The Elder Scrolls 6 was announced in 2018, and since then the lack of specific detail about the hotly anticipated title has had fans speculating about many of the features the new game could include. While there’s been no confirmation about the Skyrim successor’s story or setting, Todd Howard has claimed that the game will make extensive use of procedural generation to create a huge in-game world.
There are many ways The Elder Scrolls 6 could revolutionize the franchise’s formula, including drastically increasing the size of the world and its main towns and cities. However there’s one far smaller change that, if focused on throughout the game’s world, could bring The Elder Scrolls 6 to life in a way that wouldn’t risk undermining a core tenet of the series: player freedom.
There are plenty of ways The Elder Scrolls 6 could increase the series’ scale. The game’s world could be significantly larger, with larger towns and cities as Todd Howard indicated at Brighton Digital 2020. The game could have larger battles that put the Stormcloaks’ miniscule raids to shame. It could even see players take their first steps away from Tamriel, venturing to other continents like Yokuda or Akavir.
Increasing the scale of The Elder Scrolls 6’s map, key hubs, and battles is a priority for many fans. There’s hope in Bethesda upgrading its engine that the upcoming game could potentially push the technological limits of the open-world RPG genre. There’s also one less technologically taxing change, however, which needs to be brought to The Elder Scrolls 6. It isn’t a matter of the game’s engine, rather one of time, and it’s a change which would add significant depth to the game’s world without overprescribing the player’s experience.
The Elder Scrolls 6 needs far more dialogue which specifically acknowledges the player, their accomplishments, their titles, and their race. The Elder Scrolls formula has always prioritized freedom when it comes to roleplaying. Unlike series like Mass Effect, players can choose to completely forego the main story in most Elder Scrolls games, and their player character is given so little backstory that it’s up to them to imagine who that character might be.
In Skyrim, that lack of prescriptive input on the side of the developers is also reflected in a lack of reactivity in the world. Just because the player can choose to be whoever they want doesn’t mean that NPCs shouldn’t also react to who they have become in the world. To use examples from Skyrim, there’s no reason beyond time constraints that non-Nord players should walk into Windhelm and be asked if they’re “one of those Skyrim for the Nords types.”
Argonian and Dunmer players should receive significantly different receptions in Windhelm’s Dunmeri Gray Quarter than the city’s Argonian-populated docks. Khajiit players should not have to wonder why they are the only one of their kind able to walk freely into Skyrim’s cities, an inconsistency which just a few lines of dialogue could clear up. By seeding more situational dialogue throughout the world, The Elder Scrolls 6 would make that world feel far more reactive, helping alleviate some of the roleplaying burdens which, in Skyrim, fall too heavily on the player.
Playing through The Elder Scrolls 6 as a non-human does not need to completely transform the game or cause big changes to any major questline. The Elder Scrolls games already rely so much on the imagination of their players when it comes to bringing their blank-slate protagonists to life. By adding several acknowledgements of the player’s race and identity to each major questline, a seemingly small addition to the game would help the Elder Scrolls series create a next-gen sense of immersion.
Reactivity shouldn’t just apply to the player’s identity, but also their actions. It’s absurd, for example, that the player can become both the leader of Skyrim’s Dark Brotherhood chapter and the Riften Thieves Guild, without being able to mention that in either questline or have the game acknowledge it in any significant way. Finding opportunities for small situational acknowledgements of the player’s actions would go a long way, and could be done without making big changes to questlines.
If the player is already the head of the Thieves Guild, and then completes the first Dark Brotherhood quest and is kidnapped by Astrid, then Astrid should be given an extra line of dialogue to acknowledge this unique position. She might comment, for example, that the Thieves Guild must be going through even worse times than she thought for their leader to be taking petty hit contracts. If there was an extra line acknowledging every major joinable faction in Skyrim, Astrid would only theoretically need under 10 extra lines. Even if the Dark Brotherhood questline was completely unaltered from there, it would make the world feel far more responsive.
It remains to be seen how Bethesda will attempt to one-up Skyrim in The Elder Scrolls 6. Including more varied reactive dialogue would make the world feel far richer without actually having to create the sort of character-driven stories which the franchise’s nameless protagonists aren’t strong enough to drive. Adding more reactive dialogue would make the world more immersive without stepping on the freedom that has characterized the RPG series so far.
The Elder Scrolls games have often capitalized on the idea that their worlds allow the player to be whoever they want. However, that promise will never feel truly realized until The Elder Scrolls 6 lets players be whoever they want, and then reacts to whoever they are or have become. The Elder Scrolls 6 doesn’t need to be bigger than its predecessor to step out of Skyrim‘s huge shadow. Instead, Bethesda needs to create a world which feels far more interconnected, increasing its depth without compromising on the level of freedom which brought the series to the forefront of the RPG genre.
The Elder Scrolls 6 is in development.
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