Speculation is rampant over what possible changes The Elder Scrolls 6 could make in order to justify its absurdly long development window. It's been 14 years since the last true The Elder Scrolls game, and even the most optimistic industry insiders put The Elder Scrolls 6 at least two years down the line. The leaks and official announcements over the years have confirmed that the game is still using the same engine that Bethesda developers have come to be known for, and a full shift to something like Unreal Engine 5 is simply not in the cards.
Piecing together clues from updates and previous trends, it seems more and more likely that, despite what many want, The Elder Scrolls 6 will likely not stray too far off course from previous games in the franchise, especially considering how poorly Bethesda's most recent venture into the unknown—Starfield— went.
Oblivion Remastered is Putting The Elder Scrolls 6 in a Tough Spot
Oblivion Remastered made an important change to the original's formula that's very different from Skyrim, leaving TES 6 stranded between two extremes.
The Skyrim and Oblivion Open-World Formula Works, and Bethesda Knows It
The Elder Scrolls formula is far from perfect, but it's one that has a guaranteed audience built in. There are very few games that try to create a Skyrim or Oblivion-style open-world action RPG, and for good reason. The amount of time, resources, and dedication that goes into realizing that level of scale is astronomical. It's easy to see why most studios prefer smaller projects; it's wiser to make a game that's fun to play but smaller instead of a game that's bigger but empty.
The scope of Skyrim and Oblivion is just one part of the puzzle, however. Whether Bethesda openly admits it or not, one of the biggest reasons for the popularity behind The Elder Scrolls games is the modding scene. One needs to look no further than The Elder Scrolls Online, a game that fundamentally cannot be modified because of its online nature, to realize how big of a role modding plays for The Elder Scrolls games. ESO has just as much lore, questlines, and areas to explore as Skyrim, if not more, but where Skyrim's player count remains steady after a decade, ESO constantly has to struggle to barely keep up. And while a part of it is because of the different nature of the two games, one being an MMO and the other a single-player RPG, moddability plays a huge role as well.
What makes Skyrim a 'forever' game isn't that it's the best at what it does but that it gives modders a canvas to let their imaginations run wild. There are a thousand and one ways to play Skyrim, and only one of them was developed by the studio. The best thing Bethesda ever did was get out of the way. Giving the modding community as much freedom in The Elder Scrolls 6 as they had in Skyrim and Oblivion is a no-brainer.
Bethesda has confirmed that The Elder Scrolls 6 is being developed using the Creation Engine 2, an updated version of what was used to make Skyrim. While this engine is definitely more capable than its predecessor, it's built on top of it, uses the same file structure, and relies on many of the same processes to function. The Creation Kit can also be made for this engine, as seen with Starfield, which means it's just as moddable as Skyrim and Oblivion. Considering the overwhelmingly positive reception of Oblivion Remastered, Bethesda may choose to wrap a visual layer of Unreal Engine 5 on top of the Creation Engine 2. This would allow The Elder Scrolls 6 to be just as modder-friendly as Skyrim and Oblivion while making use of UE5's incredible visual prowess.
Starfield's Procedural Generation Was a Failed Experiment
One of the things that made Skyrim great was that traveling from point A to point B felt like anything could happen. Stuff like random enemy encounters, a Thalmor prison transport, or a new cave with great loot inside weren't exceptions but the rule. In order to make procedural generation work, Starfield stripped most of that out of the equation and was the worse off for it. Part of it was Bethesda being experimental, and part of it was to keep Starfield's identity separate from Fallout. Regardless, it didn't work then, and it won't work now. Bethesda's strength has always been handcrafting interesting locations to explore, and that's the direction The Elder Scrolls 6 is likely to take.
- Released
- 2026
- ESRB
- m
- Developer(s)
- Bethesda Game Studios
- Publisher(s)
- Bethesda Softworks
- Franchise
- The Elder Scrolls
- Genre(s)
- RPG
