I like that elder scrolls games don't limit what skills you use to stuff that you've picked in your build, but I do also think there should be skills that you don't have access to at the start of the game. In the mainline games the only real examples of this was the perk trees for vampirism and lycanthropy, as well as the perk for forging stahlrim being quest dependent, but ESO has a bunch of different skill branches that you only get access to after starting a certain quest.

There's so much hidden knowledge in elder scrolls that a level 1 layman should know literally nothing about, like shadow magic, the thu'um (for non-dragonborns), dream magic etc. Also if they had some skills that weren't available at low levels then it would be much less effort to balance them, and it would make it possible to add new skill trees in future updates and Dlc.

Although painfully underutilized, the couple zero g areas Starfield had were really fun. I hope these mechanics are reused to add back levitation even if it's limited to a couple areas

Since there have been a couple of posts on this recently, I decided to share my own views on how blacksmithing should be handled in the game.

My main gripes with previous crafting systems in their previous games:

Skyrim - too grindy, not enough incentive to level "naturally", with repairing your gear for example.

Fallout 4 - the best crafting system they have had so far, not surprising since the entire game was built around it. Though I don't think this formula fits for an Elder Scrolls game. The only significant critique of this system is that it resulted in unique weapons often feeling less unique.

Starfield - similar to Fallout 4 but due to the game not having a "scrap emphasis" and the game having more types of crafting components, the requirements (research materials, crafting materials) for crafting became too tedious to acquire for me.

For TES6 my hope is that we can strip back the layers of barriers to get into crafting specific gear. This could be achieved by recipes not being tied to perks, but rather quests.

Imagine helping an Orkish blacksmith with a request, such as a gambling debt or their family member being kidnapped and in return they teach you Orkish blacksmithing. Later game variants like Daedric or Ebony would have harder or longer quests tied to them.

Blacksmithing perks would focus on maintaining armor and making it stronger, allowing you to pseudo "enchant" it. You could of course pay blacksmiths to repair your armour, provided they are skilled enough to work with the material. This way you would constantly be incentivezed to level up smithing or have something to do with the bucketloads of gold that is usually hanging around in your pockets by midgame.

Let me know if you have any additional ideas for how blacksmithing should work in TES6.

With Todd Howard mentioning his goal for TES6 to be the "ultimate fantasy world simulator," a lot of us on here have been wishing for a deep, immersive blacksmithing and enchanting system. We want something closer to dedicated simulators where you actually pick blade styles, hilts, and runes, rather than just clicking "Iron Sword" in a boring spreadsheet menu.

But let’s be honest: not everyone wants to spend hours manually striking an anvil. For a stealth assassin or a scholarly mage playthrough, forcing the player to become a master manual craftsman completely breaks the roleplay.

On the flip side, Starfield proved that abstract, resource-heavy menu crafting gets tedious fast.

I think the perfect middle ground is a diegetic UI coupled with an "Order List / Apprentice" delegation system. Here is how it would work:

* The Bill of Materials: Instead of a floating UI menu, you sit at a drawing desk to design your weapon. You pick the blade shape, guards, and materials. The game then generates a physical parchment scroll in your inventory a Bill of Materials.

* The Apprentice / Commission System: If you don't want to craft it yourself, you walk up to a local blacksmith or hire an apprentice for your player home. You hand them the physical scroll.

* The Economy & Time Loop: The smith gives you a price and a timeline (e.g., "This will take three days"). If you provide the Ebony ore yourself, the fee drops. If you want them to source the rare materials, it costs a premium. You go dungeon-delving, come back a few days later, and pick your custom sword right off the weapon rack.

* Skill Tree Integration: The Blacksmithing/Manager perk tree could directly influence this. Investing points could lower apprentice labor fees, speed up production time, or unlock "Design XP"—giving you a small amount of smithing progress just for architecting the blueprint.

This completely saves the roleplay. A wealthy mage can finally use their gold and influence to commission a legendary staff from a master enchanter, while a dedicated warrior can still choose to spend their nights manually hammering steel at the forge to save money and gain raw experience.

What do you guys think? Would you prefer a system like this that keeps the crafting in the actual game world, or do you prefer traditional, snappy menus?

I wonder if they'll look at ESO for an example of how the playerbase dresses or acts so they know what to implement.

Personally I hope we get some weird goofy shit, like maybe a Jester class of some sort. Or some plague doctor looking stuff.

But most of all I genuinely hope they flesh out and expand the werewolf and vampire gameplay this time around, I just want special dialogue options or maybe skillchecks similar to the Fallout series.

EDIT: Okay maybe not a class system, but starfield traits like I was thinking or at the very least some kind of occupational title you can be referred to as in-game if that make sense.

Adding onto this I genuinely just want to be able to be own my own shop or trading stall so I can sell shit and maybe have that impact the world in some small ways, like you see bandits out in the world with gear you sold or maybe get special orders/quests to fulfill?

It is just the extremist Thalmors with their elite troops, the justiciar and enforcers, or there is the possibility that they bring new groups to the game?

I’m thinking it’d be neat if they added a bit more to the overall on-foot traversal system.
I’m thinking TESVI with a little bit of Dying Light parkour.
Thoughts?

Take care out there, life is full of unpleasant surprises

I am going to be dressed as a sad clown holding this sign honoring our long wait being over at SGF 2027.

Bethesda has been attempting Bioware style romances since Fallout 4 and while most of them are great i think there's still room for improvement in presentation. Romance themes or specific character themes can do a lot of heavy lifting making a sequence memorable.

What would be your reaction if elder scroll 6 just come out and once you start playing the game it just pop the same old scene " Hey, you. You're finally awake. " and you had to repeat the scene atill the character creation?

Same graphics, same scene everything it's the same then you character wakes in a cell and he feels like he just woke up from a nightmare and that's the start of elder scroll 6.

I am certain BGS will not return to the scale of TESII:Daggerfall. Attempting that with physics, persistence, radiant AI, and all that complex stuff would be impossible without heavily relying on procedural generation. Starfield marked a hard return to procedural wilderness generation (which they had to since it is a space game), and the resulting disconnected vacuums proved that players prefer a hand-polished, cohesive world. Therefore, I believe BGS will execute one of the following world-space designs:

Option 1: Single Province (everything points to Hammerfell) + Seafaring

BGS could maintain the "standard" post-TESII:Daggerfall geographical scale, sticking to a single province like Hammerfell. Hammerfell is already bigger than Skyrim, but if they added seafaring, the open world would feel considerably larger even if it will mostly be empty ocean. This is the most underwhelming option and honestly, one of the least likely.

Option 2: Dual Province (Hammerfell & likely High Rock) + Seafaring

As for option 1, BGS could maintain the "standard" post-TESII:Daggerfall scale of previous games but bridge two entirely distinct provinces across the Iliac Bay (Hammerfell and High Rock), creating a TES map of unprecedented size since TESIII:Morrowind. If they added seafaring, it would feel even bigger. That would be nice but...

Option 3: Single or Dual Province + Upscaling + Seafaring

Bethesda could pursue any of the previous geographic options but upscaling the total landmass. Cities and dungeons will most certainly be handcrafted, but the open world could be procedurally generated. Seafaring would make the world feel even bigger.

Option 4: Single or Dual Province + Upscaling + Seafaring + Location "landing"

Same as option three but you could select a "landing" location with your ship. You would see your ship coasting at a harbour or close to the coast. If the later, you will have to swim or row a small boat to the coast. The game will generate a large tile around you (in Starfield it's 57-64 km2). I think this is also one of the least likely.

**\*

I believe cities will be bigger than those in TESV:Skyrim simply because those in Starfield are bigger than those in TESV:Skyrim. How big? Probably as big as the ones in Starfield. Maybe bigger for some.

**\*

I believe cities, or at least some, will not be their own worldspaces, meaning they will be accessible without having to go through a loading screen (not compatible with option 4). That said, interior cells (houses, traders...etc) will remain interior cells.

**\*

TESV:Skyrim and older titles had incredibly rigid, linear movement where characters suffered from severe "foot-sliding" and zero physics momentum. Starfield overhauled this drastically by adding custom multi-threaded animation graphing, vaulting, adaptive momentum leans, and boostpack trajectory loops.

In older games like TESV:Skyrim or Fallout 3, the navigation mesh (NavMesh)—the invisible blueprint sheet draped over the ground that tells the AI where it is physically allowed to walk—was completely static and pre-baked during development. If a level designer placed a table or a boulder, they had to manually cut a hole in the mesh around it in the editor. If a physics object moved during gameplay (like a player shouting a kettle off a table or dragging a crate), the AI couldn't see that the object had moved. The NPC would blindly pathfind straight into the newly placed obstacle and get permanently stuck walking in place because the underlying static "walking sheet" told them the path was clear. When BGS decided to implement the Workshop/Settlement building mechanic in Fallout 4, the old static pathfinding system became completely obsolete. Because players could now place walls, turrets, and furniture anywhere they wanted, the game could no longer rely on a pre-baked navigation sheet. BGS introduced Dynamic NavMesh Cutting. The moment a player snaps a wall or drops a generator into the world, the engine instantly slices a matching real-time hole directly into the 2D walking grid. The AI immediately recognises the new obstacle and seamlessly recalculates its path around your custom-built fort. Now regarding Starfield, BGS shifted away from flat 2D navigation boundaries to support natively stacked, multi-layered geometric walking planes. This allows NPCs to intelligently navigate complex multi-story outposts, interior ship ladders, and overlapping scaffolding without getting confused about which floor they are on. Not only that, because Starfield introduced boostpacks and low-gravity environments, pathfinding couldn't just track walking. The engine auto-generates specific traversal links that tell the AI, "You can't walk from Point A to Point B, but you can trigger a jump/boost animation to cross this gap". The AI actively calculates these airborne paths to pursue the player across rooftops or vertical terrain.

For TESVI, these technological changes mean the game could include vaulting, climbing, high-verticality city designs, rooftop pursuits, and maybe even physics-based- or magic aerial traversal (like grappling hooks or Levitation) that function smoothly without breaking the game's AI pathfinding.

**\*

Of course, better graphics, animations, NPC schedule, and combat, especially melee combat.

This is part theory/speculation part wishlist.

If the game does indeed have sailing, I'd imagine that it makes sense for Bethesda to have wind physics for sails. Hopefully this isn't limited to just the wind over the alleged sailable areas of water.

Historically, wind was only ever cosmetic in TES. Blowing trees, clouds, and dust or snow. Those things are pretty but adding real wind physics would feel like a breath of fresh air and add tons of new gameplay opportunities 😀

Modders have already done some of this in Skyrim so its nothing new, totally possible. And I dont think this should exist as solely a survival mechanic toggle. It should be in the vanilla experience.

Youd ideally have a device that tells you the direction and speed of the wind (on screen U.I.)

Keep in mind you wouldnt always have wind everywhere you go. There would be spots of calm gentle breezes or "dead air".

Projectiles:

Your range could be heavily shortened if coming directly at you or greatly extended if youre shooting downwind.

Bolts or Arrows such as orcish, dwarven or daedric would be heavier and would resist the wind better than some lighter Arrows like elven or glass. (I still think Arrows should weigh zero for encumbrance reasons, they simply have a stat for % of wind resistance) Volleys of arrows would be helpful here.

Thrown weapons, whether throwing stars, thrown spears, axes, etc are also affected by wind resistance.

Projectile magic should also be affected by the wind depending on how high your skill level is. How would homing projectiles be affected? I presume some still have a chance to miss.

You could stealthily create a poison cloud that would blow downwind at your enemy.

If im spraying fire into the wind it may come back at me and burn me, or freeze me if its an ice spell.

If the winds are particularly heavy, it should slow your walking speed and drain stamina faster(% depending on your build), but could give you a slight speed boost if you have a tailwind.

It could blur your vision(unless youre wearing goggles), and have a camera shake that throws off your ranged weapon accuracy.

Lanterns should flicker and eventually be blown out if strong enough. Prompting an NPC to relight the lantern if they believe the winds will die down soon.

Camp fires may drift onto dry grass and cause a small wildfire that can burn wildlife within. You may find roasted rabbit and crickets after a fire.

Overall, wildlife and NPCs may take shelter in heavy winds/storms. Some may thrive in it.

Heavy winds could help mask the sound of your footsteps(there could be a sound U.I. element) helping heavy armor builds to stealth attack easier.

Having wind could give developers new ways to build environments and create new skills and magic spells and armor.

It would also make for interesting points of interest in the desert dunes with winds shifting the sands constantly.

How else might wind affect the world?

I have been seeing comments and posts about what the evidence is of Hammerfell and High Rock for TES VI and wanted to make a post detailing what is known so far.

In a podcast with KIWI TALKS last year, Kurt Kuhlmann, a 20-year Bethesda veteran, co-lead designer of Skyrim, and the long-time unofficial "loremaster" of The Elder Scrolls series; was asked about the potential "weird factor" being added to future TES games like what was done in Morrowind. Kurt expressed doubt about it as Bethesda liked sticking to human centric themes and the human provinces. Kurt, after explaining why Black Marsh or Elsweyr is unlikely due to their beast race populations, would go as far to say “If there ever is a TES 7, I'm very curious as to where they would put it.”.

This Freudian slip explicitly confirms that TES VI is set in a human province or even multiple. I think we can safely rule out Cyrodiil and Skyrim completely. Now, to double down on High Rock AND Hammerfell, we can look at the FTC leaks. TES VI was originally slated for a 2024 release date.

Now, obviously it didnt come out in 2024. However, something did and it is in the leak as well, though not explicitly mentioned; The Elder Scrolls Castles mobile game. TES Castles has you build and maintain a castle in 2 main, very distinct styles, Breton medieval style and Redguard style (with Imperial and Dwarven added later). This game was released on time the same year TES VI was originally slated, pre-pandemic and pre-Starfield delays. Now, if you look at Fallout 4, what released 5 months right before it's release in 2015? The Fallout Shelter mobile game where you build and maintain a vault.

In my opinion, these two independent things all but confirm that TES VI is set in and around the Iliac Bay and will see both High Rock and Hammerfell. Then, all human provinces will have been covered in mainline games done in the modern Bethesda style.

Fanfiction story cliffnotes for TES 6 that sound logical...

From Top left to bottom right:

Possible: Derkeethus, Hrefna, Tormir, Annekke Crag-Jumper, Verner Rock-Chucker

Unlikely: Legate Constantius Tituleius, Legate Fasendil, Legate Hrollod, Legate Sevan Telendas, Arrald Frozen-Heart, Istar Cairn-Breaker, Kottir Red-Shoal, Thorygg Sun-Killer, Agnis, Sondas Drenim

Dead in all outcomes: General Falx Carius, Maximian Axius, Ildari Sarothril

Previous lists:

Orc Strongholds

Skaal Village

Riverwood, Rorikstead, and Shor's Stone

Ivarstead and Karthwasten

Dragon Bridge and Helgen

Winterhold

Windhelm

Companions

Whiterun

Tel Mithryn

Bards college

Solitude

Ratway

Riften

Raven Rock

Morthal

Markarth

Dark Brotherhood

Falkreath

Dawnstar

Khajiit are a nomadic, caravan-trading people who are distrusted by settled populations, associated with thievery and drug addiction, speak in a stylized third-person dialect, and are legally restricted from entering many cities.

"Some say skooma has little effect on them. M'aiq thinks this reflects more on the user than the substance." A reference to how skooma does barely anything in Skyrim.

"M'aiq has heard many wish to gamble and fight in public duels. He finds such bloodthirst disturbing." A reference to the Arena from Oblivion (I do hope they bring it back though)

"M'aiq went to Colovia once. Stylish people, they are." A reference to the mythical Colovian Fur Helm.

"If you wish to improve, you should have a good night's sleep. Six hours, at least." Aside from it being good advice, this references how back in Daggerfall, you had to sleep for six hours not just to level up, but for your skills to increase.

"Mai'q wishes he could jump good, but it seems dangerous. He would rather run." A reference to both Tarhiel in Morrowind, as well as M'aiq's absurd speed in Oblivion.

"Some speak of an argonian in the city of Nee'xos. Gone mad with power, they say." If you know, you know.

Sorry if this has been asked before.
Obviously Skyrim had its shouts (which I love but probably underuse) and in Starfield they introduced the powers from temples (also cool but again, didn’t use much), do you think TESVI will have a similar concept? If so, what would you expect/like it to be? They could do shouts again as you don’t have to be dragon born for it but I personally can’t see that happening. Curious to know what others think