They can take as long as they want. After Starfield, I have zero confidence that TES6 will be any good. Bethesda has some serious issues they need to sort out with their production pipelines and methodology and they need to rethink how they approach story-driven open world experiences.

Every time I see a Starfield video and see the camera turbozoom in on a character as they deliver a forced, robotic line with terrifying facial animations - I get teleported right back to 2006. It is very obvious this studio does not know what they are doing and has learned little from their previous releases and from other contemporary games.

Skyrim will always hold a special place in my heart, it’s almost like a simpler time.

Starfield damaged Bethesda for me though. To spend 25 years on it in total and for it to be as it released was very disappointing. I mean basics like no city maps or land vehicles? Every base you come across having the same bodies in the same place with the same loot? I want to love it, they can do things I can’t even imagine (I can’t program Jack shit) but for that to be the end point of their decades of labour just doesn’t add up for me.

Starfield was boring as hell and now they're too scared to try ES6 (because it'll be garbage).

I would love to be wrong...

I never got the big deal with Skyrim. I'm not saying it's bad, but I don't get why people went all crazy for it. Bethesda over streamlined the Elder Scrolls series with Skyrim for the mainstream audience. By removing and/or simplifying game systems.

EDIT You can be the leader of all the guilds with a single character. Just why?

I sometimes download Skyrim again, mod it for hours and as soon as I start a new game I realise I don't even wanna play it.

Reposting my comment from another thread because I'm interested in spurring discussion.

Imo Bethesda is, in many ways, a victim of its own success. Morrowind and Oblivion were both solid entries that did well critically and financially, but no one was prepared for the massive impact of Skyrim. Its success transformed open-world fantasy games into a staple of AAA gaming, and the game has stayed relevant for over a decade.

However, even when it was first released, Skyrim fell short in several areas that were often overlooked due to the sheer “wow” factor of its open world. The game is plagued by bugs, many of which are game-breaking and persist even in recent re-releases. The AI is brain-dead, melee combat is clunky, and the quest design and writing often lack depth.

In the years since, the landscape of gaming has evolved. Numerous fantasy and open-world games have improved upon things that Skyrim did well, and raised the bar for what players expect from many areas where Skyrim fell short. Players today have a wealth of games to choose from and are less forgiving of these types of flaws. Starfield’s lukewarm reception reflects Bethesda’s seeming unwillingness—or inability—to update its design philosophy for a modern audience.

The expectations for The Elder Scrolls VI have become impossible for Bethesda to meet. These expectations are sky-high not only among fans but also from Bethesda’s new parent company, Microsoft. TES6 will almost certainly be a financial success, but Microsoft didn’t acquire Bethesda for just “decent” results like Starfield; they acquired the creators of Skyrim to make blockbuster hits that dominate the charts and win critical acclaim.

In the end, Bethesda knows they will never recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle success of Skyrim. So they’ll keep sitting on the IP, until Microsoft forces them to release something mediocre, and their studio joins many of the other classic RPG developers in obscurity

To be fair, Skyrim still holds up today.

wasted too much time on starfield, FO76, and mobile games. that's all they have released since 2018. and if you don't count VR editions or special editions then you're back to 2016 with FO4.

8 years of junk. They could have made TWO elder scrolls in that time.

We will get Skyrim re-releases 15 more times before we get an ES6 release.

Join the dark side -- stop taking your pills and enjoy Elder Scrolls 6 and Titanfall 3 with the rest of us

Tbh I kinda hope Bethesda doesn't make a new Fallout game, I predict if they do make a new one it'll make Fallout 76 look like New Vegas in comparison.

Hot take: I'm fine with Bethesda taking their time to release a game if that means it'll be higher quality. There are thousands of games released a week. Hi play something else in the meantime.

Maybe Todd Howard the Duck will tell us what's going on

It's almost like they suck at making games now.

There was a whole era of gaming from the late 90s to like 2010 where like a couple developers made something special, left, and then the company coasted on the code for a decade.

For me it was the Company of Heroes series.