Bethesda Clarifies No Elder Scrolls V Statement


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Last week at QuakeCon 09, Bethesda's Todd Howard was quoted as saying the company had "no current plans" for a fifth Elder Scrolls game. According to Bethesda, that's not what Howard said at all.

The developer's Pete Hines posted a statement on the Bethesda Blog today, clarifying Howard's comments regarding the future of the Elder Scrolls series.

That was not a direct quote from him. That was someone's interpretation of what he said. I know, I was there. At his QuakeCon talk he was asked when TESV is coming out and Todd replied, "Don't look for a new Elder Scrolls game in the near future." He also went on to say how much the franchise means to us and that it definitely will continue. He just wasn't going to provide any timeframe on "when." This should not be news to anyone that has been paying attention. Both Todd and I have said repeatedly that, of course, we're going to do another Elder Scrolls game. The last one was enormously popular. So was the one before that. You get the idea. So do we.

In other words, the fate of the series isn't in question, and it shouldn't be.

Hines goes on in his post to clarify statements Howard made about an Elder Scrolls MMO, pointing out that neither Todd nor anyone on Todd's team worked on MMOs, and when the studio that does work on them - ZeniMax Online - is ready to show what they are creating, they'll show it.

I for one am very glad to hear this. Before Elder Scrolls IV, I had never even played the series or even a Bethseda game! They definitely have me hooked so I hope they take their time and release something even better than IV.

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I hope there is an ES V. I've been playing Oblivion lately and it's just so vast, you forget how big it is compared to Fallout. I'm currently running around with 100% Chameleon and it's so much fun. By comparison, Fallout would be no where without VATS (imo).

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There is definitely a target audience that the game seems to just captivate so nicely. But I've come to figure out that I'm not part of this audience. I've tried to get into Morrowind and Oblivion. I've really really tried. In the end I just feel lost in a sea of emptiness. Maybe it is all just a reflection of myself. I feel the same emptiness when I try and read a novel.

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I was really annoyed about the original story, but when I realized that we're talking about people who run different companies (ZeniMax vs Bethesda), I finally understood that what we really had here was a failure in the original reporting, which is not shocking since certain sites seem to be in it for the headlines.

Previously Bethesda has indicated that they would like to launch Elder Scrolls 5 along with the next generation of consoles, so it's not entirely shocking that they wouldn't have started working on it in full force yet, since we still don't have a solid idea of when the next generation will launch (maybe 2012).

If they started today, they would still have three years to work on this game.

And I'm certain that they've got a team prototyping and concepting for new ES stuff constantly. That's their bread and butter.

The more interesting question right now is what they must have flipped into after Fallout 3. Bethesda's approach is that they want to have more than one IP so that they can rotate their teams. Development typically is in a couple of phases, you have the early development where a team gets the engine and framework up and running in coordination with the gameplay leads, and then you have the later stage development where you end up with a hundred people doing VO, textures, scripting, etc.

The normal approach somewhere like EA is to use contract people to beef up the team in that later stage of development and then lay them all off when the game ships. Bethesda has said that it prefers to have these people on staff, and then move them from one big project that's in full swing to the next one, and fill in part of the lull with DLC. We know they've shipped the last DLC on Fallout 3, we suspect that they haven't started developing Elder Scrolls 5 yet, so what the hell are they working on? We've got some unknown title there that logically might be shipping northern hemisphere fall of 2010 or spring of 2011. And this is in addition to Fallout: New Vegas which is at an external studio.

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:blush: I still haven't played Oblivion even though I can max it out on my laptop. I put it off because I was not sure which addons are the must haves since there are way too many mods to name that look great.

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Ah yes Oblivion, that fantastic game that performance I ruined by installing around 5 GB mods xD

10-15fps on a Radeon HD4850 512mb, 2.5ghz Quadcore and 3GB RAM...

Still it's fun, even if it's laggy^^

I just hope TES V will be atleast as modding friendly as Oblivion which I have no doubts about.

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Ah yes Oblivion, that fantastic game that performance I ruined by installing around 5 GB mods xD

10-15fps on a Radeon HD4850 512mb, 2.5ghz Quadcore and 3GB RAM...

Still it's fun, even if it's laggy^^

I just hope TES V will be atleast as modding friendly as Oblivion which I have no doubts about.

Don't think you have to worry about that one, Bethseda knows mods from top to bottom. :p

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Yeah... but if it is MMO, we won't be seeing many mods at all...

The MMO won't be coming from Bethesda. ZeniMax Online, yet another subsidiary of Bethesda and id's parent company develops MMOs. Bethesda does not develop MMOs.

The Bethesda name will be on the box because Bethesda is also the name of their publishing brand, but it is not the same studio that has been developing the Elder Scrolls games that we know and love despite their occasional rough edges.

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:blush: I still haven't played Oblivion even though I can max it out on my laptop. I put it off because I was not sure which addons are the must haves since there are way too many mods to name that look great.

TesNexus has a top 100 mods as voted by users. There's a few "unofficial patches" that fix a few bugs that even Bethsoft's patches don't fix as well.

Yeah... but if it is MMO, we won't be seeing many mods at all...

Uh, I think even WoW has mods.

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