By the time The Elder Scrolls 6 likely releases, the same amount of time, if not more, will have passed between its launch and Skyrim's as Skyrim and the beginning of the entire Elder Scrolls series.
If you're unfamiliar (because hey, it was a long time ago), The Elder Scrolls series all began with Arena back in 1994. That's a hell of a long time – so long ago that Bethesda was known for purely developing sports games at the time, never having even set foot into RPG territory.
Fast forward 17 years and The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim debuts in 2011. There were just two years between the first two Elder Scrolls games, but the cadence of releases dropped off after that, with Morrowind arriving in 2003 and Oblivion launching four years after that in 2006.
Here comes the intriguing part. The Elder Scrolls 6 is nowhere near release, even though it's been over five years since it was announced. In fact, The Elder Scrolls 6 is still so far from launch that Xbox boss Phil Spencer isn't even sure which platforms it'll launch on (hint: it probably won't be the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S generation of consoles).
With that being said, a 2028 launch for The Elder Scrolls 6 is looking pretty conservative if anything. Bethesda is full steam ahead for Starfield's launch in September, and after that it'll surely be quashing bugs and releasing DLC for years. The Elder Scrolls 6 was probably just a sticky note on Todd Howard's desk when it was announced, and it's probably still looking that way five years later.
This all leads us to the wild scenario where the gap between Skyrim and the first Elder Scrolls may be shorter than the wait for the follow-up to Skyrim. Bethesda obviously worked on a lot of other games in that time, but if this isn't an indictment of just how egregious video game development timelines and budgets have become, I don't know what is.
You can head over to our new games 2023 guide for a look at all the games that'll definitely be here before The Elder Scrolls 6.
