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Now that everyone has boarded Todd Howard’s hype train, what’s stopping The Elder Scrolls from getting at least Fallout levels of weird? In an increasingly busy market of open-world fantasy games, this series should unearth what made it special in the first place. Where have Daggerfall’s wereboars gone? What the hell is up with CHIM? More Morrowind? Yes, please.Įven at their weirdest, Skyrim and Oblivion were designed to be mostly familiar in order to ease new players into a more obscure fantasy universe. If you like to read through the in-game books in Skyrim or The Elder Scrolls Online, you’ll know Bethesda hasn’t completely buried its more off-beat past – Tamriel is still a deeply strange fantasy setting below the surface – but not many of those stranger elements pop up in the games anymore. It’s also worth returning to the matter of doubling down on kooky lore and weird fantasy. Ever since then (Fallout 76 and Starfield), the customization side of their games has been marketed left and right, and I fully expect The Elder Scrolls 6 to offer more on that front than just house-building and upgrading weapons. Granted, the balance surrounding them was tighter for the most part, but it signified an important realization that freedom of choice for players was what actually made their modern games so everlasting. In fact, the studio immediately returned to the do-it-yourself philosophy with Fallout 4 – only four years after Skyrim – by making the base-building and weapon-crafting systems key parts of the experience. Could we be looking at another Oblivion-like renaissance? In the search for more “realism” and in-universe coherence, Bethesda dropped unique features that could be easily refined. And if we go back to Morrowind or even Daggerfall, we’ll still find iterations of a neat optional system that gave these games a special flavor. but glorious, busted-as-shit spellcrafting made them worth toying with. Vanilla Oblivion already made pure mages not the coolest class type around. And it may be time to recover lost fragments of really cool game design and zany lore.Īn easy win for The Elder Scrolls 6 would be to bring back spellcrafting – notably absent in Skyrim for dumb balance reasons – to make the magic-based builds way more enticing. In fact, this streamlining process, which has ultimately benefitted the series, has been happening since Daggerfall. I still believe it’s the liveliest and most enduring 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 toned down or thrown out the window.

However, a main criticism of Skyrim has always been how “restrained” it was when it came to its deeper RPG systems.

Bethesda needs to draw from more than just Skyrim to make this a game to remember. Even though Oblivion made the franchise mainstream thanks to its key role as one of Xbox 360’s early must-plays, Skyrim’s shadow is nearly impossible to escape and has shaped the entire open-world genre, RPG or not. And that’s not a mistake, especially if we consider the ridiculous amount of Skyrim re-releases we’ve had in little more than a decade that game is hugely important for Bethesda Game Studios. But what about everything else? More importantly, what about the unavoidable rework of its moment-to-moment gameplay and RPG systems? And beyond those elements, how big can it reasonably be?Īs I discussed in my previous The Elder Scrolls 6 speculation piece, most folks are looking at Skyrim and The Elder Scrolls Online to fantasize about the next game. Of course, we are almost sure at this point about where it’s literally going: either High Rock or Hammerfell, maybe even both.

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