"Just pretend we didn't announce it": Todd Howard knows The Elder Scrolls 6 teaser has haunted RPG fans for nearly 8 years, but its early reveal was about "informing our audience"

Bethesda Game Studios first unveiled The Elder Scrolls 6, a title that now arguably stands as one of the most hotly anticipated new games underway, back in 2018 with a short E3 teaser – but it was perhaps revealed a tad bit too early.

Nearly a decade has passed, after all, with little solid news of The Elder Scrolls 6 since the infamous trailer – if you can call it that. Bethesda boss Todd Howard is well aware of all this, though, and it seems like he wishes things had gone a bit differently.

Speaking in an interview with IGN, he jokes about the long-awaited RPG, "Just pretend we didn't announce it. Doesn't exist. No one's heard a word." Easier said than done, unfortunately.

Why did Bethesda lift the curtain on The Elder Scrolls 6 so early, then, if developers knew there wouldn't be much more to share publicly in the coming years?

"Sometimes you need to inform people, and there's business considerations and et cetera, et cetera." If Howard had it his way, however, he'd love to "compress that moment where you hear about a game to when you can play it. Those would be on top of each other if I had my way every time."

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In other words, the Oblivion Remastered reveal-to-release timeline. Sometimes, fan pressure calls for a less-than-ideal timeline, though.

"If you look back at this Fallout 76, Starfield, Elder Scrolls 6 announcement, that was really about informing our audience, because when you're going to do something new, everyone's going to ask, 'What about Elder Scrolls 6? What about a single-player game?' And we did it that way, but it's not my preference."

Bethesda devs "struggle with the balance" often – they've got a lot on their plate, of course, between Fallout and Starfield and, yes, The Elder Scrolls 6. "We're working on a lot of stuff," as Howard puts it. "I think if you look at the scale of our studio, we could have 10 times the amount of people to do all this. We're doing so much, and it's just finding the right times to tell everybody about it."

I'm not too sure 2018 was the right time myself, but…

I also acknowledge that had I not seen the teaser then, I'd have spent the next, well, nearly eight years, begging for a crumb of anything from Bethesda. So, Howard's words make sense. I just hope the studio gives us something more soon.

With The Elder Scrolls 6, Todd Howard says Bethesda has "handled" the Creation Engine "better than we ever have" thanks to lessons learned from Starfield