The Elder Scrolls is a series I have a disproportionate amount of love for, considering how sad and old a series it is. People born the same year as Elder Scrolls: Arena (The first game) are now old enough to have mortgages. People born the same year as Elder Scrolls: Skyrim (The last mainline game) will be driving cars next year. It’s one of those video game series which is generational, along with the other early 2010s old guard-- GTA, The Witcher, and beyond. At least those two series got to leave off on objectively great entries, while Skyrim is such a befuddling and controversial project to me.
While Skyrim was the last mainline game, there have been lots of side projects and experiments in the ES universe: Mobile games like Elder Scrolls Blades and Castles, remasters like 2025’s Oblivion, and of course the great unspoken evil that is Elder Scrolls Online. I don’t really like the direction any of these development paths lead down. Elder Scrolls post-Skyrim has felt cheap and insubstantial. Instead of the great, expansive worlds and stories we were spoiled with for years, it’s all about microtransactions now. In my heart I feel that the sixth entry, teased back in 2018, will be a return to the big budget story of Tamriel.
But how can the series rectify this troubled era? In my opinion, by cutting back.
1. Critical Mass
While I hold a lot of love for Skyrim in my heart, it’s fundamentally quite different from the previous entries. That’s not bad by itself, but many of its changes were “dumbed down" from 3 and 4 (both now considered classics by gaming standards). By butchering the old skills and systems like bartering, classes, magic, factions and more, devs instead put a lot of effort into SCALE: What no one can take away from Skyrim is its BIG ASS MAP full of quests and dungeons. But because the number of things to do in the world increased drastically, reused assets were overrelied upon.
While the scope of Skyrim is actually something I enjoy when it works well, it doesn't always-- The gameplay is a lot of mindless wandering mixed in with an occasional sense of discovery. But after you’ve found your eighth identical mill, or explored five hours worth of dwarven ruins, it feels less like discovery and more like a chore. The Radiant Quest system, while cool on paper, is realistically just chores: Randomly generated busywork to keep the player from feeling like there’s nothing to do. While I think Radiant Quests are fine for minor, background quests, getting assigned busywork from THE LITERAL QUEEN OF SKYRIM is really uninspired.
If you ask me, while the large scale of Skyrim works in some contexts, the sacrifices made to stretch everything out are also its greatest weaknesses. For example, there’s a lack of reactivity to the main story. Even after (minor spoilers) defeating the antagonist of the game, nothing… really changes in the world. You’ve saved the world, but there are still chores to do! “Please don’t stop playing our game!” Todd cries out. “There’s still more content! Always more content!”
2. 14 Years of Silence
Skyrim is weirdly super old, turning 14 this week. Compare that to the 5 year gap between it and Elder Scrolls 4, and the 4 year gap between it and Elder Scrolls 3. Even in those old days, that release schedule was longer than the industry norm. While everybody wants more games, I don’t think anybody is advocating for more crunch time, or worse working conditions (as a side note, Bethesda was recently acquired by Microsoft, a company known for extremely harmful anti-union practices). But why should Elder Scrolls be a “generational series” now? People want more, and I’d be willing to bet that Bethesda wants to make more. So why not?
In the meantime, the series has sort of fallen by the wayside in pop culture. The biggest and best fantasy games of today (Elden Ring, Baldur’s Gate 3) are miles ahead of Skyrim in every sense: They have better stories, with more engaging gameplay, beautiful and diverse art direction, and more. If Elder Scrolls 6 comes out any time soon, these are the new standards it'll be held up against. And if it's built on the same bones as Skyrim (which in itself was built on Fallout 3’s 2008 engine) there’s really no way it’ll compare. In the 14 years of Elder Scrolls hiatus, the space for RPGs has evolved once, twice, maybe three times over.
The most common counterpoint for a position like mine is invariably the small size of Bethesda Softworks. Their games are iterative, buggy, and humble. They’re the kings of “Double-A gaming.” It’s honestly inspiring how much success they’ve had working with such constraints-- In the old days, you could chalk this up to creativity. Tamriel is an amazingly unique take on a fantasy world, with enough in-depth lore that you could create fifty different games based solely on in-game stories. So, yes, Skyrim might only be such a troubled and stale game due to budget issues. But you can't deny its missed opportunities. And you can't deny it's one of the best selling games of all time.
3. Where to Next?
From the money generated by the seventeen different ports of Skyrim, along with the popular Fallout 4, and its TV series, Bethesda should have more than enough to make the Elder Scrolls 6 of their dreams. But, in my opinion, more money can’t fix this problem… Instead, they should change up the formula. People were sick of “the formula” by Skyrim, and beyond sick of it by Starfield. Instead of infinitely scaling up the file size, as the Elder Scrolls series has done over time, I think the future of Elder Scrolls is small.
Tighter worlds lend to more in-depth narratives, which was the strong suit of the early entries. It’s also less strain for the teensy tiny little dev team, and could serve to pull back on Skyrim's crash course towards critical mass. And there’s, frustratingly, a giant wealth of story to tell in this universe. Even beyond the traditional tale of Tamriel, Michael Kirkbride’s extra-canon C0DA has paved the way for entirely other worlds to inhabit. Elder Scrolls going to another world entirely might be unlikely, but for a more restrained route, Elder Scrolls Online has already developed geographies for just about every square inch of Tamriel. Hell, Bethesda could just release the Elsweyr content pack for ESO in Skyrim’s engine and that would be, like, fine.
But I say go weird or go home. Take me to weird town, Todd. If the Elder Scrolls is going to thrive, or even survive, in the future, some traditions must be broken. Please don’t kill this beautiful thing which has touched so many of us, guiding our paths like Meridia’s Beacon towards a brighter, more hopeful world. I, for one, have faith voices like mine will be heard.