Undoubtedly among the most anticipated upcoming games currently are Starfield, Bethesda’s mysterious new single player IP, and The Elder Scrolls 6, the long awaited sixth entry in their fantasy role playing game franchise. Both games were announced at E3 earlier this year, but we haven’t seen or heard a lot of them since.
Nor should we expect to. Speaking to Eurogamer, Bethesda’s SVP of Marketing Pete Hines said that information on both games wouldn’t come for while from now. He acknowledged that while certain circumstances made Bethesda announce these games earlier than they are typically used to doing, the timeframe for their development is the same as Bethesda games in the past, saying that fans should expect as much time between Fallout 76 and Starfield (and then Starfield and The Elder Scrolls 6) as there was between Skyrim and Fallout 4, or Fallout 4 and Fallout 76.
“[You’ll hear about Starfield and The Elder Scrolls 6] a while from now and a really long while from now!” Hines said. “Actually, I should not be quite so dismissive of the question, which is to say – the timeframe for Bethesda Game Studios titles has not changed at all. What changed was our desire to lay out a roadmap of those titles, not like, hey they’re going to be putting out a game every nine months, no, it still takes them years in between projects, but because we were doing something so different on Fallout 76, taking that franchise in such a different direction, doing an online game that doesn’t look like something you’d expect from BGS, we thought it was important to say: hey, new IP, single player, sci-fi thing coming, hey we are doing TES6 after that. So that people didn’t start spinning off on, like, that’s the end of single player games from Bethesda Games Studios.
“Timeframe-wise, it would still be about as long as you’d expect when you look at Fallout 3 to Skyrim to Fallout 4 to Fallout 76. It’s still going to be those periods of time, that hasn’t changed. Or at least, I don’t think it will change from that based on what I know.”
Based on what Hines has said, we should expect 3-4 years between Fallout 76 and Starfield, which means that one is probably coming around 2021-22. And The Elder Scrolls 6? Well, that one isn’t coming till 2025-26. Yikes. That’s 14-15 years after Skyrim!
Fallout 76, at least, launches this year, on November 14 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC.