That’s long enough away to release Skyrim at least three more times.
I honestly don’t understand why anyone is surprised by this, or why it makes them have a negative opinion of Bethesda Game Studios.
I understood when they announced that TES VI was in development that it wasn’t in active development at this time, but that the announcement was to quell the fanbase who thought TES had been entirely abandoned.
Skyrim took 3 years, Fallout 4 took 4 years, Fallout 76 took 3 years (but wasn’t a mainline game), and Starfield took 5 years, which is the longest development time for mainline games by… one year, the horror, and it’s an entirely new IP with space systems that I’m sure took additional time to develop engine-specific features to support. I anticipate TES VI will be a larger and more ambitious game than Skyrim and will be influenced by how they’ve developed Fallout 4 and Starfield, so seeing it release in 2028 with a 5 year dev time vs. Skyrim’s 3 seems entirely reasonable.
Yup. No one should be surprised and this is far better in a lot of ways.
This is how Bethesda has worked for decades now. One game at a time, developed over several years. Have someone else develop/oversee the non-mainline games (eg. New Vegas, ESO) but work on all the mainline games with singular focus. No splitting teams or any of that.
The difference is the teaser. Usually, they drop the teaser, announce the game, it’s out in a few months. Although, they also teased Starfield early, but I think some things like the pandemic and the acquisition had a larger effect on the development time.
About a year after Starfield, they’ll probably get deep into TES: VI pre-production. Maybe a bit of writing will be done, but they’ll probably still be bouncing ideas (which I think they have quite a few already) off each other for a few months and seeing where it goes from there.
I’m guessing major development begins around mid-2025 and they work on that for next three or so years. Maybe a 2028/2029 release. Day one exclusive on next-gen Xbox, probably.
I think having one team that works on all the mainline games contributes to BGS games being what they are. I imagine it contributes to cohesion and knowledge transfer among the devs between games, which helps maintain consistency in output over time. In an age of AAA teams churning through devs with burnout and crunch, it seems like BGS keeps a team together that has multiple years of experience collaborating, and that’s a good thing.
Re: the teaser… imo, in the context of the time, people were going to believe TES had been entirely abandoned if they didn’t release that teaser. Since BGS had alternated TES and Fallout to that point, there was the expectation that TES 6 would be the next game after Fallout 4; but instead, in 2018, they announced, “Fallout 76 is next and Starfield after that, and we haven’t forgotten TES, it’s just 3rd in line.” If they’d only announced FO 76 and Starfield, TES fans would have blown up about the franchise being dead.
I mean yeah, the only reason people have to believe elder scrolls 6 is in development is that teaser from 2018, and honesty they probably only made that teaser to temper expectations.
As I recall Tod Howard went on an interview almost immediately after that trailer and outright said that any real development on the next Elder Scrolls wasn’t happening yet and wouldn’t be till Starfield was done. Now that Starfield is almost out the door I’m sure more resources will be shifting over towards ES6 soon but that means development is barely beginning. They did claim they put Starfield development on pause to build a feature they wanted to include in ES6 though so they likely have at least some basic concept work done on some level.
Probably still using the same engine since Morrowind, and don’t forget to pre-order!
It just works!
I still think we’ll see TES6 around the same time we see Half-Life 3 and the next Game of Thrones book.
