Highlights
- Starfield's commercial success has given Bethesda a new lease of life, which is important as it moves toward The Elder Scrolls 6.
- The Elder Scrolls 6 has just finished its pre-production phase, indicating that it is still in the early stages of development.
- Considering the lengthy development cycles of games like Starfield, fans may have to wait as long as five more years before The Elder Scrolls 6 is released, potentially pushing the release of Fallout 5 even further into the future.
Though it's had a bit of a divisive reception, it seems safe to say that Starfield was the hit that both Bethesda and Xbox needed it to be. While some fans criticized the game's abundance of loading screens, its less-than-intelligent enemy AI, and its slower start, Starfield still performed very well commercially; some reviews were mixed, but they were far from bad. With a new lease of life, Bethesda is now looking forward to its next project, and that's confirmed to be The Elder Scrolls 6.
Announced all the way back in June 2018, over five years ago now, The Elder Scrolls 6 has just officially finished its pre-production phase of development. While this is great news for fans of The Elder Scrolls franchise, this confirmation is a little more bittersweet for those who prefer Bethesda's Fallout series, with the news likely meaning that Fallout 5 is still a long way off.
How Elder Scrolls 6's Development Is Going to Effect Fallout 5
Obviously, the biggest way in which The Elder Scrolls 6's development is going to affect Fallout 5 is its development cycle, and eventual release window. While The Elder Scrolls 6 was announced back in 2018, Bethesda has presumably hardly done any work on the game at all, with most of the studio's resources likely going towards Starfield. Bethesda senior vice president of marketing Pete Hines has pretty much cemented this in recent weeks, confirming in an interview at the end of August that The Elder Scrolls 6 had finished its pre-production phase, and was now officially in early development.
While the exact status of Elder Scrolls 6's development process isn't really known, it seems fair to assume that it's only just getting its feet off the ground. Coming out of pre-production likely means that Bethesda only really has an outline of where the game is going, in terms of story, gameplay, and characters. Starfield took a total of eight years to develop, and a good three of those were spent in its pre-production phase. Starfield only entered full development after Fallout 76's release in 2018, meaning that it took another five years to come out after pre-production, which means that Elder Scrolls fans might still be waiting a while for the next entry.
Though The Elder Scrolls 6 isn't a completely new IP, and Bethesda isn't working from a completely blank slate this time around, it's still quite the monumental undertaking for the developer, with a great deal at stake. Right now, it seems very likely that Bethesda will want to take its time to ensure that The Elder Scrolls 6 lives up to expectations, and that probably means that fans can expect to wait as much as five more years before they get to play it.
Unfortunately, this means that fans who are eagerly awaiting Fallout 5 might have to prepare themselves for quite the wait. All the way back in June 2022, Todd Howard confirmed that Fallout 5 will be the next game Bethesda makes after Elder Scrolls 6. But if Elder Scrolls 6 isn't going to release until around 2028, and Fallout 5 is going to have a similar development cycle, then fans might not end up seeing Fallout 5 until the early 2030s at the very earliest. At this time, Todd Howard has only stated that Bethesda has one page of ideas written down for Fallout 5, and with a lot of huge projects in the pipeline first, the next mainline entry in the Fallout franchise won't be coming for a good while.
The Elder Scrolls 6 is in development.