Jez Corden has shared his latest insights on the state of The Elder Scrolls 6’s development.
He shared some small tidbits in conversation with his co-host Rand al Thor 19 in the latest episode of the Xbox Two podcast. To quote the two:
Rand al Thor 19: I mean, has Elder Scrolls 6 even hit full production yet?
Jez Corden: I don’t know. I’ve heard it’s quite playable.
A few minutes later, Corden shared this clarifying statement:
I have no idea how far along Elder Scrolls 6 is.
The two also discuss this game in relation to Bethesda Game Works’ overall production output. In this same podcast, they revealed that Fallout 5 has been greenlit, but this may have come at the expense of Blackbird, the cancelled MMO looter shooter from Zenimax Online Studios. As they also pointed out, Starfield is still getting DLC, and a lot of Bethesda’s developers are still working on that.
The last we reported on Elder Scrolls 6, Jez Corden shared another rumor that they already have internal trailers of the game that they are sharing within the company, if not at least within Bethesda. This does paint a picture of a game that is in the middle of development. So at the very least we can assume that they are past the conceptual phase.
In this podcast, they also bring up that Bethesda head Todd Howard’s working draft for what Elder Scrolls 6 will be. While everyone does expect that Howard is already planning for his retirement, it isn’t quite clear if he will be sticking around to see this or Fallout 5 through to completion or not.
Bethesda and Howard do have more options than to just have him completely retire cold turkey, if he doesn’t want to take on the full time work expected of a producer. He could move to a consultant role, where the staff would defer to him for some key decisions, or he could take a higher position in Zenimax Media, or even Microsoft itself.
Bethesda Game Studios as a whole has a lot of veteran game designers, and if the company as a whole is looking towards the future, they would have definitely already been preparing some of their comparatively younger staff to take over. It may be entirely possible we’ll get an Elder Scrolls 6 that isn’t led by Todd Howard at all, and we’re not entirely sure if that’s something we want to see more of or less.
