Don’t worry, I also died a little bit inside just when looking up the dates to make sure I was remembering correctly! Definitely a moment feeling like that Saving Private Ryan gif.
There were 17 years between the release of Elder Scrolls 1 (1994) and Elder Scrolls 5 (2011).
It’s coming up on 15 years since the release of Elder Scrolls 5, and still no release date for Elder Scrolls 6 in sight.
Not to mention those companies have divided priorities. Valve’s main income is Steam, they have a vested interest in keeping their product dominant. Microsoft and Epic simply don’t, because their stores are only side projects that incentivise their main income sources. But that’s not to say I want to substitute Steam with some other corpo giant’s latest money grab either.
The bigger question is why more consumer-friendly stores like GOG that sell DRM-free games can’t compete with Steam. High profile games have no incentive to release DRM-free versions of their titles on GOG because the bigger store where they make more money encourages DRM. And these locked-in publisher relationships built on DRM allows Valve to outcompete more consumer-friendly stores through sales and user experience.
Valve gets a lot of clout in the Linux sphere because their adoption of open-source platforms is better than their competitors, and we have the mindset of “a rising tide lifts all ships”, but this is also what we were saying about Google and Android 15 years ago and we can see how that is shaping up. Something something “you either die a hero…”
Basically, Valve is too big to compete with at this point, because any competing product needs to be more perfect out the gate for people to even consider using it. Which is hard to do when you are not as entrenched and don’t have the kind of money Valve has.
Guessing it didn’t enter full production until after Starfield, which itself had a delayed launch. Bethesda has a lot of money, especially under Microsoft, but their core studio (BGS) is still a comparatively small team, likely no A-team/B-team development pipeline.
I’m guessing development of the game is well underway at this point, maybe aiming for a release in the next couple of years. But development is always a dice roll of whether a project goes smoothly and launches on time or if speedbumps might necessitate changes in plans.
Despite the “trailer” for Elder Scrolls 6 that is already 8 years old at this point, Bethesda typically does not start hyping their projects until they’re fairly close to completion (e.g. Fallout 4, first trailer in June 2015, release in November 2015). Starfield was intended to be similar, with its first real trailer (something more than just a title card) in 2021 and a planned release in 2022, though the release was delayed a year by Microsoft for polishing, which I am guessing it desperately needed.
The Elder Scrolls 6 title card reveal, from that same showcase where Starfield got its token title card reveal, was more of a statement of commitment that the series wasn’t dead, not necessarily to show off the results of a project in process. So I’d anticipate that when we do actually see some tangible material from Elder Scrolls 6, its release date will not be too far off. You know, barring delays. But that’s maybe the only optimistic thing I can say about the game right now.
I think the Starfield engine was…fine. Not amazing, but it was probably the least buggy game at launch they ever put out.
I’d worry more about the gameplay loop and quality of writing. That’s where Starfield tanked, and that’s what will end up killing Elder Scrolls 6 if they don’t make improvements.
(Original reference)