Xbox's Phil Spencer has confirmed that The Elder Scrolls 6 is still "many years away", and that Microsoft has yet to decide whether it will launch on PS5.
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.
It was such a huge relief when they revealed that the protagonist for Starfield would be unvoiced, and even more when they showed character backgrounds and traits in the gameplay demo last year.
We don’t have Starfield in our hands just yet, so ofc our hope could be misplaced, but based on the evidence so far, they understand what fans loved about Skyrim and earlier games and where Fallout 4 departed from that. For me, that departure was the main quest that railroaded you into a specific sort of character and the voiced protagonist limiting dialogue to “yes/sarcastic yes/yes, but I need more info/no.” Everything they’ve shown us about Starfield makes it look like we’ll be able to come up with very different characters for each of our playthroughs, and that’s exciting.
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.
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.
It was such a huge relief when they revealed that the protagonist for Starfield would be unvoiced, and even more when they showed character backgrounds and traits in the gameplay demo last year.
We don’t have Starfield in our hands just yet, so ofc our hope could be misplaced, but based on the evidence so far, they understand what fans loved about Skyrim and earlier games and where Fallout 4 departed from that. For me, that departure was the main quest that railroaded you into a specific sort of character and the voiced protagonist limiting dialogue to “yes/sarcastic yes/yes, but I need more info/no.” Everything they’ve shown us about Starfield makes it look like we’ll be able to come up with very different characters for each of our playthroughs, and that’s exciting.
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.
Because none of the shit you’re saying is meaningful in any way.
It’s literally impossible for them to make more than one game at a time, period.
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.