Watch the anniversary video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvcfI8RPZYc
In June 2018, Bethesda showed the world a few seconds of mountains, a coastline and the words The Elder Scrolls VI, then went quiet for the best part of a decade. Children who watched that teaser are now old enough to vote. On Tuesday, 3 November, the studio finally gave the game a name: The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel.
The reveal came at the very end of “Celebrating 40 Years of Bethesda Game Studios”, an anniversary video hosted by Todd Howard. After a long stroll through the company’s back catalogue, sand slides away to uncover an Elder Scroll, and the title appears beneath it. That’s the lot. No gameplay, no release date, no platforms and no price. Bethesda’s accompanying post on X managed expectations with admirable honesty: “Development continues, and while it’ll be some time before we’re ready to share more, it feels great to finally reveal the name and location with you.”
The location is the interesting part. Sentinel is the great port city of Hammerfell, the desert homeland of the Redguards, a people descended from sword-singers who sailed in from the sunken continent of Yokuda. The name and setting had already leaked in late October, so long-time fans weren’t exactly knocked off their camels, but it’s official now. The main series hasn’t made Hammerfell its home since Daggerfall in 1996, although players of The Elder Scrolls Online have been able to wander Sentinel’s streets for years.
It’s a smart choice. Skyrim was Tolkien with frostbite: Nordic barrows, dragons and a lot of men in fur shouting at the sky. Hammerfell offers something rather different: blazing deserts, ruined Yokudan cities, a culture built around the sword and a lost continent beneath the waves. Its natural literary ancestors are less The Lord of the Rings and more Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age or the Arabian Nights, which is a register that big-budget fantasy games rarely attempt. Whether Bethesda attempts it, or simply puts a palm tree next to the usual dungeons, remains to be seen.
What we don’t know would fill a decent-sized library in the Imperial City. Reports that full production began in 2023 on Bethesda’s Creation Engine 3, and speculation that Sentinel will launch with Microsoft’s next Xbox, are just that: reports and speculation. Nobody official has put a year on anything, and given that the gap between the first teaser and this title card was eight years and five months, nobody sensible should start booking holidays around it.
The timing, at least, is sweet. Skyrim turns 15 on 11 November, having sold more than 60 million copies and been re-released on almost everything with a screen, including, at one point, an Amazon Alexa. A whole generation of players has grown up in Whiterun waiting for this. Bethesda now joins George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss in the select club of fantasy creators whose fans have been asked for quite a lot of patience, though in fairness to Bethesda, it has at least told us what the thing is called.
So: one title, one province, one scroll and a lot of sand. It isn’t much, but after eight years of silence, Elder Scrolls fans will take it gratefully and then spend the next several years examining every grain of it. Somewhere, a Moth Priest is already reading the future, and it says “2028, at the earliest.”
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