Bethesda Explains Why They Showed The Elder Scrolls 6 at E3

Bethesda did a pretty good job at this year’s E3, and they decided to cap off their fantastic show with a few-second teaser for The Elder Scrolls 6, which consisted of a name floating over a map with some epic music. And while it was enough to drive some fans to unrivaled levels of bliss, there was one lingering, nagging question that persisted long after the show ended: why? I mean, everyone knew the studio was working on the game, so that within itself wasn’t a surprise, and there was nothing in the trailer even remotely hinting at what it could be, which also clues to the fact that it’s probably not even close to being done yet. So… why bother?

Talking with FZ.se (and translated by PC Gamer), Bethesda's VP of marketing Pete Hine explains:

"A couple of years ago I talked to Todd [Howard] about clarifying with everybody that TES6 was not going to be our next game, and we had two other big games that we wanted to do first. So we had already put that out there several years ago, but we were very vague on what those other two titles were,"

So it was just in conversations with him [and] folks on my team to say, look, why don't we consider putting out a little bit more of a roadmap for the studio that explains to folks, 'Here's what we're doing—yes, we're making this game called Starfield and here's what it is, and yes, we're going to make Elder Scrolls 6, but we have these other two games to develop and make first.' It's just so that folks have a better sense of where we are and where we're headed."

So they wanted to reassure fans that the game was still happening. Fair enough. But turns out, there was a second, sneakier reason for the announcement: to calm down fans who might panic when they learned that Fallout 76 would be a multiplayer, online experience. Presumably, showing off a dedicated single-player game would show them that any rumors that Bethesda was going the way of Ubisoft were ill-founded.

Hey, makes sense to me.