{"id":287130,"date":"2026-01-16T07:06:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-16T07:06:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/287130\/"},"modified":"2026-01-16T07:06:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-16T07:06:07","slug":"bethesdas-ex-loremaster-left-due-to-bureaucracy-broken-promises","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/287130\/","title":{"rendered":"Bethesda&#8217;s Ex-Loremaster Left Due to Bureaucracy &#038; Broken Promises"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Speaking to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pcgamer.com\/games\/the-elder-scrolls\/bethesdas-former-elder-scrolls-loremaster-on-why-he-left-starfields-communication-breakdowns-and-how-he-wanted-the-elder-scrolls-6-to-be-the-empire-strikes-back\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">PC Gamer<\/a>, Kuhlmann stated his departure boils down to two reasons \u2013 the first being the off-the-scale amount of bureaucracy that built up at Bethesda over the years.<\/p>\n<p>Having been with the studio for nearly its entire existence and having worked on everything from The Terminator: Skynet and Daggerfall to Starfield, the longtime loremaster watched Bethesda grow from a small group of enthusiasts into a massive corporate machine, even before Microsoft acquired parent company ZeniMax in 2021. That shift naturally brought with it a familiar industry problem \u2013 the need for countless approvals, signatures, and JIRA tickets for even the smallest decisions \u2013 something that didn&#8217;t sit right with Kuhlmann.<\/p>\n<p>As if that wasn&#8217;t enough, the ever-increasing bureaucratization also meant that lead developers and designers were increasingly burdened with managerial duties at the expense of creative work. While the former loremaster stressed this isn&#8217;t necessarily a bad thing, he mentioned that by the time Starfield entered development, &#8220;it had gotten to a scale beyond where I was really enjoying working in that environment.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Speaking to PC Gamer, Kuhlmann stated his departure boils down to two reasons \u2013 the first being the&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":287131,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[79,18,19,17,5,82,3880],"class_list":{"0":"post-287130","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-technology","14":"tag-video-games"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115903514758760466","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287130\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}