Anyone who was around remembers the 2018 teaser: a landscape, some music and eight years of silence. The silence is over, at least where the name is concerned. On November 3, in the video celebrating Bethesda Game Studios’ 40th anniversary, Todd Howard confirmed that the next game in the series is called The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel, and showed the logo. The Verge’s rumor, which we covered on October 29, turned out to be right.
What the teaser shows
“You know, everybody’s always asking about Elder Scrolls 6,” Howard says in the video, “and we thought, hey, given the moment, what a perfect time to tell you what The Elder Scrolls 6 is actually called.” Then comes an elder scroll buried in sand, the logo and a quote: “The scroll offered only a shimmer, a veil thinly lifted to my eyes. A future lost. A victory undone. Sands of time scattered by fate.” The line is attributed to Yazar, Moth Priest to High Queen Iradne of Hammerfell, and dated 4E 206, five years after the start of Skyrim, which takes place in 4E 201.
Hammerfell, but only between the lines for now
Bethesda did not say where the game is set. What we have are clues: Sentinel is a city and a kingdom in Hammerfell, the Redguard province in western Tamriel that veterans visited in 1996’s Daggerfall and in The Elder Scrolls Online; the sand in the teaser matches the Alik’r desert; and the priest serves a queen of Hammerfell. Everything points that way, but it is deduction, not an announcement. The date in the quote also belongs to the text, not necessarily to the game. Back in the rental-store days we called this “reading the back of the box.”
No date, no platforms
There is no gameplay, no release date and no platform list; Bethesda said it will be some time before it has more to show. The studio used the moment to note that Skyrim, released on November 11, 2011 and about to turn 15, “is still Bethesda Game Studios’ most played game.” In July, in a development update, the company had already said The Elder Scrolls VI is the studio’s main focus.
The series is now more than 30 years old, going back to 1994’s Arena. To pass the time until Sentinel, Daggerfall is given away for free by Bethesda itself, as we noted in our list of classics their creators made free, and Skyrim Special Edition and Oblivion Remastered are both on Steam. The reveal video is on Bethesda’s YouTube channel.
Where to buy
Sources: Bethesda Game Studios, IGN, Polygon and Rock Paper Shotgun.
