Not much news has been released about The Elder Scrolls 6 since the game's teaser trailer was released by Bethesda back in 2018. However, earlier this year, Todd Howard revealed an interesting detail about the way the game’s world would be created that could have big implications for other aspects of the game.
Howard revealed the potentially huge scale of The Elder Scrolls 6’s map and the method through which this could be achieved by the studio. This increase in size could have implications for how the game handles and integrates its more fantastical elements, including magic and magical creatures which are rare in the lore but more common in the condensed worlds of the games. These implications could have a positive impact on some players' immersion, but could also come with downsides that Bethesda will need to be aware of if the next game is going to live up to or even surpass Skyrim’s legacy.
The Size of The Elder Scrolls 6
The Elder Scrolls 6 will use procedural generation to create much of its landscape. For those unaware, procedural generation is a tool used to help create large game worlds that generates parts of the world automatically, but then allows developers to go back in and add their own details and NPCs. It was used for parts of Oblivion and Skyrim’s wildernesses as well, though Todd Howard indicated at Brighton Digital 2020 that The Elder Scrolls 6 would make significantly more use of the tool to create a larger game world with more realistically sized towns and cities than the series has had since The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall’s enormous UK-sized generated world.
The Elder Scrolls 6 having a larger game world has many implications of other aspects of gameplay, but it also offers Bethesda an interesting opportunity when it comes to the place of magic and magical creatures in that world. The worlds of games like Skyrim are condensed, but they are not evenly proportionally condensed. Points and people of interest take priority. As a result, players are more likely to find town where many of the NPCs are uncommon in some way – after all, when it comes to choosing which characters to include, it makes sense for the common folk to be the first to go.
This means that fantasy elements like magic users and magical creatures like werewolves and vampires are more common in the in-game worlds of games like Skyrim than they are in the lore. Werewolves, for example, are a terrifying abnormality for most of Skyrim’s inhabitants in the story, but can be found in proportionally high numbers in certain cities like Whiterun thanks to the fact that unique NPCs are prioritized to populate the small in-game version of the city.
There are 11 named werewolves in Skyrim’s base game between Whiterun, Falkreath, and the Frostmoon Pack, which would seem accurately rare across the whole province, but stands out in a game world where some cities have as few as 20 inhabitants. By creating a far larger game world The Elder Scrolls 6 has the potential to increase the proportion of other NPCs such that these magical creatures and encounters feel far less commonplace and far more fascinating. Similarly, magic and the ability to perform it would feel rarer, and as valuable a skill as it is portrayed in the lore.
Challenges and Opportunities For The Elder Scrolls 6
One problem is that this change may lead to The Elder Scrolls 6 containing many more NPCs who simply don’t have an interesting character hook. This might be a particular risk in The Elder Scrolls 6's larger cities and towns, which could be populated by too many uninteresting NPCs that water down the experience of exploring the world, even if they make special encounters seem more valuable.
However, making magic and magical creatures more rare also has its advantages. Many Skyrim fans will remember their first encounter with a troll in the wild, or running into one of the random encounters on Skyrim’s roads before they had played the game long-enough to see how commonplace some of those encounters were.
These moments work well because they come out of the blue – the more common they're realize to be, the less impact they have. Another good example of this is the giants in Skyrim. While the first time seeing a giant in-game is awe-inspiring, it doesn’t take long before Skyrim’s giants feel relatively easy to find, with the game’s condensed world quickly making them feel more like a nuisance to be avoided than a fascinating and unique encounter.
The Elder Scrolls 6 has an opportunity to make its map more realistically sized, even if it will likely not approach the canonical size of Tamriel in the lore, which would likely be counterintuitive when it comes to creating a compelling game world. A larger world, however, could allow for some magical encounters to be as rare in the game as they are in the lore, which could be more immersive. However, this comes with the significant risk that the game will place scale over content.
It’s possible, however, that The Elder Scrolls 6 could create a world full of interesting NPCs like Skyrim while still keeping some aspects like magic and magical creatures relatively less common. There are plenty of non-magical NPCs in Skyrim who are still compelling characters, like those the player first meets in Riverwood towards the start of the game, or the characters in the introduction sequence. There are other ways to make NPCs stand out beyond their relation to magic or other fantasy elements of the world, though these aspects can certainly help.
The Elder Scrolls 6’s size gives Bethesda an opportunity to create more varied rare encounters across its map. While it risks making these magical encounters feel too spread thin, the game could make up for it by increasing the variety of encounters and creatures, using the larger game world to avoid making a map which feels like it’s overcrowded. Like many details about The Elder Scrolls 6, however, the way Bethesda plans to take advantage of procedural generation, and even whether the game will live up to the promise of creating a significantly larger game world than Skyrim’s, remains to be seen.
The Elder Scrolls 6Â is in development.