Summary
- The Elder Scrolls 6 needs to raise the bar in combat, storytelling, and world design, and Baldur's Gate 3 is setting a high standard.
- The Elder Scrolls 6 will likely pay homage to Blackreach, a distinct and eerie underground environment in Skyrim, by including a massive underground area of its own. That area should look to Baldur's Gate 3 for inspiration.
- The Underdark in Baldur's Gate 3 provides a template for The Elder Scrolls 6's underground realms, offering complexity, dynamism, and rich narrative content with intelligent enemies and conflicting goals.
Over the course of the past decade, there have been countless seminal RPGs and open-world games released that have raised the bar on what gamers have come to expect in terms of combat, storytelling, and world design - a bar that The Elder Scrolls 6 now needs to clear. Baldur's Gate 3, arguably the biggest RPG of 2023, is certainly one of the games that is lifting the bar for The Elder Scrolls 6, and the latter can learn a number of lessons from the former, specifically when designing one key area.
While The Elder Scrolls 6 might not replicate everything from Skyrim, there is one area that it will likely pay homage to in some way: Blackreach. This sprawling underground environment is iconic for a number of reasons, including its distinct aesthetic, eerie tone, and great opportunities for worthwhile exploration. The Elder Scrolls 6 probably won't take place in the country of Skyrim, so an exact recreation of Blackreach is improbable, but some sort of massive, multilayered underground area will most likely be included, as such environments are staples in open-world RPGs, and Blackreach's design principles would make some sort of return in this case. Assuming that Bethesda does craft an extensive underground zone, it should look at one Baldur's Gate 3 area as a template.
What The Elder Scrolls 6 Can Learn From Baldur’s Gate 3’s Underdark
As previously mentioned, the bar was already high for The Elder Scrolls 6, and Baldur's Gate 3 certainly didn't help lower it. While Larian's latest game does several things right, its environment design and exploration are definitely major highlights. One of the most unexpectedly impressive parts of the game is the Underdark, a huge, complex underground region that games like The Elder Scrolls 6 should be inspired by when crafting similar subterranean realms.
Most players will first encounter the Underdark during the main campaign of Baldur's Gate 3, when attempting to reach Moonrise Towers. Players with preconceived notions of underground levels in games may imagine the Underdark as a series of drab, nondescript caverns, but the actual zone could not be more different from this. The Underdark is dangerous, unsettling, and actually seems to have taken some inspiration from some of Skyrim's iconic underground locations, Blackreach included. The Underdark is filled with alien, glowing fungi that light the paths the player will be traveling, paths lined with disturbing and formidable creatures, alongside ancient, abandoned structures. In these ways, the Underdark is similar to Blackreach.
Where the Underdark differs from Blackreach is in its complexity and dynamism. Blackreach may be filled with enemies and side content, but it feels mostly abandoned and devoid of life. This is typical of so many underground regions in video games, which is why some gamers may dread these levels. The Underdark takes a rather different approach; it's dense, geographically complex, and multilayered. Players have to wrestle with the environment in more ways than one, and the history of the area is still being written as the protagonists explore it.
The Elder Scrolls is defined by choice, but there aren't too many interesting choices to be made in Blackreach and other underground areas. Contrast this with the Underdark, which is crawling with not just mindless monsters, but groups of intelligent humanoids as well, with their own goals that may conflict or align with those of the player. A good example of this is the Dwarf slavers that have taken over a Deep stronghold. This sort of rich, high-stakes narrative content is something that is missing in the underground regions of Skyrim and previous The Elder Scrolls games.
The follow-up to Skyrim is going to be very different from Baldur's Gate 3, but comparisons between the two will likely still be drawn. This is because, despite their differences, they are both ambitious Western RPGs, and potential mechanics like in-game relationships in The Elder Scrolls 6 now have to abide by the new standard set by Baldur's Gate 3, at least in the eyes of gaming audiences. The Elder Scrolls 6 shouldn't try to copy Baldur's Gate 3, but there is plenty that it can learn from it, with underground environments being but one example.
The Elder Scrolls 6 is in development.