BethesdaBethesda’s Todd Howard has revealed that the studio is aiming to fill The Elder Scrolls VI with enough content and replay value to last “at least a decade”, in light of the longevity that its predecessor Skyrim managed to enjoy.
Skyrim first released in 2011 for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC. The game’s vast open world and wide variety of quests led to players devoting months of their lives to the game. Over the last few years, mods and re-releases have only helped Skyrim’s popularity and replayability.
BethesdaIn a recent interview with IGN, Howard spoke about Skyrim’s ridiculously long shelf life, and the fact that, despite all the jokes and memes, re-releases of the game continue to sell incredibly well.
He explained:
People are still playing Skyrim. It’s still one of the best-selling games. I know people joke about it online, but it’s one of the best-selling games on Switch. Anything we put it out on, it becomes a hit game. And they love it, they still play it, it’s almost infinitely playable, with all of the mods, and everything like that.
While some would argue that Bethesda has milked Skyrim over the last eight years, Howard did reveal that this has inspired Bethesda to make The Elder Scrolls VI a game that people will want to stick with for a good long while.
He said:
What that does, is let us know going into Elder Scrolls 6, this is a game we need to design for people to play for a decade at least. At least.
It’s still unknown just how far along into development The Elder Scrolls VI actually is at this point. The game was finally officially announced during E3 2018 in the briefest of teasers, but Howard has said we probably shouldn’t expect for a while.
In fact, the chances of it arriving before the end of this generation of consoles is incredibly slim, but if Bethesda is serious about making a game with a decade’s worth of content, then it’ll be worth the wait.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.