It’s been a while since Bethesda has created a controversy, let’s fix that quickly shall we? In preperation for the new expansion to the Elder Scrolls Online, Zenimax Online Studios decided to ask one of Bethesda’s sister companies, Bethesda Netherlands, to design a tabletop game based around the Elder Scrolls and in particular being based in the fictional continent of Elsweyr.
After the design sheets and downloadable templates were released online for people to print and try out however many people saw strange similarities with that of another tabletop campaign, specifically the D&D one known as The Black Road. It turns out that someone over at the studio simply took most of the content from that campaign and simply put an Elder Scrolls skin over the top of it. This was so obvious that one of the co-creators of The Black Road, Paige Leitman, posted a short presentation on his Twitter feed showing side-by-side comparisons of the two tabletop experiences so people could see just how bad the plagiarism is.
Bethesda has now removed the experience from their website and is launching an investigation as to what happened here and who was the lazy person who decided to do this. Heads are certainly going to roll for this blatant stealing of someone else’s content and I for one am saddened to see this happen. Hopefully this won’t develop to anything worse but you never know these days. That’s all for now, and as always. It’s not just a game, It’s a Life.