Bethesda cautions: don’t expect to hear about another Elder Scrolls game any time soon

By Will Fulton August 10, 2015

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The impending release of Fallout 4 has got fans frothing at the mouth with anticipation. 2008’s Fallout 3 is one of the most iconic role-playing games of the 21st century thus far, and its successor promises to set a new bar for massive, open-world RPGs.

A lot of that anticipation is also rooted in enthusiasm for Bethesda’s subsequent smash hit RPG from 2011, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. While eagerly awaiting the next Fallout and as a natural follow-up, fans have started to wonder: When might the Elder Scrolls fantasy franchise receive an update for the new generation of hardware? Don’t hold your breath, according to Bethesda.

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Bethesda’s vice president of marketing Pete Hines told DualShockers at Gamescom that the studio is wholly focused on its current projects for the foreseeable future, so it will be “a very long time” before the team will be ready to share what they are working on for the next single-player Elder Scrolls title. That current docket obviously includes Fallout 4, which is currently in its final months of polish before the November release. Thereafter the team will still have plenty to do in providing the promised modding support, in addition to the expected DLC expansions. Bethesda also recently launched the massively-multiplayer The Elder Scrolls Online for consoles, which also has additional content coming down the pipe.

Unlike other publisher/developer powerhouses such as Ubisoft that have numerous studios around the world, Bethesda Game Studios (in contrast to its parent publisher, Bethesda Softworks) has remained a single, focused entity that generally does not split its efforts between multiple projects at the same time. The studio has stayed at around one hundred people for several years, more or less the same size as the team that shipped Skyrim.

While hardcore Elder Scrolls fans that were not as excited by The Elder Scrolls Online may be disappointed by the wait for another single-player game, I would much rather that Bethesda take its time to make the game they want to make, rather than giving in to the annual release schedules that have mired other AAA franchises in mediocrity.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Will Fulton is a New York-based writer and theater-maker. In 2011 he co-founded mythic theater company AntiMatter Collective…

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