The Elder Scrolls 6 is Much Further Away Than We Thought

The date when Elder Scrolls 6  will arrive is a question that many players will inquire about, particularly those who’s dabbled with past titles such as Morrowind, Oblivion, or the heavily ported, and much moddable Skyrim. There are reasons, however, to believe that a release date for Elder Scrolls 6 is still nowhere in sight, due to recent news reports. Elder Scrolls 6, ever since it was first teased by Bethesda back in E3 for 2018 has garnered the curiosities of many fans of  Bethesda and large open-world titles.

This interest was arguably not sated by the release of Fallout 76 in the same year, a game riddled with issues still on its way to becoming the game that was initially promised by Bethesda during its public reveal. This tumultuous release might have dampened some players’ anticipation of the future of Bethesda. The quality of the mainline titles that Bethesda has yet to produce for their important IPs, Fallout and Elder Scrolls. Though wanting a release date is likely no longer on the forefront of people’s minds, players most certainly still want Elder Scrolls 6 to come out.

In a recent interview with IGN, Todd Howard the director for Bethesda Game Studios confirmed that Elder Scrolls 6 will be worked on following the release of Starfield, an action roleplaying game taking place in space that’s been delayed to 2023. His response to Bethesda Game’s release schedule reads as follows:

“Yes, Elder Scrolls 6 is in pre-production,” he said, “and, you know, we’re going to be doing Fallout 5 after that, so our slate’s pretty full going forward for a while. We have some other projects that we look at from time to time as well.”

This means that Bethesda has yet to commence work on the project that they’ve announced back in 2018, but is planning or completing their plans for the Skyrim sequel. The news might not sound pleasing as a result of the laborious amount of time and work that goes into producing and releasing a triple-A title to physical and digital retailers. For reference, using Bethesda’s product, there was a five-year gap between Oblivion and Skyrim, which should help to provide perspective as to the many years that goes into video game production to make a full product possible.

Though one could argue that Todd Howard and the dev teams working under him have their workload set out for them due to the numerous IPs that they are attempting to cultivate or refurbish. In hindsight, the announcement back in 2018 might have seemed irresponsible to players who were eagerly anticipating the arrival of a full-blown Elder Scrolls successor, if they didn’t fancy the multiplayer-oriented concept of Elder Scrolls Online. With this wait looking more and more likely to span nearly a decade.

The Elder Scrolls VI is confirmed to be in pre-production.