This week, Bethesda confirmed that the next game in their mega-selling Elder Scrolls series will be called The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel. This was the most substantive information released about the game since a teaser trailer in 2018 confirmed it was in development. But the previous game in the series, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, was released in November 2011. Even granted that Bethesda has released several games in the interim in other series, that's a huge amount of time to wait for a game that should be a licence to print money, and if it turns out not to be, the immense wait for it will clearly be the main factor. So why is it taking so long?
Bethesda Game Studios was founded in 1986, and this week celebrated its 40th anniversary. During its first few years of existence, it focused on ports, taking games from one system and making them work on another. Their early work for EA Sports provided a steady income stream and allowed the team to consider their dream project: a vast, sprawling fantasy RPG set in a fully open world you could explore at your leisure. This resulted in The Elder Scrolls: Arena (1994), which featured the entire continent-spanning Empire of Tamriel in a rudimentary way, and then The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1996). Daggerfall "zoomed in" on the Iliac Bay region, consisting of the northern half of the province of Hammerfell and the southern half of the province of High Rock. Sentinel, the capital city of Hammerfell, appeared in both games. Despite taking place in an ostensibly tiny area of the map covered in Arena, Daggerfall was a much bigger game with thousands of procedurally-generated dungeons, towns and cities, mixing optional side-quests with a main storyline. The game was a big success.
Following a financial crisis triggered by the failure of two action-oriented spin-off games, Battlespire (1997) and Redguard (1998), Bethesda was bought out by Zenimax Media who provided the funding for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (2002). The game brought the gigantic scale of the first two games down to earth, with a much smaller, more easily explorable map packed with side-quests, random encounters and interesting creatures as well as a compelling main plot. It was also the first game in the series to launch on console, the original Xbox, where it sold surprisingly well and began Bethesda's association with Microsoft, which became more formal in 2021 when Microsoft bought Zenimax Media and all its subsidiaries, including Bethesda. Morrowind was credited alongside Grand Theft Auto III (2001) with starting the modern age's obsession with vast open worlds and immense player choice.
Given Morrowind's success, the company was on firmer footing going into the next game, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. With development going well and switching from pre-production to full development around 2004, the team realised their pre-production team would not have anything to do, so looked around for another project. Having worked on Elder Scrolls games almost non-stop since somewhere around 1992, they were keen to bring in another style of game and genre to work on. Bethesda head honcho Todd Howard had been a huge fan of the Fallout games created by Black Isle Studios and released by Interplay, then consisting of Fallout (1997), Fallout 2 (1998) and Fallout Tactics (2001). Interplay was collapsing, so Bethesda were able to buy the Fallout IP relatively cheaply in 2004 and they decided to immediately start work on Fallout 3, with the idea being the game would be a first-person experience using a similar structure and format to The Elder Scrolls.
This started the Bethesda practice of "leapfrogging," where work would begin on the next-but-one-game years before the next game even came out. This reduced the wait for a new game and provided very firm foundations for the development team, since they'd start work on the next game with all the fundamental questions like setting, map size, mechanics, concept art etc already worked out rather than mixing the pre-production and full development processes, a mistake made by many other companies. This process has become more common in the industry, with, for example, Rockstar Games doing something similar.
So in this early period, Oblivion started development around 2002 and was released in 2006. Around 2004 the pre-production team started work on Fallout 3, which then entered full development in 2006 and was released in 2008. The pre-production team had already moved on to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, with the earliest pre-production work taking place around 2006. And so on. Noclip's informative documentary about Bethesda confirmed this with a concept artist confirming he had started designing new weapons for Fallout 4 in the same month that Fallout 3 was released, in late 2008, a full seven years before Fallout 4 was actually released in late 2015.
This should not be oversimplified, of course. As teams and individuals wrap up their work on one game, they may transition to the next game weeks or months ahead of another individual or team. It's not like the entire main development team of Fallout 3 halted work on the game the second it went gold and was immediately starting on Skyrim the next day. This is especially complicated by the presence of DLC for the games, with smaller teams still working on the previous title months or a year or even more after release providing new content, whilst most of their colleagues are now working on the next full game. The transition from pre-production to full development can therefore be more of a gentle segue than a hard pivot. It's also not the case that the pre-production team are necessarily completely isolated from the full dev team, with people wearing more than one hat, and new weapon designs or location ideas being needed from concept artists even relatively late in full dev due to story changes or technical choices. The writers may be focused on pre-production for the next game, but still be tweaking the script and dialogue for the current one right up to recording.
Still, it emphasises that during Bethesda's "Golden Age," running roughly from 2002 to 2015, when they developed and released five large, open-world RPGs, the games did not take as fast to develop as they looked. It's clear that in the almost-identical time period since then, the process has changed or become more complicated, as they have only released one large, open-world RPG (regarded, fairly or not, as lacklustre), a multiplayer spin-off and a remaster (that was largely the work of a different company). Obviously game development has simply gotten more complicated, with vastly superior visuals requiring much more work. Sub-2K assets needed for Oblivion have been replaced by 4K assets which have four times the graphical fidelity and even more times the work. Expectations for animation, physics and lighting are vastly beyond what they used to be. Gamer expectations now are that open-world games should be very long, providing hundreds of hours of content, whilst with the likes of Oblivion and Fallout 3, a player could see pretty much everything the games had to offer in under fifty hours. A game with 150 quests will simply take longer to develop than one with 50, and a game with 75 dungeons will take longer to develop than one with 30, and so on. In a way, Bethesda themselves created this problem with the repeatable side content in Skyrim, which allowed players to build up, in some cases, thousands of hours in the game. For all the promises of new technology, faster tools and, now, AI speeding up development, in almost every case, with every new generation, it takes longer.
But still, it's clear something has gone amiss. This is an oversimplification, if not a gross one, but we can say the Golden Age development period looked something like this:
Morrowind: released 2002.
Oblivion: pre-production 2002, full development 2004, released 2006.
Fallout 3:pre-prod 2004, full dev 2006, released 2008.
Skyrim: pre-prod 2006, full dev 2008, released 2011.
Fallout 4: pre-prod 2008, full dev 2011, released 2015.
After this, the situation became murkier and less clear, not to mention somewhat contradictory, in some cases.
We know that Todd Howard had come up with the concept for Starfield, their big space RPG, in the late 1990s, and for a while Bethesda briefly flirted with the idea whilst they held the video game licence to the Traveller tabletop IP. With the success of Fallout 3, it appears that Howard returned to the idea, but Zenimax were still sceptical of juggling two franchises, let alone three. The immense success of Skyrim, which sold over 12 million copies in its first week on sale alone, seems to have given Howard the leverage to make Starfield the next project after Fallout 4. We know the title was trademarked in 2013, suggesting that pre-production on the game began after Skyrim's release, either in late 2011 or some time in 2012. Thanks to leaked images, we know that by 2018 the game had something of a playable build, a UI similar to that in the final game, and spacesuits and habitats similar to those in the final release.
However, a chaos grenade was thrown into the mix thanks to the project known as "multiplayer Fallout." Fans had been asking for Bethesda games to include co-op multiplayer since almost the dawn of the company, with multiplayer mods being among the most popular for all their titles. Bethesda had co-operated with Zenimax Online Studios to produce The Elder Scrolls Online, released in 2014 to a reasonable reception and still going today, but that was much more of a traditional MMORPG, in the vein of World of WarCraft, rather than the experience fans really wanted. With Zenimax keen to leverage the income stream from a successful multiplayer title, it was decided to add a comprehensive multiplayer mode to Fallout 4. Early results suggested this was not a good idea, the map had been developed as an intense single-player experience and was too small to support tons of players, whilst Bethesda had little experience in online technical systems and Bethesda's propriety Creation Engine had not been designed with multiplayer in mind.
Zenimax assigned BattleCry Studios, based in Austin, Texas, to help Bethesda. Renamed Bethesda Game Studios Austin (the main BGS HQ is in Bethesda, Maryland, hence the name), the newer studio specialised in multiplayer and online netcode. Very quickly, the project expanded in scope from Fallout 4's multiplayer mode to a standalone title, with its own, much larger map. The creative team at Maryland also decided to make the game a prequel to the entire series, so as not to tread on the toes of whatever decisions they took in later singleplayer games, and to reassure fans that the online games were not supplanting their traditional singleplayer, immersive experiences (The Elder Scrolls Online is also a prequel, for the same reason). The new game, now named Fallout 76 to emphasise it was a spin-off rather than a mainline sequel, would also depend on players for a lot of its ecosystem and development, meaning that the traditional, time-consuming development activities of writing and character-building would be minimised. The game also reused a lot of Fallout 4's graphical assets to further speed development. Thanks to all of this, Fallout 76 went from not existing as a concept in 2014 or even early 2015 to being ready for release in late 2018, a remarkably fast turn-around. Despite some claims to the contrary, the introduction of Fallout 76 significantly impacted progress at BGS Maryland, because though Austin handled the technical side of things, all of the creative decisions, story and art design were still handled at Maryland.
"This aged well," - Todd Howard, probably.
Still concerned that Bethesda fans would riot at the perception that Bethesda was going online or multiplayer-only, it was decided to reassure them by announcing their next two games far earlier than Bethesda ideally liked. According to Todd Howard, the platonic ideal for a Bethesda title would be to literally release it with no marketing to avoid the problem of over-hyping the game (a position probably solidified by seeing what over-hyping did to CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020). Short of that, announcing both Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 just four to five months ahead of release had been a big success. He had little interest in telling people what might happen two or four years down the line, especially when delays might happen at any time for any reason and invalidate the promise.
It was therefore with reluctance that Howard announced in June 2018 that not just Fallout 76 was coming that November, but that Bethesda were working on the space RPG Starfield, their first new IP in decades and that very early work had already started on The Elder Scrolls VI, complete with a short teaser trailer of a rocky, coastal landscape, and both would be traditional single-player experiences. I strongly suspect Howard has regretted that decision ever since.
After Fallout 76 was released in 2018 it was clear that Bethesda had commenced full development on Starfield and pre-production on The Elder Scrolls VI, and that at least some development on Starfield had happened earlier to enable the game to be in a good enough condition for the 2018-dated image leaks to exist. But some people who left Bethesda in this time period have recently expressed surprise when Starfield was internally announced to be the next full project after the release of Fallout 4, which would not be the case if Starfield had been in pre-production since 2011/12. They had been anticipating that Elder Scrolls VI would be the next game, but presumably pre-production on ES6 had not even started, so they should have known that would not be the case. The situation seems very confused compared to the very clear timeline for the Golden Age period.
Subsequent events were at least clearer: Microsoft announced it was acquring Bethesda in 2020 and completed the process in 2021. Starfield got its formal reveal in mid-2021 and confirmation it was targeting a November 2022 release date, a surprising eighteen-month lead time (more than three times that allocated to Fallout 4 and 76), indicating either that Microsoft wanted much more notice of release dates, or it was decided that as a new IP Starfield needed much more marketing, or both. As it stood, Starfield was delayed by a full year. Apparently the game could have hit its original launch date, but post-Cyberpunk 2077 and its technical issues, Microsoft were concerned about ensuring the game be as optimised as possible.
Starfield finally came out in late 2023 to a somewhat muted reception. The game was fiercely criticised for bland dialogue and the majesty of space travel being reduced to a succession of loading screens (which particularly aged like milk compared to the seamless space-to-ground transitions in No Man's Sky, Elite: Dangerous and, in early access, Star Citizen). There were some good quests, some excellent visual design and Bethesda's best-ever action combat, but the overall feeling was subdued at best, not helped by the game launching in the same month as the iconic, generational RPG Baldur's Gate III and the hugely successful Cyberpunk 2077 expansion Phantom Liberty, which completed that troubled game's redemption story. Comparing 2077's realistic, lived-in nightclubs to Starfield's hilariously polite, sterile ones became a meme for a couple of months. Starfield's muted reception, status as an Xbox/PC exclusive (shutting out the large PlayStation market) and simultaneous release on Xbox Game Pass also meant underwhelming, though far-from-disastrous, sales.
Still, the completion of Starfield meant that full development on The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel could begin in earnest, which apparently took place at the start of 2024, whilst a small team continued work on Starfield's expansions (Shattered Space and Terran Armada, both now out). In spring 2025, Bethesda even sprang a welcome surprise on fans by "shadow-dropping" (that is, releasing without fanfare) The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered. Largely the work of companion studio Virtuos, the game had had its graphical interface completely revamped, all of its assets and environments remade in Unreal Engine 5 at a high level of fidelity, and moderate improvements had been made to the game's janky levelling, combat and movement. Though technical problems have persisted since launch, with a very slow patching schedule irritating fans, the sheer beauty of Oblivion Remastered and the reminder of what a bolder, weirder Bethesda Studios was capable of back in the day, saw the game shift over 4 million units in its first week on sale, a remarkable number for a remaster of a twenty-year-old game.
In early 2026, there was a huge shakeup at Microsoft's gaming division. Phil Spencer, the longtime head of Xbox and champion of the Bethesda acquisition, was out, and newcomer Asha Sharma was in. Sharma is, very clearly, not a fan of keeping fans in the dark and not letting people know what's going on, not just with Bethesda but other subsidiary studios including Obsidian, Xbox Game Studios and Activision Blizzard. In short order, she had Bethesda confirm that Fallout 3 Remastered and Fallout: New Vegas Remastered (presumably both from Virtuos) were in development, that they were in pre-production on Fallout 5 as well as working on Elder Scrolls VI, and that Activision Blizzard were developing both Diablo 5 and a new StarCraft game, the former for 2029 and the latter for 2030 (even releasing a trailer for the latter). She tweeted about sampling a playable build of Elder Scrolls VI and even teased its title as Elder Scrolls VI: ********, which was retweeted by Bethesda itself and led to intense fan speculation (which, to their credit, quickly settled on Sentinel as the most likely title).
All of this activity led to speculation that Sentinel was much closer to release than people realised, with subreddits and online groups landing on late 2027 as a possibility. However, with it becoming increasingly clear that Bethesda are targeting the 30th anniversary of the release of the original Fallout (23 October) as the release window for Fallout 3 Remastered, even down to hosting a huge event in Washington DC, the setting for the game, this was starting to look unrealistic. With full development on Sentinel only beginning in 2023 at the absolute earliest, a release date just four years or less later seemed optimistic at best. Reports from multiple insiders, passed to journalists like Jason Schreier, confirmed that Bethesda and Microsoft are more thinking more about a late 2028 release date, possibly extending into 2029.
Bearing in mind this, the development period for the post-Golden Age of Bethesda may now look something like this:
Fallout 4: pre-prod 2008, full dev 2011, released 2015.
Fallout 76: full dev 2015, released 2018, updated a lot to make up for the lack of pre-prod and dev ever since.
Starfield: pre-prod 2012, part-time dev 2015, full-time dev 2018, released 2023 (problems due to COVID, new tech and Fallout 76 disrupting the schedule).
Sentinel: pre-prod 2018, full dev 2023, release 2028-29? Possibly early pre-prod in 2012-15 when Zenimax were still considering what game to make next.
Fallout 5: pre-prod 2023, full dev after Sentinel's release.
You can immediate see this schedule is way more chaotic, caveated and complex than for the earlier games, and it's much more arguable how things like COVID, new tech, the Microsoft acqusition and now the changing of gears at Microsoft with a new CEO, impacted development of the games.
Of course fans are not all interested in this behind-the-scenes guff. From the POV of a casual Elder Scrolls enjoyer, Skyrim came out in 2011, sold 65 million copies (and climbing) and, fifteen years later, the sequel is still only lurking on the distant horizon, despite getting a teaser trailer in 2018 and another teaser trailer in 2026. The situation is clearly far from ideal. Bethesda would argue their communication has been straightforward and was designed to keep fans in the loop and not give them unrealistic expectations, but it's also clear from this week's events that this was unsuccessful, and has put more pressure on the studio to control the situation and make a game that, after the underwhelming Starfield and arguably underwhelming Fallout 4 (plus Elder Scrolls Online and Fallout 76, which may be great online games but not what a large amount of fans wanted), has to deliver big time.
The collapse of BioWare, a one-time competitor of Bethesda in the RPG space, amidst Microsoft's trigger-happiness in closing down studios, is preying on fans' minds. Bethesda are at least vastly financially more solvent than BioWare, all of their recent games have sold well or delivered big numbers on Game Pass, and they have multiple games in development, some close to release such as Fallout 3 Remastered, which is likely under a year away. Bethesda are not going to collapse any time soon, but fans can be forgiven for being nervous.
What will be interesting is to see what happens next. Further Sentinel trailers are likely, and possibly sooner rather than later, with more information about the game likely to trickle out in 2027, possible with a full-blown trailer sometime that year (a surprise double-tap approach, with a full trailer before the end of this year, is unlikely but possible). Grand Theft Auto VI is going to suck up all the gaming discussion oxygen for a while, so Bethesda may decide to hold fire before spinning up marketing in full on the game. But at least we know what the game is called, it's on its way, and though the development time has been long and, at times inexplicably long, we know we're closer to the end of the process than the start. Bethesda now just has to deliver.
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