The Elder Scrolls VI - Argonia(?)

[audio-]

So, it's time to document the rumours and hearsay surrounding the next in this Epic Series of Games.

The Elder Scrolls series started back in 1994 with the release of 'The Arena'.

Followed by the 1996 release of part two; 'Daggerfall'

As CPU power increased, so did the third in this series; 'Morrowind'

The forth in the series saw gamers go crazy for the title 'Oblivion' which could be argued as being the benchmark for open world gaming.

Just when gamers thought it couldn't get any better...

The latest, and fifth in The Elder Scrolls Series; 'Skyrim'

Here is a video some kind person has put together plotting the changes for us...



to be continued...

 

[audio-]

As we inch closer and closer to Christmas, we grow very aware that an Elder Scrolls 6 announcement isn't happening in 2016.

We may well be getting stuck into Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim Special Edition all over again, but although we're enjoying it and it looks great, it's still a familiar story.

It's definitely time for The Elder Scrolls 6.

There's evidently still a while to wait, though. The Elder Scrolls 6 is currently a figment made largely of whisked-together rumours and internet conjecture. But we've been digging through the many pages of nonsense you'll find online to see which bits make sense. Here's everything we know about it so far...

We're going to be honest. The amount of official information available on the follow-up to Skyrim could be written on the back of a Starbucks receipt in marker pen.

The game doesn't even officially exist yet. So, is it real? Of course it is.

The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim has sold more than 20 million copies, making it easily the most successful game in the 20-year-old series, and by a huge margin. Money demands it exists.

The closest we've got to Bethesda admitting a Skyrim sequel is coming came at the Elder Scrolls Online launch. Bethesda Vice President Pete Hines talked about how most other publishers would have tried to crank out a sequel to Skyrim as soon as possible.

"They'd be spitting out a Skyrim 2 the year after or two years later. That's just not how we view it," Hines said.

"[We] make sure everything we do is noteworthy. Our approach to that hasn't differed."

That is not Hines lifting the lid on the next Elder Scrolls game, of course, but the casual way he brushes over the subject in his subtext amounts to an admission 'another Skyrim' is as likely as 'another Call of Duty'.

It's an open secret. For example, right now Bethesda is even advertising for a "Quest Designer", asking for "Experience with The Elder Scrolls Construction Set". Hint hint?

There was a four-year gap between the releases of Oblivion and Skyrim, but if that was going to happen again we'd already have the next game: Skyrim was released way back in 2011.

The big question is whether Bethesda Game Studios has really bitten into the development cycle yet.

Well according to Bethesda's Pete Hines, the team isn't working on The Elder Scrolls 6 at all yet, but they will make it one day.

@HotShame0 we aren't working on TES6 at the moment

— Pete Hines (@DCDeacon) June 25, 2016

@PCGamesN thx. fyi, the elder scrolls vi isn't in development. we simply said we would make it eventually. don't want people to be misled

— Pete Hines (@DCDeacon) August 9, 2016

Well, that's what he's saying publicly anyway...

Earlier this year, Bethesda's Todd Howard said the game was a "long way off" when asked whether the team was working on the Skyrim sequel.

"I think it's good in these moments to tell our fans, 'Yes, of course we are. It's something we love.' But it is - you know, I have to be careful what I say - it's a very long way off."

"And we actually have two other large projects we're also doing that are bigger than anything we've done," he continued. "People will probably hear about those probably even before Elder Scrolls 6. And that'll make sense many years from now.

"We think very long-term. We're not a developer that's going to rush something like this out. When you think about what is the future of that kind of game, we have a pretty good idea of what that's going to be, and it's just going to take technology and time we don't necessarily have right now."

That sentiment has been echoed by Pete Hines more recently, who said that Bethesda isn't a vending machine for games:

"This studio is not a vending machine," he said. "They're not a two-button vending machine, where first we press Elder Scrolls and then we press Fallout, and then we press Elder Scrolls and then we press Fallout... They're an incredibly talented studio of creative people. They've now made four games in a row, all of which were named Game of the Year, and they have a right to decide what they're interested in working on next and which direction they want to go."

Hines also said he never questions how Todd Howard chooses what to create next.

"He's got reasons why, and I think once we get down the road, those reasons will be more evident to folks once we get there, or maybe not," Hines said. "But at the end of the day, these folks have a right to not just have to make Elder Scrolls game after Elder Scrolls game, which is why they switched to Fallout, and they have a right to stretch their legs and try something else or do something different.

"I know what they're working on for the next decade, and I think all of them are things to get excited about, for different reasons, and once they come out, folks will enjoy them for what they are."

When producing Skyrim, Bethesda Game Studios used a fairly small team of around 100 developers, where the big AAA releases like Assassin's Creed will have upwards of 1,000 working on them at certain points. How do you think companies like EA crank out a new instalment of their big franchises every year?

This means that unless Bethesda has quietly been doubling (or more) its development team over the last year or two, the 'next Skyrim' will have only become the lead project when Fallout 4 went gold in October. This is when the code that ships on game discs is cemented.

Part of the Bethesda Game Studios team will also have continued to work on Fallout 4, first for the frenzied bug fixes always required with one of these sprawling games, then Fallout 4 DLC. There's going to be several waves of the stuff throughout 2016, and it doesn't make itself.

Given the time needed to produce the previous games in the series, this suggests we may not see the game until 2019 - which has been supported by other leaks and rumours. Ouch.

Skyrim was officially announced in December 2010, 11 months before its eventual release in November 2011. Unless Bethesda Game Studios has radically strayed from the development cycle strategy it has used since being formed in 2002, we may have to wait a bit longer for official details.

There is a glimmer of hope, though. In an interview with gamesindustry.biz in March 2016, Skyrim game director Todd Howard was asked to clarify his tease that Bethesda Game Studios has "three big and crazy" projects on-the-go, saying: "They're a long way off. I think the larger point was, no-one should expect to hear about those anytime soon. We always overlap projects. We just have more going on now than we had before."

That may sound like bad news, but it means Elder Scrolls 6 may have been in active development way before October 2015.

This isn't just a games industry person spouting off either. Bethesda Game Studios is expanding. It opened a new Montreal studio in December 2015. At the time it had 40 developers, but a quick look at the ZeniMax jobs board website shows you the studio is continuing to scale up.

For the purpose of this article, we're simple calling the game Elder Scrolls 6. But it probably won't just be called that.

Almost all the Elder Scrolls series games are set in different areas in the world of Tamriel, the series's 'universe'. Back in 1996, Daggerfall snatched the High Rock and Hammerfell provinces. In 2002, Morrowind earmarked the island of Vvardenfell.

Oblivion was set in Cyrodil and, no prizes for this one, Skyrim was set in Skyrim.

These names may all sound like Tolkien rejects, but they're actually places that featured in the very first Elder Scrolls game, Arena. That 1994 game let you wander around the whole of Tamriel, making it one of the largest games ever made.

And yes, that means a lot of its areas were pretty boring and repetitive. A reminder: it was released in 1994, just a year after the original Doom.

So what's left in Tamriel? Consult the The Elder Scrolls: Arena map and you'll see that Valenwood, Elsweyr and Black Marsh (aka Argonia) are the spots Bethesda hasn't mined yet. Morrowind would be another obvious choice, as The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind didn't actually feature any of that province's mainland area, just an island.

For any real Elder Scrolls nuts ready to leave an angry comment, yes we know Battlespire and Regard exist, but they are not part of the main series of games.

Rumours online seem to think Argonia/Black Marsh is the most likely choice for Elder Scrolls 6, although we've found no reliable source for this yet. Maybe people just think it 'sounds right', eh?

Argonia is where Tamriel's lizard folk live. They're called Argonians. You've been able to play as these scaly, underwater-breathing creatures in previous Elder Scrolls games.

Aside from having the position of its cities already laid out, Bethesda has free rein to do what it wants with Argonia. However, there is a small chance Elder Scrolls 6 will actually be called… Skyrim 2, be set in Skyrim and have a story that follows on from the last game.

Some people think that's what will happen. We doubt it, though.

There are also some rumours that the game might be called Elder Scrolls 6: Redwood, although the reasonings for this aren't as fleshed out as Argonia.

However, there's another rumour that Elder Scrolls 6 will be called Elder Scrolls 6: Valenwood, which would make sense as it's one of the areas in Tamriel that Bethesda hasn't touched yet.

The theory is based on a puported Bethesda memo from back in 2014 that prohibited its employees from "using or referencing" a number of terms, including Fallout: Nuka World (which ended up being a major DLC release for Fallout 4, thus giving the leak a little more substantiation), Elder Scrolls VI or something called Project Greenheart.

Now Project Greenheart is supposed to be the codename for Elder Scrolls 6 because as keen Elder Scrolls fans will know, Greenheart is an existing city that's located in Valenwood.

Bethesda has clearly signposted one feature you can bet will be a big new draw in Elder Scrolls 6. We're talking about house-building, possibly even town-building.

This all started with Hearthfire, an expansion made for Skyrim. It let you own and customise far more houses across Skyrim's world. By itself it was a bit of a naff expansion, but was only £5.

The whole building element exploded in Fallout 4, whose game structure is quite comparable to the Elder Scrolls games, particularly as it uses the same game engine as Skyrim. It lets you make buildings from scratch, out of rudimentary pieces.

We'd be very surprised if Bethesda doesn't add something similar to Elder Scrolls 6, especially as Fallout 4's stab at it feels like a work-in-progress effort that isn't really that well integrated with the rest of the game.

Bethesda can do better than that.

One feature that hasn't been confirmed, but is in high demand among Elder Scrolls fans, is a new game engine. Look at Bethesda's form in the past and it seems we're due one.

Oblivion and Fallout 3 used the third-party Gamebryo engine before Bethesda came out with its own (somewhat similar to Gamebryo) Creation engine, used in Skyrim and Fallout 4.

It's no wonder so many people said Fallout 4 looks a bit crusty, arriving four years after Skyrim. The engines weren't identical — four years of work won't come without progress — but they were similar.

It's time for a generational shift in the tools Bethesda uses to make Elder Scrolls games, don't you think?

However, it's likely to be an evolution of what Bethesda used in Skyrim and Fallout 4. Do you really think Bethesda's going to chuck out the mod developer tools that a) many of its dev have years of experience with and b) made a Skyrim mod scene that has kept the game popular on PC for a half-decade? Right now it's the 14th most popular game on Steam in terms of people actually playing, just one spot behind Fallout 4.

 

[Nebell]

I have not finished a single Elder Scrolls game... and I love open world RPG's. I have yet to finish The Witcher 3 as well... damnit.

 

[heatsinker]

I really hope they ditch the Gamebryo-based engines, I feel they've gotten enough mileage out of it and it's time for something new. Fallout 4 did look better than Oblivion and the earlier Gamebryo games, but let's be honest, it looked last-gen.

 

[Armenius]

Instead of focusing on one area of Tamriel at a time, I would love to see a modern version that expands across all of Tamriel like Arena did. Maybe pit you in the war between the several factions wrestling for control of the Empire on a grand scale.

 

[Mchart]

I really hope they ditch the Gamebryo-based engines, I feel they've gotten enough mileage out of it and it's time for something new. Fallout 4 did look better than Oblivion and the earlier Gamebryo games, but let's be honest, it looked last-gen.

For as much shit that they get for this engine; I'd say the engine works well enough given the vast amount of events it has to handle, and how easy it is to work with the engine scripting wise. I doubt they'll drop it because the only reason they can crank out the games that they do with the amount of events is because of all the work they've put into that engine/scripting.

And frankly, since FO4 we no longer have the technical/memory limitation issues.

The only reason FO4 looked last gen is because of the poor meshes/texturing. This isn't the fault of the engine, this is an issue with the artists that Bethesda employs and/or limiting mesh poly counts / texture size because of consoles.

Even so - There aren't many games that reach the level of complexity that Skyrim/FO4 do. Games like Witcher 3 or GTA 5 are quite expansive and also look great - But neither has as much going on like the Gambryo games do when it comes to remembering a players actions even in small ways like with the placement of objects.