The Elder Scrolls 6 is on the way! After years of waiting to hear more about the next adventure in Tamriel, with every twitch of Todd Howard's eyebrows being interpreted as a clue, the great news is we finally got a real confirmation at Bethesda's showcase during E3 in 2018. The bad news is that it's a very long way off. Like, years and years.At E3 2019, Todd Howard chastised us for our impatience, saying that Starfield is Bethesda's priority before they take us back to Tamriel.What is its release date? Where in Tamriel will it take place? Bethesda hasn't said much, but here's everything we know about The Elder Scrolls 6 so far, based on rumors and interviews about the release date, setting, and more. The Elder Scrolls 6 is confirmedWhile we knew that The Elder Scrolls 6 would come eventually, we've been waiting a long time for Bethesda to announce that it's in the batting order, and is actively being developed.
That finally happened, as Todd Howard himself introduced. There's not much to it, but here it is.
What is The Elder Scrolls 6 release date?Don't hold your breath. It will probably be before the climate crisis consumes our coastlines, but not by much.We know that Starfield is going to be finished before TES6. We also know that Starfield has no release date or gameplay trailer of its own yet. So hunker down. How many years of E3 has it been since we've heard about Elder Scrolls 6?Todd Howard put a blessing and curse on us by announcing Elder Scrolls 6 at E3 2018 despite Starfield (ahead of ES6 in Bethesda's pipeline) still being in development.
The official site for The Elder Scrolls series, including The Elder Scrolls: Blades, coming fall 2018. The official site for The Elder Scrolls series, including The Elder Scrolls: Blades, coming fall 2018. Games New Releases Legacy Elsweyr. Games Latest.
We are very patient so we're just going to casually tally the years of E3 in which we haven't heard any more about Elder Scrolls 6. E3 2019 - 'I think everyone should be very patient,' Todd Howard.The Elder Scrolls 6 could be called 'Redfall'Not too long ago, Betehsda's parent company ZeniMax Media got into a trademark dispute trying to claim the word 'Redfall.'
The dispute has since been and ZeniMax is now the of the mark. We don't know for sure that the name has anything to do with TES6 but it certainly sounds Scrolls-y doesn't it?So what is Redfall? It's not a place in Tamriel, at least that we know of.
This is all speculation mind, but some are theorizing that Redfall could potentially be a plague. A particular quest in Skyrim follows an affliction that causes victims to projectile vomit and develop red skin. The plague is tied to Daedric prince Peryite who owns the domains of (among other things) pestilence. Late in the quest an NPC mentions 'returning to High Rock' which might suggest the plague began there. Maybe even in the city of Dagger fall.It's all just educated guesses, but Elder Scrolls lore buffs really know their stuff so it's as compelling a theory as we're likely to get for a while. How far along is The Elder Scrolls 6's development?Before showing the teaser for The Elder Scrolls 6 at E3, Todd Howard showed another trailer for, Bethesda's first new wholly original franchise in 25 years (Fallout was originally an Interplay joint, remember). We don't know much about Starfield, but we know that it's coming before The Elder Scrolls 6.'
Starfield is a game we've spent years thinking about and working on, something we feel uniquely positioned to pull off, and we're incredibly excited about,' Howard said. 'But we're also building toward the game after that. And it's the one you keep asking about.' That means Bethesda likely won't be devoted to full work on The Elder Scrolls 6 until after Starfield ships, which puts it many years away. Howard backed that up, saying that The Elder Scrolls 6 is in pre-production, while Starfield is currently playable.
'We can't wait to have everybody be able to play this game,' he said. 'But that's us, too.
We want to play it.' What else have we heard about the next Elder Scrolls in the past? Check out our giant feature on, which chronicles each game in the series.In 2016, Bethesda flatly stated that it wasn't working on the game.
That's more or less been the official company line for years. In 2017, Pete Hines reiterated his 'not yet' response when asked about TES6's progress after the release of Skyrim: Special Edition rekindled the hunger for more news. 'There's still two major, multiplatform releases that the team has to work on first, and so TES6 isn't happening until those games happen,' Hines said in a. 'Big, multiplatform, triple-A stuff that they do takes multiple years, so you can do the math. It ain't anytime soon.'
Now we know that Hines was referring to Fallout 76 and Starfield. We can probably expect, then, that we won't hear much more about The Elder Scrolls 6 until Bethesda crosses Starfield off the list.Another factor prolonging TES6's debut is that Howard's crew doesn't want to be known as just the Elder Fallout Guys.
'I think Todd and his team have earned the right, given the quality of this stuff, to be able to say, 'We know everybody really wants TES6, but we as creative people want to be able to do stuff that we're really passionate about,' Hines explained to last year. 'They wanted to be able to self-determine things they worked on next, whether it was existing stuff or whether it was new IP.' Clearly, as much as they may want to get back to TES, the team at Bethesda Game Studios is excited about its singleplayer space RPG. But there's another reason it's taking so long. In 2016, that the technology needed to create Bethesda's vision for The Elder Scrolls 6 just isn't here yet.'
I could sit here and explain the game to you, and you would say, 'That sounds like you don't even have the technology—how long is that going to take?' 'And so it's something that's going to take a lot of time, what we have in mind for that game.'
Just before E3 2019, in an, Todd Howard cautioned that fans would need to be very patient for Elder Scrolls 6. By the time the next single-player adventure in Tamriel is released, it may be a decade since Skyrim's first launch. 'The gap in between is going to be long. It already is. On one hand, I think it's good to miss things. I think that makes people come to it with really, really fresh eyes, and I think when they eventually— eventually—see the game and what we have in mind, they'll understand the gap more in terms of technology and what we want it to do.' When will we see more of The Elder Scrolls 6?It's years away—possibly not until the next generation of consoles come along, according Zenimax game director Matt Firor,.
It's not coming until after Starfield, Bethesda's next big project, which itself has no release date and only a teaser trailer. Full development on The Elder Scrolls 6 likely won't start until that project is finished, which likely puts The Elder Scrolls 6's release date sometime in the early 2020s.Oblivion, Fallout 4, and Skyrim were shown off in near-finished states with relatively small waits leading up to their launches (Oblivion was scheduled for a November 2005 release; it was delayed to March 2006), and Bethesda is probably priming TES6 for a similar sequence.
Hines that the next Elder Scrolls won't be teased along both as a mark of quality and as a balm for the development team to craft the game proper instead of diverting resources for vertical slice demos.