The Elder Scrolls 6 is making some big changes to the world of Nirn. At this month’s Brighton Digital 2020, Todd Howard announced plans to use procedural generation to create a large game world with cities and towns on a more realistic scale than any seen in recent Elder Scrolls games.
However, The Elder Scrolls 6 has another problem it will need to solve if it’s going to surpass Skyrim and live up to the immense expectations being placed on the sequel. The Elder Scrolls 6 needs to figure out an answer to the problem posed by its beastfolk – the feline Khajiit and the aquatic Argonians.
The Khajiit and the Argonians are iconic staples of the Elder Scrolls franchise. In recent games, however, they have felt like a case of early-installment weirdness leaking through. When Skyrim came out in 2011 it was part of a tidal wave of gritty, realistic medieval fantasy in and out of gaming from the first series of Game of Thrones to The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings, both of which also released the same year. For fans who were unfamiliar with the rest of the series, this made the Argonians and the Khajiit seem like a strange choice at the character creation screen, especially with none seen in the introduction thus far.
The Argonians and the Khajiit were first introduced in The Elder Scrolls: Arena. The first two games in the series had a far more pulpy tone, with muscled warriors and chainmail bikinis that called into mind Conan the Barbarian more than a Song of Ice and Fire. The beastfolk’s origins lie in that genre’s aesthetic, which has caused some interesting problems as the series changes.
By the time of Skyrim the perceived clash between the beastfolk and the series’ attempt at a more down-to-earth aesthetic led to their relegation to the peripheries of the game. There are no Khajiit settlements, only their travelling trade caravans, and the only Argonian neighborhood seen in the game is the dock outside of Windhelm. There’s only one Argonian in the entire game which can be married without mods, and there are no Khajiit which can be married in the game. This makes it hard to argue that the game was designed to accommodate players who wanted to roleplay as either of the playable beastfolk races.
It is understandable that the Argonians and the Khajiit would be a small minority in the frozen tundras of Skyrim, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t discarded opportunities to explore the beastfolk far more. The lack of focus given to them even leads to some strangely dissonant moments for Argonian and Khajiit players, where they are allowed entrance to cities in which their races are banned without question.
Players could have found Khajiit running a black market with the Thieves Guild in Riften, or could have met a gang of impoverished Argonians living in the sewers beneath Windhelm. There’s a huge amount of lore with both races which is among the strangest lore in the Elder Scrolls series, but which is almost never explored with either race. The Khajiit have a huge number of subraces, ranging from highly intelligent housecats to something resembling Bosmer with tails. The Argonians have a strange and deep relationship with something called the Hist, a race of sentient trees in their native Black Marsh.
In both cases these feel like elements from an earlier iteration of The Elder Scrolls’ aesthetic. The pulpy nature of the earlier games isn’t just evidenced by the beastfolk. The first two games had a different tone in everything from dialog to in-game books. Daggerfall’s The Real Barenziah Part 3 includes a near-pornographic description of a woman’s night with a Khajiit which would later be cut from sequel games, demonstrating a shift away from pulp aesthetics that, despite its success in other areas, would leave the Khajiit and Argonians high and dry.
There are a few things The Elder Scrolls 6 could do to give the Khajiit and the Argonians the time and love they deserve. First, the next game could include more Khajiit and Argonian characters, with a wider array of personalities. Most beastfolk characters have a single voice actor in Skyrim determined by their race and gender, which has made some of the individual characters less memorable than the races themselves.
Second, the larger cities Bethesda is aiming to create for The Elder Scrolls 6 could have far more fleshed out neighborhoods with different influences. The Khajiit presence in a town near the border with Elsweyr may still be small relative to the town’s full population, but unlike the Argonian presence in Windhelm, could be represented by a full neighborhood full of interesting locations and NPCs rather than a handful of characters who all sleep in the same worker’s hall. Bethesda could even edit Khajiit player dialog so it matches their speech patterns, just as Skyrim modders have.
The games could also be far more accommodating of the roleplaying experiences of players who roll as either a Khajiit or Argonian. Khajiit players may have to bribe guards to enter a city for the first time, or sneak in through a second entrance. Argonian players could get opportunities to learn far more about the Hist, which their character would presumably have an intimate relationship with. As ostracized groups, Argonian and Khajiit NPCs in TES 6 could be quicker to recognize their own kind and offer them help in a way they wouldn’t for the races of men and mer.
Over time, The Elder Scrolls games have changed to the point that, in more recent games, the Argonians and the Khajiit seem like strange hangovers which Bethesda isn’t willing to lean too far into. Love them or hate them, however, the beastfolk are here to stay. The Elder Scrolls 6 needs to give them a proper place in the next game’s world, with unique dialog, roleplaying, and romance opportunities.
The Elder Scrolls 6 is in development.
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