The Elder Scrolls 6 may be years away — as it just entered production in August — but Bethesda Game Studios naturally has outlined what it wants to carry over from Skyrim, what it wants to upgrade, and what it wants to scrap altogether. And considering Skyrim is over a decade old, it likely needs lots of upgrading and scrapping. The standards and expectations for open-world RPGs have change a lot since then. To this end, The Elder Scrolls 6 is apparently overhauling how magic works in the game.ย
According to Bruce Nesmith, the lead designer on Skyrim, who left Bethesda Game Studios before The Elder Scrolls 6 left pre-production, he was able to convince director and executive producer, Todd Howard, to scrap the magic system in Skyrim and start over from scratch. Of course, Nesmith has no idea what of his work will end up being in The Elder Scrolls 6, but it’s safe to assume they didn’t revert on the decision to rework the magic system.ย
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“The whole magic system for Skyrim, I persuaded [Bethesda director and executive producer Todd Howard] to let me throw out the baby and the bathwater and let me restart from scratch, and he trusted me enough to do that,” said Nesmith while speaking to MinnMax. “There will probably still be traces of that in [The Elder Scrolls 6].”
Nesmith continued, noting that while the magic system was redone when he was there, he’s anticipating the leveling system in Skyrim to carry over to The Elder Scrolls 6.
“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,” said the former Bethesda Game Studios developer. “A lot of the concepts dealing with how you level and things like that, there’ll 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.”
So far, none of this information has drawn out any comment from anyone still working on the game. We don’t expect this to change, but if it does, we will be sure to update the story accordingly. In the meantime, be sure to take this information with a grain of salt.
