Elder Scrolls 6 is Bethesda’s main focus right now, says Todd Howard

Bethesda just announced it plans to bring Starfield to PlayStation 5 on April 7, along with a bunch of new content and improvements to its spacefaring RPG. In a wide-ranging interview with IGN, studio head and creative director Todd Howard also spilled a few precious drops of Elder Scrolls tea. Naturally, he didn’t share much about the hotly anticipated game’s story or setting, but he did share a bit of new information about the studio’s progress on The Elder Scrolls 6, and shared some insights about how core RPG systems should work.

It’s no secret that AAA games like Starfield and The Elder Scrolls 6 spend many years in development. According to Howard, Bethesda Game Studios projects begin with a smaller “pre-production” staff for two to three years “to make sure we know what we’re doing.” Once the overall direction is in place, the team expands to execute on that vision. “We’re at that point with The Elder Scrolls 6 where the bulk of the studio is on it, a lot of our partners are on it, and we know, ‘Hey, this is what we’re doing.’ So that’s a good place to get to,” Howard told IGN.

Though it will continue to work on live-service titles like Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online, as well as future content for Starfield, it appears that the next installment of the Elder Scrolls series is what most of Bethesda’s staff is working on at the moment. This doesn’t give us any clue about a potential release date, but it also suggests that The Elder Scrolls 6 actually exists in playable form, beyond just the title card Bethesda shared all the way back in 2018.

“We’re in a fortunate position where the builds of the game are really consistently working every day. Well, not every day, but we’ve had more days than we’ve ever had where the build is good, there’s new stuff in it, and we can play it,” Howard said.

Elsewhere in the recent IGN interview, when asked about innovation within the RPG genre going forward, Howard referenced Oblivion in a way that may offer a clue about his thinking when it comes to The Elder Scrolls 6, and it all comes back to character builds.

“After Oblivion, I felt very strongly about this. And I was seeing this a lot and thinking, ‘I don’t want that in my games.’ I don’t want someone to be like, ‘I made a mistake several hours ago and I have no way of correcting it,'” Howard observed, noting that games like Skyrim and Starfield were more open-ended in this regard. “I think there are games out there that do quite a good job with the scarcity of builds. And so as we look forward, is there a way to have the best of both worlds where you can course correct, but there’s still some scarcity?”

You can’t reallocate your skill points in Starfield… not yet, anyway. But Howard’s comments would seem to suggest that The Elder Scrolls 6 might loosen up that house rule. Maybe.