Bethesda tease "early builds" for Elder Scrolls 6 while celebrating the series' 30th anniversary
WIP versions offer "the same joy, excitement and promise of adventure"
Bethesda have marked the 30th anniversary of Elder Scrolls with the faintest of mentions of The Elder Scrolls 6, the faraway next game in the fated fantasy RPG series. They say they're even now playing work-in-progress versions of the game, which was announced five years ago, and are having a jolly old time revisiting Tamriel. Alright for some.
"Even now, returning to Tamriel and playing early builds has us filled with the same joy, excitement and promise of adventure," reads a statement posted on Xitter. Such brazen fan-baiting! Time to rewatch the teaser trailer and dream of fus-ro-dahing our way into the sunset.
OK, enough pining over teaser trailers. Let us dust off the annals and recap what little we know about the next Elder Scrolls game. It's rumoured to be set in Hammerfell and - as of 2020, at least - will run on a new version of the same engine as Starfield. According to Bethesda's former design director Bruce Nesmith, it will also likely retain Skyrim's learn-by-doing approach to character levelling together with "traces" of its magic system.
"The whole 'you do it to get better at it', while that was not my unique idea, I had a large hand in that - that's absolutely going to continue," Nesmith speculated last year. "A lot of the concepts dealing with how you level, things like that - there'll be a bunch of new ideas thrown in, but I'm betting some of the stuff I worked on will still survive."
As for the Elder Scrolls 6 release date, it's likely over five years away.
For my money, the next Elder Scrolls has a couple of big questions to answer. One is how it will follow or depart from Starfield, which strongly feels like the last hurrah for the Oblivion-through-Fallout-4 brand of open world RPG - big, scenic and full of stories but also shallow, cluttered and curiously unimaginative, a far cry from the esoterica of Fallout and Morrowind.
Another is how it will build on ZeniMax's once-scorned MMO The Elder Scrolls Online, which has been chugging away gamely for nigh a decade, relentlessly adding different Elder Scrolls regions to its world in the course of a shift to free-to-play. Solo players might shy away from it, but ESO has become an enormous repository of both Elder Scrolls lore and information about Elder Scrolls players - the creators of TES6 would be foolish not to take inspiration from it, surely.
The rest of the 30th anniversary post hails both Elder Scrolls developers and the series' legions of modders. It also trumpets Bethesda's approach to videogame preservation, commenting that "one of our goals has been to make sure everyone can still enjoy these games today, and we continue to work on new ways for you to experience them". Arena and Daggerfall remain free to download from Elderscrolls.com, don't-you-know, while Morrowind and Oblivion are backwards-compatible on Xbox and "Skyrim is on... everything". I wonder if Skyrim will still be the yardstick against which TES6 is measured when it finally ships.
A few current Bethesda devs have celebrated Elder Scrolls' 30th anniversary on their personal Xitters. "Hard to put into words my relationship with, and love for, the Elder Scrolls," studio design director Emil Pagliarulo wrote. "Began 30 years ago when I first played Arena. Fast forward to 2024: I've had the honor of doing design and writing work on TES since Morrowind's Bloodmoon DLC. As careers go, I hit the lottery."
Do you have any Elder Scrolls memories to share?