Bethesda Explains Why Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI Were Revealed so Early

Bethesda filled its E3 2018 showcase with unexpected surprises. A co-op Wolfenstein project is in the works, featuring BJ Blazkowicz’ twin daughters. We finally got a glimpse of the DOOM follow-up. The list goes on. However, no one anticipated the announcement of two games from Bethesda Game Studios—Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI. Both are years out from release, but the publisher apparently has good reason for revealing them so early.

During Fallout 76’s recent press event, Bethesda’s marketing head, Pete Hines, spoke with Eurogamer. When asked about when we’ll hear more from Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI, Hines said, “A while from now and a really long while from now! Respectively.”

According to him, the wait for these titles will mirror that of previous waiting periods for Bethesda games. Hines explained, “actually, I should not be quite so dismissive of the question, which is to say—the timeframe for Bethesda Game Studios titles has not changed at all.”

Most intriguing is his explanation of why the projects were revealed so soon. Fallout 76 shares a load of the responsibility, particularly because of its focus on multiplayer. Hines noted they didn’t want fans to think Bethesda would abandon single player. Premature announcements for Starfield and The Elder Scrolls VI were meant to alleviate these concerns before audiences settled into them.

What changed was our desire to lay out a roadmap of those titles, not like, hey they’re going to be putting out a game every nine months, no, it still takes them years in between projects, but because we were doing something so different on Fallout 76, taking that franchise in such a different direction, doing an online game that doesn’t look like something you’d expect from BGS, we thought it was important to say: hey, new IP, single player, sci-fi thing coming, hey we are doing TES6 after that. So that people didn’t start spinning off on, like, that’s the end of single player games from Bethesda Games Studios.

Timeframe-wise, it would still be about as long as you’d expect when you look at Fallout 3 to Skyrim to Fallout 4 to Fallout 76. It’s still going to be those periods of time, that hasn’t changed. Or at least, I don’t think it will change from that based on what I know.

While the wait for these games persists, fans will be able to dive into another world from Bethesda very soon. Fallout 76 launches on November 14, 2018.

[Source: Eurogamer]