The Elder Scrolls 6 is one of the most hotly anticipated titles of the coming decade. However, with almost no news released by Bethesda since the initial teaser trailer dropped in 2018, many fans are becoming increasingly impatient to return to Tamriel.
It has been almost ten years since the release of Skyrim, and since then many Elder Scrolls fans have been enjoying The Elder Scrolls Online from Zenimax Online Studios, set in the same world. However, The Elder Scrolls Online may give Bethesda some big problems for The Elder Scrolls 6.
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There are a few key things implied by ESO that could cause issues for Bethesda when developing the next main game in the series. First, ESO is set around a millennium before the events of Skyrim. This shows that over that time Tamriel has remained relatively static, similar to the timeline in games like Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Technology and magic appear to have hovered around the same level of advancement for the past thousand years. This could make it difficult for Bethesda to keep the games feeling fresh. There was a 200 year jump between Oblivion and Skyrim that was the largest time gap by far between games in the franchise until The Elder Scrolls Online came along.
In that 200 years, the Empire was brought to its knees and the Third Aldmeri Dominion rose to power. However, there is also a different iteration of the Dominion in ESO, making one of the few big changes in The Elder Scrolls world since players arrived feel a little more precedented than previously thought.
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The fact that The Elder Scrolls Online gives players access to parts of the provinces across all of Tamriel poses a big problem for Bethesda. Areas like Elsweyr, Blackmarsh and the Summerset Isles that were once shrouded in mystery have now already been visited by players. This softens some of their effects even as distant locales in the main games.
Information gleamed about Elsweyr, for example, makes it seem almost unimaginably surreal to a Skyrim player, with mentions of cat-men resembling everything from house pets to Bosmer roaming the sands in service of the moons. This helps the player immerse themselves in the world, feeling small in comparison to its scale and many mysteries.
Areas like High Rock and Hammerfell are now clearly mapped in the canon, with Zenimax establishing that ESO is canon despite not being made by Bethesda. This could cause a problem if rumors that The Elder Scrolls 6 is set in Hammerfell and some of High Rock prove to be true. Bethesda could change up the landscape for its next game to make it feel fresh. However, due to things being relatively static in the Elder Scrolls timeline excluding time-warping events like the Warp of the West, it could be difficult for Bethesda to show players something fresh.
Areas like Stros M’Kai in Hammerfell, for example, have already been explored in ESO, and are referred to in the main games in a way that implies that the locations have remained similar in the past thousand years. When players began Skyrim, the fact that the province felt completely unknown and ripe for exploration was one of the games’ greatest strengths. Through The Elder Scrolls Online, Bethesda may have accidentally played its hand far too early when it came to some of the most interesting places players hope to explore in The Elder Scrolls 6.
The Elder Scrolls 6 is in development.
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