The Elder Scrolls fans aren’t too happy with Bethesda at the moment, and you’ll never guess why (spoiler alert: it’s for exactly the reason you already assumed).
Seven years ago, and already dangerously close to being eight, Bethesda announced The Elder Scrolls VI at the 2018 E3 conference.
Since then, we’ve seen nothing The Elder Scrolls VI related. No second trailer, no gameplay footage– not even a bloody screenshot.
Over in a recent post on the r/TESVI subreddit, fans are growing exasperated with Bethesda, as they believe that the developer announced the game far too soon (considering that, seven years on, they don’t have anything to show for it).
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However, a lot of folks in the comments think the opposite. They believe that Bethesda’s decision to announce the game was justified, for several different reasons.
“Meanwhile we have millions of Fallout fans raging that there will never be a Fallout 5,” commented user Snifflebeard.
“Sometimes you just gotta let people know that "No, we did not forget about you". We didn't really get a reveal, we got confirmation that TESVI was in the roadmap. Which everyone with working brain cells knew, but which some people still needed to be reminded of.”
“Indeed there was a lot of worry in the TES fandom at the time that Bethesda was quietly abandoning the single player TES games”, replied user Conny_and_Theo.
“I remember plenty of debating online about that. The announcement of TES6 makes sense in that context at the time, even if one can argue whether it was the right choice in hindsight.”
“Honestly, the fans might be raging harder at 14 years of no TES6 and not at least knowing the games being made, even if it is the logical next step for Bethesda”, commented user Hench999.
On one hand, I get where they’re coming from here. If Bethesda had instead chosen not to announce that they were working on a new mainline The Elder Scrolls game, lots of people in the community would likely assume that they’d abandoned the franchise.
However, I don’t think that quite excuses the lack of information since. In fact, I think it directly counteracts said justification.
Sure, Bethesda may have revealed TES VI in a bid to satiate those who may have assumed they were moving in a new direction, as a result of them announcing both Fallout 76 and Starfield.
But why did they bother doing that in the first place, if they weren’t even going to offer us a crumb of information regarding the game afterwards? Besides, they must have known that the majority of gamers aren’t levelheaded enough to understand the nuance behind their decision to announce the game. Most people simply saw a trailer, and the neurons in their brains activated.
TES VI will be a huge hit when it comes out, regardless of whether that’s in January 2026 or January 2036. Still, I think Bethesda has remained a little too quiet in the years following that first teaser trailer, because literally any morsel of info in the past few years would have chilled people out.
Just a single screenshot. That’s all I’m asking for here.
Topics: The Elder Scrolls, The Elder Scrolls 6, Bethesda, Microsoft