I mean yeah, the only reason people have to believe elder scrolls 6 is in development is that teaser from 2018, and honesty they probably only made that teaser to temper expectations.
As I recall Tod Howard went on an interview almost immediately after that trailer and outright said that any real development on the next Elder Scrolls wasn't happening yet and wouldn't be till Starfield was done. Now that Starfield is almost out the door I'm sure more resources will be shifting over towards ES6 soon but that means development is barely beginning. They did claim they put Starfield development on pause to build a feature they wanted to include in ES6 though so they likely have at least some basic concept work done on some level.
At this point I don’t even care. I’m sure I’ll still buy it when it comes out, but they’ve lost my enthusiasm with the milking dry of Skyrim instead of developing something new.
They developed Fallout 4, wasted time on 76, then developed Starfield. They can only actually make one game at a time, and the scale they build for takes 4-5 years for a game. I can understand thinking elder scrolls was going to be next before we knew Starfield was a thing, but once we did the best case was always going to be 4-5 years after that.
Agreed, Bethesda hasn't been idle in the time since Skyrim came out. Granted their last few titles have been somewhat hit or miss but to say they've not been making anything new would not be accurate.
I didn't love fallout 4, but it clearly had a lot of work put into it, and a lot of people really did like it. It wasn't that far off from what I wanted it to be.
I do think 76 was a misstep, but I don't think it was a metal gear survive level disaster of an idea. It's not like nobody asked for co-op fallout, and a lot of games with similar core ideas around that time were pretty successful. It's just not what I'm interested in and not something they have experience with, and they made some bad decisions.
Starfield is going back to what they do best, which is a single player game with a massive world and complexity from top to bottom. I'm extremely hopeful. Obviously until it releases, we don't know, but that 45 minute direct looked damn good. I just wanted Skyrim/fallout with modern gunplay and in space, but "you can be a space pirate" means it might capture the need I've had since Assassin's Creed Black Flag for the first time, too. It really does look truly expansive, though.
I also absolutely want Elder Scrolls 6, but this looks like there's a good chance it will justify the wait.
That’s not what I meant by not making anything new, I meant in the elder scrolls series. Instead of developing anything new in that line like the fans have been begging for, they just keep releasing Skyrim over and over and making release announcements for Skyrim, over and over like it’s something new.
But that's the point. That's what they've been doing instead of making another elder scrolls game. They're not "elder scrolls studio". They're Bethesda. It's only possible to do one game at their scope at a time and they take half a decade to make.
They can't both give you another Elder Scrolls and make the other stuff they're making.
You keep repeating that, I understand that they’ve been making other games, but they have 3 satellite studios and decided for the last 12 years to milk Skyrim completely fucking dry instead of giving us another elder scrolls game. My lack of enthusiasm has nothing to do with their other games, it’s just their shitty business practice of selling us Skyrim over and over again, remastered bullshit, trying to monetize mods and all the other garbage that they’ve done with Skyrim. This entire post was about elder scrolls, hence the discussion of elder scrolls and not their other games.
How is it impossible? Plenty of studios will work on multiple projects. They can easily have multiple teams working on different projects under the same studio. To think that a company as large as Bethesda is only working on a single IP at any given time is idiotic.
Because their scope is bigger than anything else. If they did what you wanted and worked on all their IP at once, you'd hate it because it wouldn't in any way resemble a Bethesda game. It takes their whole studio committed completely to it for half a decade for their games to exist.
They absolutely are only actively developing one game a time. They might have a handful of teams that don't have a specific project for the game they're actively developing doing rough broad strokes on the next project, but that next project absolutely isn't being developed.
Plus they've had a very long time to grow their teams. Skyrim came out 12 years ago. We're looking at over 15 years delay for a sequel to one of the best selling games of all time.
On the short term, you can't grow very fast. Developers take a long time to onboard and while new ones are onboarding, senior devs will have to spend a bunch of time mentoring the new ones. But on the long run, you can certainly scale up considerably, especially with enough investment.
I believe it, I think that panning shot of rocks and grass was probably all they had, made public just to confirm that they weren't finished with the elder scroll series. Other projects took priority.
Yeah, with how huge their games are, they might be "developing" multiple games at once, but it means they're in the pipeline with some specific stuff handed out to people who don't have projects for the main game they're working on, not that they're actually making multiple games at once. The games are too big for that.
Probably just doing story prep, basic theorycrafting on mechanics, etc. No real work is being done and much of the stuff they do work might get thrown out anyway
Last time Bethesda said anything about the Elder Scrolls 6 they said it was in preproduction. I doubt they'll really start working on it until Starfield is out.
I don’t like the massive changes in design philosophy, business practices, or respect for the audience that have taken place since Morrowind. It is no longer a brand that I deal with. And I haven’t paid for a Microsoft product since it was bundled with a white box PC in the mid 90s.
Oblivion has wonderfully creative quests and writing, Fallout 3 is a brilliant post-apocalyptic game that respects the player like few other open world titles, Skyrim oozes atmosphere and is an excellent example of careful world building. You're missing out.
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