The Elder Scrolls VI will likely keep several things from Skyrim

Expect to see some returning mechanics and systems.

The Elder Scrolls VI is still a way off, and we probably shouldn't expect it until close to the end of the generation. But this being said, it seems like the development has really started now as there have been several fairly trustworthy news about the game recently.

And now it's time for more of this as Bethesda's former design director Bruce Nesmith (left after Starfield was almost finished in 2021 to write fantasy books) has been interviewed by MinnMax. He knows quite a lot about Elder Scrolls and says traces of his work on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim will still be in the game:

"What will probably come through, because you can see it in the history of the game, is things that were developed in Oblivion and in Skyrim will be further developed in The Elder Scrolls 6. I don't know what they will be, but you will find my fingerprints on many of those things."

He specifically mentions his magic and level up systems as examples of what we can expect to see in The Elder Scrolls VI:

"The whole magic system for Skyrim, that I persuaded Todd to let me throw the baby and the bathwater and start from scratch, and he trusted me enough to do that, there will probably still be traces of that in 6. The whole 'you do it to get better at it', while that was not my unique idea, I had a large hand in that - that's absolutely going to continue. A lot of the concepts dealing with how you level, things like that - there'll be a bunch of new ideas thrown in, but I'm betting some of the stuff I worked on will still survive."

He also says it's impossible in huge games like Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI to redo everything, which means some things will remain and that it could take three iterations of a franchise before all stuff has been renewed:

"And you can't throw away everything, you can't keep everything, you can't update everything, you've got to have something in all three of those buckets, you know. But three iterations down the road one of those buckets may be empty from what it was like three versions earlier."

The Elder Scrolls VI is expected to be released for PC and Xbox, and could arrive in 2026 at the very earliest, according to the massive Microsoft leaks last month.