Elder Scrolls The Elder Scrolls VI - officially announced but you'll have to wait

[Falksi]

At least the MC's knee will have had chance to have healed fully for the next adventure.

 

[thesecret1]

Bethesda's past titles make it clear that they want an action RPG where you go into a random dungeon, massacre everything in it, and leave with a bag full of loot. Anything directly related to this will see an improvement over Skyrim: better dungeons, overworld, enemies, combat, crafting, and itemization. Everything else will see further decline. Setting and story will be boring garbage, dialogues will be few and suck, quests will all be boring fetch quests and "radiant" quests, skills will be a further casualized joke, economy will be completely busted as usual, C&C will be non-existent, and factions will only exist in a couple spots as part of some set-pieces for quests.

Because this is Todd's vision. No immersion or any shit like that, rather "I wanna log in, head into a dungeon, kill some goblins, leave with loot, and log out."

 

[Gerrard]

Apparently using words correctly and not being a retard who thinks Hobbit is a prequel to LotR is autism now.

 

[Zibniyat]

Supposedly just 1.68 meters tall (5'6" or so in those other measurement units). I don't think much can be expected of this creature anymore. There is only so much brain matter that his skull can contain, and as he ages it shrinks further, as evidenced by increasing simplification and trivialisation of everything this thing is involved with. But as with most leaders, they cannot stand the idea to, for example, let someone else do the important work and simply try and support their vision with whatever they are still good at (marketing?), and so he still needs to shit on the creative works of others. Manlets rarely change for the better...​

 

[Caim]

Supposedly just 1.68 meters tall (5'6" or so in those other measurement units). I don't think much can be expected of this creature anymore. There is only so much brain matter that his skull can contain, and as he ages it shrinks further, as evidenced by increasing simplification and trivialisation of everything this thing is involved with. But as with most leaders, they cannot stand the idea to, for example, let someone else do the important work and simply try and support their vision with whatever they are still good at (marketing?), and so he still needs to shit on the creative works of others. Manlets rarely change for the better...​

Left to right: Troy Baker (voice actor), Harrison Ford (regular actor), Todd Howard (crisis actor).

 

[Zibniyat]

Even a shriveled old man like Harrison is taller than the smooth-skinned goblin on the right.

 

[Butter]

Even a shriveled old man like Harrison is taller than the smooth-skinned goblin on the right.

Ford was something like 6'2" at his peak.

 

[Elttharion]

Fresh leaks

• Game is going to be more immersive, with fast loading times
• Game takes place in Hammerfell and High Rock
• Game will have naval battles, ship building and marine (underwater) exploration inspired by Starfield, explorable islands
• Dragons will return
• Game is set to have 12-13 big cities
• Progression system is much more flexible, abandoning classes for a natural progression, better combat.
• Game to have Fortress and Village building alongside settlement building.
• Game could be shown in July 2025

Source in Spanish

 

[The Wall]

Fresh leaks

• Game is going to be more immersive, with fast loading times
• Game takes place in Hammerfell and High Rock
• Game will have naval battles, ship building and marine (underwater) exploration inspired by Starfield, explorable islands
• Dragons will return
• Game is set to have 12-13 big cities
• Progression system is much more flexible, abandoning classes for a natural progression, better combat.
• Game to have Fortress and Village building alongside settlement building.
• Game could be shown in July 2025

Source in Spanish

I just don't give a fuck anymore. I truly don't. I wanna make MY Elder Scrolls VI, Todd's ES6 will be morbid curiousity along the lines: let's take a look at new, innovative way he fucked up this time

Game being shown this summer is something I can believe in. It's not fast, you just got accustomed to slooooow development. By now we should have been at Elder Scrolls 9

• Progression system is much more flexible, abandoning classes for a natural progression, better combat.

Classes and any kind of character development depth is something Bethesda abandoned back in 2011, with release of Skyrim. 14 FUCKING YEARS AGO, btw

 

[dbx]

Fresh leaks

• Game takes place in Hammerfell and High Rock

Source in Spanish

Who's going to post the copypasta about americans and their nigger worship?

 

[EvilWolf]

Fresh leaks

• Game takes place in Hammerfell and High Rock

Source in Spanish

Who's going to post the copypasta about americans and their nigger worship?

Never forget King Cameron! Greatest Redguard leader to ever live! :^)

 

[PlayerEmers]

Fresh leaks

• Game is going to be more immersive, with fast loading times
• Game takes place in Hammerfell and High Rock
• Game will have naval battles, ship building and marine (underwater) exploration inspired by Starfield, explorable islands
• Dragons will return
• Game is set to have 12-13 big cities
• Progression system is much more flexible, abandoning classes for a natural progression, better combat.
• Game to have Fortress and Village building alongside settlement building.
• Game could be shown in July 2025

Source in Spanish

sounds like bullshit that copypasted previous ""leaks"" and speculations
theres no way they will show game footage this year, game is at least 1 or 2 years away

its the same type of retarded bullshit that GTA 6 spergs keep spreading on twitter and lelddit about how GTA 6 will look like

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

• abandoning classes for a natural progression,

This is how you know the leak is fake and that the "leaker" has no idea what they are talking about.

 

[The Nameless One]

Hammerfell according to bethesda in TES VI:

 

[SilentSeeker]

Fresh leaks

• Game is going to be more immersive, with fast loading times
• Game takes place in Hammerfell and High Rock
• Dragons will return
• Progression system is much more flexible, abandoning classes for a natural progression, better combat.
• Game could be shown in July 2025

Source in Spanish

So... Daggerfall? I mean, it's missing:

• Game will have naval battles, ship building and marine (underwater) exploration inspired by Starfield, explorable islands
• Game is set to have 12-13 big cities [this one's arguable, but at the very least I'd count Sentinel, Wayrest, and Daggerfall itself]
• Game to have Fortress and Village building alongside settlement building.

But I'd bet there are (or will be) Unity mods that add those in.

You have to admit it'd make for a fantastic trolljob to make a release announcement for a game from 1996. And hey, it's already out, so it could legitimately be called a "trailer"!

 

[EvilWolf]

Fresh leaks

• Game is going to be more immersive, with fast loading times
• Game takes place in Hammerfell and High Rock
• Dragons will return
• Progression system is much more flexible, abandoning classes for a natural progression, better combat.
• Game could be shown in July 2025

Source in Spanish

So... Daggerfall? I mean, it's missing:

• Game will have naval battles, ship building and marine (underwater) exploration inspired by Starfield, explorable islands
• Game is set to have 12-13 big cities [this one's arguable, but at the very least I'd count Sentinel, Wayrest, and Daggerfall itself]
• Game to have Fortress and Village building alongside settlement building.

But I'd bet there are (or will be) Unity mods that add those in.

You have to admit it'd make for a fantastic trolljob to make a release announcement for a game from 1996. And hey, it's already out, so it could legitimately be called a "trailer"!

"We heard your complaints, our quality of games has gone downhill these past two decades. So we're going back to 1995 with a BRAND NEW expansion to our titular title: Daggerfall. You too can now build your own ships, fortresses, and villages! Explore vast, procedurally generated underwater areas and dive for treasure! Visit 9 new bustling cities in Hammerfell and High Rock!" -Todd Howard circa July 2025.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Wouldn't be faster and more honest if Bethesda will just remove every residual RPG elements, and keep only village/fortress building in their next game? This is obviously their goal since Fallout 4, to have a management/sim life/minecraft clone, but they are too shy to stop pretending making something else.

 

[Takamori]

Even less RPG and Emil retarded writing plaguing everything. Why we bother at this point?

 

[Modron]

Why we bother at this point?

With big releases? I don't.

 

[S.torch]

There's a leaked footage rolling around that confirms the Hammerfell location.

 

[luj1]

Fresh leaks

• Game is going to be more immersive, with fast loading times
• Game takes place in Hammerfell and High Rock
• Game will have naval battles, ship building and marine (underwater) exploration inspired by Starfield, explorable islands
• Dragons will return
• Game is set to have 12-13 big cities
• Progression system is much more flexible, abandoning classes for a natural progression, better combat.
• Game to have Fortress and Village building alongside settlement building.
• Game could be shown in July 2025

Source in Spanish

Sounds like a pirate game (cringe) with nigger worship (double cringe). Great

 

[false Kalin]

Not much of what Nesmith says seems disagreeable to me, they're in a tough spot with TES VI because a lot of people will just expect/want Skyrim, but Skyrim also looks from today's perspective like a relic of an era where things had gotten too over-simplistic - it was the right game at the right time in 2011 but if you released it today people would probably find it pretty dull. For the first time in a long time we're in a position where tastes have shifted to the point where something akin to Daggerfall could be a big mainstream commercial success if done right, but they'd also piss off fans who want something closer to MW/Oblivion/Skyrim, especially the latter which is what most people probably expect when they play something with "The Elder Scrolls" written on it. On top of that is that first person action combat governed skills always sucks - it sucked in Arena, it sucked in Daggerfall, it sucked in Battlespire, and it somehow got worse by the time of Morrowind, and the best Oblivion could think to do was fuck everything up beyond belief, so the opportunities for TES to seize on the success of BG3 are pretty limited.

I think something Starfield doesn't get credit for is making skills more varied and more important than in a lot of recent Bethesda games. They even gate basic core mechanics behind skills, which is pretty ballsy. You can see the outline of how TES VI's character building might work there. The only huge misstep is the stupid "challenges" you have to complete before you're allowed to advance a skill.

I really hate this mindset that "changes are always forward and good".

I'm not sure Nesmith is saying that; he's just observing that there was a move away from simulating a tabletop experience over the last two decades because it was perceived to be unappealing to the mainstream, and that BG3 stands out for discarding that trend and achieving huge success, which suggests that the trend may be reversing.

Never played Daggerfall, so this is an actual question: how do the extra mechanics translate to more ways to play the game? Can you actually do rat diplomacy? Is the gameplay you get from all the extra complexity worth having the complexity in the first place?

In Skyrim, the speech skill doesn't lead anywhere. There are barely any checks. Higher speech makes purchases cheaper but you don't really need to buy anything. You get all the good stuff as loot and quest rewards. Of course, in Skyrim this is more of a balance issue. Bethesda couldn't even design the game to encourage people to drink potions. Players are always saving them for later when they might need them more.

Somehow, I suspect that stats systems in early TES games promised lot of different gameplay styles without really delivering and that later entries in the series, instead of expanding the gameplay to fit the stats, reduced the stats to fit the gameplay.

 

[Lemming42]

Never played Daggerfall, so this is an actual question: how do the extra mechanics translate to more ways to play the game? Can you actually do rat diplomacy? Is the gameplay you get from all the extra complexity worth having the complexity in the first place?

You can't do rat diplomacy sadly, but you can do simplistic diplomacy with every human enemy and most non-human ones. The game rolls your Etiquette/Streetwise skill for humans depending on their class, and your Nymph/Giant/Daedra/Harpy/etc language skill for the corresponding races. If successful, the enemy will turn non-hostile, meaning that if you get your language skills to maximum (something very difficult to do without using guild trainers), you can walk through the game with no problems except from undead enemies and non-sapient animals. Some enemies will even fight for you after you pass the check, I can't remember what determines this though.

Other skills, like climbing, add a huge amount of options for you in the game world. It allows for things like climbing onto rooftops to parkour through the city, climbing onto balconies to infiltrate buildings through side entrances*, and navigating pits and caverns in dungeons in ways that other builds can't.

*there actually is a reason to do this, too - if you're caught lockpicking, guards won't be able to reach you as easily if you're in some insane rooftop entrance

Is the gameplay you get from all the extra complexity worth having the complexity in the first place?

I'd argue that the gameplay is worth the complexity, in the same sense that Deus Ex benefits from having non-lethal options and stealth even if you never have to use them, the game doesn't really react to them (after UNATCO, anyway), and they're not well fleshed out as mechanics. The fact that they exist at all ascends the game into something less like a simple action game and more like a world simulation.

Somehow, I suspect that stats systems in early TES games promised lot of different gameplay styles without really delivering and that later entries in the series, instead of expanding the gameplay to fit the stats, reduced the stats to fit the gameplay.

You're not really wrong, but I'd suggest it's more of a dramatic and deliberate shift of focus that occurs from MW onward. The later games aren't really interested in simulating a world with systems that allow for emergent gameplay; they're more focused on putting you in handmade dungeons so you can stab shit and get loot.

To give you another example of what I mean by emergent gameplay in Daggerfall: you have a consistent criminal reputation. If arrested, you can represent yourself in court (the strength of your case governed by a mix of the seriousness of your crime and the strength of your speech skills). If you keep getting arrested over and over again, even if you're consistently found not guilty, the guards will eventually get sick of you and harass you by arresting you for "criminal conspiracy" even when you've not technically done anything, or they'll just outright sentence you to banishment, which actively fucks with whatever plans you might have had for that region. If you have a time-sensitive quest, you'll have to complete it while being hunted by law enforcement until you can leave the region.

It's fairly simplistic as a system, but it demonstrates the ways in which Daggerfall's systems are designed around creating unexpected and unscripted scenarios unique to each playthrough in a way the later games don't.

 

[SilentSeeker]

Not much of what Nesmith says seems disagreeable to me, they're in a tough spot with TES VI because a lot of people will just expect/want Skyrim, but Skyrim also looks from today's perspective like a relic of an era where things had gotten too over-simplistic - it was the right game at the right time in 2011 but if you released it today people would probably find it pretty dull. For the first time in a long time we're in a position where tastes have shifted to the point where something akin to Daggerfall could be a big mainstream commercial success if done right, but they'd also piss off fans who want something closer to MW/Oblivion/Skyrim, especially the latter which is what most people probably expect when they play something with "The Elder Scrolls" written on it. On top of that is that first person action combat governed skills always sucks - it sucked in Arena, it sucked in Daggerfall, it sucked in Battlespire, and it somehow got worse by the time of Morrowind, and the best Oblivion could think to do was fuck everything up beyond belief, so the opportunities for TES to seize on the success of BG3 are pretty limited.

I think something Starfield doesn't get credit for is making skills more varied and more important than in a lot of recent Bethesda games. They even gate basic core mechanics behind skills, which is pretty ballsy. You can see the outline of how TES VI's character building might work there. The only huge misstep is the stupid "challenges" you have to complete before you're allowed to advance a skill.

I really hate this mindset that "changes are always forward and good".

I'm not sure Nesmith is saying that; he's just observing that there was a move away from simulating a tabletop experience over the last two decades because it was perceived to be unappealing to the mainstream, and that BG3 stands out for discarding that trend and achieving huge success, which suggests that the trend may be reversing.

Never played Daggerfall, so this is an actual question: how do the extra mechanics translate to more ways to play the game? Can you actually do rat diplomacy? Is the gameplay you get from all the extra complexity worth having the complexity in the first place?

In Skyrim, the speech skill doesn't lead anywhere. There are barely any checks. Higher speech makes purchases cheaper but you don't really need to buy anything. You get all the good stuff as loot and quest rewards. Of course, in Skyrim this is more of a balance issue. Bethesda couldn't even design the game to encourage people to drink potions. Players are always saving them for later when they might need them more.

Somehow, I suspect that stats systems in early TES games promised lot of different gameplay styles without really delivering and that later entries in the series, instead of expanding the gameplay to fit the stats, reduced the stats to fit the gameplay.

A very fair question. And, as Lemming42 so eloquently stated, kinda. The game has language skills, but all they do is make enemies of that type non-hostile. I once went through the game with a character whose primary, major, and (nearly all) minor skills were languages, and by the endgame, I didn't have to fight anything I didn't want to, except the undead (animals stop showing up in the mid-levels). That didn't really ADD much in terms of gameplay, true, but it certainly did in atmosphere; ancient liches are pretty much the most powerful enemies in the game, but they freely throw around AOE attacks, and since you're usually fighting in narrow corridors, they often kill themselves, too. The scariest enemies in the game are probably the vampire ancients, whose battle cry is a stock bobcat scream that sends shivers down my spine to this day- and since my character wasn't specced for combat, and them I HAD to fight, it made them even creepier.

But that's atmosphere, not gameplay, and while (as Lemming noted), the climb and swim skills do add some things to the game (underwater monsters were of different types than their land-bound counterparts), the dungeons and cities weren't really designed around it, so they added more by way of shortcuts and escape routes than core elements.

The whole gave the idea of an incredible set of tools, though; that these systems would be refined and fleshed out in future games, that we'd have whole simulated worlds and actual FUNCTIONAL Prostitute Guilds. We didn't; Morrowind took the franchise in a very different direction, design-wise. Not every change was for the worse, but we lost out on some incredible potential.

I think the best franchise comparison is Ultima; up until VIII, the growing complexity of its systems kept expanding, but you could DO more and more with them, like bake bread with the blood of a murder victim, or have a lesbian fling between a Gypsy hooker and a halberd-wielding mouse.

Plus, Daggerfall once sent me a quest letter requesting I meet someone at "the Fart Residence of Zenuhno in Sentinel"; you don't forget a thing like that.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Yeah, I think the reversal of the casualisation/simplification trend is here to stay; the late 2000s/early 2010s are gonna look like a weird abberation to people in the future.

What I am worried about is the average technical literacy of future developers.

In the 2000/early 2010s developers decided to simplify games by a deliberate choice, not for technical limitations or because they just weren't good enough to design complex games.

I think that in the future games will be still simple and linear, but this time not for a conscious choice, but just because they are simpler to develop in this way. We see this trend even now, when modern games, usually made with third party pre-existing engines, are technically less advanced than games made 10 or even 20 years ago.