Pete Hines: No Elder Scrolls 6 news is coming until "years from now"
Looks like we'll be waiting for a while when it comes to news about the next Elder Scrolls title, according to Pete Hines.
Do you remember The Elder Scrolls 6? We do. Unfortunately, we won't be getting any new information about the game for some time, according to Bethesda Softworks' senior VP of global marketing Pete Hines.
In response to a fan tweet asking for news regarding The Elder Scrolls 6 from Twitter user @KilowattQ, Hines asserted that information about the game was still "years from now" away, following Starfield, which gamers "pretty much know nothing about."
"Alright check it out @DCDeacon , let’s cut the sh$t, when can we expect some info on #TheElderScrollsVI ? We 👏 need 👏 this👏 #Bethesda #elderscrolls #XboxSeriesX," wrote @KilowattQ.
"It’s after Starfield, which you pretty much know nothing about. So if you’re coming at me for details now and not years from now, I’m failing to properly manage your expectations," Hines replied.
The last time anyone heard about Elder Scrolls 6 was actually two years ago during E3 2018. We got a very brief reveal trailer that showed off a partial landscape and the game's familiar score. But it looks like we won't be able to expect anything more than that for quite some time, and we haven't even heard much about Starfield at all.
It's now officially been nearly a decade since we got a new Elder Scrolls, with the most recent title being Skyrim back in 2011. It's continued to receive additional ports over the years, including to the Nintendo Switch. But at some point, something has to give. Hopefully this is just a bit of hyperbole, but don't get your hopes up for any news soon.
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replyBrittany Vincent posted a new article, Pete Hines: No Elder Scrolls 6 news is coming until "years from now"
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lol
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Not really surprising. Bethesda doesn't usually talk about their games much more than a year, year-and-a-half out, and like Pete says, we haven't even seen anything about Starfield yet.
Also lol @ his "properly managing your expectations" comment.
Also also, damnit tell us about Starfield!-
Yeah they usually announce with a pretty short turnaround.
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Since RayTracing is not supported, they'll just hack it by scaling down characters models 0.001% with different colored helmets to bounce around and "illuminate" the scene.
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It’s pretty telling that there’s been an almost 10 year vacuum for these games and nobody in the industry has filled it. Nothing even remotely like the experience offered by TES/Fallout games at such a grand scale. Witcher, AssCreed games are not the same.
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Meanwhile Skyrim continues to be a top seller across basically every system ten years later. They didn’t blow shit, they’re making games that literally nobody else can. Why wouldn’t other companies fill this vacuum if they were able? Seems like an obvious jackpot given how thirsty everyone is. TES6 is gonna sell even more when it comes out in thirty years.
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It's because the games are actually much more technically complex and labor intensive than consumers give them credit for. "They're all on the same engine!" - some person completely ignorant of software development, somewhere. They get exponentially more complex with each new generation also, so expecting a new one in the same timeframe as the old ones is not realistic.
I think it's just a case where there literally aren't any apples:apples comparisons in the industry, all we have are their previous track record on vastly different hardware requirements, or the release schedule of other, completely different companies making completely different software. So yeah when you compare Bethesda to Ubisoft or something it seems like they're "slow" but that's obviously not a good comparison.-
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What makes Skyrim special isn’t all the technical stuff, it’s the effort they put into world building and telling the story. Plenty of other studios do a much better job on the technical side of things, but none of them can do the world building part as well.
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I don't think that's true, though. I think you underestimate the technical complexity of the VERY specific thing Bethesda games do. Games like The Witcher, AssCreed, Zelda, ALL other open world games are not like TES in a ton of small ways that add up to a pretty different thing by the end. The world building and storytelling is garbage, that's definitely not the reason these games are so unique. It's the fact that they are truly attempting to be open/give unprecedented player freedom that is what makes them so difficult to replicate, IMO.
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I think it's some of both.
On the one hand, as many people who played The Outer Worlds discovered, the bajillion persistent objects you can interact with, and the characters with behavioral routines more complex than "stand around and wait for the PC to talk to you", and the really sprawling open world, do a tremendous amount to enhance the verisimilitude of the game. You don't realize how important they are until they're not there.
On the other hand, Bethesda RPGs are filled with detailed, interesting locations, often with their own little stories and lore attached to them. They go farther than virtually any other open world game with their locations and the story and lore behind them. That goes a long way to draw people in and keep them playing and exploring.
Combined, those two aspects create a unique experience that really engages people over the long term.-
Yeah, that was exactly my experience with Outer Worlds. It felt like a Bethesda game with all the little bits that make it work stripped out...so you end up with a pretty bland, vaguely open world without all that much going on.
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The technical stuff helps in the moment to moment illusion, pike you can enter a house and suddenly every item is interactable. You can pick a book, any book off the shelves, it's not just a texture, fling it around etc. You can take a pot and put it on an npc's head. No other games does this kind of interactivity.
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You have to sit around and wait for shit to load any time you enter a town or house, that kills whatever immersion putting a pot on someones head provides IMO.
And the goofball physics certainly don't help.
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I’m pretty sure that fixing a decade of technical debt with the engine is one reason this is taking so long. They can’t do what they did with Fallout 4 and slap some shit together with 10 year old tech and expect people to eat it up.
Modernizing the engine so it can compete with games like Witcher or Ass Creed is for sure one of the reasons it’s taking so long. The game after this one probably won’t take 10+ years to make.-
"Fixing a decade of technical debt" in reality means they are developing, maintaining, and progressing their engine tech, like they do with every release. They're not "fixing their engine" like every uninformed gamer on reddit says they should do - they are improving their very specific tool that they use to create very specific (completely unique within the industry) games. They're developing a product that is orders of magnitude more complex than the previous one (like all their games). It's not going to take the same amount of time as a game from 10 years ago. From what I hear they've kept the team size the same as well (~100 ppl), so it taking the same amount of time simply wouldn't make sense.
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They just gotta fix a few of these jank issues, then that'll really bust this Elder Scrolls thing wide open. Just slightly less janky and maybe Skyrim would be on the Steam top sellers list for 30 straight years instead of 29.
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Yea just look at what a smashing success their last two games are, it's clear that they can just keep shitting out the same thing without improving the underlying tech and everything will work out fine for them.
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Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 are also on the Steam top sellers list RIGHT NOW lmao. Dude their games are some of the most successful of all time, despite the alternate reality of some circlejerking nerds.
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Fallout 76 was a huge turd and the sales reflect that, the fact that people on steam are still buying it doesn't change the fact that they still haven't broke past 3 million units sold.
Fallout 4 sold well, but most of those sales were in the first 24 hours, when suckers like me bought it without realizing that it was garbage. It would be interesting to see how well Fallout 4 sold after 3-6 months compared to other titles like The Witcher 3 or Ass Creed Origins/Odyssey.-
It's also worth noting that the FO76 team (and I think the Fallout team in general?) is totally separate from the TES team, so it's not really useful to make any predictions/assumptions based on that stuff anyway. Just as an aside I actually thought the tech for FO4 was perfectly fine. It looked great, had lots of fun new features like the settlement stuff. Sure the janky animations were still there, but that's definitely not a dealbreaker for me.
The thing that made FO4 suck was their double-down on the linear narrative content. There was just so much...plot, and characters, and your character talking, etc. All of it was dull as shit and made the world seem boring. That stuff is just never good from Bethesda, their strength is in environmental awe and splendor, letting your imagination go nuts filling in the blanks. Any time you have to do a real quest in those games it becomes pretty apparent where the real magic of those games lies. -
I was ok with 4 but it was clearly at a point where their next game needs to be a major improvement both technically and in terms of story.
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Fallout 76 is outside the top 50 top sellers globally right now on Steam. Behind Skyrim itself as well as RPGs like Divinity Original Sin 2 and Cyberpunk. Fallout 4 is outside the top 100.
Your thesis is that Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 are actually worthy successors to Skyrim and the majority of Bethesda fans think they represent the kinds of large, meaningful improvements we should expect from their once every 4-5 years type releases? That if Elder Scrolls vNext is of similar relative quality to them it will be considered a great success?-
I'm saying the little janky things like gamers often say require "a new engine" are the least of Bethesda games' problems.
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And they're both in like the top 50 or whatever for me
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?filter=topsellers
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Nintendo? Breath of the Wild scratched a very similar itch for me.
And Bethesda seems to want to replace the one area they still shine (unique sidequests with interesting dialog and characters) with procedural bullshit if their last few games is anything to go by.
Outside of a handful of sidequests I didn't care for Fallout 4 basically at all.-
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CD Projekt Red? and they kinda did with the Witcher 3
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Yeah!!! The game is awesome and does environmental storytelling almost as good.
Although TES games have tons of "unique" locations, but the room design and artwork that goes through each one is borderline repetitive.
Witcher oth does indoor much better, has a lot of interesting and varied locations with more setting appropriate art.
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You missed Obsidian. BioWare is dead and I blame EA. Nobody will produce a title like a title like Elder Scrolls unless they develop a engine like it. Then they have to remember to make it mod friendly.
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Actually the latest leak from the FromSoftware reliable source says there are actually eight different lands of different races. Each one is selectable as your character’s starting zone, complete with different stats, plus each land must be traversed, with a giant boss at the end ruling overturning it that’s much larger than a main Dark Souls boss. UNF
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It’s even got a janky ass engine, to boot.
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I have it on xb1, need to fire it back up sometime.
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Mom: we have Skyrim at home!
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My point being that others are capable of making a Skyrim-esque game, but it's hard given the complexity of such a feat. The similarly sized studios don't usually want to wade in there and even for decently managed and staffed start ups (like Kingdom Come team), it's a long and difficult development.
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Eh, I'd say they have a long, long way to go. Their history is better, though.
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It's not even a little bit close to the same experience, I'd argue.
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I still haven't gotten very far in that game.
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Maybe Starfield will be the interim. Would be nice.
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Fallout 3 was released like 10 years ago and 4 kind of sucked. I’m skeptical that even Bethesda can recreate the magic of their older games without seriously changing things up.
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If Starfield is Elder Scrolls in space then that's all I really care about. They can take their time with number 6.
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Duh.
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Also a much min spec for PC, maybe something like a GTX 1060.
RDR2 and Control have a min spec with something like a GTX 780. They'll be able to push much higher for ES6 if this is a 2023 or 2024 game, both because the overall bar for PCs will be higher and there will be a breakaway from the 2013 consoles.
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I was expecting a world half the size of Skyrim, if that, with forced multiplayer, and the NPC shopkeepers would directly bring you to the Bethesda storefront to purchase mods, and decorations for your home.
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