The Elder Scrolls games are, first and foremost, about complete player freedom and the wonders of explorations, but having played something like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild recently, I can’t help but wonder if maybe something like that can be done even while having a larger focus in other areas of game design. Skyrim did, to be fair, feature a few puzzles here and there, but they were very simplistic and hardly posed any sort of a challenge.
Maybe having more difficult, engaging puzzles in the game will not only help with making the game world more immersive, but will also prove to be a nice distraction and help the game from becoming monotonous. That’s not to say that a potential The Elder Scrolls 6 will need to have intricate, Zelda-style puzzles, of course, but having the sort of puzzles that can pull you out of the action just for a little while and actually force you think about what to do next would be a welcome change.
How can this be done? Well, Bethesda can always do what Breath of the Wild did and provide little snippets, similar to Shrines, that pose physics-based puzzles for players to tackle. That, of course, will open a completely different can of worms, in that Bethesda will need an overhauled engine that isn’t nearly as buggy as their current one is. Another path that Bethesda can take is to simply make their dungeons the source of all puzzles- much more conventional, but by no means less effective. That said, dungeons and dungeon design has never really been a strength of the Elder Scrolls games, so it would be interesting to see something like that happen.
Do you think having more intricate and layered puzzles in The Elder Scrolls 6 would be a good idea? How would they even be implemented in the game, and how do you think they would work? Tell us in the comments section below.
This article is part of our series on Bethesda’s next big entry into the world of The Elder Scrolls. Through this series we take a look at the possible new features that Bethesda can add into the next The Elder Scrolls game, based on what they implemented in the previous entries and player feedback.
