Elder Scrolls fans who’ve been patiently waiting for updates on the next big mainline Elder Scrolls title may still have a long wait ahead, but the iconic director and producer, Todd Howard, has offered some small morsels around the game in a recent interview with YouTuber, MrMattyPlays.
The full, hour-long interview is well worth a watch for its other content as well, around things like Fallout and Starfield, so check it out here. But Howard was surprisingly willing to at least chat about The Elder Scrolls VI, if not especially keen or able to offer concrete details. There were discussions around the game’s protracted development, and especially how the studio plans to support it long-term based on what it’s learned from its previous games.
“We would look back at Skyrim, which we’re still updating to a small extent – and there’s all those creations and mods there – still a hugely-played game, and same with Fallout 4, that we wish we had supported them longer,” Howard admitted.
“We went into 76 knowing hey, this is a game we’re gonna support for as long as we can. Starfield we go into that knowing the same thing, and as we go into Elder Scrolls VI we sort of… with all these games you’ve go to start now by thinking about a 10-year horizon, right? How do we support a game for that long?”
Perhaps more interesting is when asked about what ideas Bethesda has for TES6’s long-term support after seeing Skyrim players return to that game over and over for the better part of a decade, Howard gets a little cryptic and, at least in my eyes, seems to suggest that there will be some big systemic concept in TES6 that’ll make the passage of time interesting.
“100%, yeah. Seeing obviously what Skyrim has done, and our other games, I think you could say for Elder Scrolls VI… yeah, I’ll just stop there,” the director said, and didn’t stop there.
“We know people are going to play it for a long time, so I think a game like that is not just, what it means for content. It goes further than that in, you know, the type of game, what it means for your character, what it means for other things to say, ‘Hey, can this be something that you come back to?’…”
I don’t know, something about that has me theorising all kinds of things from MMO-like elements to real-time ageing of the world or other gnarly ideas like that. It could just as easily be Todd being Todd, though.
Which, speaking of, Howard did briefly address the fact that he got up on the E3 stage in 2018 and announced the game.
“It’s the sixth anniversary of us releasing the teaser for Elder Scrolls VI. So that did make me pause and say ‘Oh wow, that has been a while,'” he admitted, before stressing that, “We’re working hard on it and one day we’ll have it to everybody.”
Matty also asks in the interview how much crossover there was between the development of Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI, especially given TES6 had already been in the works for quite some time by the time Starfield launched.
“We overlap a lot,” Howard responded. “..and you know a lot of the Starfield technology is the starting point for Elder Scrolls VI and then obviously we try to do another jump up in technology with looking at what’s coming in the future? How do we do that? And always be moving the ball forward.”
Check out the full interview below:
