Unionised Bethesda Games Studios staff embroiled in Microsoft’s latest round of mass layoffs have expressed further doubts about the company’s ability to create games at the “quality level” of the very bestest Elder Scrolls and Fallout projects, as they continue to haggle with Microsoft over severance terms.

“We thought we were safe,” comments BGS gameplay engineer and union representative Anne Barrett, in an interview with The Guardian. “I mean, Bethesda Games Studios is Skyrim, it’s Fallout. We have really highly anticipated stuff coming out. We thought that the work we were doing was going to keep us safe. And instead, we got brought into a meeting that was two minutes long, to end, in some cases, decades of career at the company. It was just devastating.”

Alex Nguyen, a union bargainer who is still employed at Bethesda Games Studios Dallas, also reports being mystified by the targeting of the cuts. “I’m on the character art team, and we lost two people who had been there for decades,” he told the paper. “They did everything that was asked, they were very passionate, they were great at their jobs. They worked on all this stuff that made our creatures, characters and armour feel real. Outstanding employees. It never made any sense.”

Barrett is of the opinion that the reduced Bethesda will struggle to make games that have the same look and feel as the studio’s older first-person RPGs. “I don’t know how you create games at the quality level we were without the institutional knowledge that’s been lost,” she adds elsewhere in the piece. “We have proprietary tech. Our titles have a very well-known visual identity. And when you lose the people who built the tech, when you lose the people who were improving it, you can’t just throw new people at that problem, right? You can’t replace an artist with someone brand new and say: ‘Now replicate what they were doing 15, 20 years ago.’ The company has said that they can do it. I disagree.”

Bethesda Games Studios are currently working on The Elder Scrolls 6, which is possibly the only game that commands the same degree of cultish fervour as GTA 6. This isn’t the first time current and former Bethesda developers have aired their outrage and scepticism about the stripped-down team’s ability to bring it home. “We were already running a tight ship and are worried about this delaying the game,” one anonymous staffer commented in July.

The situation appears worse at Doom creator id Software, which has reportedly been gutted, with anonymous developers accusing Microsoft of entertaining a “disposable worker mentality”, though senior staff have pushed back on this suggestion.

As for the state of the negotiations between the Bethesda union and Microsoft, Barrett told the Guardian that Microsoft have “not made enough substantial movement to care for the very real consequences impacted members are facing.” In response, a Microsoft spokesperson declared that “we have offered severance terms comparable to the generous package provided to our non-union represented colleagues.” Recently, Bethesda union members held rallies outside nine company offices in the US. Modders have stocked Fallout 4 with OneBGS protest signs in solidarity.