similar to Bethesda’s previous games in unfortunate ways. Bethesda’s really going to have to change things up for The Elder Scrolls 6 if it wants to recapture the hearts and minds of hardcore gamers. Certainly Microsoft would be happier that way.