Todd Howard would really have preferred not to announce The Elder Scrolls 6 a full 8 years ago, sounds like: ‘Just pretend we didn’t announce it. Doesn’t exist. No one’s heard a word’

When it comes to The Elder Scrolls 6, Todd Howard has one message for you: What even is that?

So says Todd in a recent chat with IGN, where he reflected that, yeah, since Bethesda announced it was working on a sixth Elder Scrolls all the way back in 2018, he’s changed his attitude towards announcing things a little. But given he can’t put that genie back in the bottle, he jokes that we should all “Just pretend we didn’t announce it. Doesn’t exist. No one’s heard a word.”

This is, just to reiterate, a gag, and Todd Howard has not suddenly forgotten he announced The Elder Scrolls 6, but it is emblematic of his Big Philosophy Of Game Announcements. “When you go and press play, you’re about to play a game. What do you already know? What’s in your head? What’s your excitement level? What’s your expectations? And I back up from there. I prefer not to talk about stuff until then.”

That’s a pretty different approach than the one which led Bethesda to show us that one goddamn image of TES 6—that I will probably have to use as an image in this article, for lack of alternatives—that we all know and love. “I like to compress that moment where you hear about a game to when you can play it,” says Howard. “Those would be on top of each other if I had my way every time.”

Howard’s banged this gong before. After Oblivion Remastered’s shadowdrop last year, he was out and about chatting about how much he loved the tactic of announcing and releasing a game at practically the same time, and even called that game’s release a “test run” for things yet to come.

So I’d anticipate more of those, were I you, though probably not for TES6 itself. Announcing the next Elder Scrolls was, says Howard, “really about informing our audience, because when you’re going to do something new, everyone’s going to ask, ‘What about Elder Scrolls 6? What about a singleplayer game?’ And we did it that way, but it’s not my preference.”

When will the next Elder Scrolls come out? Wish I could tell you, but it sounds like Bethesda’s spinning a lot of plates: “We’re working on a lot of stuff. I think if you look at the scale of our studio, we could have 10 times the amount of people to do all this. We’re doing so much and it’s just finding the right times to tell everybody about it.” Today, I suppose, is Starfield’s turn. But tomorrow? Who knows?

So I’d anticipate more of those, were I you, though probably not for TES6 itself. Announcing the next Elder Scrolls was, says Howard, “really about informing our audience, because when you’re going to do something new, everyone’s going to ask, ‘What about Elder Scrolls 6? What about a singleplayer game?’ And we did it that way, but it’s not my preference.”

When will the next Elder Scrolls come out? Wish I could tell you, but it sounds like Bethesda’s spinning a lot of plates: “We’re working on a lot of stuff. I think if you look at the scale of our studio, we could have 10 times the amount of people to do all this. We’re doing so much and it’s just finding the right times to tell everybody about it.” Today, I suppose, is Starfield’s turn. But tomorrow? Who knows?