According to The Verge,
The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinelis the title of the highly-anticipated follow-up to Bethesda’s Skyrim…While we’re not quite sure when to expect… However, Bethesda does like to wait until its games are close to the finish line to really lay it all out there, so we may be waiting a while before we get raw gameplay.
✨📜 Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! 📜✨
There are numerous… tales, scrolls, prose, and legends
Shelves of stories, space of songs for every heart and wisdom
Where every world of atoms of each letter carved in time
Has a Universe to share with you, your friends, the Hero
~ /\
Considering the general “progress” US-based big devs have made in the last decade, I will set my hopes for this game to be veeeery low. Also probably best to just wait another 10yrs to just buy the “remastered special collectors mega ultra super edition, final cut (for now)”
I hope I am wrong though…
My hopes for this are low simply because Bethesda is still gonna use Creation Engine despite it being inadequate for nearly two decades now, and Starfield clearly showing it was no longer nearly good enough for a modern open world game.
With the money they got from Skyrim and the M$ buyout, they should have made a new one.
Like you said, Starfield really exposed how yanky this engine has gotten and I don’t expect TES6 to turn out much better, especially since their credo still seems to be “bigger, bigger, bigger”, despite that turning SF into a bland void with loading screens
A reminder that No Man’s Sky came out in 2016, and Cyberpunk 2077 came out in 2020, while Starfield released in 2023.
Yet Starfield feels like it’s a dramatically older game. Does Starfield seem like it’s a 3 year old game? Hell no, it feels like it’s over a decade old, and it felt like that the day it released.
Bethesda’s development team is larger and arguably more experienced than both CDPR and Hello Games combined, yet they have essentially abandoned Starfield while the other two completely salvaged games that had terrible launches.
Bethesda has absolutely no credibility anymore. Expect ES6 to be terrible, and require community mods to be made playable to modern standards.
Someone was just recently showcasing a mod for Skyrim that allows seamless transition between zones, effectively turning Skyrim truly open world. Link here and here . That’s one guy in his free time doing what Bethesda hasn’t done in any of their games. I’m not saying the engine is fine but the issue isn’t the engine, it’s the lack of ambition within Bethesda. That Skyrim mod shows Bethesda could’ve fixed the loading screens in Starfield, they simply couldn’t be bothered to. Who knows what other limitations of the engine Bethesda could’ve overcome if they actually bothered to have some ambition with their games.
It’s great the developer invested and applied their time into the ineffably magnificent universe, title…
But, I do not believe the developers at Bethseda, Zenimax do lack ambition for it. They have professionals, much more sufficient and experienced for such a task, too.
Yet, they also are accountable and responsible for titles, history, and are expected to always stay that way, too.
Such a drastical change as you describe is indeed much significant… and that added to the official release assumes every single person will receive it, and those who remember it the way it was won’t have it anymore, and those who adventure the universe the first time - will have different than it was.
That is, it may permanently damage the initial, and now inscribed into the infinite history, presentation and shift expectations.
Changes like that may break connections between people, apply utter confusions, and insert gaps into the history enough to dissapoint everyone, where new state is now disconnected from the past experience.
Personally, I appreciate these transitions. The allow me to re-think and analyze future actions better. They add a pause that allows to reconsider the events.
These transitions are there for reason, and accountable, responsible developers, artists, people… consider it all, too, based on statistics or not.
I never implied Bethesda was supposed to add this solution to Skyrim. I’m simply pointing out that a modder has done this in Skyrim, a game that is now 2 console generations old. I get why Bethesda wouldn’t add something like that to Skyrim on launch, the console hardware couldn’t handle something like that. I also get why they wouldn’t add it later, in part of what you explained. But what’s the excuse for not having it in Starfield? Starfield desperately needed to get rid of loading screens because at some points of the game it’s loading screen after loading screen. And Starfield doesn’t get the console hardware excuse because the biggest benefit of this gen consoles is the reduction of loading screens. Furthermore Bethesda are supposed to be the professionals, they do this for a living. They now have the hardware to do it, they have the engine that was capable of doing it a decade ago, they have the ability to modify the engine (which is something the modder can’t to) and they’re supposed to have more experience that a single university student fiddling with the game for fun.
I think it raises a perfectly valid question. Why hasn’t Bethesda done this for Starfield? And a followup question to you, because my answer to the previous question is the lack of ambition, if the answer is not the lack of ambition what is the answer?
At least the modding-community can make it multiple times better then. Vanilla skyrim was pretty bland.
But otherwise the engine sucks, yes…
What, you think Bethesda is developing this game? They’re still hard at work on the eleventy millionth Skyrim release. But this time it will be playable on the Samsung Fridge.
Awesome! If only I had a fridge that wants the internet…
Dunno who actually develops it, but also doesn’t matter much. All big US-studios have collectively killed AAA-gaming. At least for the more critical customers.
Yeah I can’t imagine I’ll play this full price. I may check it out on gamepass but even that seems like it’s on the chopping block.
Unlikely that day one releases on GP will continue with the way that Xbox is headed. I’d be happy to see ES6 be an Xbox exclusive though. It might be the only thing that convinces people to buy a Helix.