The Elder Scrolls VI: release date, rumors, news, and more | Digital Trends

At the end of its E3 2018 press conference, Bethesda played not one but two tantalizing teaser trailers. The first was for Starfield, a science-fiction epic that marks Bethesda’s first new franchise in 25 years. The teaser was vague, showing space, a planet, and an odd-looking object floating around that could be a satellite, ship, or perhaps even a space station. The second teaser trailer was for the game everyone knew was eventually coming: The Elder Scrolls VI.

The brief trailer merely showed a vast rocky terrain and the title (but no subtitle), managing to be even more ambiguous than Starfield‘s trailer.

Considering Starfield is slated to launch before The Elder Scrolls VI and was recently pushed back to 2023, it will be at least several years before the next mainline entry in the fantasy RPG series lands on consoles and PC. The Elder Scrolls VI hasn’t been confirmed for any specific platforms, but it will likely launch on the current generation of consoles, specifically the Xbox Series X/S, with the PlayStation 5 still being a mystery.

We have a long road ahead before it launches, and this year’s Xbox conference is another chance to learn more about this highly anticipated title, but here’s everything you need to know about The Elder Scrolls VI, from concrete info to speculation.

Further reading

Release date

This is the question every fan wants answered. Unfortunately, you certainly won’t be able to play it any time soon, which is unfortunate given it’s been 10 years since the release of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. While no one at Bethesda has given a release window, we know that The Elder Scrolls VI isn’t too far along in development. At E3 2018, Bethesda Game Studios executive producer Todd Howard said that the game is currently in pre-production. That means it’s not playable yet.

During an interview with GameSpot in 2019, Zenimax Online Studios game director Matt Firor said, “You can go back and count the years between Bethesda Game Studios releases, and you’ll get the idea that [The Elder Scrolls VI is] not coming anytime soon.” The smallest gap between Bethesda Game Studios’ major releases has been two years, between The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3. It’s usually at least three years, though.

The struggle of switching between two massive franchises could also be to blame. During an interview with IGN, Howard said, “We had done so many things, we were going Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Fallout … You have this Starfield game in your head, you sort of say, well, when? It can be never, you could say never. But look, we’re creatives, and it’s like we have to make this game, and this is the time. So Elder Scrolls VI is going to have to wait a little bit. And plus, again, Elder Scrolls Online is doing so well, it’s so vibrant, that this is the time, both for us creatively and our audience.”

Starfield is the next game to be coming out from Bethesda, and while it was originally slated for November 2022, it was pushed back to sometime in the first half of 2023. This delay will no doubt have a domino effect on whatever timeline there may have been for Elder Scrolls VI, meaning even our low expectations of even seeing this game in the next three or four years need to be lowered even further.

Given what we know about Starfield and Bethesda’s game release history, it would appear that The Elder Scrolls VI is at least four years away. And considering Bethesda didn’t begin development until the latter half of 2017 at the earliest, we still have a long wait ahead of us.

Platforms

Given the fact that we need to wait on another game that has no firm release date to come out before The Elder Scrolls VI even enters full production, there’s no doubt that this is going to be an Xbox Series X generation game for consoles, with PC, of course, being a standard platform for the series. However, there is one new wrench thrown into this discussion, which is the acquisition of Zenimax and, by extension, Bethesda by Microsoft in 2020. This obviously has no bearing on anyone looking to play this on PC, and Xbox players who subscribe to Game Pass can expect to get the game for free on day one as part of the subscription unless the promise of all first-party games being available on the service changes by then. That just leaves the question of PS5 users, and at this point, there’s no concrete answer if Microsoft will opt to make this a console exclusive. They have been upfront since the purchase was announced that they weren’t interested in excluding gamers with this purchase, with Phil Spencer going so far as to say, “This deal was not done to take games away from another player base like that. Nowhere in the documentation that we put together was: ‘How do we keep other players from playing these games?’ We want more people to be able to play games, not fewer people to be able to play games.”

Todd Howard also made a comment about the possibility of The Elder Scrolls VI being limited to Xbox consoles, stating, “I would agree that is hard to imagine.” While that is somewhat comforting, he also added, “We haven’t gone through all of that, to be honest … We’ll do that as part of Microsoft as well. They’ve been pretty open on other platforms and not just within Xbox. This is an outside perspective, but if you go back 10 years at Microsoft, you wouldn’t expect them to have a full Office suite on an iPhone either.” While this all sounds hopeful for a multi-platform release, we will have to wait and see.

Trailer

High Rock has only been mentioned by name in mainline Elder Scrolls games since Morrowind. It has, however, appeared in Elder Scrolls Online. Likewise, for Hammerfell, which has been a location in the Elder Scrolls Online but only mentioned by name since Morrowind in the mainline series.

GamesRadar’s Leon Hurley offered an interesting theory of his own, mentioning the sunken island of Yokuda, which is said to have featured “rocky barren hills.” A setting of Yokuda would mean The Elder Scrolls VI is a prequel.

Still, based on the minimal information we have, we think that Hammerfell or High Rock are the most likely locations. But who knows, really, as Howard has also said some aspects of the trailer aren’t in line with the region at large. Bethesda probably wants to keep fans guessing until the full reveal.

Gameplay

Gameplay has remained largely the same for the past few iterations of The Elder Scrolls games, and if that trend remains true, then we can probably guess the basics of how it will play. Odds are we will make our new character and control them from either a first- or third-person perspective with the ability to change between them and build ourselves to use a large range of weapons and skills, from fists and blades to bows and magic. Hopefully, Bethesda has some new ideas for how to spice up the variety of combat, but the core they are starting with is at least solid.

There will no doubt be a new version of the skills and leveling system to dive into as well. Again, we expect some new additions we can’t predict just yet, but things like lock-picking, speech, and smithing will likely make a return. As far as any completely new gameplay systems are concerned, and this is pure speculation, we would love to see a more robust relationship system between your character and companions and other NPCs for more realistic and evolving interactions. Skyrim did have a marriage system in place, but it was extremely barebones and limited.

Multiplayer

DLC

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