By Azura, is The Elder Scrolls 6 far away! With Starfield set to arrive near the end of the year, the sixth main entry in Bethesda’s iconic saga might as well not exist right now. Of course, we’re not short on massive open worlds – especially now that SSDs are taking over and rewriting what can be done when it comes to level design – but you just can’t fill that Skyrim-shaped hole, can you?
What makes The Elder Scrolls so captivating? Is it the wacky-but-epic fantasy setting? Is it the buggy nature of of all the games set in that world? Or does it just come down to the unique mix of flexible RPG systems and immersive sim DNA? Most veterans will argue it’s the latter. But we can’t reduce the series’ success to a perfectly calculated fusion of genres, because the games themselves are anything but rigid.
Skyrim undeniably set a new bar for open-world games back in 2011. That’s why everyone is still going on about it now. It got popular mostly because it implementated Radiant AI alongside the series’ staple procedural quests and traditional, hand-crafted storylines. And it had that Bethesda Game Studios patented world design, with those unforgettable morsels of bite-sized lore, too.
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