The Elder Scrolls VI was first revealed three years ago, but we’ve heard precious little about it since then. This is likely to be for one very good reason: in an interview with The Telegraph, Bethesda Games Studio director Todd Howard confirmed the game is still in a design phase. When development does eventually start, the game will be built on the new Creation Engine 2.
Creation Engine 2 has been built for Starfield, a game now confirmed to be exclusive to Xbox, and this is where the team is concentrating on development right now. However, the team also had The Elder Scrolls VI in mind and the engine will become a “new tech base” for games moving on. Howard went on to add:
It’s good to think of The Elder Scrolls 6 as still being in a design [phase]… but we’re checking the tech: “Is this going to handle the things we want to do in that game?” Every game will have some new suites of technology so Elder Scrolls 6 will have some additions on to Creation Engine 2 that that game is going to require.
Despite Bethesda’s Vice President Pete Hines insisting the game wouldn’t be revealed until it was close to release, the game was announced very briefly at E3 2018. The reason for this was to confirm the publisher was still invested in single-player games despite the recent release of Fallout 76. It’s clear the game is still years away from release and they’ve even said it’s likely to be years before we even hear any more news about it.
This hasn’t stopped fans from speculating, though. The game’s location has already been settled and many people are speculating it is set in Hammerfell. First there was the theory that the position of the mountains in the E3 teaser trailer matched the map layout of Volenfell and Sentenial City on the coast of Illiac Bay in The Elder Scrolls Online. More recently, Reddit also believed they’d found a map outline of High Rock, Illiac Bay and Hammerfell etched into the control panel of the spaceship in the Starfield footage shown at E3 2021.
Microsoft has yet to officially announce whether or not The Elder Scrolls VI will be exclusive to Xbox with all Bethesda games being decided on a case-by-case basis. Howard has previously said it would be “hard to imagine” the game being restricted to Xbox platforms. There’s always a chance it will be a timed-exclusive, though, with how early it is in development, there’s a good possibility the decision will be made to keep this one on Xbox, just like Starfield. As soon as we hear more then we’ll let you know.
[Source: The Telegraph, Reddit]
