There is no doubt that Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls games have a passionate following. After all, the series has been going strong since the mid-90’s, when the first game titled The Elder Scrolls: Arena hit the shelves.
If one thing is clear though, is that 2011’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is the high point of the series, and one of the best role-playing video games made to date. Skyrim not only offered a huge world to explore, with hundreds of unique dungeons to conquer and plenty of memorable quests to tackle, but it also gave players countless possibilities to build their characters and leave their mark in the game’s fantasy world. As one Forbes writer put it, Skyrim is “the high king of the open world sandbox genre”.
Skyrim offered hundreds of hours of gameplay, and is still being played to this day, in part thanks to a PC modding community that has released many “user mods” for Bethesda’s RPG, such as the popular cosmetic mods that make the game’s graphics look prettier, for instance. But given that Skyrim was released back in 2011, it makes sense that fans of the Elder Scrolls games are wondering when Bethesda will release another entry in this long-running series.
And speaking to comedian Pete Holmes at the DICE summit in February, Bethesda’s game director Todd Howard (who was also project director for Skyrim), said that the company is working on three “big and crazy” projects which are “in many ways different than things we’ve done before”.
Hunting dragons in Skyrim was tons of fun, but is another Elder Scrolls game coming soon?
So does this mean that the Maryland based developer is busy working on new IPs and has forgotten about their classic fantasy role-playing series? Not necessarily. And even if the company has set up a new studio in Montreal, which reportedly will be developing mobile games (which makes sense considering what a success Fallout Shelter was last year), it would be “crazy” for Bethesda to ditch its flagship series. After all, Skyrim has sold more than 20 million copies to date, and is one of the top twenty best-selling video games of all time according to Wikipedia.
Also, back in 2010 Todd Howard had told the gaming press that his outfit was working on a new fantasy game, without hinting that this new game was in fact a new Elder Scrolls entry (actually Skyrim’s superb announcement trailer was a big surprise for gamers worldwide). And the more recent Fallout 4 was announced less than 6 months before its launch date in November 2015, which was certainly a first for Bethesda, meaning that the company may yet have a surprise or two in store for gamers.
And Bethesda will hold another press conference at this year’s E3 show, hopefully giving gamers more clues about their upcoming projects. In the meantime though, the newly announced Fallout 4 DLC may be enough to keep fans of Bethesda’s role-playing games happy until the next big Elder Scrolls game hits the shelves.