Sound the alarms, Bethesda boss Todd Howard has spoken a bit about The Elder Scrolls 6 in a recent interview. While he’s keeping a lot close to his chest, a few details about the game’s lengthy development were revealed that should soothe the eager RPG fan out there.

Speaking to IGN, Howard was first asked about what he wants and needs from the next generation of console hardware, given the fact Bethesda is developing its big new RPG The Elder Scrolls 6 for it.

To this, Howard responded: “We’ve been fortunate that we see that stuff really, really early and it’s tricky for, let’s say console manufacturers – whoever they are – they have to take a very long view of development when you sort of tape out on a chip, how you make that call with timing and cost, and then what does it look like five or 10 years after that? So it’s a really, really tricky kind of thing to maneuver both technically and business-wise when anyone is making a system like that where you’re going to lock it down.”

“Our approach has always been – and because fortunately we’ve had such a PC audience… to cast a wide net technically, to both take advantage of the very high end, but allow the game to scale down and handle [low-spec],” Howard expanded. “You look at handhelds now, you look at how popular those are becoming, and I think you’re going to see more lower-powered devices where, say, you’re traveling and you want to underclock that thing in a certain way; we want our games to be able to handle that.”

Howard also spoke about his newfound consciousness around the timing of game reveals, to which IGN appropriately asked about the 2018 Elder Scrolls 6 reveal. To this Howard remarked: “Just pretend we didn’t announce it. Doesn’t exist”.

When prompted to elaborate on the matter, Howard mused on the ongoing challenge of keeping fans of multiple projects informed: “If you look back at the Fallout 76/Starfield/Elder Scrolls 6 announcements [from Bethesda’s E3 2018 showcase], that was really about informing our audience, because when you’re going to do something new, everyone’s going to ask, ‘What about Elder Scrolls 6? What about a single-player game?’ And we did it that way, but it’s not my preference,” Howard said.

“And I will say, we struggle with the balance because our fans want to know. They’re amazing, and are asking like, ‘Well, what are you doing?’ And, well, we’re working on a lot of stuff. I think if you look at the scale of our studio, we could have 10 times the amount of people to do all this. We’re doing so much and it’s just finding the right times to tell everybody about it. Look at Starfield today; I feel like the Starfield audience has been like, ‘What about us?’ And we had sort of a balance with, like, ‘Hey, the end of the Fall was for Fallout the TV show,’ with everything we were doing. And we knew that we were just going to save the Starfield stuff to give it its spotlight during this time. But yeah, it’s a balance.

Howard was also asked about the progress on Elder Scrolls 6’s development, to which he joked “nothing” and “never heard of it”. As a follow up, the Bethesda director was prompted on what lessons learned from Starfield’s development have been brought over to The Elder Scrolls 6.

This, it turns out, Howard was keen to answer. “I want to be careful with what I say about The Elder Scrolls 6, too, because I think everybody wants to know and we want to find a time that we’ll obviously talk about that in depth. But the one thing I’d say is really in the tech as we’re going to Creation Engine 3, again, the team has done a really incredible job at not just pushing what it is, but how it’s integrated into our development cycle.” He added that the studio is “in a fortunate position where the builds of the game are really consistently working every day,” before catching himself. “Well, not every day, but we’ve had more days than we’ve ever had where the build is good, there’s new stuff in it, and we can play it.

“And when you’re making those kinds of technical changes as we talked about, often you’re pulling the rug out from under the team who’s making content. [You don’t want] to be like, ‘Okay, that doesn’t work for this period of time, you’re going to have to wait until we get that working again.’ And we’ve done a really good job of managing that on this game. And with Starfield, we struggled there for a number of years in terms of when we went through the engine change.”

The Elder Scrolls 6 may still be a long ways off, and is almost certainly not coming out in 2026. But still, one hopes this little bit of insight will keep the carnivorous hordes of Bethesda fans sated for a while. One can hope!