The Elder Scrolls 6 has an enormous legacy to live up to. Skyrim was hugely critically and commercially successful, selling over 20 million copies between 2011 and 2014. Despite this, it is not a game without its problems.
For The Elder Scrolls 6 to succeed, it will need to solve some of Skyrim’s biggest issues in order to step out from its shadow and provide a truly next-gen-feeling RPG story. There’s one element in particular which the next game will need to improve upon to give players an exciting and fresh Elder Scrolls experience.
One of Skyrim’s biggest problems is that, when it gives the player choices, the game very rarely gives the player reason to give those choices equal consideration. For example, in the opening sequence the player character is famously almost executed by the Imperial army after being caught up in a Stormcloak ambush on the Cyrodiil border.
In that same introduction, after the dragon Alduin attacks and disrupts the execution, the player is presented with the choice of following Ralof the Stormcloak who they were imprisoned with, or Hadvar, an Imperial soldier. The problem is that so far, Ralof has been the player character’s only sympathetic window into the world around them, while Hadvar literally helps administrate their almost-execution, albeit with a dour face.
As a result the choice exists, but it makes so little sense in almost any role-playing context for the player to go with Hadvar. Indeed, Hadvar doesn’t even promise to free or pardon the player if they go with him, something which could provide a motive to choose Skyrim‘s Imperials over the rebels in the hope of gaining clemency with the more powerful political force. Without this motive, one of the only reasons a player might go with the Imperial soldier is because they know the Empire from the previous games.
There’s a similar choice problem when choosing the player’s race in Skyrim. For players unfamiliar with The Elder Scrolls series, the wide array of races available during character customization might come as a bit of a shock. In the introduction, the player only meets humans, with some Thalmor high elves seen at a distance. The only sympathetic character introduced by this point is still Ralof, and that combined with the Skyrim marketing materials make choosing a Nord, at least for the player’s first character, seem like the only truly immersive choice.
Compare this to Oblivion, where the character starts off in the Imperial prison across from a Dark Elf, immediately introducing them to some of the diversity of the province they’re in. This makes playing as any race in Oblivion seem more immersive, as compared to Skyrim it doesn’t feel like the game was designed with a particular race for the protagonist in mind.
The Elder Scrolls 6‘s player character needs choices like these to feel like they’re given equal weight. There should not be one choice which the game makes far more appealing than the others or seems to want the player to make. Otherwise the choices in the game are plentiful, but they’re too easy to make for them to feel anything other than arbitrary.
The next Elder Scrolls game should be designed to make choices like these have equal immersive weight. There should be an emotional appeal to both options when presented with a choice like the one between Ralof and Hadvar, the Stormcloaks or the Empire. When it comes to character’s race, the game should make the effort to ensure that the different options feel just as legitimate at the time of character creation.
This could be helped by the fact that The Elder Scrolls 6 is rumored to take place in Hammerfell, which is divided between the Aldmeri Dominion and the Redguard between the events of Oblivion and Skyrim. This could make one race seem less like the main character of the game, and, as in Oblivion, give the player more incentive to choose a race other than the natives of the province. In any case, Bethesda needs to ensure that different roleplaying choices feel as legitimate in the story if its next game is going to escape Skyrim‘s shadow.
The Elder Scrolls 6 is in development.
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