The Elder Scrolls 6 Director Reveals Big Improvement From Skyrim

The Elder Scrolls 6 release date is far away. Right now, Bethesda Game Studios is focused on releasing Starfield next year via the Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, and PC. After this year, Bethesda Game Studios will shift its focus to The Elder Scrolls 6. That said, while the team is primarily working on Starfield, it doesn’t mean zero work has been done on the next Elder Scrolls game. To this end, Todd Howard, creative director of Bethesda Game Studios, teases the game will go deeper than Skyrim. 

During a recent interview, Howard noted there are parts of Skyrim that have “a veneer in terms of its interactivity.” The aim is to remedy this with The Elder Scrolls 6. Adding to this, Howard also teases fans of the series that the team knows it has to make improvements to AI and NPCs that interact with the players. 

“There are a number of parts of [Skyrim] where we don’t go deep enough, where it’s a veneer in terms of its interactivity. […] When we think about games and what we would want to do going forward, it’s okay… whatever that system is… how deep can we make it,” said Howard. “The other thing is how AI and NPCs interact with you. That’s something I think we still have a long way to go with.”

Howard continues:

“Everything takes longer than we’d like as well, but we want to make sure we get it right. Hopefully Elder Scrolls 6 — you don’t want to say that it’s worth that kind of wait, but it does stand up to the series as it has been in a really big, impactful way when it comes out.”

As you can see, it sounds like The Elder Scrolls 6 is nowhere near releasing and very much still in the conceptual/pre-production stage. And again, we don’t expect this to change until 2023, assuming Starfield isn’t delayed out of 2022, which is a possibility.

Not only is there no word when the game will release, but there’s still no word if the game will skip PS5 or whatever PlayStation console is at the forefront when the game releases. Right now, this is the expectation, but Bethesda continues to decline to explicitly say the game will be Xbox console exclusive.

H/T, IGN.