Bethesda announced The Elder Scrolls VI five years ago at E3 2018, but the new fantasy RPG is still “five-plus years away,” according to Phil Spencer..
Also, the teams behind ESO and the mainline titles are not the same. The main team that made Skyrim, Oblivion and the others is focused on Starfield now, and probably for the next three-ish years with the post-release content.
They may both be Elder Scrolls games but I have 0 interest in ESO. I’m not an MMO player and never will be. It is a different market. You can have two things set in the same world that have different markets imo.
Prior to ESO, though, Elder Scrolls was a franchise entirely marketed at people who wanted single player RPG experiences.
Even if it’s still Elder Scrolls content- a good portion of that original market is not going to have interest in a multiplayer experience. Or a subscription experience. Or a”live narrative” experience with gated content windows.
It’s a very different experience at its core, so while there may be an overlap between the two markets in the Venn Diagram, it’s still a very different market segment than a pure single player outing.
In the Venn diagram of people who will pay for ESO and people who will pay for ES6, I’m sure there’s a ton of overlap, but there’s probably some ESO players that aren’t necessarily huge fans of single player games, and I know for a fact a huge portion of people who played ES5 and will play ES6 will never play ESO. They are not the exact same group of consumers.
Yeah, that’s why I wasn’t that hyped when they announced it. Unlike when they announced Fallout 4 when it was only like 6 months away? That’s the type of announcements I prefer. 6-12 months away as opposed to announcing it then it being like a 5-10 year long dragged series of promotions and teasers.
They only teased it this early because people were unable to understand that ESO is not made by Bethesda Game Studios and won’t be a hindrance of TES VI being made.
I definitely shared that opinion a few years ago. I found Fallout 4 disappointing, Fallout 76 was a disaster (I’ve heard people say it’s better now, but I still feel like a lot of the design decisions are at odds with Fallout as an IP) and they were making a lot of poor decisions.
But I can’t help but be optimistic for Starfield. It’s not just the recent presentation that gives me hope; everything I’ve seen about their approach to it and their design philosophies seems promising to me. I’m sure it’ll still have some of that traditional Bethesda jank to it, but I’m more than happy to accept some jank if I get a proper RPG with some good player agency.
I get that modern games are time consuming to make, but we’re getting well past the Duke Nukem Forever and Daikatana timelines here… and the longer it takes the more disappointing it always seems to be.
I wish they just wouldn’t announce it until it is like 6-12 months ready from release. I hate these announcements that will inevitably be 5-10 years away.
See this is actually the crazy part to me. Not making more than one game at a time. Why didn’t they just give these IPs to another team, or have some employees switch gears onto this project, or anything else they could have done to get some parallelism going on here.
Because it literally takes their entire studio spending 4-5 years to make a game of their scope. It cannot possibly be done faster without massive compromise. They don’t have people sitting idle. They’re actively completely working on the project the company is.
Way too much logic with this approach for a game publisher/company to follow. Gotta milk every IP for all its worth, seperatley, to get the biggest cash cow’s out of the nothing burgers served.
I mean - they’ve had teams working on Fallout, ESO, and Starfield simultaneously. What work was probably going to be dedicated to ES6 probably got transitioned to ESO or Starfield. They’ve definitely had multiple teams focused on multiple things - ES6 just got deprioritized.
This statement was made during a hearing, so he said whatever is best for his case as long as he doesn’t lie. In my opinion the statement has zero value as an official statement.
Baseless speculation here, but my gut tells me that Microsoft is going to put a remaster-focused studio to task on a current-gen Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim triple pack, a la the Master Chief Collection, to tide people over.
Remastering Skyrim is the easy way out, but Oblivion is still trapped on the 360 (if you don’t have a PC) and Morrowind is the darling title of the franchise that people would love to see remastered (and was recently used as an example by Nvidia on “how to remaster a game”). Remaster the earlier two and then just shove the Xbox One copy of Skyrim Anniversary Edition in there for funsies is something people would get behind, more than just another port of Skyrim alone.
What would even be the point of an official remaster when you can combine the OpenMW engine with a mod pack? And there’s Skywind the great remake still in the making…
People have hacked a lot of those onto the old official engine actually (MGE XE) :D OpenMW is more focused on fundamentals than on the flashy stuff, but AFAIK currently has great fog support and the ability to load custom shaders from mods
I am amazed people are still buying Bethesda games. I was done with them after Fallout 4. I see Starfield hype… no thank you Todd. I am keeping my money.
I liked Fallout 4. There were things that I didn’t like as much as New Vegas, sure, but I don’t see alternatives that are doing a better job, and that’s really the bar that counts.
similar boat- graduated middle school, high school, and undergrad of college, and working on my master’s now. I’ll be married and have kids by the time the game comes out, if the world hasn’t ended by then
Oh my god, I’ve just realised how much of my life has passed. Similar timeline to you. I’m starting to think my kids will be teenagers by the time it comes out.
There’s even a chance, if the time between releases increases, I might not make it to the next one after this.
It’s made on the same engine as Skyrim and Fallout 4 so for all intents and purposes this is going to be like any other Bethesda game. So, if people want Fallout 4 in space with procedural worlds and companions then I guess it’ll be what they’re looking for. But my belief is it’s going to feel like a last gen game with a sheen of current gen on top.
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As long as they’re still making money selling ES:O expansions, why devote the resources for an all-new game?
Also, the teams behind ESO and the mainline titles are not the same. The main team that made Skyrim, Oblivion and the others is focused on Starfield now, and probably for the next three-ish years with the post-release content.
They are two different markets. You can also buy the next elder scrolls have while paying for ESO.
One is a single player game, the other is an mmo with that mmo feel.
I’m not quite sure what your point is, but they aren’t “two different markets”.
Sure, one is a (mostly) subscription model, but at the end of the day, they’re both digital Elder Scrolls games sold by the same publisher.
They may both be Elder Scrolls games but I have 0 interest in ESO. I’m not an MMO player and never will be. It is a different market. You can have two things set in the same world that have different markets imo.
Prior to ESO, though, Elder Scrolls was a franchise entirely marketed at people who wanted single player RPG experiences.
Even if it’s still Elder Scrolls content- a good portion of that original market is not going to have interest in a multiplayer experience. Or a subscription experience. Or a”live narrative” experience with gated content windows.
It’s a very different experience at its core, so while there may be an overlap between the two markets in the Venn Diagram, it’s still a very different market segment than a pure single player outing.
In the Venn diagram of people who will pay for ESO and people who will pay for ES6, I’m sure there’s a ton of overlap, but there’s probably some ESO players that aren’t necessarily huge fans of single player games, and I know for a fact a huge portion of people who played ES5 and will play ES6 will never play ESO. They are not the exact same group of consumers.
Huge mistake if it’s an Xbox exclusive like Starfield.
Well yeah but all that is simply grabbing some texture or filter mods and adding them to the stick game
Starfield is not an Xbox exclusive tho. It also comes to pc day one
Yeah, that’s why I wasn’t that hyped when they announced it. Unlike when they announced Fallout 4 when it was only like 6 months away? That’s the type of announcements I prefer. 6-12 months away as opposed to announcing it then it being like a 5-10 year long dragged series of promotions and teasers.
They only teased it this early because people were unable to understand that ESO is not made by Bethesda Game Studios and won’t be a hindrance of TES VI being made.
It sucks to wait but it would suck a lot more if they fucked up the franchise. My asshole is already puckered because of Starfield.
At this point I have faith that they can pull off both a long wait, and a shit game.
I definitely shared that opinion a few years ago. I found Fallout 4 disappointing, Fallout 76 was a disaster (I’ve heard people say it’s better now, but I still feel like a lot of the design decisions are at odds with Fallout as an IP) and they were making a lot of poor decisions.
But I can’t help but be optimistic for Starfield. It’s not just the recent presentation that gives me hope; everything I’ve seen about their approach to it and their design philosophies seems promising to me. I’m sure it’ll still have some of that traditional Bethesda jank to it, but I’m more than happy to accept some jank if I get a proper RPG with some good player agency.
I get that modern games are time consuming to make, but we’re getting well past the Duke Nukem Forever and Daikatana timelines here… and the longer it takes the more disappointing it always seems to be.
I wish they just wouldn’t announce it until it is like 6-12 months ready from release. I hate these announcements that will inevitably be 5-10 years away.
They’re making other games. They haven’t been working on elder scrolls. They can’t do more than one game at a time.
See this is actually the crazy part to me. Not making more than one game at a time. Why didn’t they just give these IPs to another team, or have some employees switch gears onto this project, or anything else they could have done to get some parallelism going on here.
Because it literally takes their entire studio spending 4-5 years to make a game of their scope. It cannot possibly be done faster without massive compromise. They don’t have people sitting idle. They’re actively completely working on the project the company is.
Way too much logic with this approach for a game publisher/company to follow. Gotta milk every IP for all its worth, seperatley, to get the biggest cash cow’s out of the nothing burgers served.
I mean - they’ve had teams working on Fallout, ESO, and Starfield simultaneously. What work was probably going to be dedicated to ES6 probably got transitioned to ESO or Starfield. They’ve definitely had multiple teams focused on multiple things - ES6 just got deprioritized.
ESO is developed by Zenimax, Bethesda is only the publisher.
They released a teaser trailer 5 years ago. It’s surprising to me that the game wasn’t being worked on in all that time.
That was just a CGI landscape, not really a teaser
outsourced to people knowing how to do CGI trailers
Yeah, even back then, I had a feeling that they just announced it so that people would actually shut up about it and leave them alone.
This statement was made during a hearing, so he said whatever is best for his case as long as he doesn’t lie. In my opinion the statement has zero value as an official statement.
Meanwhile, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Re-release-master-vamped 3 Toaster edition is likely six-plus months away
Just in time for the Xbox X Series SSX Tricky
Baseless speculation here, but my gut tells me that Microsoft is going to put a remaster-focused studio to task on a current-gen Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim triple pack, a la the Master Chief Collection, to tide people over.
Remastering Skyrim is the easy way out, but Oblivion is still trapped on the 360 (if you don’t have a PC) and Morrowind is the darling title of the franchise that people would love to see remastered (and was recently used as an example by Nvidia on “how to remaster a game”). Remaster the earlier two and then just shove the Xbox One copy of Skyrim Anniversary Edition in there for funsies is something people would get behind, more than just another port of Skyrim alone.
A 4K60 Oblivion with a much much improved draw distance would be fantastic! I’d buy that in an instant on my Series S
While I’d love a Morrowind remaster (not remake), it’s incredibly unlikely since Todd Howard himself is against it.
What would even be the point of an official remaster when you can combine the OpenMW engine with a mod pack? And there’s Skywind the great remake still in the making…
Fair point, I was thinking of some of the complex graphical features, like ambient occlusion, screen space reflection or even ray tracing.
People have hacked a lot of those onto the old official engine actually (MGE XE) :D OpenMW is more focused on fundamentals than on the flashy stuff, but AFAIK currently has great fog support and the ability to load custom shaders from mods
Oh, nice. Seems like a good time for a new journey in Vvardenfell =3
I am amazed people are still buying Bethesda games. I was done with them after Fallout 4. I see Starfield hype… no thank you Todd. I am keeping my money.
I liked Fallout 4. There were things that I didn’t like as much as New Vegas, sure, but I don’t see alternatives that are doing a better job, and that’s really the bar that counts.
I had a blast.
Fallout 4 had its missteps for sure, but it’s still a pretty fun game. What about it made you quit Bethesda?
Bethesda games scratch a unique itch it’s hard to describe and no other studio is able to fulfill it.
By the time this game hits the market it’s target audience will be significantly diminished by having passed away from natural causes.
So far, in the time between Elder Scrolls V and and VI, I have:
similar boat- graduated middle school, high school, and undergrad of college, and working on my master’s now. I’ll be married and have kids by the time the game comes out, if the world hasn’t ended by then
Oh my god, I’ve just realised how much of my life has passed. Similar timeline to you. I’m starting to think my kids will be teenagers by the time it comes out.
There’s even a chance, if the time between releases increases, I might not make it to the next one after this.
Man, it feels like Xbox just has such a hard time getting a steady game pipeline.
What do you think is more likely to release before we all die? TESVI or The Winds of Winter?
Both of these will release before the ending of Hunter X Hunter
Really gonna be like 16 years or more between elder scrolls games, feels bad man
So much pressure on Starfield to be good.
Even good isn’t really good enough, it has to be great.
It’s made on the same engine as Skyrim and Fallout 4 so for all intents and purposes this is going to be like any other Bethesda game. So, if people want Fallout 4 in space with procedural worlds and companions then I guess it’ll be what they’re looking for. But my belief is it’s going to feel like a last gen game with a sheen of current gen on top.
I feel I’ve been hearing this exact thing for a decade now
The “plus” in the statement is putting in some work.