Despite previous reports revealing the game’s 2026 release window, The Elder Scrolls VI is at least five years away and is likely to release, unsurprisingly, only on PC, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S.
Today, new court documents of the FTC vs. Microsoft case surfaced online, including a summary of Microsoft’s approach following acquisitions since 2018, which includes all games released by Bethesda since its acquisition as well as the yet-to-be-released sixth entry in The Elder Scrolls series. According to the document, the game is not releasing on PlayStation 5, and its expected release window is 2026 or later. As reported on X/Twitter by Axios’ Stephen Totilo, during the testimony at the hearing, Phil Spencer clarified the game’s release date, saying that it is at least five years out, and that platforms have yet to be determined, although, back in 2022, Microsoft did say that The Elder Scrolls VI is unlikely to release on platforms other than PC and Xbox Series X|S.
Wasn’t Cyberpunk 2077 released like, a decade after its original teaser trailer?
Anyways, Skyrim hasn’t aged gracefully, Fallout 4 sucked ass, Fallout 76 was less ass than Fallout 4 but still pretty ass, and from the sounds of it, Starfield was a resounding mediocrity. I’m really not in any rush to play another new Bethesda game given their recent track record lol.
Bethesda hasn’t made a great game since Skyrim. And tbh, I probably look back on Skyrim more fondly than it deserves because I was in highschool when it came out.
I’ve played 30 hours of Starfield and feel like I didn’t really have fun the whole time. It just felt like a 6/10 game. Very pretty, 10 miles wide, and an inch deep. And there’s too much of it that is actually downright bad.
It’s sad because Bethesda used to be the gold standard for RPGs, but their ambition is getting the best of them. It’s very apparent in Starfield with all the empty space, the same 5 repeated planetary buildings, only like 3 types of enemies, and a severe lack of planet flora/fauna. And the missions are mostly really boring and not challenging.
I’m not hopeful that Elder Scrolls 6 is going to be anything better than mid-tier.
Since Morrowind. Skyrim wasn’t bad, don’t get me wrong, but it can’t hold a candle to its granddaddy in terms of world-building and stat-based character advancement, which was sacrificed for the sake of action combat that is not even close to good enough to carry the game.
But here’s the thing… Bethesda hadn’t made a great game before Morrowind either. That was their big breakout hit, and ever since then they’ve just been remaking that same game with slightly different coats of paint hoping to catch lightning in a bottle for a second time. They used to make more varied and innovative games before that, but none of them was really all that good. Terminator: Future Shock had fully 3D environments and enemies and a mouselook control scheme a year before Quake, but there’s a good reason why the latter game is remembered as one of the foundational pillars of the genre and the Bethesda offering lies forgotten.
So I agree with you that expecting TES6 to be amazing is naive, but I don’t think it’s because Bethesda has gotten worse. It has simply regressed to the mean.
Always has been. I haven’t played Starfield yet, but from what I’ve read about it online, including your description, it sounds a hell of a lot like a sci-fi version of Daggerfall, which was insanely overambitious for its time. It’s a shame they seem to have focused on making the graphics prettier rather than the procedural generation more complex and interesting.