Eight years ago, I sat at my desk enthralled. Bethesda had just released the first trailer for The Elder Scrolls 6, a then mysteriously nameless, locationless sequel to one of the biggest games of all time, and I reckoned I’d just found the secrets to both. It was going to be set in the region of Hammerfell, I reckoned. And the city of Sentinel was a crucial factor in reasoning why.
Admittedly, I’m maybe a little more horrified at my level of Elder Scrolls obsession than I am chuffed at any apparent clairvoyance. Ultimately it was a bit of a punt, launched off the back of a day’s worth of fanatical hyperfocus and exactly the right amount of the old Gamer Network office’s weapons-grade filter coffee. “There’s not really a lot to go on here”, I wrote, sagely, “but, if we had to, we’d plant our flag in Hammerfell as the location of The Elder Scrolls 6.”
Indulge me a bit and let’s retread the reasoning. First, three assumptions were required in order to make any kind of guess at all: The Elder Scrolls 6 would not be set in all of Tamriel; not set outside of Tamriel; and would be set somewhere vaguely close in the timeline to the events of Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim – so as to make that bit of scrabbly rock and ruined castle, visible in that now infamous first teaser, at least somewhat traceable with contemporary descriptions in the lore.
Then came a lot of narrowing down. Not Morrowind, Cyrodiil, Skyrim or the Summerset Isles, I decided, as we’d been to all of those too recently (I’ll leave it up to you whether another eight years since Morrowind lets that one still count as remotely “recent”, but still). And then not Valenwood, Elsweyr, or Black Marsh, thanks to the topography of the land in the trailer and the type of environment on show. That left High Rock and Hammerfell, the former of which we ruled out because of its relative size – on the small side for a presumably beefy new TES game – and more importantly, the architecture that seemed at odds with the sandy stone just barely visible in the structures of that first teaser.
And finally: Sentinel. The city was perfectly positioned – along a coast with the sea to the right, dry mountains in the foreground, warm stone ruins to the left, no visible land beyond. Now, that setting is all but confirmed – “all but” as, technically, nothing’s set in stone yet, pardon the pun. All we’ve since been shown is a sand dune, an Elder Scroll, the name Sentinel, and a brief quote from a Moth Priest to a Hammerfell High Queen. But we can pretty much lock it in.
To the Elder Scrolls obsessive who spent that day eight years ago scurrying down endless YouTube rabbit holes and lingering on the dustiest unofficial wiki pages, the thought of a game set there ought to be tantalising. Already, even with that paper thin new teaser, there’s enough to start picking at. The new trailer’s quote is dated just four years after the events of Skyrim, for instance, with both that territory and Cyrodiil located right next door, making for some lovely opportunities for crossovers and references to wider events. And the quote itself is curious. As our guides team have already speculated, the notion of “A future lost. A victory undone. Sands of time scattered by fate” gives off the faintest whiff of a time-forking Dragon Break. That being the timeline-branching, multiple-player-choice-enabling thing that happened at the end of The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall, a game which took place – aha! – in the Iliac Bay between High Rock and Hammerfell. Surely, the same bay we’re looking at in that original TES 6 trailer.
It keeps going! The “victory” mentioned in that quote could refer to the victory won by the people of Hammerfell against a Thalmor invasion, in a conflict that – ooh! – took place around the same time Skyrim’s main story was happening, and just a few years before that quote is dated. Could we get branching timelines? A tying together of the overarching Thalmor plotline that’s been simmering away until now? A load of varying endings, as Bethesda experimented with so openly in Starfield? I’m off again. Fire up the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages!
There’s such magic here, far beyond the apparent mastery Bethesda has over theory-baiting teasers for suckers like me. These games, for instance, also have an uncanny knack for joyful stupidity. There are Oblivion NPC barks out there that landed right as YouTube’s golden era hit liftoff, and in turn defined an entire generation’s sense of humour. I was once in a Slack channel here called #reeblereeblereeble, which was just myself and two other writers punting Imperial Watch taunts at each other to lighten the mood every couple of weeks, or whenever someone seemed a bit stressed. When I leave a gathering of old school friends I still catch myself bidding them “farewell!” with Wood Elf gusto, and giggling at the thought of being immediately squished into mulch.
And none of that is to mention the design itself, which has at times been more or less unparalleled. The clockwork, systemic magic of Morrowind is extraordinary, the first hour alone a lesson – at least as important as good old over-cited Mario 1:1 – in instructional design. Within a walkable radius of the musty little settlement of Seyda Neen Bethesda gave the player every tool necessary for understanding – and subsequently playing with, then outright breaking – its entire world. With Oblivion it brought the role-playing open world to the masses. With Skyrim it expanded what our very concept of the masses means.
By all accounts I should, then, be absolutely drooling at the thought of The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel. But for some reason the excitement is muted. It’s been like this since long before this second teaser, frankly, and for much of that time I’ve put it down to Bethesda itself.
Bethesda Game Studios has not been on a good run. Fallout 76 might’ve finally recovered from its nightmarish launch, but time hasn’t been hugely kind to Fallout 4, which longer-running fans have come to generally settle on as decent, but something of a slight step back from the wilder, more playful tendencies of Fallout 3 and Obsidian’s New Vegas. The same could be argued of Skyrim, a wonderful game in its own right that did, nevertheless, sand down some of The Elder Scrolls’ signature RPG elements into something smoother, almost closer to a frictionless modern action game (a topic on which Elder Scrolls fans have some rather strong opinions, though that’s a whole other debate). And then there’s Starfield, a perfectly alright game that, by virtue of that, is sort of a disaster. Its mere adequacy has only served to harden the belief, amongst long-running fans, that Bethesda has lost its magic touch.
The natural question, then, is can Bethesda recapture the magic? Again for some time I’ve been worried the answer might be ‘no’. I worried about the BioWare-ification of the studio: the failed (albeit very well recovered) live service punt, the wonky new IP, the consolidation beneath changing owners, the shifting goalposts, the creeping corporate-ification and apparently inevitable entropy of big, creative RPG studios over a long enough period of time. The Bethesda of today is not the Bethesda of Morrowind, Oblivion or Skyrim. It’s probably not even the Bethesda of Starfield. And worryingly, it’s shown for some time now that it seems to care more for broad appeal – that mirage of financial success – over having caché with its long-running fans. That kind of blinkered thinking always comes back to bite.
But that’s not it. I worried about that, but then I learned to stop worrying about that. The reality is Bethesda can absolutely recover the magic, just as any studio can – including BioWare for that matter, had it been given a clear, EA nonsense-free chance – for the obvious reason that no two development cycles need ever be the same. Development studios are not individuals, they’re not sportspeople who go in or out of form, or see the talent fade as their legs start to give out. They’re massive organisations full of all kinds of people. And so just as people leave, other people can join. There are always systemic issues at work, but you can overcome those if you can hire well, design well, plan well – if your owners are smart enough to let you, if you’re given enough runway, and your leaders know what they’re doing. Good game development, like just about anything done with a large team, is ultimately about making good decisions consistently over time. This is entirely possible for Bethesda to do, with the right people in charge to make them. That goes for the people above Bethesda’s top brass, too.
Will Bethesda deliver? Yes, no, maybe. In a way it’s besides the point. Instead, I’ve realised the thing that gives me pause, before burrowing giddily down into another warren of silly Tamriel backstory, is that the world this Elder Scrolls game will launch into will just be so thoroughly different to the last. Every video game from a western, triple-A publisher is life-or-death now. Every sales figure, metascore, or stray quote is another algorithmically driven hate-narrative, a collective Emperor’s thumbs down. And every ultimate owner of these games now seems to be properly set on being really impossible not to loathe.
Bethesda can’t make games that are just alright, because today alright means doom. It takes too long, for one – we’re already well into GTA 6 territory here, 15 years on from Skyrim and counting, with master of whispers Jason Schreier suggesting at least another two to go. And by virtue of that, its games must surely cost too much. The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel will sell gangbusters, which will mitigate that. But at this level of spending, the level of the stratosphere, a sales hit alone arguably isn’t enough. The world demands something more.
You take that long and cost that much and your game has to shake the mountains and rumble the earth. Move the industry or revive it. Sell physical consoles that are likely to cost into the low thousands. Rewrite a narrative of failure, incompetence, arrogance, waste, and decline. This is not me declaring those things necessary; it’s the way of the industry now. The sands have shifted. A game like The Elder Scrolls 6 is now a symbol. In this case one of its owner, Xbox.
That company has no other cards to play but this one, as evidenced by CEO Asha Sharma jangling her Todd Howard-shaped keys every time the heat from all that delicious bloodletting gets a little much. Sentinel has to not only be successful, then, but widely adored. Anything else, after hundreds of millions on its development, billions on wider acquisitions, thousands upon thousands of layoffs (and, let’s not forget, a boycott derived from still blood-splattered links to what a UN commission calls a genocide), will be a failure. Not a failure for Bethesda’s developers, by any stretch, but for the company at large after the weight of context Xbox has dropped on top of them. A failure to flip over the table at the dying moment of a losing game. A failure for those who are all too desperate to change the story.
All this – all the perpetual, seemingly endless turmoil of making video games, the cynicism in the air of so many gaming spaces, the terminally compromised corporate ownership of the games themselves – is what makes excitement so hard to muster. I look at The Elder Scrolls now and can’t help but feel a little tinge of anger or sadness. Anger that yet another route to open joy – and to unserious teen memories and, frankly, a tiny little part of a personal identity, no matter how hard I try to resist that – has become wound up with such unsavoury ownership. All this, reduced to yet another PR tool and distraction technique to shift eyes and words away from bleak and pointless cruelty. And then sadness, at the idea I might escape into it, whenever it finally arrives, only to find myself in exactly the world I wish I could just briefly leave behind. Bethesda’s developers can recapture the magic. But can the world of video games let them?
