Elder Scrolls 6 will keep Skyrim's approach to levelling and "traces" of its magic, says Starfield designer

24.10.2023 - 08:47 / rockpapershotgun.com / Todd Howard / Bethesda Softworks / Bruce Nesmith / Of Its / Will

The Elder Scrolls 6 is going to be a mixture of new ideas and RPG systems that go all the way back to The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, according to Bethesda's former design director Bruce Nesmith, who was lead designer on The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim and senior designer on Starfield. In particular, Nesmith reckons it will "absolutely" continue with Skyrim's approach to levelling and progression, whereby you improved skills by performing the associated actions. He also thinks the game will "probably" retain elements of the magic system he designed for Skyrim, which broke away from Oblivion and Morrowind in being simpler to understand and more immediately powerful, at the price of flexibility and inventiveness.

All that's from a new interview with MinnMax, in which Nesmith - who started at Bethesda back in 1995, and retired in 2021 to write fantasy novels, including the Loki Redeemed series - reflected on his contributions to Elder Scrolls and Fallout, and speculated a little as to the next Elder Scrolls game, which was announced back in 2018.

Nesmith noted that while Bethesda Softworks director and executive producer Todd Howard will have set the overall direction for the game, much remains to be thrashed out - or at least, such was the case when he retired from the studio. "Todd knew what he wanted, knows what he wants, but that's this set [of ideas] over here - there's the whole rest of the game that is not defined," he mused. "And that's going to be worked on and decided by the people who are there now. What will probably come through, because you can see it in the history of the game, is things that were developed in Oblivion and in Skyrim will be further developed in The Elder Scrolls 6. I don't know what they will be, but you will find my fingerprints on many of those things."

"The whole magic system for Skyrim, that I persuaded Todd to let me throw the baby and the bathwater and start from scratch, and he trusted me enough to do that, there will probably still be traces of that in 6," he went on. "The whole 'you do it to get better at it', while that was not my unique idea, I had a large hand in that - that's absolutely going to continue. A lot of the concepts dealing with how you level, things like that - there'll be a bunch of new ideas thrown in, but I'm betting some of the stuff I worked on will still survive."

All this follows what Nesmith terms the "triage" approach to creating sequels. "I do a talk for colleges and universities about sequels, and how to make a sequel, and at the time I created the talk it was for Fallout 3 to Fallout 4, but it applies everywhere," he said. "And basically it comes down to a triage system - you got to know what to keep, you got to know what to throw