Now that Bethesda have announced the remastered edition of “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim”, their fans got an opportunity to calm down a bit with regards to “The Elder Scrolls 6”. For more than a year now, there’s been a lot of active discussion about the new game among the most dedicated fans of the franchise, and many were convinced that it’s going to be announced soon.
It looks like Bethesda had slightly different plans about the franchise on their mind though, so now we’re back to the assumption that we’ll be waiting for a long time before “The Elder Scrolls 6” is even announced.
The most recent rumors about the new game point towards 2019 as the earliest most reasonable possibility for its release, but that speculation doesn’t actually seem to be based on any concrete facts. There aren’t actually many concrete facts to go by in the first place, so fans have been clinging to any rumor they could find.
Other claims about “The Elder Scrolls 6” lately talked about the possibility of the game bringing some significant changes to the gameplay formula. With the amount of time that’s passed since “Skyrim”, that’s pretty much guaranteed, otherwise fans would be quite disappointed.
“Fallout 4” showed that the core gameplay of Bethesda’s games could actually use a lot of improvement and fine-tuning, and the game received a lot of praise for its combat mechanics. And while it did focus a little too heavily on the combat side of things, hopefully Bethesda have learned their lesson for “The Elder Scrolls 6”.
It’s rumored that the company might be looking into a significant revision of the game’s leveling system, possibly moving away from the standard XP-based style that they’ve traditionally used until now. Some players have suggested that a skill-based leveling system could be more appropriate for the latest entry in the franchise, and something like the perks from “Fallout 4” could also be incorporated nicely.
Although, as some have pointed out, Bethesda would have to make some changes to the perks system in order to make it more appropriate for “The Elder Scrolls 6”, as it would feel a bit out of place thematically.
What about multiplayer? This is another hot topic in the community, but it doesn’t seem like many players would be excited to see it added to “The Elder Scrolls 6” in any form. The release of “The Elder Scrolls Online” was already a controversial move for Bethesda and it lowered some fans’ trust in the franchise and the studio as a whole, so hopefully they are going to remember the past and won’t make that mistake again.
The only way multiplayer could possibly work is in some sort of cooperative game mode, although even that would be tricky to pull off properly, according to some fans. The game relies to a large extent on the feeling of immersion and, partially, isolation. Cooperative multiplayer could easily break the fragile shell of the game and kill its charm.
And on the other hand, spending time working on multiplayer would mean investing less time and fewer resources in the single player component of the game. That would definitely be unacceptable for most fans, no matter how good the multiplayer feels. We’ve already seen other franchises ruined by the exact same move from their developers/publishers, and Bethesda should have enough experience in the industry to know what this will lead to.