As Starfield descends upon us and Todd Howard writes letters to everyone from Bethesda and Xbox staff to Starfield reviewers and even the Starfield Reddit, the de facto face of Bethesda has also come up with a cracking idea: "Someone should make a sequel to Skyrim."
Howard discussed his history with games, the roots of Starfield, and plenty more in a new video from BAFTA (above). Asked what game he'd like to see make a comeback, Howard singles out the NCAA Football series, which is also his most-played game series of all time, though Ultima 7 is his single favorite game and also still a major inspiration for Bethesda's style of RPGs. (As Howard briefly mentions, the NCAA Football series is actually due for a return, as EA announced over two years ago.) But that's not the end of his answer.
"It's one of those things where you realize – whatever the game is, when they go away – that they were special times and that you do miss it," he says. "In some ways, because we haven't made Elder Scrolls in a while – this is gonna sound weird coming from me, but – someone should make a sequel to Skyrim. Someone should get on that."
The good news is that a sequel to Skyrim – at least in the sense that Skyrim is a sequel to Oblivion – is technically in the works. As Bethesda's Pete Hines clarified just days ago, The Elder Scrolls 6 has officially left pre-production and entered more tangibly active (but still vaguely defined) development, but we still won't see or hear anything from it for years to come. That's partly because Bethesda is going to be head-down on Starfield for a while, and also because these RPGs take years and years to make. But per our Starfield review, if it's anything like Bethesda's latest open-world epic, it'll be worth the wait.
Todd Howard admits Bethesda may have announced The Elder Scrolls 6 too early: "I probably would've announced it more casually."
