“I mean, look, I think everybody knows why we announced it that way then.” Stay calm, I’ve got to get my dinner first. “We know some things we’re doing.” Please stop trying to jump on the bench. “It’s going to be a while yet.” Some of these are things I often have to say to my cat when the clock ticks to within an hour of feeding time. Some of them are things Todd Howard has said about The Elder Scrolls 6 in his latest bout of interview chatter about the RPG. He’s confirmed it’s running on a new version of the Creation Engine, but will also be a return to Bethesda’s “classic style”.

“I think in many ways Fallout 76 and Starfield are a little bit of a creative detour from that classic Elder Scrolls, Fallout, a Skyrim or a Fallout 3 or a Fallout 4, Oblivion, where you’re exploring a world in a certain way,” Todd the bod told Kinda Funny Games. “As we come back to Elder Scrolls 6 that we’re doing now, we’re coming back to that classic style that we’ve missed, that we know really really well.

“We’ve spent the last, you know, several years bringing Creation Engine 2, which powers Starfield, up to Creation Engine 3. that’s going to power Elder Scrolls 6 and beyond,” he continued. “Obviously we do all the rendering things. We’re really happy with the new stuff that we’re doing, but also [in terms of] world systems loading, how we bring things into the world, how we get that detail close to the camera immediately.” He added that there’s also still “a lot of innovation to be done” in terms of making the game’s world “feel like you are experiencing it for the first time” when you fire it up.

That last part I’m taking to mean that the game feels like a big leap compared to its predecessors and competition when you first fire it up, in the same way you could argue a game like Red Dead Redemption 2 did. What, I’d never seen horse balls rendered in such detail before, it was natural to feel a bit blown away. Describing Fallout 76 and Starfield as detours is also – fittingly – kinda funny, since it makes them sound a lot less like huge projects which have taken up the majority of the studio’s past decade. There’s also the fact plenty of folks view both games as navigational miscalculations which have sapped confidence in Bethesda’s ability to not only do what they did best with games like Skyrim again, but to take that formula forwards in a fashion that can compete with today’s top RPGs.

To be fair, The Elder Scrolls 6 ending up as a bit of a polarising game wouldn’t be too out of step with its beloved predecessors. Skyrim’s often criticised for having taken the simplifying of RPG elements too far in an undeniably successful pursuit of mass accessibility. Fallout 4 and Fallout 3 attract similar flak. Even Obsidian’s New Vegas is viewed by some people – who are wrong – as overhyped and far too buggy. Basically what I’m saying is that not even a return to this “classic style” with some technical advancement under the bonnet may be enough not to leave TES VI an unquestionable return to form of Bethesda when it comes out of the oven in the year 3027.