Bethesda’s former design director thinks The Elder Scrolls 6 will keep The Elder Scroll 5: Skyrim’s levelling up and progression system.
Bruce Nesmith, who was lead designer on Skyrim and senior designer on Starfield before leaving Bethesda in 2021, told MinnMax the highly anticipated sequel would “absolutely” continue the system. Nesmith no longer works at Bethesda, of course, so can’t guarantee these inclusions himself, but he was an influential and high-up figure at the developer just a couple of years ago.
Skyrim’s progression system is similar to that of other role-playing games such as Final Fantasy 2, where the player will level up specific skills when using items and abilities related to that skill. Using a bow and arrow levels up Archery, playing stealthily increases Sneak, and so on. Progressing in these individual skill trees will contribute to a larger experience bar that allows the player to level up fully.
“The whole magic system for Skyrim, I persuaded [Bethesda director and executive producer Todd Howard] to let me throw out the baby and the bathwater and let me restart from scratch, and he trusted me enough to do that. There will probably still be traces of that in [The Elder Scrolls 6],” Nesmith said.
“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 and things like that, there’ll be a bunch of new ideas thrown in, but I’m betting some of the stuff that I worked on will still survive to the new one.”
It’ll be years before fans find out for sure how the new game works, however, as thanks to Bethesda working on space epic Starfield, The Elder Scrolls 6 won’t arrive until 2028 at the earliest. That’ll put a minimum of around 17 years between it and Skyrim. No wonder fans are still regularly modding in new content and recreating Skyrim in the likes of Age of Empire.
The Elder Scrolls 6 was officially revealed in 2018, though Howard admitted earlier in 2023 that he “would’ve announced it more casually” in hindsight. The game is now in early development, at least.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.
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