One of the things that frustrates me about Skyrim's higher difficulties is that it doesn't really encourage players to be clever - it merely encourages farming, grinding, and resource hoarding. I'd like the next game to implement a more sophisticated difficulty system. Here are some suggestions:

1. Make enemies do more damage at higher difficulty levels. This already exists in Skyrim, Oblivion, etc. Not much else to say here, other than this is a good way to keep players on their toes.
2. Make enemy AI smarter at higher difficulty levels. At lower difficulty levels, enemies should simply attack and defend. At higher difficulty levels, enemies should know when to retreat, drink potions, use healing spells, counter player behavior, etc. If the player uses a lot of magic, enemies should use wards. If the player uses a two-handed weapon, enemies should keep their distance and counter with ranged attacks. This forces players to think on their feet and adapt their combat style.
3. Make enemy AI more aggressive at higher difficulty levels. Not only should enemies adapt to the player's style, but I want them increasingly bloodthirsty. At easy difficulty levels, they may swing their sword every couple seconds, one baddie at a time. On Legendary, they should be swarming and hammering the player.
4. Enemies should NOT be tankier at higher difficulty levels. This just makes combat more tedious and less fun. It also makes the player feel weak. I understand wanting to make enemies harder to kill, but making them more evasive accomplishes the same thing without the tedium.
5. Skill checks can be higher at higher difficulty levels. For instance, if a persuasion check normally needs a level of 20 to pass, it might rise to 25, 30, etc. (this can be offset with items that boost one's skill). Smarter players will be encouraged to invest in such items or find other ways to bypass such checks. This could apply to other skills as well; an example would be if a player needs a high enough one handed skill to join a swords guild, or a high enough alchemy skill to cure certain people.
6. RNG should NOT be used in difficulty scaling. I'm almost entirely against the use of RNG in general in combat and other gameplay mechanics, but especially so in making a game harder. It doesn't require any additional skill, just luck. It tricks players into thinking that there's a challenge while encourage savescumming. This point isn't really as relevant as modern TES games don't really involve much randomness in general, but I have seen some people advocate more RNG-based checks here and there, which I am firmly against.
7. Allow players some fine-grained control over difficulty settings. For those of you who have played Doom: The Dark Ages, you know what I mean. That game offers you the ability to modify game speed, projectile speed, enemy aggression, etc. While I don't think we need all of that in an Elder Scrolls game, some ability to tweak certain aspects of difficulty would be nice.

I think implementing this sort of difficulty scaling would make for very interesting combat encounters, among other things. What other settings would you like to see?

^{(Pic unrelated.})

A lot of talk lately about Pearl Abyss “embarrassing Bethesda” with everything theyre working on in this game. While its not the exact same type of game, at all, Crimson Desert is clearly doing something right.

What do you think Bethesda could learn from them?

Im curious how much it might even influence Bethesda to raise the bar, modern gaming has come a long way.

I believe Bethesda can outshine Pearl Abyss when it comes to questing, immersion, and characters, though. The strongsuits that make Bethesda games what they are. But the intricacies of this game, down to the bugs and water currents, are of another level

This game is unbelievable when it comes to details, worldbuilding, and exploration. Kind of making this post partially to draw comparisons between this game and wishes for TES6, as well as to ultimately recommend this game to fill that explorer’s void while we wait for TES 6 to finally come out

So annoyed by people pushing for Bethesda to change what TES is and try to make it something new.

No one who likes TES wants something new.

We want a new TES, period!

New location, new caves and quests and whatever slight gameplay adjustments. That's basically it.

This game does NOT have to be the size of the actual earth with every feature every other new game has had.

We just want another TES.

Will you be following the main quest, exploring the wilds, searching for a specific faction to join, or collecting 10,000 sandworm pelts?

For me I'll be searching for the mages guild or whatever incarnation they come in!

I have played the mainline games Daggerfall - Skyrim, with hundreds of hours in each game. Of all the changes made, one I miss the dearest is how charisma and speechcraft gradually became less and less important.

To differentiate itself and build a new legacy, I sincerely hope TES VI revamps speech, charisma, and reputations to allow for a brand new archetype to be viable. The abilities of this, say, bard or actor archetype, would be, pacifying and recruits enemies to aid you, bypassing the law with a smooth tongue or small fee, rising to the status of an elite by making great gains selling and buying from merchants, and making yourself welcomed anywhere with your affable personality. These are some impromptu ideas that would make up the core of said archetype. Such a playstyle would obviously excel in non-combatant environments such as towns, and cities. Its solutions to combat would be arguing the hostiles over to your side or avoiding combat altogether by pacifying them before blades are drawn, of course, if this fails you just have to run. Stealth is solved by making the people think you naturally belong there, lockpicking is done by either having companion do it for you or convincing someone to open locked thing for you.

Other benefits from adding this would be it supplementing the rest of the game by having such systems as reputations, talking options, &c. in place. As well as adding more skills to blend into class building and roleplay.

Details of this system, I have not yet thought out, this is more a proof of concept and not deep-dive into how it would function. If the post does well enough, or people ask for(probably won't), I may try designing the whole idea, but until then, tell me what you think.

Godspeed.

It just occurs to me, that a lot of people will have TES6 as their first Elder Scrolls game and their introduction to the setting. The lore expanded massively over several games by now. I think someone stepping into it for the first time will have difficulty catching up. Which makes me wonder; would having lore “hint” during dialogue be immersive or immersion-breaking? What I thought about was that in Morrowind, you can ask the NPC about “topics” they mentioned in conversations they had with you. I also was reminded of what Avowed did. They have a little “glossary” you can pull up during conversation too.

What are your thoughts on this? Would you love it or hate it? How would you do it, if you think it’s a good idea to have?

i know its just a placeholder fans used after the supposed title drop from Ashra, and it was the logo for the last game in 15 years, but in skyrim the broken end of the right wing represented the crumbling of the empire 200 years after the end of the Septim dynasty and the great war that afflicted the Mede empire which lead to the skyrim civil war between them, plus if it takes place in Hammerfell the empire wouldn’t have any jurisdiction there after the white-gold concordat

DEAR SEPTEMBER BELIEVERS

Todd in his infinite wisdom has judged us UNWORTHY of receiving the September 6th release of TESVI.

He has instead communicated to me that we must REDOUBLE our efforts to spread the good word of TESVI returning! If by his newly appointed day we can convince everyone that Todd was the good guy all along, we may receive TESVI only TWO DAYS after GTA6 releases!

Allow me to explain how Almighty Todd has revealed this date to me:

There are 8 Divines according to the Thalmor, but we have to add the 3 beehives from that Thieves’ Guild quest in order to get the month, 11, aka, November

But obviously the Thalmor are wrong so we take the extra divine (Talos) and use that for the day. 1 + 8 (number of dragon priest masks in base Skyrim) + 11 (number of cities in Oblivion including the Imperial City and New Sheoth, plus Sutch, the secret cut city) is 20. Plus we add Talos again because the Thalmor deserve it and we get 21.

November 21st CONFIRMED but, and I stress this again, ONLY if Todd deems us worthy

I was just wondering if y'all would want to have the feature of sailing in TESVI.

I personally love sailing in video games, especially AsC Black Flag and AsC Odyssey. And assuming that TESVI will have more islands than Skyrim, it would be really fun to be able to sail and maybe even have naval battles if there's war questline in it too.

Sailing itself would be enough, but having the ability to customize ships would be even more fun. And then there would be more stuff for Creation Club too.

I'd like for Player homes to be more meaningful in TESVI. In Skyrim buying a home is just a money sink to what essentially becomes a glorified storage container with the eventual cooked meal by your spouse. There isn't a time playing Skyrim that I want or need to go to a home that I own, it is always just a stop along the way. If I visit Whiterun for whatever reason and I own Breezehome, then I will go by and just leave some stuff, but it is never my primary destination.

This is something that is also present in other games as well, Player homes acting as just a 'nice to have' but rarely has any additional function. The only Player homes from the top of my head which do have much more functionality would be Skyhold from Dragon Age: Inquisition, where you have the War Table, Judgement Seat and such, as well as Pribyslavitz from Kingdom Come: Deliverance though here it is more of a settlement management but it does make you want to go there, you manage it's economy, be the judge between quarrels and such, oh and in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood the HQ progression felt natural, and when playing you actually had a reason to visit there, though that ends when you max out everything.

I'd like for homes in TESVI to be more than just a storage facility or a place to send your followers to when you don't need them. Make me want to go there, and make it fit dynamically into the world instead of just being it's own pocket dimension where the outside world just doesn't know or care that you own the home.

I think I may have some ideas that could make Player homes just places that you want to own and visit more frequently than in previous titles.

Mail and Couriers

I think that this is the best upgrade to have added, in Skyrim the courier just follows you, you can be at the throat of the world and suddenly a courier runs up to you and hands you a letter.... how did he find me and how did he get there lol. If you own a home like lets say in Lainlyn, that should be the place where couriers go to drop of their letters directed to you, and I think that this should also extend to bounties, I feel it would be pretty logical that if the Town Chief/Jarl/President would put out a bounty he would also send word out to inhabitants of his town, especially knowing that some of his inhabitants are mercenaries, soldiers, adventurers and what not.

Coming home would mean you receive whatever the courier wanted to give you, and any outstanding bounties or news of that given region.

As an added bonus, I'd want couriers to stick to cities and towns, not follow you to the edge of the world, if you visit a town and stumble upon a courier, then you receive whatever was addressed to you.

Housecarls / Followers

Make it more dynamic. If you have a housecarl inside your home and just leave them there because you have a different follower or maybe you just don't like that housecarl, at least have them have some gameplay value. Returning home in which you have a Housecarl, they could be the ones that debrief you on current affairs.

Return to Breezehome and Lydia is there telling you about how the Jarl has put up 3 bounties, some citizen has lost his sword and is looking for someone to find it and that there have been rumours of a group of bandits that attack and rob people on the roads towards Markarth.

Suddenly, instead of just her being in the home sitting near the fire-pit and eating sweet-rolls, you have a source of information about POIs and potential quests.

Would be nice to also be able to give them some small tasks, like lets say that you finished 4 bounties and instead of having to walk to the Jarls quarters and hand them in by yourself you can just got up to your housecarl / follower stationed in your town home and ask them to hand them in for your.

Unique Buffs

Lastly I think that to make homes something the Players wants to visit, It would be nice to have some buffs added if you sleep at your own place, craft or cook at your own place. Make it a bit more worth your time to use the home that you use.

If you sleep at your own home, maybe get a buff that is called "Nothing better than your own bed" and get a boost in Stamina regeneration.

If you cook at your own place, get a 'Home cook' buff on those that just adds 5% more health regen when consuming.

Crafted items will just have that little more armour rating / damage.

Nothing that would make crafting or sleeping outside of your home just worthless, like if you craft a Iron Greatsword at some random forge lets say it will have 14 dmg but crafting it at your own forge at home will make it have 15 dmg. It is a nice to have bonus but not something that would be game breaking.

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There are more stuff that could be added to make it more than just a big storage room, maybe you could build a garden in the backyard for alchemical supplies that your housecarl / follower tends to, or perhaps have training dummies that would actually get used by said followers to improve their skills. Perhaps if you know you use some common ingredient very frequently you could create a purchase order so that every week you get a delivery of 10 iron ingots so that when you return home you have them already there.

Owning a home in a town should make NPCs know you own the home in the town, maybe that comes with it's own perks like -10% in price for Mead at the tavern, or perhaps it opening the possibility to order unique items / weapons from crafters within the town. The blacksmith does keep a stock or just regular weapons, but if you own a home in the town and become one if its citizens, the blacksmith allows you to order weapons with unique buffs or looks.

Just a thought.

playing as a crowns Nobel will be wild

Bethesda Game Studios has a development pace that, seen with a bit of distance, is surprisingly consistent. It's no coincidence that every time a new Elder Scrolls or Fallout title comes out, someone pulls up a spreadsheet and tries to predict when the next one will land.

Let's actually do it properly, with real dates.

- The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind: May 1, 2002

- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: March 20, 2006 (~3 years 11 months)

- Fallout 3: October 28, 2008 (~2 years 7 months)

- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim November 11, 2011 (~3 years)

- Fallout 4: November 10, 2015 (~4 years)

- Fallout 76: November 14, 2018 (~3 years)

- Starfield: September 6, 2023 (~4 years 10 months)

The pattern jumps out immediately: with the exception of Fallout 3 (the shortest cycle, but it followed the franchise acquisition from Interplay and a team that had already broken in the engine on Oblivion), every gap sits within the 3-to-4-year window.

Bethesda Game Studios essentially always runs two parallel tracks that alternate between Elder Scrolls and Fallout, which is why the rhythm stays so constant over time: while one project wraps up and moves into post-launch support, the other is already deep in production.

Starfield breaks the pattern, and for reasons that are fairly clear once you line them up: it's a brand-new IP (no assets, lore, or systems to recycle from earlier work), development ran straight through the Covid years with everything that meant for remote work and slower asset production, and in the middle of it all Microsoft acquired Bethesda (2021), which, while it didn't halt development, still demanded time for organizational integration. A nearly five-year gap, in that context, is anything but anomalous.

So what about TES6?

Here we can reason by analogy, cross-referencing public statements from Todd Howard with the studio's historical behavior. A plausible timeline looks like this:

2020-2022: pre-production

Design documents, definition of core systems, early technical experimentation. In this phase the dedicated team is small, often a tight core of senior designers and a handful of programmers laying the groundwork while most of the studio is still on Starfield.

2023: validating core mechanics

The focus here shifts to proving out the game's core mechanics (combat, exploration, the systems that will define how the game actually plays) alongside the first setup work on the engine and the initial world-building pipeline: terrain tools, early testable regions, first iterations of how the world will be built and streamed. It's the stage where the project moves from "documents" to "something playable enough to test internally."

From mid-2023: full production

With Starfield shipped (September 2023) and most of the post-launch support absorbed in the following months, more and more people get moved onto TES6, until the team reaches full capacity.

The point worth clarifying, because it's the part most easily oversimplified, is that this isn't a light switch. It's not that up to September 6, 2023 nobody touches TES6 and from September 7th onward the whole studio is working on it. The transfer of people is a gradual, continuous process that already starts in early 2023 (once Starfield is largely in polish and QA and no longer needs every designer and level artist on board) and intensifies progressively as Starfield gets closer to release, ships, and post-launch support winds down. It's a flow, not a single event.

2027 as the target

Applying the same historical rhythm (3 to 4 years between installments, with the exception already discussed) to a full-capacity effort realistically starting mid-2023, a 2027 release is the estimate most consistent with the data: roughly a 4-year development cycle at full strength, in line with what we saw between Skyrim and Fallout 4, and with Starfield itself. Earlier would still be a notable acceleration relative to the studio's usual standards; later would mean a real departure from a pattern that has otherwise held remarkably steady for twenty years.

No certainties here, of course: this is a studio that has learned the hard way what it costs to promise precise dates. But if Bethesda's recent history has any predictive value, 2027 remains the most likely year.

While I find myself excited about the new TESVI, I also feel perturbed with the bloated emptiness that has increasingly taken up space in some games, with bethesda becoming a leader in this.

More and more unnamed npcs, large regions of nothingness, and "infinite quests" that are just the same 5 fetch quests on repeat.

Bethesda has seen a continued shift towards prioritizing innovation in creating more bloat rather than innovating in terms of actual handcrafted content and interesting mechanics.

Bethesda is at their best when they create unique, often times odd, characters and stories. These draw people in and make people want to interact more with the world.

When they sanitise this and instead put their focus in developing systems of empty husks and auto-generated content they dont create more playability, more fun and interactions, it turns people off from interacting with the world as it feels like a waste of time to interact something that will not provide you with a unique experience.

From what i understand , a part of the point of this is to create a more "sandbox" like experience that can then be filled by modders. Additionally , it allows them to market and hype the game as bigger than it actually is.

My point being, a world that is theoretically infininitely large in size but is a vacuum of content does not make an enjoyable experience, and I fear generated content pushing out handcrafted experiences. I have also yet to see an example of a balanced approach or "best of both world".

Yet i have no doubt that we will see one or multiple new and old mechanics focus on generated content.

My questions thus are:

what do you expect that their latest version of infinite content is going to be in TESVI?

What could they do to actually make it interesting and enjoyable (if anything)?

Does anyone actually enjoy the procedurally generated content? (I have not met anyone , but some must be out there for them to keep putting it in)

What would you very much not want to see?

Now this is in no way my expectation or what I believe is even considered realistic given the production timeline but I wanted to make this post just to have a fun discussion (kills me to think what if they had gone into pre production right after skyrim and have been working on this game for 15+ years). When Godd finally gets on stage I pray that he reveals the following:

- The map is similar to the pic posted (maybe minus the Azurian sea/upper left portion) with the entirety of Hammerfell and High Rock explorable as well as the bay and surrounding waters and islands via ship, swimming, etc.

- Map size is 1.5x-2x the size of Skyrim with more handcrafted POIs, landscape, caves/dungeons, etc

- There aren't any invisible walls, instead once you go outside the map you enter proc gen environments endlessly. So if you're sailing outside the map it's proc gen ocean with enemies, POIs, loot. If you go northeast it's proc gen mountain terrain, if you go south east it's proc gen Savanahh terrain, so on and so forth.

-0 proc gen environments within map boundaries. (Hammerfell, High Rock, Bay and surrounding waters within map borders are all hand crafted)

- underwater exploration with unique dungeons, enemies, etc

Thoughts?

EDIT - I have 0 affiliation with the Map in this post, I just grabbed it off Google Images as a visual aid for my post.

Personally I was really impressed by KCD2's kuttenberg. There were unnamed npcs but they were not walking around pointlessly.

I want them to have fun creating the game, not pressure. Let's not forget that there is a difference between developers and guys from the marketing and investors. If we really want them to do the magic again let them cook. Even if it's for three more years. But yeah. Maybe some news could je nice just saying to us why it's taking time. We're not stupid and we could understand. Also they will not come out at the same time as Fable.

I hope they don't do it. But how likely is it that at least one destination in TESVI has building and crafting like the Settlement system produced in Bethesda games since Skyrim.

Just give us something

Just one picture

Just one little information!

I've seen a lot of discussion of VI being set after Skyrim and what the canonical outcomes of the previous game might be.

Has anyone explored what a game set shortly before or concurrent with Skyrim would be like?

There's plenty of fertile ground for story and plot in Hammerfell's severance from the empire, protracted conflict with the Dominion, Second treaty of Stros M'Kai, the fallout of all of that in the years that follow, the fence waiting for Lokir to show up with a horse, etc