As we continue to wait for The Elder Scrolls 6 and – long before that – Starfield, our veteran Elder Scrolls fans keep wondering where? Bethesda arguably the highly anticipated sixth mainline entry of their great fantasy series.
Of course, at this point we’re pretty sure where it’s headed: High Rock or Hammerfell, maybe even both. But what about everything else? More importantly, what about the inevitable rework of moment-to-moment gameplay and RPG systems? And beyond those elements, how big can it reasonably be?
As I discussed in my previous The Elder Scrolls 6 speculation piece, most people watch Skyrim and The Elder Scrolls Online to fantasize about the next game. And that’s no mistake, especially considering the ridiculous amount of Skyrim reissues we’ve had in just over a decade; that game is hugely important to Bethesda Game Studios. Even Forgetfulness Made the franchise mainstream thanks to its key role as one of the Xbox 360’s early must-plays, the shadow of Skyrim is nearly impossible to escape and has shaped the entire open-world genre, RPG or not.
However, a major criticism of Skyrim has always been how “understated” it was when it came to its deeper RPG systems. I still believe it’s the liveliest and most enduring of Elder Scrolls, but it’s hard to deny that a fair amount of Morrowind and Oblivion’s more out-of-the-box ideas and systems were either watered down or thrown out the window. In fact, this streamlining process, which ultimately benefited the series, has been going on since Daggerfall. And it might be time to recover lost fragments of really cool game design and crazy knowledge.
An easy win for The Elder Scrolls 6 would be to bring back enchantment – notably absent from Skyrim for stupid balance reasons – to make the magic-based builds much more appealing. Vanilla Oblivion already made pure mages, not the coolest class type out there… And if we go back to Morrowind or even Daggerfall, we’ll still find iterations of a nice optional system that gave these games a special flavor. In the quest for more “realism” and coherence in the universe, Bethesda dropped unique features that could be easily refined. This is just an example.
In fact, the studio immediately returned to the DIY philosophy with Fallout 4 – just four years after Skyrim – by making the base building and weapon building systems important parts of the experience. Granted, the balance around them was tighter for the most part, but it marked an important realization that freedom of choice for players was what made their modern games so eternal. Since then (Fallout 76 and Starfield) the customization side of their games has taken the market left and right, and I fully expect The Elder Scrolls 6 to offer more in that area than just building houses and upgrading weapons.
It is also worth returning to the issue of doubling mad knowledge and weird fantasy. If you enjoy perusing the in-game books in Skyrim or The Elder Scrolls Online, you’ll know that Bethesda hasn’t completely buried its more unusual past – Tamriel is still a deeply strange fantasy setting beneath the surface – but not many of those weirder ones. elements no longer show up in the games. Where have the Daggerfall hogs gone? What the hell is going on with CHIM?
Even at their craziest, Skyrim and Oblivion were designed to be trusted primarily to aid new players in a more obscure fantasy universe. Now that everyone’s boarded the Todd Howard hype train, what’s stopping The Elder Scrolls from getting at least Fallout levels weird? In an increasingly crowded market of open world fantasy games, this series should find out what made it special in the first place.
It might sound like I’m frustrated with the franchise’s post-Morrowind direction, but on the contrary, I think it became really approachable and completely enjoyable when it dropped a lot of its half-cooked systems and focused on more straightforward combat and skill. mechanics. But I have to admit that that process also solved some of The Elder Scrolls’ unbearable charm. As more and more new IPs try to replicate and put their spin on the formula, mining the established universe for the truly distinctive things could be the key to its survival.
Yes, The Elder Scrolls isn’t dying out anytime soon, but dreaming big is part of the franchise’s history and what made Bethesda explore previously uncharted territory with barely 3D games, when most developers were still trying to come up with linear first-person games. .
That’s why Starfield fills me with hope – it’s audacious to combine the studio’s greatest strengths and areas of expertise with procedural technology that can nurture unparalleled scale. No one should expect it to be perfect or as crowd-pleasing as Skyrim, but it will certainly be a great experiment that will be better what comes next. If anyone can break the handcrafted-procedural balance for open-world design, I believe it’s Bethesda. They’ve been there before and success is within reach if they just stay true to their core principles.
In a way, The Elder Scrolls Online should also serve as a (half) blueprint for The Elder Scrolls 6, at least in terms of how diehard fans want their Elder Scrolls to play. The Skyrim DNA is there, but ZeniMax Online has wisely restored older bits and pieces to make it shine like a true RPG. Plus, it largely feels like a single-player RPG inhabited by thousands of players on top of all the NPCs.
It has evolved into an immersive blend of Tamriel’s bygone adventures and game design that looks to the future. Coupled with its huge yet crafty world, I feel like there’s plenty to learn from what others might ignore as “just another MMO game doing its own thing”.
In a year, Bethesda Game Studios should be well into (really, this time for real) TES6 pre-production. Looking at what comes of them next, where they come from, and what everyone else is doing, it’s not unreasonable to expect a new kind of Daggerfall. That is, an ambitious fantasy RPG full of ideas and knowledge of the past, but not afraid to explore unknown paths and make new mistakes.
0 Comments