While Bethesda Game Studios’ Starfield will still receive support, the studio is pivoting towards its next highly-anticipated title, The Elder Scrolls 6. While it’s gone from pre-production to early development, there’s still a lot we don’t know, from the setting and the mechanics to when it releases. Even Microsoft is unsure about its exclusivity period, though it believes a release some five years down the line is possible.
Speaking to Minmaxx, former design director Bruce Nesmith, who worked on Starfield before leaving Bethesda in 2021, shared some interesting new details. Perhaps most important is that The Elder Scrolls 6 will have the same leveling mechanics as The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim.
“The whole magic system for Skyrim, I persuaded Todd to let me throw out the baby and the bathwater and let me restart from scratch, and he trusted me enough to do that. There will probably still be traces of that in six.
“The whole, ‘You do it to get better at it’… while that was not my unique idea, I had a large hand in that… That’s absolutely going to continue. A lot of the concepts dealing with how you level and things like that, there will be a bunch of new ideas thrown in, but I’m betting some of the stuff that I worked on will still survive to the new one.”
It’s not the biggest surprise, considering how many concepts and systems the developer likes to carry over between releases. Bethesda hasn’t announced any platforms for The Elder Scrolls 6, but it could be the last title in the series developed by Todd Howard. Stay tuned for more updates in the meantime.
