Bethesda Game Studios are celebrating their fortieth anniversary and, as part of the celebration, Todd Howard has confirmed that The Elder Scrolls VI will be called Sentinel. The game will be the long, long-awaited follow-up to the mega-selling Skyrim (2011), though exactly how long we'll have to wait for it remains unclear, since the teaser does not mention a release date. However, according to reliable reporter Jason Schreier, Bethesda are targeting a late 2028 release window for the game.
Bethesda created the Elder Scrolls franchise in the early 1990s, partially derived from the Dungeons & Dragons games helmed by some of the staff there, though with some added metaphysical twists. The franchise kicked off with The Elder Scrolls: Arena (1994), which saw the player travelling across the vast continent-spanning Empire of Tamriel. The game was a modest success, but its sequel, The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1996), was a much bigger hit. The game allowed tremendous freedom in a truly colossal open world (a roughly 1:1 scale map about the same size as the island of Britain) but was famously janky and buggy. Two action-focused spin-offs, Battlespire (1997) and Redguard (1998), were financial failures that pushed the company close to bankruptcy before it was rescued by Zenimax Media. Bethesda then embraced both modern 3D technology and a strategic alliance with Microsoft for their Xbox consoles to deliver The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (2002) and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006), the former making them critical darlings and the latter being their first big, smash-hit game.
Bethesda had bought the Fallout IP from the collapsing Interplay and developed Fallout 3 (2008), whilst collaborating with Obsidian Entertainment on Fallout: New Vegas (2010). Bethesda later returned to that franchise solo with Fallout 4 (2015) and the online game Fallout 76 (2018). Inbetween they released The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim in 2011. Still their biggest-selling game, with over 65 million copies solid, Skyrim has infamously been re-released multiple times on different generations of hardware with one full graphical remaster, as well as substantial mod support and two large and several small expansions. The game's multi-generational, perennial popularity is remarkable, with just under 30,000 people playing the game right now on Steam alone.
Given Skyrim's immense success, it was assumed that Bethesda would return to the Elder Scrolls world after the release of Fallout 4 (and the unexpected making of Fallout 76, a radical expansion of what had originally been a planned multiplayer mode for Fallout 4), and indeed, this appears to have been the expectation. However, Todd Howard had long dreamed of making a space opera video game involving travel to different planets, inspired by the Traveller tabletop roleplaying game (which Bethesda had briefly licensed in the late 1990s). The result was Starfield, released in 2023 to a muted reception. In the meantime, Bethesda's sister-team at Zenimax Online Studios had released The Elder Scrolls Online (2014), which was well-received but not regarded as a substitute for the next proper Elder Scrolls experience.
Frustration also mounted given that Bethesda had teased the existence of The Elder Scrolls VI in 2018 with a very brief trailer, but little information was subsequently released. Bethesda had revealed the existence of the game to allay fears that The Elder Scrolls Online would stop the development of new single-player titles (as had occurred at Blizzard with the release of World of WarCraft forestalling the release of new single-player games in the original strategy series).
It appears now that pre-production of The Elder Scrolls VI had originally been planned to start after the release of Fallout 4, but the introduction and development of Fallout 76 prevented much headway from being made. Pre-production began properly in 2018 after Fallout 76's launch with the main development team moving to Starfield. Starfield's protracted development (including a year-long delay late in the day) seemed to impact work on Elder Scrolls VI, with full development of the latter not beginning until early 2024, shortly after the release of Starfield. Despite this, some fans had theorised that Bethesda's expanded headcount (the company has more than quadrupled in size since Skyrim's release), new technology, possible parallel development and the relative straightforwardness of Sentinel's development compared to Starfield, which required many new gameplay systems and ideas, would allow the game to get out the door much faster, potentially in 2027.
The failure to provide a launch window for the game suggests 2027 is now off the table, not to mention Bethesda is expected to launch Fallout 3 Remastered on 23 October next year at a special event in Washington DC, so would not want to clash with that in any case. Jason Schreier's reporting indicates late 2028, with a potential delay into 2029, may be more realistic in this case. That would mean a near-eighteen year gap between titles in the series, even more startling than the thirteen-year gap between Grand Theft Auto games.
Bethesda have also confirmed the title gives a clue to the game's location. In Elder Scrolls lore, Sentinel is the capital city of the western province of Hammerfell, home of the legendary warriors known as the Redguards. Daggerfall was previously set in the northern half of Hammerfell and the southern half of neighbouring High Rock, with Sentinel as a visitable location. Whether Sentinel includes all of Hammerfell plus all of High Rock, or again parts of both is unknown. The brief teaser also ends with a quote dated 4E 206 (the 206th year of the Fourth Era), five years after the events of Skyrim, suggesting the game may take place in that time period.
Bethesda have also confirmed that Fallout 5 is in pre-production, and they are collaborating with Obsidian Entertainment once again on a new Fallout game.
