If you’ve played a new Elder Scrolls game anytime since 2002, you’ve seen Christiane Meister’s work: The senior character artist spent 27 years at Bethesda, contributing to games from Morrowind to Skyrim. As of this week’s round of Xbox layoffs, however, her tenure is over.
The news came to my attention via a post by Lady Nerevar on Bluesky, though I double-checked Meister’s LinkedIn and, sure enough, she is currently looking for work: “I was in charge of design, creation, and management of character art assets throughout all of the Elder Scrolls projects, starting with Morrowind to our latest title, Skyrim.
“This included drawing concepts and seeing the art piece through to the final stage of getting the object in the game as well as handing off concepts to other artists in the character group. I also oversaw outsourced assets from design to final in-game models.”
As for her role in Skyrim, Bethesda still (bitterly) has a ‘meet the artist’ blog from 2022, wherein Meister talks a little bit about how she gave the khajiit and argonians a facelift between Oblivion and Skyrim: