Earlier this month, Xbox announced a wave of layoffs unlike anything the corporate has seen before. Every studio underneath the corporate has been impacted, and if one hasn’t been outright sold or let go, they’ve suffered brutal layoffs that you simply argue they might not have the option to come back back from. It’s a really wide-ranging wave of layoffs, and we’re seeing some immense talent let go.
Just to actually show how deep these layoffs go, it has been revealed that a senior character artist that has worked at Bethesda for 27 years and left an everlasting mark on The Elder Scrolls was also laid off recently.
Xbox Just Laid Off The Designer Of The Khajit And Argonian
Among the many layoffs was character artist Christiane Meister — a 27-year veteran of Bethesda and (so far as I can tell) one among the longest tenured women in games, period. She worked on Argonians + Khajiit in TES3, horses in TES4 and TES5, Fallout creatures, and more. (cont’d)
— Lady Nerevar (@ladynerevar.bsky.social) 2026-07-07T21:51:43.381Z
First noticed by BlueSky user Lady Nerevar (thanks PC Gamer), Christiane Meister has worked on just about every modern Elder Scrolls game, having first worked on Khajits and Argonians in Morrowind, before moving onto horses in Oblivion and Skyrim. She has also worked on creatures for the Fallout franchise, and has essentially been a significant a part of Bethesda for close to 3 a long time.
She also gave her original creations a little bit of a makeover for Skyrim, helping to show Argonians and Khajits from creepy beast men into the Argonians and Khajits that all of us love and recognize today.
It’s a large loss for Bethesda and Xbox as a complete, and a layoff that does not make much sense within the grand scheme of things. You’d must assume that level of experience would have been welcome in The Elder Scrolls 6, but on the other hand, most of what Xbox is doing straight away doesn’t make sense outside a couple of spreadsheets.
Hopefully, Meister can find some more work soon, though she has a reasonably impressive resume to fall back on if she must. Not everyone can simply point at a race in The Elder Scrolls and say “I did that”, and Meister definitely deserved quite a bit higher than she’s sadly gotten.