Gamers have wanted a new Elder Scrolls game for many years now, but the current project on Bethesda's docket is Starfield. Game Director at Bethesda, Todd Howard, explains in a new interview why Starfield took developmental precedence over Elder Scrolls 6.
Bethesda is known for its ambitious open-world RPG franchises in Elder Scrolls and Fallout. With these series, releases can be years upon years apart due to their tremendous scale, in realizing a detailed open-world as well their sophisticated role-playing systems. Starfield is Bethesda's newest IP, taking players out from the high fantasy world of Elder Scrolls, and dystopic wastelands of Fallout, and into the stars, where players will journey through a hard sci-fi universe of interplanetary space travel. Ironically, and perhaps to Bethesda's detriment, Starfield was announced at the same E3 that Elder Scrolls 6 was confirmed to be in development.
In a new interview with Kat Bailey from IGN, Todd Howard explains the decision to prioritize Starfield's development over Elder Scrolls 6. According to Howard, Starfield was a "now or never" type of project that began shortly after the release of Fallout 4 in 2015. Howard says in the interview, "We felt doing something like Starfield... we'd been wanting to do something else for a long time and play in a new universe, so if not now (...) when? It felt like, if we didn't do it then, the 'when' could be 'never." So this, in tandem with other projects like Fallout 76, pushed Elder Scrolls 6 out considerably, with it now being a decade since Skyrim.
As the interview continues, the conversation pivots to Elder Scrolls 6 and fan expectations. Howard reiterates the lengthy nature of game development of this magnitude, saying, "[E]verything takes longer than we'd like as well, but we want to make sure we get it right." With the adoration of Bethesda's RPGs has also come a bit of a fan expectation that upon release, its games still have a degree of bugginess to them, with Fallout 76 being a mess at launch, for example. "Hopefully Elder Scrolls 6 — you don't want to say that it's worth that kind of wait — but it does stand up to the series as it has been in a really big, impactful way when it comes out," he says as the end of the interview.
While Elder Scrolls fans likely have many more years left to wait now until Elder Scrolls 6, it is likely the best route that Bethesda could have currently taken with its development. Had Bethesda tried developing both games at the same time, probably neither title would have lived up to the vision it had set out with. It is hard to fault Howard for expressing Bethesda's desire to try something new in Starfield, but one must wonder if it was worth even announcing Elder Scrolls 6 to begin with if the game was going to be put on the "backburner."
Starfield releases November 11, 2022, on PC and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: IGN