The Elder Scrolls 6 Needs to Avoid Big Starfield Mistake

By Tyler Fischer

Starfield is scheduled to release worldwide on September 6, 2023. Once its out, Bethesda Games Studios will shift its focus to The Elder Scrolls 6, the long-awaited follow-up to 2011's Skyrim. It's understood that the game is currently in pre-production, which means design choices that will define the game's development are still being made. To this end, Bethesda Game Studios would be wise to look at its past work more than its most recent work for inspiration. 

Starfield could release in September and there could be nothing wrong with it, and it could be a masterpiece. In other words, this hot-take may be a bit early, but it's reasonable, enough. When the size of Starfield was revealed, it created a bit of hestitation among those looking forward to it. The game is set to have over 1,000 planets across more than 100 solar systems, all of which can be explored. In other words, prodcedural generation is going to do a ton of heavy lifting for the game. You can't handcraft 1,000 explorable planets. You can't even come close to doing this. At the very least, most of these planets will be heavily procedurally generated and formulaic unless Bethesda Games Studios is using some type of magic we don't know about. 

This is not going to be a problem for everyone. Some people like games that already do this, like No Man's Sky. But it's very different than the design of Skyrim and previus installments in the series. Skyrim has procedural generation, but it's the background to a hand-crafted world. And it's hand-crafted world is why so many love it. When you explore Skyrim, you are immersed in a world that feels deliberate and well-realized because it doesn't bite off more than it can chew. Starfield is not out yet, but it's hard to imagine it will replicate this because you can't replicate this at such a large scale. 

If Starfield somehow pulls off this massive promise, which is an incredibly big if, it also doesn't mean that its scope is all of a sudden a good fit for The Elder Scrolls 6. Starfield is about exploring space, so you want it to feel massive, or at least you can understand why you'd want to make it feel massive. The Elder Scrolls has always had big open worlds but nothing so big it needs to be doused with procedural generation.

The bigger The Elder Scrolls 6 gets, the more content needs to be packed in to make it feel alive. The more quests you write and the more dynamic events you have to script, the more thin you spread your resources. The more thin you spread your resources, the less quality you get per quest or per dynamic event or per square inch of the map. 

The Elder Scrolls and vast open worlds go together, but Bethesda Game Studios will need to show some restraint coming off Starfield. Less is sometimes more. The bigger Starfield is, the more it's going to rely on procedural generation, randomzied events, reptitive mission structure, and repeat assets. And maybe these shortcomings won't weigh down Starfield, but they don't belong in The Elder Scrolls 6.

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