On this most auspicious of days, Bethesda released its first and only teaser for The Elder Scrolls 6, which didn’t really reveal any significant details about this new game outside of declaring that yes, it’s being worked on—at a snail’s pace.
On June 11, or 10 depending on where you are in the world, Bethesda finally revealed to the whole wide world that its long-awaited Elder Scrolls 6 was in development. With a broad shot of a beautiful, mountainous region and a cheeky title fade-in, the company confirmed the existence of this elusive title but then proceeded to spend eight years saying basically nothing about it.
As we near almost a decade since it was teased, I think it’s high time Bethesda fessed up and said clearly whether the game is actually in development. I mean, look, even Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t take this long to go from teaser to a proper trailer (we only had to wait six years), and that’s partly because the company was working on a fully-fledged game, The Witcher 3, and two massive expansions, one of which can be viewed as a standalone game itself.
Bethesda is exponentially larger than CD Projekt Red was at the time, or even by the time Cyberpunk 2077 launched. Sure, the company released Starfield in the meantime and is still polishing the game, but I cannot for the life of me understand how a studio with thousands of staff is incapable of at least putting out another cinematic trailer or teaser just to reassure all of us that the game does indeed exist.
Todd Howard’s brief remarks aside, we know next to nothing about The Elder Scrolls 6. Fans have been theorizing about its potential setting and plot for nearly a decade now, but the title remains as elusive as it was in 2018. Nothing is clear, no answers were ever given, and all we’re stuck with are fanfictions of ifs, buts, and maybes.
Over on social media, fans are making fun of the whole situation because that’s all we can do, really. “At this point, we deserve a remaster of that teaser,” one said in a Reddit thread about the anniversary, playing off Bethesda’s obsession over porting and remastering Skyrim a dozen times and making it work on fridges, of all things. Even Oblivion got remastered in the meantime, and God knows what else is waiting to go through the glamour machine.
“That means we’re now further from the TES6 announcement (8 years) than the announcement was from Skyrim (7 years). Depressing..,” another user remarked. And, yes, you’ve read that right. It took Bethesda seven years between 2011 and 2018 to announce TES6, but we’re now 15 whole years away from The Elder Scrolls 5 and still have no sequel.
Furthermore, players only had to wait six years to get Skyrim after Oblivion, teaser, game, and all.
And, to put things really into perspective: E3 no longer even exists. The teaser is from an E3 showcase, and that convention is long dead and buried, partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
And some players are getting very gloomy, with one saying, “I still believe that not a single line of code for TES6 had been written at that time,” and I would agree. I don’t believe TES6 is even being worked on, and as Bethesda constantly tries to re-establish Fallout 76‘s relevance with updates or attempts to salvage the unsalvageable Starfield, I’m beginning to think we’re going to wait a lot more years to hear anything about this fabled game.
