While the recent layoffs at Microsoft have raised questions about the state of The Elder Scrolls 6, during a recent live Q&A session on Bloomberg, Jason Schreier said that the RPG is still two or more years away. Schreier’s statement was spotted by social media user Idle Sloth.
In the meantime, Bethesda and Microsoft have both continued to maintain silence on the subject, and neither of the companies have offered any details about a potential release window for the highly-anticipated open-world RPG.
The closest we have seen to any official statement on the subject has been director Todd Howard, who described The Elder Scrolls 6 as “our biggest project right now.” He acknowledged that there have been many fans eagerly waiting for the game since it was first unveiled all the way back in 2018. “We know we need to get it right, and it’s been a long time,” he said.
Xbox CCO Matt Booty was asked about the state of The Elder Scrolls 6 last month, and while he didn’t quite reveal any details, he said that the project has been “coming along well”.
“I would say one of the more challenging balancing acts of someone in a job like mine is balancing that you want to go show the world all the cool stuff you’re working on, and you want to get them excited early, but we also know that we want to wait till the right moment,” he said.
“And when you decide to show it, you want it to be the best you’ve got. And also that when you show the game, you’re also giving them a promise of, hey, it’s coming soon. So I can tell you, having visited Bethesda and sat with Todd and seen ‘Elder Scrolls‘ playing, it looks amazing, and it’s coming along well. And we’ll make sure to announce it and really reveal it at the right time.”
Howard had confirmed back in March that most of Bethesda has been working on The Elder Scrolls 6. He also referred to the game’s development process as feeling quite refreshing for the team, since it’s quite different from the studio’s last two major single-player releases – Fallout 4 and Starfield.
“The majority of this building is working on The Elder Scrolls 6,” he said. “It’s amazing for us to come back to it. I gotta be honest, right? Being in that world after not developing in Elder Scrolls – it’s so different than Starfield, so different than Fallout – it feels great for us.”
Interestingly, former Bethesda developer and lead designer on The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, Bruce Nesmith, had spoken about how the studio likely doesn’t want to rush development since it risks “disappointing fans”. He went into detail about the processes of software design, where developers often have to balance three aspects: resource, time, and quality.
He explained that reducing development time would lead to “either increasing resources or reducing features, or both,” before going on to note that “resources in most big studios are already quite large, and it takes to onboard them.”
