A legal dispute may have confirmed the ELDER SCROLLS VI subtitle

A legal tussle between Bethesda Softworks, their owners Zenimax Media and a small-press publisher may have inadvertently given away the subtitle of their next Elder Scrolls video game.

Bethesda filed a trademark claim for the name "Redfall" over a year ago, prompting a response from BookBreeze, the publisher of author Jay Falconer. Falconer had written a series of post-apocalyptic novels under the Redfall banner title.

After the threat of legal action, Zenimax and BookBreeze reached an out-of-court settlement (read: money exchanged hands) in May 2019 which appears to allow both Zenimax to use the title in the future and for BookBreeze to continue publishing books under that name.

The story has resurfaced in recent weeks due to a series of alleged leaks about The Elder Scrolls VI, most of which later turned out to be false. However, the "Redfall" title tussle is one of the view hard pieces of information we have about the game. Based on the very brief teaser released two years ago, it is widely expected that the game will take place in the provinces of High Rock and Hammerfell, the home of the Redguards, who loom large in Elder Scrolls lore. There is also the matter of a side-quest in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011), which hints that a "red plague" is currently loose in High Rock and a character is headed back there (Bethesda had previously lined up Skyrim with repeated references to that province in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion back in 2006).

The Elder Scrolls VI: Redfall or Whatever will very likely not be released until the middle of the next decade, as Bethesda are still hard at work on their epic SF CRPG Starfield, as well as further expansions to online survival shooter Fallout 76.