Years before The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel, Todd Howard explained how Bethesda's progression philosophy had changed between Oblivion and Skyrim.
Speaking to Official PlayStation Magazine in Spring 2011, Howard explained what was changing in his hot new RPG, Skyrim, which was set to release later that year. In Oblivion, he said, they'd learned that players repeatedly got buyers' remorse when it came to picking their skill paths.
"What we found in Oblivion is that you start the game and you pick what you want to look like, and that gives you a bunch of preset extra abilities," he explained. "And then you play for a while, and later on in character gen, depending on how you play it [...] it asks you what your class is, and then you pick the skills that are important to you. But if you weren't expecting that menu, then you would have just kept playing and getting better at the things you were doing."
That system - of letting your playstyle inform your skills - is what Bethesda adopted for Skyrim, which Howard said "lets you play around but then never asks you what's important to you." The result is a "much more elegant" levelling experience that says "'just keep playing and whatever's important you will factor into your level'." That didn't happen in Oblivion, where people would play for a while, select their skills, and then potentially discover hours later that "'I chose wrong' [...] and then you start over. So you get this loop of playing the game for three hours, then realizing that was a waste of time."
"As developers, we don't want that scenario," Howard said then. At that point, months before Skyrim would release and what would eventually prove to be nearly two decades before we'd see The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel, it was clear that Bethesda was still rolling with the punches, adapting quickly between RPGs which were still launching every few years. That overhaul would end up being a big part of Skyrim's appeal, and combined with its expanded radial quest system allowed Bethesda to capture a sense of true freedom across its open world.
But it's already been 15 years since Skyrim, triple the gap we had to wait between Oblivion and The Elder Scrolls 5. And since then, RPGs have changed massively, with titles like The Witcher 3 pouring depth into their quest designs, and the likes of Elden Ring and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 offering players the chance to laser-focus into specific build paths and specialisations. Starfield made moves in that direction, walling the progression of certain skills behind unlocking them first, but it seems unlikely that Bethesda will be looking to repeat much of its middling sci-fi foray in its tentpole fantasy series. The sheer amount of time since Skyrim means Sentinel will be forced to overhaul a lot of The Elder Scrolls, and it'll be fascinating to see what Bethesda comes up with this time.
Our first crumb of The Elder Scrolls 6 lore is a Hammerfell quote dated 5 years after Skyrim.
