Elder Scrolls 6 will keep Skyrim's approach to levelling and “traces” of its magic, says former Starfield designer

All that’s from a new interview with MinnMax, in which Nesmith – who started at Bethesda back in 1995, and retired in 2021 to write fantasy novels, including the Loki Redeemed series – reflected on his contributions to Elder Scrolls and Fallout, and speculated a little as to the next Elder Scrolls game, which was announced back in 2018.

Nesmith noted that while Bethesda Softworks director and executive producer Todd Howard will have set the overall direction for the game, much remains to be thrashed out – or at least, such was the case when he retired from the studio. “Todd knew what he wanted, knows what he wants, but that’s this set [of ideas] over here – there’s the whole rest of the game that is not defined,” he mused. “And that’s going to be worked on and decided by the people who are there now. What will probably come through, because you can see it in the history of the game, is things that were developed in Oblivion and in Skyrim will be further developed in The Elder Scrolls 6. I don’t know what they will be, but you will find my fingerprints on many of those things.”

“The whole magic system for Skyrim, that I persuaded Todd to let me throw the baby and the bathwater and start from scratch, and he trusted me enough to do that, there will probably still be traces of that in 6,” he went on. “The whole ‘you do it to get better at it’, while that was not my unique idea, I had a large hand in that – that’s absolutely going to continue. A lot of the concepts dealing with how you level, things like that – there’ll be a bunch of new ideas thrown in, but I’m betting some of the stuff I worked on will still survive.”

All this follows what Nesmith terms the “triage” approach to creating sequels. “I do a talk for colleges and universities about sequels, and how to make a sequel, and at the time I created the talk it was for Fallout 3 to Fallout 4, but it applies everywhere,” he said. “And basically it comes down to a triage system – you got to know what to keep, you got to know what to throw away, and you got to know what to do more of or improve.

“And you can’t throw away everything, you can’t keep everything, you can’t update everything, you’ve got to have something in all three of those buckets, you know. But three iterations down the road one of those buckets may be empty from what it was like three versions earlier.”

Any snap reactions to share? Personally, I’m happy for Bethesda to bring back Skyrim’s learn-by-doing levelling ethos, but as a graduate of Winterhold, I really want the developer to overhaul the Elder Scrolls magic system, perhaps restoring spell-crafting from Morrowind. The Elder Scrolls magic schools are wonderful to think about, but in-game, it often just feels like a glorified collection of projectile attacks, wonky cloaking abilities and self-heals. Though I always got a kick out of summoning ghost wolves to chew on bandits. How about taking a leaf from the book of Magicka, Bethesda, or even The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood?

Elder Scrolls 6 is rumoured to be set in Skyrim’s neighbouring region Hammerfell, homeland of the Redguards. Beyond that, we have only whispers and shadows. Oh, and that extremely out-of-date leaked Microsoft planning document from 2020, according to which The Elder Scrolls 6’s release date will fall in financial year 2024. Head of Xbox Phil Spencer recently stated that the game is “five-plus years” away.