» Tue Jan 19, 2016 1:52 pm I was lurking on these forums when they first announced the formation of the new BGS studio in Montreal a few weeks back, and was kind of surprised by the overall lack of interest - it seemed many people downplayed it as being just some mobile development branch, or else a secondary team who might be working on a new IP that we won't hear about for many years.? But I've been looking into it, and I think most people have overlooked the significance of the news. Put simply, between the merger itself, the dozen or so staff added during Fallout 4, and a crop of nearly 20 new job openings for BGS on Zenimax's site, they will have almost doubled their team size since Skyrim as they move into their new project - which we're assuming for now is TES 6.
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So, first question many people may have: is Montreal just some mobile / tablet developer? No. In the first place, the original team there before the merger involved many more console and PC developers than it did mobile developers. More importantly, however, the new job openings for Montreal are overwhelmingly - indeed almost entirely - console and PC specific. The job requirements constantly demand this, and never even mention app or mobile gaming experience, or programming languages used in mobile development.
Secondly, how do we know it's the same project that BGS Maryland is working on? This is a big one: the word "co-developed" comes up several times in job postings about a future project. They all also refer to their team as "pushing the bleeding-edge of RPG development for the PC and consoles", which is exactly what all Maryland-based jobs refer to as well. So clearly there's a co-developed RPG in the works between both teams.
Thirdly, the engine. There's currently several engine-based jobs - Senior Engine Dev, Havok Physics Dev, Senior VFX Dev - for the Montreal crew being recruited. Also notably, all of these job listings are clearly looking for more than one of each programmer, so even though it's only three job listings, each one is for two or more staff. Now, all of these roles are once again strictly console and PC based, not even requiring knowledge of any mobile developer languages. These programmers are clearly working on a new engine or an update of the Creation Engine.
And what about DLC for Fallout 4 or a new IP; can't they be doing that? Well, like the Maryland team they probably are doing DLC right now - or at least a portion of them. But over the next year both teams will obviously be moving onto their next project, and it's pretty clear based on the complete overlap of requirements (PC and console only, bleeding edge RPG, co-developed project) that it's the same game. Do we know it's TES 6? No, but it does largely rule out the hypothesis that they're a B team working on a second (potentially new IP) game. This by default raises the chances of it being TES 6, simply because there's virtually no chance that there isn't a team somewhere working on it, for obvious financial and fanbase-related reasons.
Lastly, why does any of this even matter? Well, even when Skyrim came out BGS was already on the lower end of the staff size spectrum compared to other AAA games, floating around 100 developers. At the time Todd Howard even said he didn't want to go higher. But since then, dev teams for most major games have gone up to 300, 400 and even 500+ during primary development, usually involving several studios all across the map, and it's hard to remain competitive when your competition has five times the resources. Obviously Todd had his arm twisted on this one, or came around to the idea, otherwise they'd never have branded it as specifically a BGS team. So it's clear that Bethesda has been vetting and grooming this new studio for some time now, and the announcement of their merger into the BGS family right after Fallout 4 shipped is telling - they must be firing up for their next project, and what other project deserves that level of expansion and investment? The logical answer is TES 6.
