In the final day of the FTC federal trial, one of Microsoft’s lawyers made a strange statement, which raises some strange questions in itself, about the next The Elder Scrolls game.
As reported by Tom Warren who did live coverage for The Verge, this is what the Microsoft lawyer said:
“Could I clarify one issue that council raised with you, when you were asking about Zenimax and asked him to find a game that was most similar to Xbox, he mentioned Elder Scrolls. That is incorrect.
There are two Elder Scrolls games, one is online called Elder Scrolls Online — that is a multiplayer game, it is on PlayStation today. The game he’s talking about Elder Scrolls 16… the projected release is 2026 as a single-player game.
It is not anywhere similar to Call of Duty, which as you know is multiplayer and multi-platform.”
So, what exactly happened here?
This lawyer seemed to want to make an argument about comparing The Elder Scrolls and Call of Duty franchises. Gamers themselves, as consumers of these products, understand the point he wanted to make. You can’t compare the two franchises because The Elder Scrolls games come out every few years, while Call of Duty’s development scheduled has been worked around so that it is an annualized game franchise. Only sports games have a similar game cycle, and those don’t have to put in as much changes as Call of Duty does.
So, most readers are joking about the lawyer talking about The Elder Scrolls 16, when we know that the next game coming up will actually be The Elder Scrolls 6. But did he flub when he said that the next The Elder Scrolls game would be releasing in 2026?
To briefly review, once the 3D era of these games started, The Elder Scrolls didn’t take that long to release after each other. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind came out in 2002, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion released in 2006, and then The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim came out in 2011.
We had not received a new numbered The Elder Scrolls game since, though The Elder Scrolls Online did come out in 2014.
Even taking that into account, Bethesda had not been making new The Elder Scrolls games for nearly a decade now, content with making DLC for both, and porting them to new generations of consoles.
In spite of what Todd Howard has said in the past, we don’t know how long Bethesda has been working on The Elder Scrolls 6. This lawyer may have accidentally led the trade secret out, and funnily enough, the way he did it makes it easy to dismiss.
Well, we will certainly find out eventually if The Elder Scrolls 6 is arriving earlier than we have been led to believe.
