For over seven years, fans have been eagerly awaiting news about the upcoming sixth installment of The Elder Scrolls. However, studio head Todd Howard urges patience.
When The Elder Scrolls 6 was announced, we were all a little younger: In the summer of 2018, E3 was still happening, Angela Merkel was Chancellor, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance was the hot newcomer in the role-playing genre.
Not much has happened since then – at least with regard to the sixth Elder Scrolls installment. Apart from the first 36-second teaser, we haven’t seen anything new about the upcoming Bethesda epic for years.
And according to Bethesda studio head Todd Howard, that’s how it’s going to stay for the time being. He would prefer to release the game without any further information as a so-called shadow drop – i.e., as a surprise and without a major marketing phase, trailer, or other advertising (much like the recent Oblivion Remaster).
Playable, yet so far away
In an interview with GQ magazine, Howard said that The Elder Scrolls 6 is still a long way off
. He doesn’t want to get fans’ hopes up.
However, Elder Scrolls 6 is apparently already playable and is being put through its paces internally at Bethesda. Howard reveals that the game is currently his “daily occupation.” Just a few days ago, a large playtest took place in the studio. “You really have to look very closely at the screen and ask yourself: What is that?
What does the game still need? Where are we at? […] Great games are played, not made. And the screen doesn’t lie,” says Howard.
However, playable is far from finished. And it will probably be at least two years before Elder Scrolls 6 reaches its final state.
A creative break
But why is it taking so long? After all, Bethesda could have made a new Elder Scrolls game immediately after the release of Fallout 4, instead of launching a completely new brand with Starfield, which was met with significantly less enthusiasm from gamers than the acclaimed Elder Scrolls franchise.
According to Howard, after Skyrim, the team simply needed a creative break
from Tamriel and wanted to experiment with other worlds. But since working on the Oblivion remaster, which was created by Virtuos and approved by Bethesda, they are now fully back in the Elder Scrolls world.
Will TES 6 be a shadow drop?
This remaster also showed Howard what an optimal release for the new Elder Scrolls could look like: I like to just announce things and then release them. My perfect version – and I’m not saying that’s how it will be – would be for it to take a while and then one day the game would just appear.“ The developer is referring to a ”shadow drop.”
However, given the popularity of the brand, this is highly unlikely.
The reason TES 6 was announced so early in the first place is that fans would otherwise have been all over Bethesda to find out more about the future of the series. Looking back, I probably should have announced it in a more relaxed manner at the time
, Howard says today.
