We know by now that The Elder Scrolls 6 is a long ways off yet, with Bethesda choosing to focus their energies on other projects, some of which are presumably going to be new IPs. The speculation circulating the internet seems to suggest that while we’ve still got some years to go before we finally get to play a sequel to the revolutionary Skyrim, it will probably happen close to the end of the life cycles of the PS4 and the Xbox One. However, would the game be better served if Bethesda decided to hold off on it a little longer and chose instead to release it for the PS5 and the Next Xbox?
We think so. Of course, there’s plenty of arguments to be made against that. For instance, look at the likes of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. Those are games that are, without a doubt, built around the PS4 and the Xbox One, however both of them are playable on the PS3 and the Xbox 360 as well, and barring a few slight performance cutdowns, the experience of both the games is largely the same on both generations of systems.
However, let’s consider the ambitions Bethesda might have with The Elder Scrolls 6. The series has always been about pushing the boundaries of open world gameplay, and with the open world genre having undergone somewhat of a renaissance in recent years with the likes of The Witcher 3 and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it makes sense that with The Elder Scrolls 6, Bethesda will want to do something massive, something that will push the genre beyond what we’ve seen so far. And for that, it is possible that they may want to skip the generation of the PS4 and the Xbox One altogether and choose to focus development on their successors.
Will fans be able to go that long without another Elder Scrolls? A lot of them won’t, but a lot would probably be glad if the end product ends up benefiting from the delay, which it very well might do.
