Bethesda has officially christened the next entry in its long-running fantasy RPG series The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel. This is our first meaningful bit of news on the game since the first brief teaser trailer the studio unveiled in 2018, but keep your hopes in check: even with the arrival of the series' 40th anniversary, this doesn't mean that Sentinel's release is imminent.
"Thank you for 40 years of shared memories," Bethesda says in a social media post. "We can’t wait to make even more together with The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel. Development continues, and while it’ll be some time before we’re ready to share more, it feels great to finally reveal the name and location with you."
On Bluesky, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier is reiterating his previous assertion that the game is "more than 2 years away," and Bethesda's statement sure doesn't make it sound like it's any closer. We know that Sentinel is playable in some form, at least, as Xbox boss Asha Sharma recently boasted about a "live playthrough" that demonstrated "incredible" scale and an "even greater" story.
Bethesda has been one of many studios affected by Xbox's ongoing mass layoffs, and the developers who remain expect the cuts to "have a substantial and cascading effect on the game," potentially including further delays. I suppose Microsoft and Bethesda would argue that you can't actually delay a game that never had a public release date, but The Elder Scrolls 6 is already starting to be discussed in the same breath as Duke Nukem Forever and Beyond Good & Evil 2.
I hope Sentinel lives beyond those sorts of comparisons, but Bethesda has a lot to prove after Starfield disappointed so many of the studio's longtime fans. Kicking out veteran developers certainly won't make delivering on those expectations any easier.
Our first crumb of The Elder Scrolls 6 lore is a Hammerfell quote dated 5 years after Skyrim
