When The Elder Scrolls 6 actually does manage to release, it’ll have to deal with the weight of industry-wide expectations regarding its quality. Fallout 76 has only recently come into its own, and Starfield, for all its ambition, exposed the cracks in Bethesda’s designs. What worked 14 years ago with Skyrim just isn’t enough anymore, and for a studio that once defined the open-world RPG, The Elder Scrolls 6 will likely represent one of the more consequential creative decisions in Bethesda's history.
Starfield was supposed to demonstrate Bethesda's ability to innovate beyond its established franchises, but for all its better angels, ended up a cautionary tale about scale vs. Substance. The game's planets felt empty, and it ran into a veritable brick wall of technical troubles at launch (to say nothing of the loading screens). More damning than these technical issues, though, was the realization that Bethesda's core design loop, which carried Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Skyrim to critical and cultural acclaim, is undeniably dated.
How The RPG Landscape Has Evolved
Consider what defines a successful AAA role-playing game in 2026. Baldur's Gate 3, for one, set the standard for player choice in big-budget RPGs and proved that audiences reward developers who treat them as capable enough to navigate complex moral terrain. Meaningful agency now exists beyond binary good/evil karma or obvious decision points, and based on the reveal of Divinity, it can come around a lot faster, too.
A year earlier, Elden Ring suggested that exploration works best when it's involved and rewarding in ways that transcend loot tables, but was, more importantly, independent. It didn't hold hands or waypoint anybody to death, and there's no journal full of radiant quests to ignore, no quests at all, really. Letting players forge their own path was, ironically enough, reminiscent of the Morrowind era of RPGs, when Bethesda excelled at the same thing.
Games like The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 also proved that complex narratives can coexist with a player's freedom to choose. CD Projekt RED's approach also resulted in densely populated cities, morally complex characters, and side quests that can rival the main storyline in both games. None of these elements came at the cost of another, and all are pain points that have consistently felt thin in Bethesda's recent games.
The Flaws in Bethesda's Formula
Bethesda's traditional strengths, though industrially formative, increasingly struggle to compensate for weaknesses that these contemporaries have addressed. The studio's dialogue systems remain clunky compared to what Larian has offered, and combat, whether we're discussing Skyrim's floaty swordplay or Starfield' s competent but uninspired gunplay, has never been Bethesda's forte. It also can’t skirt by nearly as comfortably in an era where Elden Ring exists. The writing, while occasionally best-in-class, has suffered when stretched across hundreds of hours of content.
Perhaps most critically, Bethesda's reliance on procedural generation may have worked when Daggerfall pioneered repeatable content in 1996, but it feels exhausting in 2026. Starfield's many empty planets are one thing, but the identical outposts and recycled dungeons stood in sharp contrast to the clock-like precision design of Night City in Cyberpunk 2077 or the reactive environments of Baldur's Gate 3. The illusion of exploration shatters into box-checking when surrounded by repetition like that, though the universally common flora and fauna also didn’t help.
The Elder Scrolls 6 Must Choose A Path
The central mystery in all of this industry talk is what’s actually in store for The Elder Scrolls 6. Considering the last substantive update anybody has had since 2018 is longtime TES loremaster Kurt Kuhlmann leaving Bethesda, it's not unfair to say that things look uncertain at the moment. Still, two options for what plays out with The Elder Scrolls 6 immediately spring to mind.
The safe (and disappointing play) would be to deliver 'Skyrim but bigger,' doubling down on familiar systems while hoping that nostalgia and The Elder Scrolls brand carry the day. It’s a recipe for a profitable game that’d sell millions of copies, but it’d cement the RPG crown firmly onto Larian's or FromSoftware's head, without reclaiming creative leadership in the genre.
Procedural Generation Is A Necessary Change
The alternative is that Bethesda fundamentally reconsiders what makes its games special and then acts on that reconsideration. Players may have any number of problems with Fallout 76 or Starfield, but what works and what doesn’t can be hard to quantify without a controller in hand. The material improvements this route absolutely demands, however, at least extend to better combat systems, more sophisticated AI, and a willingness to trust players with real consequences for their actions rather than being endlessly and overtly accommodating without pushback.
Bethesda obviously shouldn’t abandon what makes its games distinctive; its commitment to strong fantasy worlds remains unmatched, as does its sandbox design. The sense of stumbling into something weird and wonderful around any corner has value, and Bethesda's approach to mods allows the community to transform these games into living, evolving experiences. These strengths just can't carry the franchise alone anymore, not when players have experienced what Baldur's Gate 3 or Elden Ring have accomplished with player agency and world design.
The Stakes Are Reputational If Not Existential
The reality is that if The Elder Scrolls 6 ever actually releases, it will sell well regardless, but it’ll also determine whether Bethesda remains the RPG genre powerhouse it’s been or becomes a legacy studio coasting while younger, hungrier developers define the medium's future. Starfield's reception turned out to be a mulligan with critics and audiences who understood, maybe even more than it warranted, that new IPs face unique challenges. With a franchise like The Elder Scrolls, they likely won't get a second one.
It feels like immense pressure, but frankly, it should. After this long a wait, if The Elder Scrolls 6 feels like more of the same, then the ten-year conversation from then to the eventual release of Fallout 5 will shift. The question of 'when will Bethesda innovate?' Will become 'maybe they can't anymore.'
- Released
- 2026
- ESRB
- m
- Developer(s)
- Bethesda Game Studios
- Publisher(s)
- Bethesda Softworks
- Franchise
- The Elder Scrolls
- Genre(s)
- RPG
