There’s no question that Skyrim significantly simplified the Elder Scrolls formula, removing character classes among other features in order to make the game more accessible to a wider audience. It worked. The Elder Scrolls 5 sold 20 million copies between 2011 and 2014 and remains one of the most successful RPGs to date.
This has led some to worry that The Elder Scrolls 6 with further simplify the series, though that is not necessarily a bad thing. What’s key is what Bethesda takes from the success of Skyrim’s simplicity, how it implements that into The Elder Scrolls 6, and how it avoids falling into certain traps.
Though many long-term fans of the series were disappointed to see features from Oblivion and earlier Elder Scrolls games go out the window in Skyrim, some of the simplifying design choices made a lot of sense. Lockpicking, for example, was made far more intuitive and in-line with the recent Fallout games.
However, for as many changes as there were between Morrowind and Skyrim, the Elder Scrolls games have always had a degree of simplicity about them. Players enter into the world, which they can then explore from any angle, meeting NPCs along the way and more-or-less forming their own story. The plotlines of the main quests are rarely complicated, the protagonists are blank slates, and the worlds, while vast, are relatively shallow.
While it might seem like a weakness, this has always been among the greatest appeals of Bethesda RPGs. The world is big enough and the ways of interacting with it are clear and robust enough that the studio can get away with most questlines and characters having little impact on that world. Most of the story takes place in the head of the player. For example, the Skyrim quest Missing in Action requires the player to rescue Thorald Gray-Mane from the Thalmor.
Thorald Gray-Mane is a flat character, the Aldmeri Dominion‘s stooges are straight-forward bad guys, and the rescued man doesn’t appear after his rescue or have any relevance in the rest of the game. However, the player stealthing or fighting their way into an elven keep on the edge of a frozen northern shoreline to rescue a man from a torture chamber is engaging because of the world Bethesda built up around it, while the simple but consistent ways the player can interact with that world prioritizes dynamic moments over tightly woven narratives.
The big lesson from Skyrim shouldn’t be to simplify the series further for The Elder Scrolls 6 by removing more features. Instead, it should be to maintain the simple design philosophy behind the games – build an engaging world, and let the rest sort itself out. This could even involve adding more ways for the player to interact with the world of Tamriel.
The Skyrim mod Master of Disguise, for example, allows players to don faction disguises while NPCs judge how convincing they are based on factors like race. In Missing in Action this can allow a human player to extract Thorald with relative ease while dressed as an Imperial soldier, or an elven character to do the same dressed as a Thalmor Justiciar. This adds another dynamic but simple way to interact with the world that generates more unique experiences even if they aren’t scripted narratives.
Similarly, much of the dialog from Skyrim’s famous opening scene was cut down for the sake of simplicity, and there are mods which can restore it to its full length. This is the wrong kind of simplification to aim for – the more there is to engage with in the world the better, what’s important is making sure the terms of engagement like combat mechanics and dialog options are easy to understand.
The trailer for The Elder Scrolls 6 released back in 2018, and there has been little word from Bethesda then. It’s possible The Elder Scrolls 6 will be a very different game from Skyrim, especially with the studio branching out into new IPs like Starfield for the first time in decades. Even as the game approaches its 10-year anniversary it’s likely that Skyrim will remain the archetypical Bethesda RPG for some years to come.
The Elder Scrolls 6 is currently in development.
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