Fans have been waiting for more news about The Elder Scrolls 6 ever since the game was announced back at E3 2018. Aside from the occasional comment and rumors, almost nothing has been revealed about the next game. Its full title, story, and setting remain a mystery to fans of the franchise.
After years of waiting, it's time for fans of The Elder Scrolls to accept that The Elder Scrolls 6 may not be as good as Skyrim. Doing as such could be better for the final product and even fans as well.
Bethesda Since Skyrim
It has been nearly a full decade since Skyrim released, and since then both the franchise and Bethesda itself have seen some huge changes. First, the release of The Elder Scrolls Online revealed areas of every province in Tamriel, something that hadn't been done since The Elder Scrolls: Arena. While The Elder Scrolls Online remains a popular game, revealing so much of the continent could make it much harder for The Elder Scrolls 6 to take fans back to Tamriel and make them experience the same sense of wonder they felt playing their first Elder Scrolls game.
Bethesda itself has undergone some big changes since the development of Skyrim. Fallout 4 released, and while receiving generally positive reviews, it was criticized for its main story and an overall lack of character depth compared to many contemporary RPGs. Fallout 76 attempted to transfer the Fallout franchise to multiplayer, and the end result was a game Todd Howard has since admitted "let a lot of people down."
In fact, it has been speculated that The Elder Scrolls 6 was announced at E3 2018 in order to help cover any flak Fallout 76's announcement might receive. As the years pass, that assessment seems all the more likely. Regardless, Bethesda has made moves since Skyrim's release that may lead some fans to question the studio's judgement when it comes to developing The Elder Scrolls 6.
The Industry Since Skyrim
Microsoft's acquisition of Zenimax Media Inc has led to even more doubt. It has been announced that some future Bethesda games will be Xbox exclusives, though the games in question have not been specified. Skyrim was hugely popular across all platforms, and if Microsoft is willing to make the next Elder Scrolls game an exclusive, it raises questions about the influence of Bethesda's new owner on other aspects of development.
Expectations have also changed since Skyrim, in no small part due to Skyrim's immense success. The Elder Scrolls 5 inspired many RPG studios to attempt to integrate open worlds into their franchises. Since Skyrim's release, some RPGs found a far better balance between open-world exploration and tight, character-driven storytelling than Skyrim was able to achieve.
Skyrim's world barely reacts to the player, presents them with few impactful decisions beyond whether or not to complete certain quests, and has been criticized in the past for its lack of story depth. The true star of Skyrim was its world, but The Elder Scrolls 6 now has to live up to the immensely impressive worlds and stories of games like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt which released after the last Elder Scrolls game. After Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, the studio has yet to prove that it's up to the task to make the next steps.
Succeeding Skyrim and Managing Expectations
What few details have been revealed about The Elder Scrolls 6 do have many fans excited. At Brighton Digital 2020, Todd Howard revealed that the next game would make use of procedurally generated landscapes to create a large world and potentially more realistically sized cities and towns. However, procedural generation was also used to create parts of the countryside in both Oblivion's Cyrodiil and Skyrim, so this reveal doesn't actually give fans a great idea of the next game's scale.
The events of Skyrim also pose The Elder Scrolls 6 with some big challenges. The outcome of Skyrim's Civil War, for example, has huge implications for the balance of power in Tamriel and the Empire's survival. This would be felt no matter where in Tamriel the next game is set. Unless The Elder Scrolls 6 allows players to import old decisions as series like Mass Effect do, it's hard to see how the next game can do anything other than ignore the few big decisions players got to make in Skyrim.
This scratches the surface of one of The Elder Scrolls 6's biggest challenges - growth. It's difficult to see how a series like The Elder Scrolls could have a developing world without the same kind of character-driven storylines found in series like Dragon Age. Indeed, The Elder Scrolls Online shows that Tamriel has been more-or-less the same since at least the Second Era.
Similarly, Bethesda will have to make some big decisions when it comes to new features and priorities in The Elder Scrolls 6. In order for the game to feel like a worthy spiritual successor to Skyrim it could include a more character-driven story, but this might come at the cost of player freedom. The world could be even larger and the player given more freedom than before, but this may make that world feel even shallower than Skyrim's. There are risks no matter which direction Bethesda decides to go down, and the right path is far from clear.
Skyrim may simply have been a unique game, releasing at the right time to influence RPG development for years to come. Fans hoping for The Elder Scrolls 6 to match or surpass the Skyrim experience may be disappointed if they put all their eggs into one basket. Instead, with all of this in mind, it's better to temper and manage expectations than trumping TES6 up to be something that is arguably impossible. Just as no looter shooter has ever been a "Destiny Killer," there's no game that can really replace Skyrim for its impact, even from Bethesda itself.
If the release of much-hyped games like Cyberpunk 2077 has taught RPG fans anything, it's not to get their expectations up too much, regardless of the IP or studio involved. At the end of the day, accepting this possibility and being surprised is better to hype it up and it not meet expectations. Accepting that the quality could be better, worse, or simply unknown may, in the long run, be better for fans and the game itself.
The Elder Scrolls 6 is currently in development.