Starfield Is the Present and Future of Bethesda Game Studios…at Least for a While

After years of waiting, Starfield has finally arrived. I recently called it the most important launch for Xbox since at least Halo 5, and now it’s here and on your Xbox console or PC. I hope you enjoy it! But being the previews lead at IGN, it’s my job to live in the future; I’m always looking ahead to the next big thing. And the next big thing for Bethesda Game Studios isn’t The Elder Scrolls 6. At least, not for a while. The next big thing for Todd Howard and his team is still going to be Starfield! Let me explain.

Naturally, the bulk of BGS will move on to Elder Scrolls 6. In fact, we know that with Starfield shipped, the follow-up to Skyrim has completed pre-production and moved into full production. But for us, the players of Bethesda’s expansive games, Starfield will remain our focus for quite a long time. Like, a long time. This is for a couple of reasons.

First, not only is Starfield a gigantic game by any metric, offering hundreds of hours of role-playing adventure – including a high degree of replayability in which you can make different choices both for your character and out in the universe – but it’s also going to be supported by Bethesda for years (not months) to come. BGS has walked the walk on that with their previous RPGs; we’re going to get patches, content updates, DLC, and full-blown expansions for Starfield, further fleshing out and polishing the worlds the team has built.

And second, the fact is that modern AAA games take a very, very long time to build. Despite the advancement in tools available to developers, project durations are, by and large, getting longer, not shorter. Sure, The Elder Scrolls 6 may have been announced back in 2018 – before a single line of code had been laid down – but it’s going to take many years to get it done. Starfield took eight years, and while Todd Howard told me back in June that he hopes TES6 doesn’t take that long, the most logical prediction is that it’s going to be a five-year development cycle.

That might mean Starfield is the only BGS release we get in the Xbox Series X generation. The Elder Scrolls 6 is likely to target the next-generation Xbox that’s likely arriving around 2028 instead – perhaps even as a day-one launch game, as Oblivion was intended to be for the Xbox 360 before ending up shipping four months into the console’s lifecycle.

Also, given Howard’s well-earned preference to keep his franchises close to his chest – at least when it comes to the mainline entries (I see you, Fallout: New Vegas!) – and work primarily on one game at a time, it seems we’ll have to wait until after The Elder Scrolls 6 to get Fallout 5, per Howard himself in an interview with me last year. And while I wish Howard a lifetime of good health and hope he never has an itch to retire, given his age (reportedly 53) and that aforementioned preference to stay in the director’s chair and work on one big game at a time, it’s also possible that, no matter how successful Starfield is, we might never see a sequel to it. Or if we do, it’s genuinely 15-plus years away, your kids will be playing it on day one, and it could end up being Howard’s final game.

It’s strange to think about that kind of stuff, because we’ve never really had to, given how young the video game industry is as a whole. Almost none of our greatest creators have retired, let alone passed away (thank goodness!). Even Shigeru Miyamoto, though he doesn’t really personally direct games anymore, is only 70!

Anyway, the point is that, because of how Howard chooses to work – a choice he’s absolutely earned – and how long his kind of games take to make, Starfield is obviously the present for Bethesda Game Studios, but it’s also the future too, at least for a while. Fortunately, there’s a whole universe out there to explore.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.