The Elder Scrolls VI

The Elder Scrolls VI is an upcoming open-world role-playing game in development at Bethesda Game Studios. It was publicly acknowledged for the first time on June 10, 2018, via a 35-second teaser trailer shown at E3, and as of June 2026 — eight years later — remains unannounced in any substantive sense: no title, no setting confirmation, no gameplay footage, no release window, and no appearance at the Xbox Games Showcase held this month.

What is known is that the majority of Bethesda Game Studios is now working on it, that it is being built on a new proprietary engine, and that Todd Howard has described the wait as necessary, painful, and not close to ending.

What Is Confirmed

The 2018 Teaser

The only official look at The Elder Scrolls VI is a 35-second teaser shown at E3 2018 during Bethesda’s pre-show briefing. It showed an aerial sweep over a rugged coastal landscape — rocky cliffs, mountains, ocean, a palette of grey and green — before cutting to the title card reading “THE ELDER SCROLLS VI” with the qualifier “IN DEVELOPMENT” underneath. No characters, no dialogue, no gameplay, no subtitle.

Todd Howard later said announcing the game this early was a mistake. “We probably shouldn’t have announced it,” he told IGN in 2022. “I understand why we did — and it probably was the right call at the time — but we’re paying for it in a sense.” The clip is still the only official footage Bethesda has ever released for the project.

Eight Years: How TES VI Ended Up Here

The Elder Scrolls VI was announced at E3 2018, seven years after Skyrim launched in November 2011. In those seven years, Bethesda had shipped Skyrim Special Edition (2016), Fallout 4 (2015), Fallout 76 (2018), and was mid-development on Starfield. The E3 2018 teaser served primarily as reassurance that a sequel existed — not as a development milestone.

Between 2018 and 2023, Starfield consumed the bulk of Bethesda Game Studios’ resources. Howard confirmed that TES VI entered meaningful early development in 2023, following Starfield‘s September launch, with early internal builds reportedly in place by March 2024. For the five years between the 2018 teaser and 2023, the project was essentially in holding — a title and a promise, not a production.

At this point, more time has passed since the 2018 E3 teaser than elapsed between Skyrim‘s 2011 release and that announcement.

Development Status as of June 2026

The most recent confirmed information comes from two sources in late 2025 and early 2026:

December 2025 — Game Informer: In an exclusive interview, Todd Howard confirmed that “the majority of the studio’s on VI” and described development as “progressing really well.” He added: “We all wish it went a little bit faster, or a lot faster, but it’s a process that we want to get right.” He also acknowledged that Bethesda continues to overlap projects, with Fallout-related content still active alongside TES VI development.

March 18, 2026 — GamesRadar roundtable: Howard reiterated: “The majority of this building is working on The Elder Scrolls 6. It’s amazing for us to come back to it.” He noted the studio is not rushing and has no specific release target driving the schedule.

The game did not appear at the Xbox Games Showcase in June 2026 — a significant absence, as the show is typically the venue at which Xbox’s most important upcoming titles receive attention. No explanation was given for the absence.

Howard has also floated, without committing to, the possibility of announcing and releasing the game simultaneously in the style of Oblivion Remastered‘s April 2025 shadow drop. He stopped well short of indicating this is the plan.

Creation Engine 3

In February 2026, speaking on the Kinda Funny Gamescast, Howard confirmed that The Elder Scrolls VI is being built on Creation Engine 3 — a complete overhaul of the engine used for Starfield, which was itself Creation Engine 2.

“We spent the last several years bringing Creation Engine 2, which powers Starfield, up to Creation Engine 3,” Howard said, describing the new engine as specifically designed for TES VI’s requirements. He confirmed the game is already playable internally in some form on the new engine, characterising this as a significant milestone: pre-production is complete, and active production is underway. The engine upgrade confirms that TES VI will not be a technological extension of Starfield but a distinct step forward — consistent with the jump from Oblivion‘s Gamebryo to Skyrim‘s Creation Engine 1.

No technical specifications for Creation Engine 3 have been disclosed publicly.

Setting: The Hammerfell Theory

Fan speculation about the setting is anchored in two sources: the 2018 teaser’s landscape and the internal logic of the franchise’s geography.

The teaser’s coastline — rocky, Atlantic-feeling, with scrubby grass and dramatic sea cliffs — has been most consistently interpreted as Hammerfell, the homeland of the Redguard people and a province that plays a significant role in Skyrim‘s backstory without appearing as a playable location in the main series since Daggerfall (1996) and the spin-off Redguard (1998). Hammerfell occupies the western coast of Tamriel and famously refused to sign the White-Gold Concordat with the Thalmor at the end of the Great War — a plot thread Skyrim establishes but does not resolve.

High Rock — the adjacent province, home of the Bretons, which borders Hammerfell to the north and also appeared in Daggerfall — is the other primary candidate, with some analysis suggesting the teaser landscape is more consistent with its more temperate, forested coastlines.

Several credible industry observers have speculated that TES VI may cover both provinces simultaneously — as Daggerfall did in 1996, when its map encompassed both High Rock and Hammerfell. This would provide geographic scale comparable to or exceeding Skyrim‘s map while keeping the setting within the western reaches of Tamriel that the numbered series has not revisited in three decades.

No setting has been officially confirmed. The FTC v. Microsoft documents from 2023, which referenced TES VI as a planned release, described it only as “set on a continent in Tamriel” — unhelpfully vague.

Platform: Will It Come to PlayStation?

The Elder Scrolls VI is confirmed for Xbox and PC. Whether it will release on PlayStation is the most commercially significant unanswered question about the project.

FTC documents from 2022 cited an internal Microsoft communication suggesting TES VI would launch only on Xbox and PC, reflecting the strategy in place at the time of the Bethesda acquisition in 2021. Todd Howard said in 2020 that “it’s hard to imagine” not releasing a game of TES VI’s scale on multiple platforms — before Microsoft completed the acquisition.

The intervening years have complicated the picture. Microsoft’s platform strategy has shifted since 2022: Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment, Sea of Thieves, Grounded, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and eventually Starfield itself all came to PlayStation after initially being Xbox/PC titles. The shift suggests that the earlier exclusivity intent may not hold through the end of a development cycle that won’t conclude before the late 2020s at the earliest — and by which point the commercial dynamics of platform exclusivity may look very different.

No formal statement on platform plans has been made since the FTC documents.

A Return to Classic Bethesda

The few substantive things Howard has said about the game’s design philosophy consistently emphasise a return to the Skyrim and Oblivion template rather than the open-ended space simulation of Starfield. He has described TES VI as the “ultimate simulator of a fantasy world” — language that positions it as an extension of what Bethesda built in the mainline TES series rather than the exploratory departure Starfield represented.

What that means in practice — whether the game will retain the same character-building systems, the same faction structure, the same approach to dungeon design and radiant AI that have defined the series — has not been specified. Bethesda’s track record involves iterating heavily on these systems between entries: Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim feel like related but genuinely distinct games in how they handle character progression, dialogue, and world structure. Whether TES VI continues or revises those patterns is unknown.

The Fan Community and the Wait

r/TESVI — a subreddit dedicated entirely to the unreleased game — draws more organic search traffic than the game’s Wikipedia page, Bethesda’s official TES portal, and the Game Informer update article combined. Its 14,000+ monthly visitors are primarily exchanging speculation, lore analysis, wishlist discussion, and news aggregation for a game that has produced no new official information in eight years.

The community has developed sophisticated fan theories about the setting from the 35-second teaser, tracked every oblique Howard reference, and documented every FTC, court filing, or leaked roadmap mention of the title. A regularly updated Reddit thread titled “A summary of development progress on Elder Scrolls VI” functions as the de facto status document for everything publicly known — a document whose content could comfortably fit in a short email.

Industry analysts including Jez Corden have placed expected release in the 2028–2031 range, with 2029–2030 as the most cited window. Howard has not confirmed or denied any specific year. The June 2026 Xbox Showcase non-appearance indicates a formal reveal is not imminent.