Obsidian Entertainment co-founder Chris Avellone recently revealed on Twitter that Bethesda turned down various Elder Scrolls spinoff pitches from Obsidian. While Avellone didn’t share a concrete timeline, it’s safe to assume that this was long before Microsoft’s acquisition of both Bethesda and Obsidian since he left the latter in 2015.
Obsidian was no stranger to creating spin-offs for Bethesda RPGs. While Fallout New Vegas wasn’t as well-received at the time of its launch in 2010, it is still touted as the best RPG in the 3D Fallout era.
As intimated by Chris Avellone, the pitches to Bethesda included several Elder Scrolls spinoffs, one of them being a smaller spinoff between mainline entries, similar to Fallout New Vegas in terms of scope.
“One of the Elder Scrolls proposals (which I pitched) was intended to serve the same function as Fallout: New Vegas did between Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, to provide more adventures in the setting during the years before the next Bethesda release,” said Avellone.
Now, it’s up for anyone’s guess why Bethesda turned these pitches down. New Vegas didn’t boast high enough sales numbers immediately after its launch which might have swayed Bethesda executives into disapproving further spin-off projects.
There’s another theory as put forth by many Fallout fans. Obsidian surpassed Bethesda in terms of narrative design and roleplaying freedom with New Vegas. Would Bethesda want that to happen time and again?
Whatever the case, it seems from Avellone’s statements that we could have received several Elder Scrolls games since Skyrim if Bethesda decided to greenlight some of the pitches from Obsidian. Unfortunately, what we got instead over the last decade are multiple remasters and re-releases of Skyrim.
