The Elder Scrolls 6 has some seriously huge shoes to fill. Skyrim sold 20 million copies between 2011 and 2014 and has continued to sell well on Steam nearly ten years after its release. Not only that, but no first-person RPG has achieved the same critical success as Skyrim since its release, leaving the previous game one of few reference points for developing the next game.
However, as is so often the case with the Elder Scrolls series, the modding community comes to the rescue. Skyblivion is an ongoing volunteer project to rebuild the entirety of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion in the Skyrim engine, and the excitement around it could be indicative of the features to keep and improve upon in The Elder Scrolls 6.
Gameplay Lessons
Skyblivion’s appeal isn’t just that it updates the graphics of Oblivion to match Skyrim’s. While Skyrim’s graphical leap forward is significant, it is possible to make Oblivion look very good already using graphic enhancing mods, and the difference alone would not be enough to motivate a total remake.
Skyrim’s melee combat may have been criticized, but it was a huge step up from Oblivion for many fans of the series. While Oblivion’s class system was far more complex than Skyrim’s, combat was significantly clunkier, and composed mostly of running back and forward towards the enemy swinging a sword until they rag-dolled to the floor. One of Skyrim’s biggest strengths was that it made the game extremely accessible. Combat, though clunky, was very simple.
The smooth simplicity of Skyrim’s first-person experience is one of the main focuses of the Skyblivion trailer, which doesn’t recreate the Oblivion trailer in the new engine as fans might expect but instead focuses on the first-person perspective of the player running through the wilderness of Cyrodiil. Bethesda should look at some of the key appeals of a remake like Skyblivion to see which features of Skyrim improved upon Oblivion the most, even if some of these decisions were often criticized.
Community Lessons
The existence of Skyblivion at all also makes one thing very clear – one of the greatest assets that the Elder Scrolls games are their modding communities. The fact that a huge volunteer project like Skyblivion could get off the ground and attract enough developing talent to get to the point it has is staggering.
One of the key reasons this is possible is because it is relatively easy to mod Skyrim using the Creation Kit compared with other games. Even though the Skyblivion team is recreating Oblivion's world from scratch, thanks to the Creation Kit it has always been the scale of the project, rather than the technicalities of programming quests and NPCs, which has been the main challenge.
The Elder Scrolls 6 will need to be even more accessible to the modding community, especially if Bethesda wants the game to have the same longevity as Skyrim. While the Creation Kit is one of the best modding tools released by a major developer, the next game needs to take strides to make modding even more accessible, just as Skyrim worked to make its combat and class system more accessible for the vast majority of players.
Skyblivion is a huge project, but the next Elder Scrolls game should be accessible enough to creatives that it doesn’t take huge groups of volunteers to make their own quests and stories in the game. The existence of such large projects as recreating all of Oblivion shows that fostering the modding community for The Elder Scrolls 6 will be almost as important to its longevity as the success of the vanilla game itself.
With Bethesda facing unprecedented competition from developers like Obsidian Entertainment and its upcoming game Avowed, it could be Bethesda’s ability to make its next game accessible to modding to a never-seen-before extent that could give the older franchise the advantage it needs to survive into the next generation.
The Elder Scrolls 6 is currently in development.