Like it or not, The Elder Scrolls VI is still a very, very long way away. The vast majority of insiders have put The Elder Scrolls VI release date at around 2025 at the absolute earliest. That’s how far off we are from a release.
Tyler McVicker, the former Valve News Network insider who correctly predicted the existence of a Half-Life prequel months before Half-Life: Alyx was announced, suggested earlier this year that the game won't launch until 2026. We also know that Bethesda’s 2022 RPG Starfield is the current focus, so work won’t even start on The Elder Scrolls VI in earnest for at least another year.
Assuming The Elder Scrolls VI launches in 2026, that’ll mean a whopping 15-year gap between it and its predecessor, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. As it stands, it’s already been 10 years since Skyrim launched and we’re still no closer to knowing much at all about the anticipated sequel.
Advert
Bethesda Game Studios director Todd Howard acknowledged the huge chasm between the two games in a recent interview. Speaking with IGN as part of a 10th anniversary Skyrim retrospective, Howard said he’d love to release The Elder Scrolls VI sooner rather than later if he could - but it’s just not possible.
“Would you plan to have the kind of gap we’re having between Skyrim and the follow-up? I can’t say that’s a good thing,” Howard said. “I wish I could wave a wand and the game that we want to make, and we have or haven’t started things on just came out. Absolutely. But there’s other things we want to do, right? Obviously, Fallout 4 was a huge success, we spent a lot of time on that. We wanted to go into online with Fallout 76.
“We felt doing something like Starfield – we’d wanted to do something else for a long time and play in a new universe. Well, if not now—I’m going back in time, we started it right after Fallout 4, so 2015, end of it—if not now, when? And it felt like the when, if we didn’t do it then, the when could be never.
“And we felt pretty good with where Elder Scrolls was as a franchise, particularly with Elder Scrolls Online, that now was the time we could do Starfield.”
Advert
Howard added that the biggest reason behind the wait for The Elder Scrolls VI is perhaps the simplest of all: Bethesda wants to get it right.
“Hopefully Elder Scrolls VI, you don’t want to say hey, that it’s worth that kind of wait, but that it does stand up to the series as it has been in a really big, impactful way for when it comes out,” he finished.
Featured Image Credit: BethesdaTopics: The Elder Scrolls 6, Bethesda