The wait for The Elder Scrolls VI continues, but development appears to be gaining momentum. Bethesda’s Todd Howard indicated in a recent interview that progress is smoother than it was during the development of Starfield, and he expressed satisfaction with the new game engine.
While a 2027 release is still considered optimistic, the studio is making significant strides. The game has been in development since its announcement in 2018, following the 2011 release of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and represents a major undertaking in the RPG space.
According to IGN, Howard shared insights into the benefits of both Creation Engine 3 (Starfield was built using Creation Engine 2) and the advantages of maintaining a proprietary game engine.
“Well, gosh, I don’t want to reveal too much. I mean, you gain the fantastic rendering of shiny pixels that everyone expects,” Howard said. “And I think the transition to Creation Engine 2 from Starfield was a big upheaval for what we were doing. We felt like we could have handled that better. So, as we go to Creation Engine 3 now, I can’t say enough about our technical people and how they’ve handled the transition so that we can still craft a game while it’s happening.”
Howard also discussed lessons learned from Starfield and indicated that The Elder Scrolls VI is already in a playable state. “But the one thing I will say is really in the technology as we go to Creation Engine 3,” he stated. “Again, the team has done an incredible job, not just showing what it is, but how it’s integrated into our development cycle. So you don’t feel like what we’re doing on a daily basis, like the game is crashing. So we’re in a fortunate position where game builds are working every single day. Well, not every day, but we’ve had more days than we’ve ever had where the build is good, there’s new stuff in it, and we can play it.”
The development process appears to be more seamless this time around, with Bethesda successfully avoiding many of the challenges encountered during Starfield’s engine transition. “And when you make the kind of technical changes that we’ve been talking about, you often pull the rug out from under the team that’s making the content,” Howard explained. “ [You don’t want to] say: ‘Ok, it doesn’t work in this build, you have to wait until we get it working again.’ And we’ve done a very good job of managing that in this game. And with Starfield we struggled with that for years as we went through the engine change.”
The interview, which contains further details about Bethesda’s future plans, suggests that The Elder Scrolls VI is finally making substantial progress. While a firm release date remains elusive, the positive developments offer a glimmer of hope for fans eagerly awaiting the next installment in the iconic RPG series. The game is anticipated to be a flagship title for the Xbox Helix platform.
