The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel’s hardest boss will be Todd Howard – Reader’s Feature

This week’s news wasn’t really news (Bethesda)

As Bethesda finally confirms the name of The Elder Scrolls 6, a reader is dubious about its prospects without a major change in management.

This week we saw Bethesda announce that The Elder Scrolls 6 is called Sentinel. Most fans worked that out months ago, in large part thanks to a very unsubtle clue from Microsoft, so really we didn’t learn anything new. Especially since the trailer didn’t show anything except that sand was involved – but you’d know that already too, if you understood where Sentinel is in the world of the game.

That means in eight years we’ve been told absolutely nothing, except that Bethesda hadn’t even started work on it when they first announced it. Although that’s been pretty obvious for a while too.

I’m probably coming across as a bit cynical already. but I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Bethedsa. Oblivion and Skyrim are two of my favourite games ever, and I like Fallout 3 too, but while they were ahead of the game in the Xbox 360 era, they’ve been off the ball ever since.

Fallout 4 was okay, but it was worse than 3 and had no new ideas and some pretty terrible storytelling. Then you get into Fallout 76 and Starfield and it gets into real amateur hour stuff. I’m not going to beat a dead horse when it comes to Starfield but if that game hadn’t been made by Bethesda it would’ve scored much lower and been instantly forgotten. Although it has been pretty much forgotten now anyway, which is not what you usually expect of a Bethesda game.

The problem here, I feel, is Todd Howard. He’s been at the company for decades and insists on being the director on all the big games. I feel this is both why they take so long (a company the size of Bethesda should be able to make two things at once, but they never do) and why they’ve been getting worse with time.

It’s pretty obvious that Todd is his own biggest fan and that would be okay if he still had the juice, but I don’t think he does. He’s been doing this too long and he’s out of new ideas. But that’s okay, it happens. Someone with his experience should’ve moved away from being director a long time ago and concentrated on being a producer and training up younger talent.

That’s what happens at Nintendo, to use one obvious example. Shigeru Miyamoto is the most famous game developer in the world, but he hasn’t directed a game since Super Mario 64 in 1996. He constantly talks about training up younger developers and, well… the Zelda: Ocarina Of Time remake scores this week show you how well that’s going. Where they purposefully put younger, less experienced developers on the game to make sure they got a new perspective on it.

So what’s going on at Bethesda? The one time Todd wasn’t the director we got Fallout: New Vegas and he’s been sulking about that being everyone’s favourite ever since.

The Elder Scrolls 6 should’ve come out years ago and they barely seem to have started it. It also needs to completely distance itself from the other games, in terms of both tech and game design. Starfield was downright embarrassing in many areas, especially characters and dialogue, and that’s the stuff that’s pretty much the same across all their games.

The problem for them is Sentinel looks like it’s going to come out right around the same time as The Witcher 4. Bethesda still hasn’t made anything as good as The Witcher 3 and CD Projekt is actually still innovating, so there’s a very good chance Sentinel is going to look badly outdated the second it comes out. I hope I’m wrong but with Todd Howard in charge I have very little confidence.

By reader Cambor

At least Sentinel is a cool name (Bethesda)

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