Kurt Kuhlmann probably knows what location we’ll be visiting when The Elder Scrolls 6 launches in approximately 100 years. Or at least, the former Elder Scrolls loremaster knows where Bethesda wanted to go before he left the company in 2023. But no, he’s not telling us.
“From when we were talking about it way back in the Fallout 4 timeframe,” he tells us, “there was a sort of consensus amongst a few people that were talking about it.”
He clarifies that he doesn’t know if that’s still the case, and that it wasn’t completely locked in—and obviously he’s been out of the loop for a couple of years. But he remembers it being an easy choice at the time.
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Kuhlmann, whose brain is absolutely filled with The Elder Scrolls knowledge, seems to sincerely have no idea what the story of the sixth entry is. “Because I haven’t been involved in that level of the story side of things since Skyrim,” he says.
Todd Howard initially promised Kuhlmann the lead designer role on TES6, after being co-lead on Skyrim. But then came Fallout 4, Fallout 76 and Starfield, and somewhere along the way Howard changed his mind. Kuhlmann’s hopes were dashed near the end of Starfield’s development, years after TES6 was announced in the teaser.
The implication is that Bethesda had barely even started to think about TES6 by the time it first teased the game, and that it was still extremely early days when Kuhlmann left the company.
Of course, this isn’t entirely surprising. Starfield sounds like it was a black hole for the developer’s resources, with everyone focused on Bethesda’s big interstellar gamble. But it does put into context just how ridiculous that brief trailer was: getting us all hyped for a game that, at the time, was just this vague idea being thrown around.
That said, Kuhlmann did have a story concept, where TES6 would have been like “The Empire Strikes Back”. Players could save the day in a broad sense, but the game would have ended with the Thalmor taking over Tamriel, setting up a high-stakes, dramatic clash in TES7.
So! We still have no idea where the next game will be set, though the most popular theory points to Hammerfell. High Rock gets thrown into the mix a bunch too. Overly-long YouTube videos and Reddit threads will fling mountains of ‘evidence’ at you, but the truth is that it’s all based on pure guesswork and a teaser that was created eight years ago.
We’re just gonna have to keep guessing, then.
