Elder Scrolls 6 Is Playable and Xbox's CEO Has Seen It, but a Former Skyrim Designer Explains the Long Wait

Somebody outside Bethesda has finally seen a live playthrough of The Elder Scrolls 6: the new Xbox CEO says she has seen the game, and Bethesda says its developers are playing it every single day. At the same time, a former Skyrim lead designer has explained why we have been waiting so long. There is a lot going on here, and some of it makes me considerably less comfortable about the game than the Xbox hype does.

So what do we actually know? Almost nothing. No gameplay for us, no release window, no confirmed location, and they won't even tell us the title. But there is a lot going on here beyond a simple please be excited update, so I want to go through everything confirmed, the leaks, the rumours and the updates in turn.

The Xbox CEO has seen a live playthrough of The Elder Scrolls 6

The closest thing we have had to a reveal came in August, when the new Xbox CEO said she had seen a live playthrough of Elder Scrolls 6. She praised the scale and she praised the story, but she wrote the title as The Elder Scrolls 6 followed by eight asterisks. Bethesda replied using the same eight asterisks.

That immediately sent everybody into detective mode. Eight letters, of course. Is it Hammerfell? Well, Hammerfell has 10 letters, so now we are counting letters in imaginary subtitles for a game whose last actual trailer was a flyover of some mountains in 2018. That is what eight years without seeing the game does to people.

I also want to put this out there: the Xbox CEO is not going to see a live playthrough and then say it is bad. To be fair, though, a live playthrough does matter.

Bethesda says its team plays Elder Scrolls 6 every day, but there is still no launch window

Bethesda has also said that ES6 is its primary development focus right now. The majority of the team is working on the game, and the team is playing it every single day. That is more concrete than the usual line that development is progressing well. The game exists in a playable state, and Xbox leadership has seen it.

But don't turn that into it releases next year. A working internal build can exist for a long, long time before a game is ready for millions of people to break it in ways nobody at Bethesda thought possible. Todd Howard was asked for a launch window in July, and he wouldn't give one.

A former Skyrim lead designer says Elder Scrolls 6 was expected after Fallout 4

This is where it gets good. Kurt Kuhlmann, one of the lead designers on Skyrim, spent years shaping Elder Scrolls lore. He says, "The people at Bethesda expected to make Elder Scrolls 6 after Fallout 4." Think about how different this conversation would be if that had happened. Instead, Fallout 76 grew into a bigger commitment than expected, and then Todd pushed the studio right at Starfield.

Kuhlmann says he personally would have preferred making Elder Scrolls 6, and he believes many of his colleagues felt the same way. That doesn't mean Starfield was some evil plot. It means the 15 year gap after Skyrim was partly the result of decisions Bethesda made about what game to build next.

Honestly, that changes how I look at the 2018 announcement and the meme it became. At the time, Bethesda showed us the little landscape teaser, the music swelled, and everybody went, okay, here we go. We were not, in fact, going anywhere.

Hammerfell and High Rock are still just theories

Kuhlmann said a few people had reached an early consensus on where the next game could take place during the Fallout 4 era, but he described it as an idea, not a location that was permanently locked. He also said they hadn't developed the story. He left Bethesda in 2023, so he can't tell us what survived into the game being made today. That is why I question any claim that a former developer has confirmed Hammerfell details. Where is the evidence?

Hammerfell is, of course, the big theory, and I get it: a new land, the Redguards, political tension, and an opportunity to give the series a very different feel from Skyrim. There is a ton to work with there. High Rock gets brought up too, and some people want both. As of right now, though, Bethesda has confirmed none of those. "The eight asterisks are a tease, not a map." If the eventual title is something nobody guessed, I am going to enjoy seeing 20,000 lore theories instantly become historical documents.

Creation Engine 3 is the technical update that deserves attention

There is one technical update that does deserve attention. Bethesda says ES6 is being built on Creation Engine 3, a platform that has been developed since Starfield. Before anybody asks why they didn't just use Unreal Engine: the engine is more than how pretty the trees look. Bethesda's games depend on interactive objects, persistent worlds, strange player decisions, and a modding community that can keep a game alive for two decades. Todd Howard has talked about building tools and systems around that kind of freedom.

I understand the argument for keeping Bethesda's own technology. I also understand why people hear Creation Engine and immediately picture an NPC walking through a wall. "Both reactions are valid and both are earned."

What I want from Elder Scrolls 6 is more than scale

I think the real test is whether Bethesda uses that tech to make a world you want to inhabit, a world you want to live in. Starfield was enormous, but size alone doesn't recreate the feeling of walking in one direction in Skyrim and accidentally losing four hours because you got distracted.

I don't need a map that takes an hour to cross. Give me towns that feel different from each other. Give me factions with stories I will remember. Give me a cave that turns into something weird because I was nosy enough to go inside it. Let me steal a spoon, get caught, and somehow end up involved in a political conspiracy. That is the Bethesda experience I want. The scale sounds great, but I want to know what is actually in that scale.

Layoffs at Bethesda are the uncomfortable part of this update

There is also an uncomfortable part of this update, and I think it deserves more attention than the subtitle guessing. Microsoft has made cuts across Xbox, including Bethesda. Kuhlmann has criticised the decision to lay off experienced people while ES6 is being made. His argument is simple: if this game is such a priority, why remove people with years of knowledge about how Bethesda games are built and tested?

That is his assessment as a former developer, not proof the project is in trouble, and Bethesda says production is good. But if you are asking why I am not celebrating an executive seeing a demo as though the game has already crossed the finish line, that is part of the answer.

Bethesda may have been protective of The Elder Scrolls

Just yesterday, Kuhlmann offered another explanation for the wait. He suggested Bethesda has been protective of The Elder Scrolls, which may help explain why we never got a single player spinoff from another studio while the main team worked on Fallout and Starfield. He didn't confirm that Bethesda considered and rejected some secret Elder Scrolls equivalent of New Vegas, and that distinction matters.

It is just hard not to look at 15 years without a new mainline game and wonder whether there was a way to give fans another adventure during that time. Elder Scrolls Online has kept the world active for plenty of players. It just isn't the next single player Skyrim that people have been waiting for.

Elder Scrolls 6 now has to carry 15 years of expectations

So where are we really? Elder Scrolls 6 is playable internally, and most of Bethesda is working on it. Creation Engine 3 is being built around this game and future Bethesda RPGs. The Xbox CEO has seen it and says the scale and the story impressed her, which is very corporate and very vague talk. These are real updates. But Hammerfell, High Rock, an eight letter subtitle, or any release year being passed around as fact is complete speculation.

The biggest new insight might be the simplest one. According to someone who helped make Skyrim at a deep level, this sequel could have been Bethesda's next major project after Fallout 4, but Bethesda chose a different path. Now this one game has to carry 15 years of expectations. I want it to be incredible, and I am probably going to lose a month of my life when it comes out. But after eight years of looking at the same mountain and the same title flying onto the screen, "I'm kind of done pretending that asterisks are gameplay." Show us the world. Show us a quest. Show us why this was and is worth waiting for.

Does hearing that the Xbox CEO has seen a live playthrough make you more confident, or are you holding off until Bethesda finally shows the rest of us what Elder Scrolls 6 actually looks, feels and sounds like?