Summary
- The Elder Scrolls 6 needs to improve gold balancing to make it more valuable and impactful in gameplay.
- Gold acquisition in TES games scales unevenly, often lacking meaningful items to purchase.
- Bethesda should make being rich a viable roleplaying playstyle, with the ability to influence particular regions with gold, and tie certain quests to player spending.
When it eventually releases, The Elder Scrolls 6 is sure to be one of the biggest games of the year, if not its generation. In the long wait since Skyrim, plenty of fans have created wish lists for features they want to see improved, discussed lore theories, and even started whole careers based on exploring the long-running fantasy IP. Although there has been no main game for 14 years, Bethesda and Zenimax have not sat idle, supplementing the series with The Elder Scrolls: Online and other spin-offs, each fleshing out various core features of the IP.
More recently, though, Oblivion Remastered was shadow-dropped, immersing many newer fans in an older game. For the first time in a while, there was renewed discussion about what features Oblivion did better than Skyrim, and vice versa, and it seems to have successfully whetted the appetite for the next installment. However, there is one core feature, executed differently in each game, that has never quite lived up to what it could be, and if The Elder Scrolls 6 is going to be a big game, it needs to remedy it once and for all.
Oblivion Remastered is Proof The Elder Scrolls 6 Should Put Its Own Spin on a Standout Magic Feature
Oblivion Remastered makes a strong case for The Elder Scrolls 6 to add the ability to craft spells, but not exactly like Oblivion's.
The Elder Scrolls 6 Needs to Make Gold Matter
Gold, money, Septims - currency in The Elder Scrolls goes by many names, but it sadly doesn’t have many functions. While it can be found in chests or obtained by selling items, there aren’t enough uses for it to truly matter in any playstyle, and the way it’s balanced, Bethesda has created the problem of players being too poor early on, and too rich in the late-game. With TES 6 likely to be the largest game in the series, it would be a good opportunity for Bethesda to nail down some of the worldbuilding and gameplay systems like gold, giving it real value outside of producing insanely expensive potions for fun.
The Two Biggest Problems With Gold in TES Explained
There are two major problems with gold. The first is that acquiring it is very unbalanced. In the early hours of a playthrough, players will often be selling even expensive items for very low asking prices, while buying basic necessities such as arrows is difficult due to the high costs. As a player levels up, the gold comes rolling in, and having gained a frugal mind for their money, a lot of players end up not buying much from shops, instead only selling looted armor and gems. Eventually, they’re richer than the Black-Briars and Silver-Bloods put together, and there isn’t any useful purpose for all the acquired money.
The second problem is that there isn’t anything good to buy. Outside of player homes, of which usually only one is needed, regular merchants simply don’t sell useful items. There are a few exceptions, of course. Players can power-level alchemy and smithing in Skyrim by purchasing the entire stock of a merchant and selling the crafted wares back, but it’s unlikely that anyone will go to Madesi in Riften to buy a ring when rings are plentiful in chests. Oblivion does try to make merchants more desirable to purchase from, with the persuasion system improving prices, and many of them stocking a uniquely enchanted item. Unfortunately, these items are often too expensive in the early game, and after a certain level, players can easily find or make better versions.
The Elder Scrolls 6 Can Learn a Big Lesson From Oblivion Remastered and Dune
There is a very important lesson The Elder Scrolls 6 needs to learn from its influences if its is going to be a game that lasts as long as Skyrim.
The Argument for Gold Being Scarcer in The Elder Scrolls 6
One of the greatest assets to The Elder Scrolls series is immersion, and there is little more immersion-breaking than being a millionaire through selling ten stacks of iron armor to an alchemist each time the player enters a city. When a bed at an inn can be bought for ten gold, and a house for 5000, it makes having hundreds of thousands of gold pointless, and buying huge stacks of the most expensive items trivial.
There is an argument to be made for making gold scale less aggressively. While some players likely love Skyrim’s broken alchemy system, creating potions worth more than a house with ingredients that cost 100 gold, balancing this system better would help the late-game income scaling a lot. Similarly, gold itself should be rarer, rewarded in smaller chunks, available less in chests, making it feel like an asset to have. It’s a much more immersive experience to feel like a character is living within their means instead of being rich enough to buy all the homes in a city.
The Elder Scrolls 6 Needs to Make Gold Matter in More Circumstances
Bethesda has created the problem of players being too poor early on, and too rich in the late game.
It shouldn’t just be scarcer, it should also matter more. Merchants need to offer desirable and affordable items to players that are worth the investment, and a rebalance of certain loot could help with that. For example, Orcish Boots are a strong mid-game item, and having them available for purchase at an orc blacksmith for a high, but attainable, price could offset them being very rare in random loot chests. Merchants could even have certain quests tied into how much a player spends with them, as favored customers could be hired to help with specific problems, perhaps retrieving shipments or sabotaging another merchant.
Being Rich Could Be a Genuine Playstyle in TES 6
As players will inevitably find ways to make obscene amounts of money, Bethesda could lean into this aspect, allowing them to roleplay as merchant lords. This kind of playstyle would see a player pay for mercenaries to protect them, using their wealth to influence local politics, bypass certain quests, and pay off local guard barracks. By investing very high sums of money in one community, a player could become a lord of sorts, recruiting NPCs to do their more menial tasks. Skyrim’s Creation Club experimented with the idea by adding player farms, and Fallout 4’s settlements could offer a similar experience.
Player Housing and Settlements Should Only Be Maxxed Out by Very Wealthy Players
Speaking of which, it seems likely that Bethesda will add settlement building in The Elder Scrolls 6, as it has been a feature of Fallout 4, 76, and Starfield. This brings with it a huge perk for players with lots of gold, as it allows them to roleplay as a settler, start a mining operation, or perhaps build a castle. The investment required to get a settlement to the highest tier might be enormous, so only characters with the right perks would be able to afford it, making gold feel valuable again. Similarly, these could allow merchant roleplayers to set up streams of income, meaning dungeon-delving isn’t necessary for a late-game aristocrat player.
- Released
- 2026
- ESRB
- m
- Developer(s)
- Bethesda Game Studios
- Publisher(s)
- Bethesda Softworks
- Franchise
- The Elder Scrolls
- Genre(s)
- RPG
