It’s crazy that in 2017 there were ads on TV for a game that came out in 2011. Skyrim came to the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation VR last year and was once again a system seller for those two systems. I remember when the first Switch trailer aired, they had someone playing Skyrim. People freaked out more over that than the new Mario game they showed!

Since releasing it has sold around 30,000,000 copies and is the number 12 best selling game of all time as of now. Who knows what kind of numbers it will have when we get near the end of 2018! So it’s safe to say that people go nuts over these games when they come out and even in the years to follow. Especially the modding community. I think Skyrim might be the most modded game in gaming history at this point. There are thousands of them and even an entirely new area on PC.

This list is going to focus on some of the rumors going on around about the next installment of The Elder Scrolls series. There aren’t many concrete details since the devs aren’t really talking about it much other than saying that there will be another one, but even a simple phrase like that can lead to rumors. So none of these rumors are necessarily fact, but that doesn’t mean that some won’t happen either. Who knows, some of these might actually happen and that that would be awesome!

25 New Engine, Who Dis?

The Creation Engine was developed in 2011 for Skyrim, and that has been the open world engine that Bethesda has used for all of their games. The point of the engine was to give the games a more realistic world and have things move naturally. The engine does work as intended, but there are some pretty major bugs that came with it. Dragons would start flying backward or characters would teleport around the place as you talked to them. This actually still goes on in Skyrim: Special Edition.

The engine is good, but needs an update.

A strong rumor about the next Elder Scrolls game is that they are developing a brand new engine, and that’s why it’s taking so long. I don't think they have to make a new engine for the next game, but the fans would be happy if they did.

24 A Horse Is A Horse, Of Course

Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim were all huge games and going on foot took forever so you could buy a horse and ride to where you needed to go. You could actually ride dragons in Skyrim by using one of the shouts or just use mods. And that was all fine, since the games were set in a medieval-type world and horses were the main type of transportation back then. But Elder Scrolls Online came out in 2014 and let you have different mounts.

It’s typical of an MMO to have different mounts, like in World of Warcraft, so it wasn’t surprising to see them do that but it did get the community interested in having them in the mainline games. Cause come on, how cool would it be to ride a sabertooth around the world in the next game? I’ll answer that, very cool!

23 Say What?

Now, I know that most people feel that quality means more than quantity. But when playing RPG games, that argument can almost be thrown out the window in certain areas. When Skyrim came out, it had around 60,000 unique lines of dialogue and that was a ton at the time! Well, Fallout 4 launched with over 111,000 lines of dialogue in the game, and that’s about double!

And we'll likely see more in this Elder Scrolls game.

So, a rumor has been going around that Bethesda wants to have the dialogue king be an Elder Scrolls game again, and the new game may have even more than Fallout 4. So that would mean the game would have like 120,000 lines of unique dialogue, and that’s ridiculous. That could be the case though, as we will touch on in a later entry.

22 More Meat

Huge open-world games like Skyrim are most known for their side content, seeing as that is the majority of what you're doing. And a lot of the side stuff in those games are awesome, some even being just as good or even better than the main story line. Having said that, not all of the side quests are good or even worth doing. The rumor is that Bethesda wants to make most of, if not all of, the side stuff mean more in the next game.

In Skyrim you could join all the guilds without anyone really caring. Now, that did make it easy to see all the content in one playthrough, but that didn’t make sense in the world. Like if you join the Stormcloaks then the Imperials should see you as an enemy, but that wasn't the case.

21 A Whole New World

The Elder Scrolls games have been around a while and have had some huge areas to explore around Tamriel. But the bigger places are becoming scarce. If you look at a map of Tamriel then you'll see that we’ve already been to Morrowind, Cyrodiil (where Oblivion took place), and Skyrim. So that leaves Hammerfell and Black Marsh as the last two large areas to have a game set.

The rumors have leaned more in the Hammerfell direction to set the next game in.

But another one is about going outside of Tamriel completely, but I’m not sure that one has legs. Cause where would it be set at that point? The moon or a crazy Borderlands world? If they did that, then all the games wouldn't connect like they do now and that would probably throw everything off.

20 “Get In, Loser, We’re Going Shopping”

It kinda seems like every game that comes out lately has some form of multiplayer in it or at least a Battle Royale mode! Now I don’t see an Elder Scrolls game with any kind of Battle Royale mode but ever since The Elder Scrolls Online came out fans have been thinking the next game may have some multiplayer in it.

It would be the first game in this mainline series, or even Fallout, to have true multiplayer in it. I would think that it would be more co-op missions than anything though. Unless they have some kind of arena where you can fight and test out who has the better gear and weapons. Or like… dragon battles! I think most people would be down with something like that, and Bethesda has a sense of humor about their games.

19 In The Before Time

Skyrim was the 5th numbered Elder Scrolls game, but that doesn’t really mean a ton in that universe. All the games are stand alone games but they do share a connected world. Like you’ll hear murmurs about other parts of the land from people even if you can’t go there but there isn't an ongoing story to the series.

So the rumor of the next game taking place before all the others might be extra tricky to pull off.

My guess would be maybe having settlers going to Tamriel for the first time and settling there, but that sounds super boring, so... Unless it took place when the dragons ruled the place like they talked about in Skyrim and have it directly connect to that game. We’ll touch more on connecting to Skyrim later on, though. Not sure about this rumor, but that’s why rumors exist I suppose.

18 Good Plan, Great Plan

You remember going into E3 2015 and hearing all the Fallout 4 rumors and Todd Howard came on the stage and dropped not just the game but the release date? Wasn’t that awesome? How about if he just came out this year and did it with the next Elder Scrolls game? That would be awesome! Well, there’s a rumor going around that he’s gonna do just that this year at the Bethesda show.

I would argue that the Elder Scrolls games are a little bigger than the Fallout games but not by much, so him doing that would be nuts! Fallout 4 did get announced in May and came out in November so it gave people plenty of time to get the pre-orders in for the collector's edition. I would personally love at least a trailer this year!

17 It’s Coming Right For Us!

Last year Skyrim came out for the PlayStation VR and the entire game was playable in VR. Now, I can't imagine playing a 100 hour RPG totally in VR, but here and there would be cool and honestly more impressive than anything. They actually have a PSVR bundle that comes with Skyrim, and that’s nuts that an old game like that is still a system selling in 2018.

So since that happened there are some whispers that the next game will also be fully playable in VR.

Resident Evil 7 was fully playable in VR the day it came out, so it has happened with a big game before. I would think it would be hard to make a huge game like that with a new engine run smoothly in VR. But hey, maybe it can. I’d be surprised if this came true though.

16 You’re Not The Chosen One

The past games have focused their main stories around the playable character being this once in a lifetime chosen one. In Oblivion you were the only one who could close Oblivion gates and in Skyrim, you were the Dragonborn. There’s a rumor that you might not be that in the new game but maybe chasing it instead. It would be more like Morrowind in that regard.

That might take some of the power fantasy out of it if they go that way but it would also be nice to get back to basics with a story. The Elder Scrolls games have always been political and it would be cool to maybe be a character that is more a part of that. Not like sitting in on debriefings or anything like that, but have more control over the land and what happens there. We’ll touch on this later.

15 Pick One

We touched on this a few entries ago with the more fleshed out side quests, but let’s talk specifically about the guilds. There have been quite a few guilds over the past few games and if you play on consoles there have been achievements/trophies tied it joining each one. In Skyrim, you could join them all and it was no big deal to the way people looked at you. But there are rumors that might change in the next game.

Once you join one guild, you have to stay with that one or leave it to join another.

And if you come into contact with members of the rival guild then they will attack you on the spot. That would give the world a more realistic feel to it but it would require trophy/achievement hunters to make several characters.

14 Lookin' Good, Shorty

Playing through Skyrim: Special Edition made me realize how dated the character models look in that game. They still look fine, but in a post Fallout 4 world they could look a lot better! This one isn’t so much a rumor but more of an "it’s going to happen." At this point, Fallout 4 is over 2 years old. The characters looked great in it and I’d imagine by the time the next Elder Scrolls game comes out they’ll look even better than that.

The lip-syncing is the big thing to me. The dialogue is so good in Skyrim, but man the lips don't even get close to matching the words. It’s like playing a Final Fantasy game and they didn’t go back and sync the lips to English and just left them speaking Japanese. I have all the confidence in the world they will look great in the next game… hopefully.

13 I Remember You

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor came out in 2014 and introduced a new enemy system called the nemesis system. If you haven’t played it, it basically is a system where the enemies remember you and get stronger the more they end you. Most people thought every game would copy that system since Mordor won a few game of the year awards, but no one really did.

Having a system like that in an Elder Scrolls game would basically make the next game feel/play totally different.

It did make Mordor a little hard sometimes when you perished from the same guy like 4 times and he was powered up. But it made the gameplay super engaging. I’m not sure if the people at Bethesda have even considered using those mechanics, but it would be interesting.

12 Is This Fallout 3?

I am a fan of main characters perishing in really well-told stories. Video games have rarely done it because they want to allow you to still play after the credits roll, but some have done it and still let you play. I’m about to spoil a few games that are older at this point but still wanted to let you know. Fallout 3 and Red Dead Redemption are great examples of how to handle that. I’ll point out that Fallout 3 did it well once it added the DLC.

Doing that in the next Elder Scrolls game would be interesting and would need a strong story to pull it off. Having your character build up to overcome something epic and sacrifice him/herself in the end would be good! They could even have you come back in the first DLC and make something original… oh, wait.

11 I Rule This Land

Jarls in the Elder Scrolls universe pretty much rule over the different cities in the games. You normally have to do quests for them to gain their trust to buy a house or open up all the things you can do in a city. They even have a crown and everything.

So the rumor is that you might play or be able to become a Jarl in Elder Scrolls 6.

It would lead into taking more of a political playstyle in the game if you could be one. Or it could be more like Dragon Age: Inquisition where you lead a large group of people and still the main line of offense. It could be like owning properties in a GTA or early Assassin's Creed games where you get money from owning stuff. And you would get a throne!

10 You Know How To Use That Thing?

So this is more of an “I want this” more than it is a rumor. I literally love everything about a game like Skyrim. The world is gorgeous, the music is some of the best I’ve ever heard, and the voice acting is amazing! The combat is by far the weakest aspect of those games to me. It does the job fine, but sometimes it feels like I’m just randomly swinging a 2x4 at enemies until they go down.

I would love to see more of a Dragon Age/Mass Effect approach to combat for the next game. And I know that is totally changing things up, but the series needs it in my opinion. The shooting in Fallout 4 felt so much better than the other games and here’s hoping that it feels good in Elder Scrolls 6 to swing a sword.

9 Side Content

I’m a pretty big fan of not having to have every game in a series be a numbered sequel. Fallout: New Vegas is still my favorite game in that series because that game took risks and they paid off to me. So there’s a rumor about the next Elder Scrolls game not being a numbered sequel and maybe being a New Vegas-type game.

It would be cool to have the game set at the same time as another game but deal with the issues from another perspective.

Like how did Morrowind deal with the dragons coming back in Skyrim and how did it affect them, if at all? It would be cool to explore some stories like that and make a whole game out of it. Or even not have it connect to the other games at all and totally be its own thing. I just don’t want a Kingdom Hearts situation and have 10 years between numbered games.

8 Want A Nuka Cola?

You know that rumor that has been going around that The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad take place in the same universe? As crazy as that sounds, there’s a part of me that wants that to be true just because how cool would that be! Well, there have been rumors about Fallout and The Elder Scrolls games taking place in the same universe!

It would be cool to see something that resembled the power armor from Fallout in the next Elder Scrolls game or some hint of technology being in the land somewhere. It might make more sense to have something in the next Fallout game since they take place after. Or some type of time travel aspect could be in a crazy easter egg in Elder Scrolls, maybe if the game isn't a numbered sequel they could do something like that.

7 Bigger Isn’t Always Better, But It Usually Is

It kinda seems like open world games keep getting bigger and some of them have less to do in them. When Oblivion came out, it was fun to just wander around and look at the gorgeous world. But putting things to do in these worlds has become very important.

So there’s a rumor that Elder Scrolls 6 might be the biggest game Bethesda has ever made.

Skyrim is a huge game, and it’s one of the smaller areas of Tamriel. Hammerfell looks huge when looking at a map, and if the game is set there then it very well could be the biggest game ever made. I just hope it’s like Skyrim or even Breath of the Wild and they put a ton of stuff to do in it. Or maybe even make it like The Witcher 3. That game nailed huge world with a ton to do!

6 I’ll Take That One, And That One Over There

Skyrim had a ton of different weapons that you could get and craft, but I always thought they could've used more. Having played the Dark Souls games and seeing the variety of weapons in those games, the next Elder Scrolls game really needs to add some more weapon variety.

It would be cool to see weapons like katanas, halberds, and spears. Most melee-based games have weapons like that, and bringing them in would be nice. They actually did have some of those in the previous games, and I never understood why they took them out. I do like that some weapons have enchantments on them, and it would be cool to see more of that. Having named, one of a kind weapons would be something interesting to bring in as well.