Surely no one expects The Elder Scrolls VI to be released this year, but rather in 2027 at the absolute earliest, and probably even later than that. That means we've been waiting an absolutely absurdly long time for the game, considering that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was released in 2011 and the sixth instalment was announced in 2018.
But now development seems to be moving along at a good pace, and in an interview with IGN, Bethesda veteran Todd Howard explains that it's going more smoothly than with Starfield and that he's very pleased with the new game engine. Here's what he says about the benefits of both Creation Engine 3 (Starfield was developed with Creation Engine 2) and the advantages of having a proprietary game engine:
"Well, gosh, I don't want to spoil too much. I mean, you get your whiz-bang rendering shiny pixel stuff that everyone would expect. And I think the change to Creation Engine 2 from where we were for Starfield was such an upheaval for what we were doing. We felt coming out of that, we could have managed that better. So going into Creation Engine 3, I can't say enough about our tech staff and how they've handled that transition so that we can still be making a game while that is going on."
Howard was also asked what lessons they're taking from Starfield into The Elder Scrolls VI, to which he replied as follows, and hinted in passing that it's already in a playable state:
"But the one thing I'd say is really in the tech as we're going to Creation Engine 3. Again, the team has done a really incredible job at not just pushing what it is, but how it's integrated into our development cycle. So, you don't feel that what we're doing on a day-to-day basis, like when the game goes down. So, we're in a fortunate position where the builds of the game are really consistently working every 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."
Overall, development seems to be going more seamlessly, and Howard says they've been able to avoid many of the problems they previously faced with Starfield:
"And when you're making those kinds of technical changes as we talked about, often you're pulling the rug out from under the team who's making content. [You don't want] to be like, 'Okay, that doesn't work for this period of time, you're going to have to wait until we get that working again.' And we've done a really good job of managing that on this game. And with Starfield, we struggled there for a number of years in terms of when we went through the engine change."
It's a substantial interview with several exciting details that's worth reading for fans of Bethesda's games. What we take away from it is that The Elder Scrolls VI seems to have really started moving forward. Of course, that doesn't mean it's coming out anytime soon, but maybe we'll get a first glimpse of it sooner than we think. We can't imagine a better launch title for the Xbox Helix.