Following a recent tease by Bethesda Game Studios and Xbox CEO Asha Sharma about The Elder Scrolls 6 having a hidden 8-letter word as part of its title, a former developer at the studio has indicated that the open-world RPG might be called “Sentinel”. Taking to Reddit, Michael Kirkbride, who has previously worked on games like The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, said “yep” to a post asking whether the game would be called The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel.
Fans of Bethesda’s games have taken the speculation a step further and have discovered some hints about The Elder Scrolls 6 in Starfield. As Reddit user StarfieldNovember noted, the Sentinel title could be spotted in the character creation screen for Starfield, which was first shown off more than three years ago. The “Employee Number” for a Starfield character, while initially looking like a random string, seems to in fact be a deliberate range of numbers – 190514-2009140512.
Dividing the entire string into pairs of numbers and introducing a substitution cipher to the mix to swap out pairs of numbers for the corresponding letter in the English alphabet, players have discovered that it spells out Sentinel. For example, “S” is the 19th letter of the alphabet. Similarly, “E” is the 5th letter. Another user on the Elder Scrolls subreddit noted that the number always stays the same, which would imply that it was a deliberate choice by Bethesda Game Studios.
Even if Kirkbride’s “confirmation” about Sentinel being the official title for The Elder Scrolls 6 might be suspect, since he hasn’t worked at Bethesda for quite some time now, the fact that the word Sentinel also shows up in Starfield offers stronger evidence for the veracity of the title.
Speculation about The Elder Scrolls 6’s title began when Sharma confirmed that she had played an early build of the open-world RPG. Referring to it as “The Elder Scrolls VI: ********”, and getting further confirmation from Bethesda that the hidden word is eight letters in length, fans of the company’s games immediately got to work to try and figure out what it could mean. If the title turns out to be Sentinel, this means that the upcoming game could be taking place in the region of Hammerfell.
Sentinel is one of the nine kingdoms in Hammerfell, and serves as the capital for two regions: the Alik’r Desert and Myrkwasa. The city itself has also been considered one of the safe havens for the western side of the world, and has been considered to be the capital for the entire Hammerfell region following the events of the Tiber War. When it comes to the games, Sentinel has only shown up in the first two releases in the franchise – Arena and Daggerfall. Since then, the region has only been mentioned throughout other games in books and conversations.
Another interesting aspect of the potential title is the fact that The Elder Scrolls 6 would be the third mainline entry in the franchise to feature a region name in its title, following The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind and The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. Other mainline entries have featured names like Arena, Daggerfall, and Oblivion.
