“I’ll just play Skyrim one more time,” you say. You install sixty-two increasingly stupid mods, get them all in the right order, turn the game on, see yourself in that cart, and–you turn it off. ‘Never mind,’ you think. ‘I’m not strong enough to do it again. I need new content. I need fresh Elder Scrolls lore, and I need it now.’ Too bad, according to Todd Howard in a new IGN interview: The Elder Scrolls 6 is still years away. Thinking back to the five-year gap between Oblivion and Skyrim, this one seems downright cruel. The good news is that as game-changing as Skyrim was in 2011, The Elder Scrolls 6 is set to improve on it drastically.
During the interview, Howard discussed how the next mainline Elder Scrolls title will have more interactivity across the board. “There are a number of parts of [Skyrim] where we don’t go deep enough, where it’s a veneer in terms of its interactivity,” he said. He also mentioned that NPCs will be greatly improved, and interactions will be more widely varied. Thank the Gods.
Bethesda’s next game, Starfield, is scheduled to launch in November 2022. Updates for the intergalactic RPG will be coming throughout the next year, but while that’s a disappointment for those in the Elder Scrolls Fanclub, there is a silver lining: Starfield and The Elder Scrolls 6 are both being developed using the Creation Engine 2. This means that feedback on Starfield could help shape the next mainline title even more.
The Elder Scrolls 6 is still in development, and no release window has been announced just yet. If you want to play Skyrim in the meantime, be honest–you probably already own it on five consoles. The game can now be played on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation VR, and Amazon Alexa. (No, that last one is not a joke, and it’s surprisingly fun.) The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – Anniversary Edition will bring the enhanced title to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on November 11, 2021.