What I Hope to See from The Elder Scrolls VI

I want The Elder Scrolls VI to be good. I really do. But if I'm being honest with myself, I don't have much confidence in Bethesda anymore. The studio that gave us Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim feels like it's lost its way. Fallout 76 was a disaster at launch. Starfield, while not terrible, felt like a game designed by committee rather than passion. A million planets with nothing meaningful on most of them, loading screens breaking immersion at every turn, and that same creaky Creation Engine showing its age more than ever.

Maybe what I'm hoping for is a pipe dream. Maybe Bethesda can't recapture what made their earlier games special. But hope costs nothing, so here's what I'd love to see from The Elder Scrolls VI whenever it finally arrives.

Bring Back Fallout 4's Crafting System (But Leave the Settlements Behind)

Fallout 4 had its problems, but the crafting and scrapping system wasn't one of them. Being able to break down junk items into base components and use those materials to upgrade weapons, armor, and power armor felt incredibly satisfying. It gave every rusty tin can and desk fan a purpose. That loop of scavenging, breaking down materials, and improving your gear was genuinely engaging.

I'd love to see a similar system in TES VI, adapted for the fantasy setting. Imagine breaking down iron daggers for metal ingots, deconstructing enchanted items to learn their properties, or salvaging materials from ruins to upgrade your equipment. It would make looting feel more purposeful and give crafting skills like smithing and enchanting more depth.

What I don't want is the settlement building system that came with it. Look, I know some people loved building settlements in Fallout 4, but for many of us, it felt like busywork that distracted from the core experience. Having to babysit a dozen settlements, constantly interrupted by Preston Garvey telling me another settlement needed my help. No thanks.

That said, I wouldn't mind some form of base building, just scaled way back. Let me build and customize a single home or castle. Let me choose the furnishings, decorations, and maybe even the layout of certain rooms. Make it personal, make it mine, but don't turn it into a management sim. Games like Kingdom Come: Deliverance handled this well with its "From the Ashes" DLC. You could rebuild a village, but it was optional and self-contained. Something like that would be perfect.

The Dual-Engine Dream

This one's probably the longest shot on my list, but I can't help hoping. The Oblivion remaster is using a dual-engine approach: Unreal Engine for graphics and UI rendering, with the Creation Engine running underneath to maintain compatibility with the original game's systems. If they can pull this off successfully, why not use the same approach for TES VI?

The Creation Engine has been Bethesda's millstone for years now. It's great for certain things. The way it handles object persistence and environmental interactivity is still impressive. But it's showing its age in every other department. The animations are stiff, the loading screens are constant, and the graphics look a generation behind competitors even at launch.

Using Unreal Engine for the visual presentation while keeping Creation Engine's strengths under the hood could be the best of both worlds. We'd get modern graphics, smooth animations, better performance, and a more polished UI, while still maintaining the environmental interactivity and modding capabilities that make Bethesda's games special. Is it likely? Probably not. But a guy can dream.

Modding Must Remain a Priority

Speaking of modding, this is non-negotiable. The modding community is the reason people are still playing Skyrim fourteen years after its release. Bethesda needs to not only maintain but improve modding capabilities for TES VI.

This means a few things. First, don't lock down the game's systems in ways that make modding difficult. Keep the game's architecture open and flexible. Second, provide better official modding tools from day one. The Creation Kit for Skyrim was powerful but also buggy and poorly documented. Third, don't try to monetize mods in predatory ways. Creations are problematic enough; anything more aggressive would be a disaster.

Most importantly, Bethesda should look at what the modding community has accomplished with Skyrim and take notes. Some of the most popular mods should inform the base game's design.

Learning from the Mod Community

Skyrim's modding scene has basically become a years-long beta test for what fans actually want. Bethesda would be foolish not to pay attention.

SkyUI completely overhauled Skyrim's terrible console-first interface and became essential for PC players. The lesson? Design proper PC interfaces from the start, with sorting options, search functions, and layouts that make sense for mouse and keyboard. Don't give us a UI clearly designed for controllers and call it a day.

Immersive Equipment Displays let players actually see their equipped gear on their character: weapons on the back, potions on the belt, shields worn properly. Why wasn't this in the base game? It's such an obvious feature for immersion and character customization.

TrueHUD added floating health bars for enemies and better on-screen information without cluttering the UI. True Directional Movement made combat feel more modern and responsive by allowing you to move in any direction while locked onto targets. These aren't radical changes, they're quality of life improvements that make the game feel less dated.

If mods like these became so popular that they're considered essential by a huge portion of the player base, maybe those features should just be in TES VI from the start.

Proper Climbing and Environmental Interaction

Bethesda has always prided itself on environmental interactivity. You can pick up nearly every object, items persist in the world, you can stack cheese wheels into towers if you want. But movement through that environment has always been limited. You can jump. You can walk up slopes. That's about it.

Give us a proper climbing system. Breath of the Wild proved that letting players climb almost anything transforms exploration. It doesn't need to be that extensive, but being able to scale cliff faces, climb over walls, or shimmy along ledges would add so much to exploration. Right now, mountains in Skyrim are navigated by jumping up them at weird angles or following the one winding path. It's clunky and immersion-breaking.

Better environmental interaction would go hand in hand with this. Let us vault over low obstacles, slide down steep slopes, swim underwater for meaningful distances, or push objects to create makeshift platforms. Make the world feel more physically interactive, not just visually detailed.

No Voiced Protagonist, Please

Fallout 4 tried a voiced protagonist, and it was a mistake. It limited dialogue options, made roleplay feel more restrictive, and cost a fortune in voice acting that could have been spent elsewhere. In a game about creating your own character and making your own choices, having a predetermined voice breaks the illusion.

The silent protagonist approach works for Bethesda RPGs. It lets players project themselves onto the character more easily, allows for more dialogue options without exponentially increasing voice acting costs, and makes different playthroughs feel more distinct. Keep it that way.

Bring Back the Better Leveling System

The perk system in Fallout 4 was a step backward. It looked cool as a poster, but in practice, it removed the skill system entirely and made character progression feel less meaningful. The pre-Fallout 4 approach, used in Skyrim, Fallout 3, Oblivion, and earlier games, was better.

Having both skills that increased through use and perks that specialized your character created interesting progression. You got better at things by doing them, but you also made meaningful choices about how to specialize. The Fallout 4 system collapsed everything into perks, which made leveling feel more generic and reduced the sense of character development over time.

Go back to that earlier model. Let skills improve through use. Let perks modify and specialize those skills. Give us meaningful choices that define our character's identity rather than a system where everyone eventually unlocks everything.

The Skyrim Formula, But Better

Here's the thing: Skyrim worked. Despite its flaws, despite the bugs, despite the dated engine even at launch, it worked. The core experience of exploring a vast fantasy world, stumbling into dungeons and quests organically, and gradually becoming more powerful was compelling enough to keep millions of players engaged for over a decade.

TES VI doesn't need to reinvent the wheel. It needs to take what worked about Skyrim and enhance it. Better combat, sure. More reactive NPCs and better AI, absolutely. More varied dungeon design, please. Questlines with actual choices and consequences, yes. But keep the core formula of "go anywhere, do anything, discover the world at your own pace" that made Skyrim special.

Starfield felt like Bethesda trying to do something different and losing what made their games work in the process. Don't make that mistake again. Trust the formula that's kept people playing Skyrim for over a decade, just make it better in every way.

Tempering Expectations

I want to believe Bethesda can deliver on even half of this wishlist. I want The Elder Scrolls VI to be the game that reminds us why we fell in love with Bethesda's RPGs in the first place. But I'm also trying to be realistic. The Bethesda that made Skyrim might not be the Bethesda that's making TES VI. Studios change. Priorities shift. The games industry has changed a lot in the decade-and-a-half since Skyrim launched.

Maybe what I'm hoping for really is a pipe dream. Maybe we'll get another Starfield. Competent but uninspired, technically functional but creatively hollow. Or maybe, just maybe, Bethesda will surprise us all and deliver something special.

I'm cautiously optimistic. But I'm also prepared to be disappointed. Until we see actual gameplay, until we know what TES VI actually is, all we can do is hope and wait.

And maybe, just maybe, Bethesda is listening.