The Elder Scrolls 6 continues to be one of gaming’s biggest enigmas, with not much detail to go on except a few sprinkles of occasional information and a teaser trailer from eight years ago, which Bethesda probably regrets showcasing in the first place.
Now, just weeks after confirming that The Elder Scrolls 6 will have more trees than Skyrim, game director Todd Howard has revealed that it will be a ‘classic style’ Bethesda RPG that they (Bethesda Game Studios) know very well.
The Elder Scrolls 6 won’t be a ‘creative detour,’ unlike Starfield and Fallout 76
In an interview with Kinda Funny Games, Howard touched upon what fans can expect from The Elder Scrolls 6 after the studio’s two very unorthodox open world outings with Starfield and Fallout 76.
He says almost assuringly that Starfield and Fallout 76 were “a little bit of a creative detour” from traditional BGS titles such as Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout 3, particularly in terms of exploration, and that “as we [Bethesda] come back to Elder Scrolls 6 that we’re doing now, we’re coming back to that classic style that we’ve missed, that we know really really well.”
When he says ‘classic style,’ it seems he’s talking about how exploration in past BGS titles worked, when players would organically discover something intriguing while going from point A to point B, and divert their attention towards that new distraction.
The same isn’t possible in Starfield because of its incoherent space travel system, and Fallout 76 is a live-service title that, while allowing for roughly similar levels of exploration, is targeted to a whole different audience. As such, Elder Scrolls 6 should be welcoming for fans of the traditional BGS titles.
Another reassuring piece of information coming from this interview is that the majority of Skyrim’s developers are working on TES6, despite some key figures leaving in the last few years, such as the Elder Scrolls loremaster Kurt Kuhlmann.
In the same interview, Howard also revealed that The Elder Scrolls 6 is being powered by a modified Creation Engine 3. As such, players could expect some fidelity and gameplay enhancements over Creation Engine 2’s only production, Starfield.
It’s already been confirmed that Elder Scrolls 6 is using photogrammetry and motion capture to add a more life-like feel to its world and NPCs, so the tech improvement might just be to support its relatively ambitious visual and mechanical endeavours.
To that end, it’s going to be a while until Bethesda provides another look at The Elder Scrolls 6. It’s still a long way off, though Howard has confirmed that the majority of BGS and its partners are actively working on the game, and that it recently crossed a big milestone internally.
Xbox’s June Showcase is a place where we might get another glimpse at this highly anticipated RPG, though there’s a high possibility that the next time we see it would be a lot closer to its launch, or possibly at launch, as Howard teased last year; a shadow drop is a possibility.
