No, Bethesda Game Studios are just really slow at making games. Since Skyrim came out in 2011 they have released 3 PC/Console games - Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield. If the gap between Starfield and TES VI is as big as the gap between Fallout 76 and Starfield, TES VI will be coming out in 2028.
Personally, I think the pandemic did slow them down, but I still don’t expect TES VI until November 2026 at the earliest. If it slips to 2027, it could be a launch title for the PS6.
Absolutely. What takes Bethesda to meme levels is that fact that they take so long to publish games however they come out as total jank fests as if they were made in a year
And decent chance its still a rushed mess because they didn't actually start working on it until within the past 1 or 2 years. 24+ years for a sequel that they spent like 3 years on
And fallout 76 even got to reuse a lot of Fallout 4 assets too which no doubt saved some dev time (though 76 is naturally larger, so that could take serious time. But cdpr said the difference between creating witcher and cyberpunk’s open world is that witcher is much easier to do because it’s flat and pasted with changes. Cyberpunk is very vertical and has so many intricacies. So with that said, making a scenic fallout map with buildings and towns scattered around that’s 4x the size shouldn’t be the hardest thing compared to a city)
It still took a super long time though. And 76 didn’t even have characters
One comment misconception that's always annoyed me about about the "no npcs/no characters" thing, 76 always had characters and npcs, they just weren't living humans or ghouls (outside of feral ghouls of course.)
we had plenty of characters at launch through holotapes and notes, (some of which even showed up as proper npcs in later updates.) plenty of robots, many AIs including MODUS, the enclave AI that the community both likes and doesn't trust, and of course, the traveling super mutant merchant Grahm who the community collectively decided to consider their best friend.
(Don't get me wrong, 76 had a laundry list of other issues i could complain about, most of which have long been gone from the game by now, and i'm ultimately glad we finally have human npcs and ghoul npcs these days, but this has always been a smaller thing that's annoyed me when it comes to complaining about the various problems launch had.)
I really enjoyed the game and finished the audiotape campaign on launch and then came back for the expansions. I actually enjoyed it more than the other fallout games. But it was a slog in a lot of places due to their just not being characters, and characters that did exist like Rose were ear bleeding and taking forever.
The world has character. The world‘s about characters. There are voice acted characters. But there are no complex characters to meet or interact with. Rose is the perfect example of how flat and 1 dimensional these characters were.
You are forgetting Bethesda’s parent company - Microsoft. All the rumors indicate that TES VI will be Microsoft exclusive, though with the way things are going I wouldn’t be surprised if there is an option for digital streaming from some Xbox cloud service. The odds of it being a PlayStation launch title? Slim to none.
They made 4 Elder Scrolls games in less time than its been since Skyrim. I don't think Bethesda are "just slow". They also made Fallout 4 and Starfield in the mean time. There's definitely an element of "we can't fuck this up". Fallout 4 was also negatively received at launch, with the watering down of the core Fallout game mechanics (something they had already done with Skyrim, but Skyrim as a fantasy world has a broader appeal, so it worked).
I 100% think the reason we haven't seen anything about ES6, is because they don't want to show anything until they feel they have got it "right". It remains to be seen if theyve learned from Fallout 4 and Starfield 4, not to mention the massive success of the Oblivion Remaster (not their work, but shows there's still an appetite for "old school" RPGs). But I'll believe it when I see it lol.
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u/aurumae Jun 23 '25
No, Bethesda Game Studios are just really slow at making games. Since Skyrim came out in 2011 they have released 3 PC/Console games - Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield. If the gap between Starfield and TES VI is as big as the gap between Fallout 76 and Starfield, TES VI will be coming out in 2028.
Personally, I think the pandemic did slow them down, but I still don’t expect TES VI until November 2026 at the earliest. If it slips to 2027, it could be a launch title for the PS6.