People have been demanding for a sixth The Elder Scrolls game to come out for a long time now. Skyrim came out six years ago, in 2011, and with every year that has passed since then, the demand and expectation surrounding the inevitable but as of yet unannounced The Elder Scrolls 6 has grown exponentially. However, if recent comments made by Bethesda’s Pete Hines are anything to go by, that fact is not going to have much of a impact on when the game launches.
Hines said a great many things, but the basic gist of it was, that Bethesda are not just boing to keep going back and forth between Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, that they are going to flex their creative muscles whenever and wherever they can in new IPs and new ideas, and that they’re not going to give up on that just because the fans’ demand for The Elder Scrolls 6 is sky-high.
I can completely see what he means, and I even respect Bethesda for it. In an industry that is as reliant on sequels, reiterations and cashing in on big names as ours, it is refreshing to see a company as major as Bethesda putting mammoths such as The Elder Scrolls on hold to try out new things. There’s no way anyone can spin that as a bad thing, and I definitely hope that more developers follow Bethesda’s lead.
But, if I speak about this from the perspective of someone who is first and foremost an Elder Scrolls fan, those comments made by Pete Hines are quite worrying. Sure, a lot of us want to see new things and new ideas, but perhaps more than that, a lot of people want to see The Elder Scrolls 6. We know that that game is a ways off from launch yet, at least a few years still, but if these comments are anything to go by, maybe the wait is going to be even bigger.
There’s also the fact that Hines is speaking about admirable notions of not being a machine company and not wanting to be stuck to doing the same thing over and over. And while he has a point, this is the same company that has been cashing in on Skyrim for six years now. Skyrim has received and will be receiving a number of new versions and re-releases, and for a company that doesn’t want to be chained to the same thing, that’s a bit contradictory, if not hypocritical.
Hopefully, we’re overthinking it, and Bethesda will be surprising us and launching the new Elder Scrolls game sooner than we think. We’re glad that Bethesda are trying out new things, and we desperately want to see them succeed in doing that, but we’re also looking forward to a Skyrim sequel with fervent anticipation, and we hope the game doesn’t get held off any more than it has to.
