Bethesda Game Studios is dedicating most of its attention to The Elder Scrolls 6 now, and it's come as a breath of fresh air to the developers – one that hits quite differently to Fallout and Starfield, according to Todd Howard.
The Bethesda boss himself reveals as much during a recent roundtable interview attended by GamesRadar+, explaining how Starfield affected Bethesda's appetite for other projects.
"The majority of this building is working on The Elder Scrolls 6," he admits. "It's amazing for us to come back to it. I gotta be honest, right? Being in that world after not developing in Elder Scrolls – it's so different than Starfield, so different than Fallout – it feels great for us."
Howard continues, admitting, "We feel we're in a really good place with these franchises. Obviously, we're around Fallout stuff as well, and we feel good about that. The trick is still we have three big audiences, and in some ways, three big franchises – and in a lot of ways, the franchise is the studio. Skyrim is somewhat the sequel to Fallout 3. Fallout 4 is somewhat our follow-up to Skyrim."
There is, after all, "a lot of crossover" among fans. "There's definitely people who strongly, strongly prefer one over the other, which is totally understandable," though – and I'd certainly agree, as an Elder Scrolls truther myself.
"They're very different vibes, and they're different vibes to develop," as Howard puts it. When it comes to The Elder Scrolls, for instance, "there's something very romantic" about the fantasy setting and the feeling it gives of "a world that you feel you can almost step out into."
It's not much in the way of news regarding The Elder Scrolls 6, but it's something. It's at least reassuring to learn that Bethesda has its full focus on what might just be one of the most hotly anticipated new games underway, and that the devs are feeling good about it.
Excitingly, Howard also says that, with The Elder Scrolls 6, the studio has "handled" the Creation Engine "better than we ever have" thanks to lessons learned from Starfield.
In other words, quite a lot of work is evidently going into the upcoming RPG, and Bethesda seems confident about it to boot. Here's hoping we get to see it sometime soon, though… It has been a whopping eight years since its infamous teaser at E3 in 2018, after all.
