The Elder Scrolls 6, announced in 2018, is probably Bethesda’s most anticipated game of all time. It would be a return to form for the company, which has spent a lot of the last seven years on Fallout and Starfield, among other projects, slowly but surely chipping away at its original franchise away from the spotlight.
In a recent interview, Bethesda creative director Todd Howard said the studio is going to return to its “classic style,” for which the company has become known. The Elder Scrolls is the poster child of Bethesda Game Studios, while the other games it has worked on, i.e., Fallout 76 and Starfield, were “creative detours,” Howard believes.
That classic style is going to be characterized by Bethesda’s recognizable approach to fantasy RPG elements and, naturally, the use of the Creation Engine (a new version, of course). Though it’ll stay true to what fans expect, a lot of “innovation” will come as well.
And this brings me to the meat of this featurette: Bethesda has a ton to innovate on if it’s to make The Elder Scrolls feel great again.
As time progressed, Bethesda increasingly embraced a shallower, more approachable, and less complex RPG style that favors quantity over quality and believes that so long as players have things to “do” in a game, that should be enough. Because of that, we got Skyrim, which ditched stats and any kind of build complexity in favor of a streamlined set of categories aimed at removing a proper class system.
That game also had countless fetch quests, shallow “go there and do that” types of assignments, stories that rarely overlap, side missions that don’t make sense in the grand narrative of the game, as well as faction quest chains that do not take your character into account, allowing them to become contradictory as well (becoming a member of multiple factions at once, for example).
The game almost completely did away with roles to be played, remaining an RPG in name only.
Skyrim isn’t the worst offender, however, as Bethesda’s subsequent titles had even more of these flaws. But, then again, it seems Howard considers these “creative detours,” so I’ll refer to their last TES game instead.
Though it pains me to accept the Creation Engine at all, I think it could be overlooked so long as Bethesda did away with these “classic” aspects of its design philosophy, not to mention the jank and the bugs the company has come to be associated with.
