Three things are always in your future: death, taxes, and yet another version of Skyrim. It seems Bethesda boss Todd Howard is in on the joke, even when he's writing internal messages to the rest of the dev team.
Today, just before the Starfield launch, Howard sent out a heartfelt congratulations message to the Starfield devs and everyone at Xbox and Bethesda. In that message (which was made public by Windows Centrai), Howard notes that "Our path to creating Starfield would be a long and winding one where we made other games along the way." Those games include, in Howard's words, "Fallout 4, Skyrim SE, Fallout Shelter, Skyrim VR, Fallout 76, [and] Skyrim again…"
In that letter, Howard says that Starfield was formally pitched to the head of ZeniMax in 2013, so releasing three different Skyrims in the space of a decade is a pretty neat feat. Howard's talking about three versions in particular: the remastered Skyrim: Special Edition released in 2016, the PSVR and PC title Skyrim VR first released in 2017, and the expanded Skyrim: Anniversary Edition which released in 2021.
That makes four formally distinct editions of Skyrim, but if you total up every release of the game across every platform it's been on, you're looking at well over a dozen editions - even more if you count versions on different PC platforms like Steam, GOG, Epic, and Game Pass.
There are a lot of years left before The Elder Scrolls 6 launches. Who knows how many more versions of Skyrim we could play in the meantime?
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