‘The Elder Scrolls 6’: Is ‘Skyrim 2’ Coming Earlier Than We Thought As Bethesda Evaluates ‘Battlecry’?

About a month ago, the Inquisitr reported that The Elder Scrolls 6 (or, possibly, Skyrim 2) would be seriously delayed due to the impeding release of Fallout 4; it seemed as if the earliest we might even hear about the new Elder Scrolls would be 2017. As Bethesda VP Peter Hines put it, “… generally speaking that’s what you’d be getting with another publisher in charge. They’d be spitting out a Skyrim 2 the year after or two years later. That’s just not how we view it.”

Of course, if you can believe it, we’re just a month short of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim‘s fourth anniversary, on November 11. We’re not exactly a year or two later. Hines, though, has suggested several times that Bethesda — which doesn’t like to shuffle developers between projects — will have their core development team (the same team in charge of The Elder Scrolls games) focusing on support for Fallout 4 for years to come.

It’s Bethesda’s biggest game to date, and they’re predicting a bigger release than Skyrim. And it’s good to hear that they’re so dedicated to supporting it. At the same time, it’s left a lot of Elder Scrolls fans disappointed, especially as the series’ core fan base ages.

And so, in a subtle way, a new report perhaps offers some hope. As PC Gamer is reporting, Bethesda has “concerns” with their new third-person action game, Battlecry, and is “evaluating” it, and that’s news in its own right. What should interest Elder Scrolls fans, however, is the wording of Bethesda’s official statement.

“We have concerns about the Battlecry game and whether it is meeting the objectives we have for it. We are evaluating what improvements the game needs to meet our quality standards. The studio remains busy during this process on multiple projects.”

If you didn’t catch it, the key phrase here is “multiple projects.” Bethesda has classically dedicated its efforts to one game at a time; although many projects are usually being worked on behind the scenes, Bethesda typically focuses on a single public property. “Multiple projects” suggests a bit of a different direction for the studio.

It makes sense, if one thinks about it. Not only is Bethesda now publicly working on Fallout 4, Battlecry, and a new expansion for The Elder Scrolls Online (as was recently reported by The Christian Post,) they certainly have the resources to expand their efforts. Not only did Skyrim drastically outsell any other PC game previously released by Bethesda – “… by a large, large number,” according to Bethesda game director Todd Howard in an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun, he stated in that same interview (as of February, 2014) that it would be “a while” before Bethesda’s next game announcement.

That announcement was Fallout 4 and came only a little more than a year later, after comments from Bethesda that seem to mirror what we’re hearing from them about the Fallout 4 release and subsequent delays for The Elder Scrolls 6. Bethesda’s overall strategy may have been not to raise false hopes recently, but they’ve managed to publish eight games in the past year, if we include mobile game Fallout: Shelter. The Elder Scrolls Online continues to boast high sales numbers, and while it’s impossible to say how much Skyrim has sold (Valve doesn’t publish digital sales numbers) it’s likely that it very easily tops over $1 billion USD on PC alone.

So whether the core development team is available or not right now, Bethesda certainly has the resources for development of The Elder Scrolls 6 to proceed, and compellingly, the studio has a history of starting their next project before the last is even released; work had already begun on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion before The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind had even officially released, and the same is likely true of Skyrim.

Right now, all we have is speculation and a few offhand statements, but Elder Scrolls fans, take hope; Skyrim 2 may be closer than anyone thinks.

[Image courtesy of Bethesda Entertainment (edited)]