The Elder Scrolls 6 release date, trailer, location and more

Back in E3 2018, Bethesda revealed The Elder Scrolls 6. That is, if you can call a trailer lasting under a minute a reveal. 

However, it was a clear statement that there is a sixth Elder Scrolls game in the works, despite Bethesda having plenty of other things on its plate, such as Fallout 76. And while it may be some time before we see a new Elder Scrolls game, it’s still exciting stuff. After all, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was critically acclaimed and a huge financial success, especially considering its spread from the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 to the PS4, Xbox One, the Nintendo Switch, and even virtual reality. 

As it stands, there’s really not a lot of information out there about what will be in The Elder Scrolls 6. But we’ve heard murmurs, and going by Bethesda’s previous Elder Scrolls titles, we can certainly speculate about what the game will entail. So here’s what we know so far about The Elder Scrolls 6.  

With The Elder Scrolls 6 in the design stages of development, a release date is likely to be a very long way off. We’d predict it could be some five years or so before it launches. 

That’s likely down to Starfield taking up the focus of Bethesda Game Studios, which is no bad thing as The Elder Scrolls 6 with use the Creation 2 engine that Bethesda’s original sci-fi game is being built on. 

So as much as the wait may be panful for Elder Scrolls fans, it gives Bethesda the scope to ensure that when The Elder Scrolls 6 launches, it could be spectacular and well-polished.

There’s only one trailer for The Elder Scrolls 6, and it shows very little about the game. No game footage was released, nor did we learn any details beyond the game’s basic title and a sweeping shot across some mountains. The music was a riff on the familiar theme that has been present in the last several Elder Scrolls games.  

Despite the scant information in the trailer, it has that uncanny ability to conjure up excitement among Elder Scrolls fans. We still remember how the initial trailers for Skyrim set the pulses of open-world RPG fans racing.  

All Elder Scrolls games take place on the mythical continent of Tamriel, with the past few games being located in specific nations on the continent: Morrowind in The Elder Scrolls 3, Cyrodill in The Elder Scrolls 4 and Skyrim in The Elder Scrolls 5. There hasn’t yet been a single-player Elder Scrolls game that made it to the nations of Valenwood or Black Marsh, homes of the Wood Elves and the Argonians respectively. 

But going by the mountains in the trailer, there’s been speculation that the game could take place in Black Rock, home of the mage-centric Bretons, or in Hammerfell, the land of the warrior-like Redguard. Or the game could span several of the Tamriel provinces, which is why it’s simply been called The Elder Scrolls 6.   

With no game footage released for The Elder Scrolls 6, we can only guess that it will share some of the core game elements of Skyrim. The game will likely be a massive open-world game where you won’t have to follow the main story, and can instead wander well off the beaten path to clamber up mountains, plumb the depths of cave systems, and poke around ruined fortresses and towers. 

We do hope Bethesda will make a more compelling story in The Elder Scrolls 6, as the one in Skyrim was decent, but some of the side quests felt more compelling. Bethesda could take notes games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Witcher 3, which have a lot of side quests that relate to the games’ core stories. 

More dynamic combat and spell-casting wouldn’t go amiss. Neither would the ability to do more in the open world, like establishing a stronghold or leaving more of a mark on the world. If you planted a tree, for example, perhaps it would eventually grow. And we absolutely want Bethesda to find ways around repeated dialogue from NPCs. We’re tired of hearing guards spout about how they used to be adventurers until they suffered arrow-related injuries to the lower parts of their bodies. 

Given that Bethesda is the publisher of the Dishonored games, the company could draw some inspiration from those titles and add some immersive sim elements into The Elder Scrolls 6. We’d like to be able to better traverse the open world and find new ways to tackle enemies, other than hacking away at them with swords and blasting them with fireballs. 

In short, we’re expecting The Elder Scrolls 6 to be a significant evolution over Skyrim, but still very much an Elder Scrolls game at its core. With the potential power that the Xbox Series X and PS5 can bring to bear, not to mention gaming PC hardware over the next few years, The Elder Scrolls 6 should look spectacular. We expect to see a whole lot of dramatic screenshots of vistas and skylines on social media when the game finally comes out. 

Skyrim spread across a load of platforms, and eventually ended up being a game you could play in VR. It’s one of our picks for the best VR games. So we’d not be surprised to see The Elder Scrolls 6 build upon that, and deliver a more refined and dynamic virtual experience for people with powerful PCs and some of the best VR headsets you can buy. 

Support for mods has seen Skyrim go from a vast open-world game to an RPG that can still feel fresh nearly a decade after its release in late 2011. With Steam Workshop mod support, it became trivially easy to add mods into the PC version of Skyrim. As a bare minimum, we’d expect The Elder Scrolls 6 to have a similar level of mod support. But we’d also like to see some form of mod support for the game on the next-generation consoles, including the Nintendo Switch 2, if that system comes out in the next few years. 

If Bethesda can do this, as well as create a compelling open-world game with a stellar plot and clever game systems, then The Elder Scrolls 6 could be a worthy follow up to Skyrim. But we’ll need to wait a while before we get an idea of how the game will to take shape, so come back here next time you’re hungry for Elder Scrolls news. 

With precious little solid information about The Elder Scrolls 6m it’s hard to predict it’s outlook. But another fantasy open-world game on an epic scale will certainly be welcome from Bethesda. 

And now that Bethesda Game Studios is part of Microsoft, it could mean the developer side of Bethesda might benefit hugely from Microsoft’s tech, tools and expertise, making for a new Elder Scrolls game that could be superbly polished at launch and have a mind-blowing scale.