Distant in time and diluted in memory, it remains memory of the first announcement of The Elder Scrolls VI, the highly anticipated successor to Skyrim that promises to take us back to Tamriel. How long? This initial reveal took place at Bethesda’s E3 2018 event, so it will soon be six years.

That’s right, yes At the time, it was reported that the game was still in pre-production, so we knew it would be a few more years before it hit the market. Even more so considering that its launch was scheduled after another title that was also first announced at the event, Starfield. Yes, the Starfield, which experienced several delays before finally ending up on the market in September last year.

The delay of The Elder Scrolls VI cannot now be attributed, at least not exclusively, to Starfield, as at the end of 2020 Bethesda confirmed that they had decided to change the engine, which, as you can already imagine, involved a huge amount of extra work. Now, and given that the new engine would also be Starfield’s and that the studio was going to significantly increase the number of programmers dedicated to its development, we made the mistake of expecting everything to go faster.

Today marks 30 years since The Elder Scrolls: Arena, the first game in the saga, was released in the United States, and Bethesda released tweet on his official account celebrating this anniversary with a picture that includes a text dedicated to the history of the saga. And what interests us most is that at the end Bethesda confirms that The Elder Scrolls VI is in the early stages of development.

What does it mean? Well, in short, we will have to wait years for its development to be completed. But how long have we been talking? A few months ago, a document was leaked that pointed to 2026, and in it we could read that Starfield was planned for the first half of 2023 (the latter finally arrived), so we could consider it reasonably accurate. However, and with these new data, this forecast is hardly tenable and It makes more sense to consider (speculate) that his arrival will occur in 2028 at the earliesti.e. ten years after its announcement.

We will undoubtedly find not only an example of this Announcements made too soon can be counterproductive, which is also another sign that the days when the same saga could see several of its titles on the same generation of consoles are long gone. And to the monstrous scale of development, we must also add the many problems that can arise in these processes, such as the one we told you this morning about GTA VI, another great example of a long-awaited title.

Regarding the Rockstar title, let’s recall that its predecessor GTA V debuted before the gates of autumn 2014), so if what we announced this morning comes true, its successor will arrive 12 years later. And that may seem like a lot, but it pales in comparison to the case in this report, since The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim entered the market in November 2011, so if the prediction for 2018 comes true) 17 years pass between the launch of the two.