Today, it has been 6 years since The Elder Scrolls 6 teaser

I hope they're using this time to learn lessons from their Starfield flop and gather the talent and budget needed to improve upon Skyrim. A modern engine probably wouldn't hurt.
However, my expectations are very low at this point.
- They haven't learned from Oblivion, Skyrim, or Fallout 4. Probably others.
  Or really, they learned they can just keep releasing games on a hacked-up Morrowind engine, and make huge piles of money. So that's what they'll keep doing.
  
  Yup. ES6 is going to sell like condoms on an STD themed swinger convension no matter how many bugs are going around.
  And the saddest part is that too many have learned nothing about AAA titles, and will preorder the game, making the game a massive financial success even before releasing anything of quality.
  
  Don't forget they learned they can charge for mods, too!
  
  They haven’t learned from 3 of their best and most popular games?
- The budget for Starfield was twice that of Baldur's Gate 3. Throwing more money at it isn't going to do a lot if they're allocating it poorly.
  
  I'm not suggesting that a big budget alone is sufficient to make a good game.
  However, enough budget to keep the team employed (note the many gaming industry layoffs lately) and appropriate budgeting (in terms of both money and time) affect things like code, art, and writing quality. It's kind of important.
  
  The real number is Morrowind had something like 10-20 writers that worked on it. Modern Bethesda games have 1.
  
  It's a tricky balancing act. They need to recover the investment as early as possible to pay less in capital costs but doing that will mean that later on when the product is sub-par it will cause problems and extra work.
  Since the engine, game logic, art, story, testing is so heavily coupled together changing the engine a little bit could cause a month of work down the line.
  I think personally the best way is to start by making an engine or taking one off the shelf and then write a mini version of the game with shit art that has a lot of bugs.
  At the same time making models with hitboxes that all have the same physical properties otherwise, dialog content and recordings and all other content that can be done separately.
  Once that is fun to play then you can start working creating a slightly bigger system with a single short storyline to have a cohesive experience and will have the genaral feel of the game.
  Once everything above is done setting up a closed beta is the way to go. Take some feedback, add features and redo the small story to be more fun.
  Then once everything is a fun experience but people just want more you do the whole everything.
- A modern engine probably wouldn't hurt.
  If it does not have similar levels of moddability then it will absolutely hurt.
  
  I think it's safe to assume they know that and would bear it in mind when choosing or building an engine. Their games are famous for modding, after all.
  
  I think we're only ever see a new engine once Todd is no longer part of the company. Because the quote him out of context 'it just works'
- Thanks, I needed that laugh.
- I'm replaying Starfield, and on my second playthrough, I'm noticing the depth they put into this game. Sometimes a single dialogue line you said days ago will have an effect on NPC attitudes through an entire side story. I'm not going to argue that it's not a regurgitation of their lame formula they've milked for the past 15+ years, but they do need to reevaluate where their money/dev time goes to.
  
  Replaying as well, doing side quests I put off and surprised they actually go interesting places. Just did the one where zero G kept turning off and on at the space station that got taken over.
- I like Starfield.
  
  Sshhh that isn't an approved opinion for Internet use
- The only thing Bethesda is motivated to do, frothing, absolutely chomping at the bit, is figure out a way to successfully monetize modded content.
  
  Yes, will probably make a monthly subscription that walls off ability to download mods.
  (Also, it's "champing" at the bit. Sorry for the correction but it's a small pet peeve seeing chomping so much now)
- We all know that all they are going to do is re-release new versions of their old games on devices we largely don't care about.
- as long as they don’t have space travel between every objective and hundreds of barren procedurally generated planets it will be fine.

It's gonna take twice as long as Starfield all to contain the same jank in an even larger, more barren, world where nothing is interesting and you're just going through the motions because that's what Todd Howard thinks games are.
- It really does feel like Starfield completely killed any excitement for Bethesda games, everything since Oblivion has been a step in the wrong direction IMO.
  
  Including Oblivion. I enjoyed it but it was a huge disappointment to me coming out of Morrowind. Bethesda reputation for me has been on Morrowind credit this whole time.
- People have actually made it through Starfield? I tried so hard, but couldn't make it past 20 hours (which isn't a lot for a Bethesda RPG). The story is just so damn BORING.
  
  The story is just so damn BORING.
  Oh boy, you're lucky. I trudged through for 70h out of sheer morbid curiosity. The boring main story goes straight into "icecream on forehead" when the starborn show up. The ending is just a shit cherry on top of that, with Emil Pagliarulo's best "fuck you for asking questions" ever

- I don't believe, they're actually 6 years into the development. Back then, they just announced that at some point, there would be a TES6, but they've been busy developing Starfield since then.
  As part of Starfield, they did do some engine upgrades. You know what that looks like...
  
  Their announcement for the 30th anniversary implies that it is in early pre-alpha right now. Chances of it running on the same exact engine as Starfield are practically 100%
- Elder Scrolls especially Morrowind will always have a place in my heart but I’ve moved on. If they ever release a better game I will come back. What ever is running Starfield won’t be it.
  I’ve found New World and as far as MMOs go, it’s the best I’ve played in comparison to Elder Scrolls Online and Guild Wars 2 (in depth) and a few others (<40 hours).
  But New World has the lore, baby. That’s what seals the deal. Superior gameplay: check. Great art design: check. The lore is the final block and New World is so interesting. I didn’t think a fantasy setting could have new and interesting lore but they succeeded.
  How the Lost came into creation from ::: spoiler Tap for spoiler trying to cure the Corruption ::: is so tragic. I’m still learning what Angry Earth is all about tho.
  And it’s just fun! Like, I would have never guessed that I’d enjoy running around in a pilgrim hat getting killed by a giant turkey with laser eyes. And who would have guessed you could successfully merge the giants from Nasusicca Valley of the Wind with 1500s Caribbean aesthetic?
  But if you’re thinking: “We’re talking about single player games, dumbass.” Yea, I know, I like New World so much that I wish the same dev team would make a proper single player game in the exact same setting.

If they take too much fucking longer I'm gonna look for my RPG fix Elsweyr.

Don't worry, in five years it will launch with the same physics tick rate bug and the dearth of anything interesting that is customary of any Bethesda Game Studios game.
- Welcome to the place washed by Iliac waves
  There's two and a half peasants with the same ugly face
  You're not into small towns? Check out big-ass plains
  Fifty times the size of Skyrim's, twice as many pointless caves!
  
  And there's even one new cave variation!

Normally, I would say that I don't care when a game comes out, as long as it's a genuinely good, complete experience. But knowing Bethesda, it'll be another 5 years before we see anything, and then we'll get an embarrassingly buggy title, that hasn't innovated on anything since Fallout 3 came out.
I used to forgive them for anything, knowing that the modding community would just patch things anyway, but we've seen how Starfield was rejected by a ton of people with skills.
- I think too many people forget that Skyrim was actually popular enough without mods to bring enough modders to the table to fix the rest of it. Bethesda seems to have forgotten that they actually have to deliver a mostly fun and mostly playable game for a proper modding scene to take root.
  
  That really is a pretty substantial part of it too. Modding at its core requires a good game, and everything else comes from people wanting to change parts of it, that aren't necessarily to their liking. Bethesda somehow assumed that people would be willing to reimplement half of the game at launch. That just won't slide anymore, for 70$
- It didn't help that Starfield didn't release with any of the normal modding toolset for Bethsda games. It literally didn't get it until this month.
- 1 dev of the skyrim together mod.
- Shadow of the Erdtree DLC comes out this month after being developed for 2 years. Even amazing games take forever to develop, I'm certainly not waiting half a decade for another fucking Starfield...
  
  That's the difference. I would wait a decade for a follow-up to Elden Ring. It was a genuinely incredible game in every way.
- Starfield didn't have modding, but was it an embarrassingly buggy title that hasn't innovated on anything since Fallout 3?

They could take 30 years to make it, but it would still be made by Bethesda and it would still suck.
- I have great memories of Morrowind
  
  It was still a glitch fest, but at least the world was top notch.
  
  I have great memories of Skyrim. And FO3. And New Vegas. And Fallout 4. And Fallout 76 actually got not bad. And Elder Scrolls: Online had one of my favorite quest chains in a game. And...
  
  I also liked Skyrim and oblivion. Not sure how people can think they suck.
  
  I liked Daggerfall, too, despite serious glitch issues. I just saved a lot and it was fine.
- and then they'd re-sell it a bunch of times after that too.
  
  Because it was such a bad game that people gladly bought it again?
- I like the bugs. The Giant Space Program was nice
- God what a fucking boring and wrong opinion to be have
  
  They literally said Starfield was in the making for 25 fucking years. And you see how that ended up

Just in terms of timeline, Dragon Age 4 was teased at about the same time with the same level of teaser trailer. It's releasing this fall.
So a full modern RPG being fully developed in that time by a smaller studio, and for elder scrolls we haven't heard squat.
Who knows how DA will turn out, but we know modern Bethesda quality thanks to starfield. Not having any news in 6 years proves this trailer was made just to shut fans up
- Who knows how DA will turn out, but we know modern Bethesda quality thanks to starfield. Not having any news in 6 years proves this trailer was made just to shut fans up
  Pretty sure they flat out said this was true
  
  Yup:
  "Bethesda and Todd Howard announced Elder Scrolls 6 when they did because of fan demand, or in the words of Skyrim's lead designer Bruce Nesmith, because 'the pitchforks and torches were out.'" Source
  Elder Scrolls VI exits pre-production, development begins (August 2023)
- Often times trailers that early are used as a hiring tool, too. Cyberpunk's original CG trailer was back in like 2012, and that game came out in 2020, but we know from an interview at E3 before The Witcher 3 came out that there was a very small team working on Cyberpunk before Witcher 3 was done, and Cyberpunk at that point was mostly just design documents.
- And DA4 got almost remade to remove the live service features
  What's Bethesdas excuse?
  
  they were working on starfield?
- I wouldn't dare to call Bioware a smaller studio, pretty sure people said that Bethesda is the one that is strangely small for a AAA developer.

They just released this teaser to shut everyone up at the time
- It's like people have completely forgotten that fact. That snippet was at the very end of a 30 minute Bethesda presentation that had Fallout 76 with its multiplayer being a significant move away from their traditional formula, Elder Scrolls Blades (which is a mobile game nobody remembers) and the reveal of Starfield, a completely new franchise. Of course fans are going to question where is TES 6.
  And a few months later Blizzard showed what happens when you don't tease Diablo 4 after revealing Diablo immortal.
  
  I played Blades for a little while until it got too 'gimme gimme' about me paying. Then I stopped. Not paying to win.
  
  DON'T YOU GUYS HAVE PHONES???
  But what really hurts is that diablo immoral is a HUGE money printer.

I want to be positive and I'm trying to remain optimistic, but somehow I just know it in my bones that they're going to further Fallout 4 the franchise and strip away even more skills and attributes. Hell, maybe they'll get rid of dialogue entirely.
- Indeed. I would love to have a "modernized Morrowind" experience -- an RPG game that really nails the role-playing part of RPG, but without the cheesy parts of Morrowind like the unintuitive combat system -- but all of us know that it's just not gonna happen.
  
  The combat in Morrowind is intuitive if your previous RPG experience used dice and paper.
  
  but all of us know that it’s just not gonna happen.
  Certainly not by Bethesda, but in truly typical fashion, Bethesda games are are held together and made fun by modders (and sometimes, even fully built, as is the case with Enderal). Only trouble is that can take a wild and/or completely unknown amount of time.
  https://tesrskywind.com/
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJkeWN3_fbA
- Hell, maybe they’ll get rid of dialogue entirely.
  100% they're going to try to do AI NPCs and you're going to get cartoonishly awful dialogue that will be great for memes and terrible for any kind of actual gameplay.
- ES6 will have a voiced main character.
  
  An AI voice with zero emotion

The teaser itself is some generic terrain with procedural grass anyone could do in blender in 3h
- That's what I thought at the time "yes that does spell elder scrolls VI, Bethesda, and?"
  
  Tbh it was 100% a move to avoid pissing off the fans by only announcing Starfield

Excited for the special edition of the trailer
- ported to the Nintendo Switch

I used to be a Dragonborn like you, but then I got a fire arrow to my dedicated graphics card.
Now nothing newer than Oblivion will ever run on that machine.
- Try Daggerfall Unity. Only the engine is newer, also loads of bugfixes and mod support.
  
  Thanks, I'll try it.
- luckily the last time Bethesda had good writing was Morrowind so you're not missing much
  
  In Morrowind I like the story and the music. But as I explored the battle mechanics, I couldn't stand the randomness.
  Also in a later retries after Oblivion and Skyrim I missed the real talking more than the graphics enhancements.
  A bit unfair, I know. Maybe I'm not that game connoisseur myself.

Yay, six more years til they release a buggy mess
- Do you want another release of skyrim? Because that's how you get another release of skyrim!
  
  The Skyrim releases will continue until morale improves.
  -Todd Howard
  
  As much of a joke as all the re-releases are, I'm super happy Skyrim VR exists. It's one of the best VR experiences with the right mods that make it an actual VR game instead of a cheap cash-grab...
  
  I have a feeling they'll be pushing different releases of Starfield so they can act like it was good.
- why are so many people absent mindedly pushing this buggy mess narrative? starfield was their least buggy release ever (i personally only encountered one terrible bug that was easily fixed with reloading a save)
  its not like bethesda ever released a game as buggy as fallout new vegas or cyberpunk, besides 76 but, like new vegas and cyberpunk, it got fixed
  
  New Vegas gets a pass because it was made in 18 months.

Well, at least they won't need to make "thousands of planets" worth of "content", so the game might at least look consistent
Still, after Starfaild, my expectation is for TES6 to have something that kinda almost resembles Dark Messiah of Might and Magic's melee combat; only Archery, Melee, Magic and Armor skills to level up; Emil Pagliarulo's "greatest" story yet with double the time travel and multiverse bullshit; twice the amount of stories that get nowhere and that nobody in the world cares about; removal of stealth
- Well, if you think about it, they might want to do a Daggerfall with thousands of nondescript villages and dungeons, powered by AI.
  
  looks like they're being beaten by old daggerfall devs at their own gimmick then https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oncelostgames/the-wayward-realms/?ref=kicktraq
  
  Which would be an improvement over the 10 different "dungeon" buildings + 3 caves + 6 POIs you can find in starfield
  
  Heck, if they went back to Oblivion's concept of having the npcs with predefined lives and goals and slapped a free version of chatgtp onto the npc interactions, it would be cool.
- I hope stealth gets a major rework, at least. Or maybe not stealth itself but how the AI handles interacting with it. No NPC should ever guess that it was just the wind when there's an arrow sticking out of them or their colleague is lying dead in plain view (or even just doesn't respond when they call to them).
  They should use strategies and tactics that work against stealth. Patrols (including their own stealth patrols sometimes), roll calls, better lighting, positioning of guards to cut off entrance points, traps (and not just the dungeon traps, but NPCs setting new traps when they suspect stealth, where the trap could be as simple as a trip wire attached to metal rings that will jingle if someone disturbs them), spells that locate nearby people, using senses other than sight and hearing, dark vision. Sometimes stealth missions should be forced to end and come back later because the residents realize someone is trying to sneak around and kill or rob them and go on high alert with effective tools to negate stealth. Just sometimes, sometimes it should work like it does in Skyrim where a guard just doesn't want to deal with whatever is shooting arrows at him and maybe just yells threats instead of using a stealth counter (just get rid of that memory of a goldfish thing).
  I mean, stealth is fun, but it's not as fun when every single character I make ends up becoming some kind of a stealth archer because the NPCs are effective at generating opposition to everything but that.

Shut up. 6 years!? 👴
- The beforetimes

It was 5 years and 8 months between the release of Oblivion and Skyrim. Oblivion was released on March 20, 2006, and Skyrim was released on November 11, 2011.
- Yes, but we didn’t have AAAAA gaming standards back then. Do you think they could have made a masterpiece like Skull & Bones in those days?
- Skyrim is almost three times as old now. I'm going to be honest, I'd rather just have another Skyrim expansion than a modern Bethesda game.
  
  Check out Beyond Skyrim

Probably working out how to add stealth archer mechanics to a MTX.

Wow, thought it was like 2 years if you asked me

It's just the time necessary to figure out how to create a ladder climbing animation

Got to do better than Star field and come close to BG3 , dark souls, elden ring. Chances are they hit the reset button after it became apparent they couldn't coast on the mod community
- Doing better than starfield shouldn't be hard for them. Getting on par with the quality of Divinity Original Sin, much less Baldur's Gate 3, is likely beyond bethesda's ability, tho.
- that'll never happen. they don't have good writers.
  
  Just hire Kirkbride back goddamnit. I installed Immortals of Aveum and saw that Kirkbride is the main writer and got pumped on the game but that damn thing keeps crashing on me. So I'm back to just playing Diablo or Minecraft for the time being.
- come close to BG3 , dark souls, elden ring
  All of these were lovingly crafted bespoke characters and story arcs, with god only knows how many hours of real human thought put into the story, the setting, and the dialogue.
  Bethesda execs don't want any of that shit. They want a big button that says "MAKE NEW GAME" that they can slap and then a new game that pops out of a slot on the other side of their computers.
  The mod community is so vital to these modern games because its real humans having real human ideas that go into them. Business only gets to latch on after the fact, once a DOTA or CS:GO has already fully taken off and left orbit.

After the reviews on Starfield, maybe this is for the best.
You really want to see what shameful AI slop they try to shoehorn into this game? Or how much of it is shamelessly cribbed and rehashed from Skyrim, the last good thing Bethesda ever did? Do you really want to play "Morrowwind But If It Was Designed By Houston's Urban Planning Team?" Enjoy an hour and 30 minute commute to your next quest, plus traffic, you stupid idiots.
Now with a bug patch that's labeled as DLC!

It would not surprise me at all if we are another six years away.

Meanwhile me with shitty laptop & Skyrim LE be like.... Nah...i don't need that thing bc my Skyrim already perfect
- Make it IBM T43 and Oblivion.

Anyone else not like the capital E in Elder? Looks like a G.
Can't wait to play this in 2030.

I personally think if something is in pre-production you shouldn't announce it at all.
- They announced it back then because at the time people were afraid they were only going to make Fallout games.

Wow, I'm feeling old.

They should just release a new game with the graphical fidelity of Fallout 4, but with better performance and animations. They could probably cut their dev budget in half if they made a game with Skyrim's scope and FO4's graphics.
No one plays Bethesda games for their graphical fidelity so they really need to stop wasting time there.
- Frankly, they could rebuild skyrim with the fallout 4 mechanics for base building, shared item storage for crafting, weapon modding, and for shits and giggles throw in steam centurions being unobtainable dwemer power armor frames.
  Fuck, sell me basic ass skyrim but integrate the top 30 mods on nexus into the base game. It's honestly not hard to do better then they're doing.
  
  I'd be willing the buy another expansion for Skyrim. I want to return to Skyrim so badly but I've done literally everything that game has to offer
- People can always mod them for increased graphics to their hearts content after the fact anyways

Gonna have Skyrim on NerveGear before this comes out lol

Bunch of capital G Gamers in here.
Goddamn.

I remember remarking at the time that they likely didn't have much more than a terrain object and a title card.
Probably still don't.

They can keep it. Bethesda sucks

So they could release a trailer-perfect version of it today and it'd still be six years outdated.

Since they announced that it will be PC and XBOX only- I stopped giving a shit. I refuse to buy a new hardware that once was accessible without having to.
- You're probably not missing much. Morrowind is the last good Elder Scrolls game they ever made. But that has also been PC/Xbox exclusive since 2002 so may as well write the series off completely.
  
  last good
  Aite I loved Morrowind, it’s one of my top games of all time but both Oblivion and Skrim are stellar. SkrimVR with mods is insanely fantastic.
  
  ESO is fun. But that's not even by the same team lol

Didn't they make an MMO in the mean time? It is like asking when Warcraft 4 is going to be released.

My theory is that they've been reallocating teams into Zenimax Online studios for projects like ESO. TBH I've been playing it and it's pretty cool compared to the dated feel of Vanilla Skyrim. If any of you own it, ESO Plus is free until June 19th, you just have to head to the Crown Store and click the free trial button.
- I've tried to get into ESO multiple times, always hyping myself up to just ignore the combat/difficulty and pacing and do it for the story alone, but it wears me down quite quickly every time. The vibe is just entirely off in every way. It's like playing with a cheap McDonald's toy with stiff legs and a weird button that makes it move it's arms vs. a licensed action figure.
  Save for my issues with the lack of real risk or challenge anywhere outside of running end-game group content solo, I always get irritable with the weird class themes the developers went with. I think if they had three guardian base classes (Thief, Warrior, Mage) and allowed players to spend their limited pool of points into other Elder Scrolls trees (Destruction, Alteration, Restoration, Conjuration, Blunt, Blade, etc.) it could have been balanced well enough and felt true to what we've come to expect from that universe. But instead it feels like they made the game as an entirely different MMO, then at the last minute agreed to put an Elder Scrolls skin on it.
  I'd like to be a Warrior with minor specialization in Restoration and Alteration, but if I want to play that sort or archetype I basically have to be a Templar who uses sun spells and does all of his fighting with aetherial javelins, maybe joining the Mage's Guild or something to simulate some sort of Alteration type buffs. Or I roll a Dragonknight who is themed entirely around fire and lava spells. Or I run around labeled a Sorcerer and use daedric spells/buffs to simulate Alteration, and ignore the rest of that classes abilities to branch out into melee and armor abilities. It's all just so convoluted and unusual.
  Beautiful soundtrack, though.. Moth, Butterfly and Torchbug really does things to my heart, and leaves me hopeful that even without Jeremy Soule, TES6 may still have the type of score it deserves.
  
  Combat Difficulty? I haven't experienced that yet and I'm at CP 385. When does the difficulty start? Are you talking about the super late game trials?
  Oh you mean lack of difficulty, yeah I feel that it's sort of a let down.
- I did try ESO for a few weeks but it just felt a little bit... Not TESy? Like the actual movement feels different, the combat feels different, it just feels like a bit of a different beast! It's fun for what it is though, for sure. What do you play as? :)
  
  For sure the mechanics are wack, but it's got fully voiced dialogue for tons of quests, it's got material gathering and a bunch of other exploration based activities to do. It's also got equipment and consumable crafting, but TBH not much of it is actually useful except for Provisioning.
  Argonian Templar, stuck with the training gear until summerset isles and swapped to Psyjic Gear to prep for trials.
  
  I wonder how much different it is now, compared to when the game was in closed beta.
  It was a literal floating camera back then, lol.
  Never played the game afterward due to subscription-based access.

Is there literally a single opinion in this thread that doesn't reek of entitlement and rage?