After a week of only partially intended revelations about The Elder Scrolls 6, a reader is upset at the haphazard way the game is being unveiled.
We’ve been waiting so long for news about The Elder Scrolls 6 and when it finally came it’s hard to think of how they could have messed it up worse. This was Xbox’s big plan, as I understand it. Xbox boss Asha Sharma, who has openly admitted she knows very little about video games, went to visit Bethesda, who had planted 800 red flags in their law, and an inflatable rat, to protest the number of people that have been laid off at the company.
I don’t know what a person like Sharma thinks when she sees something like that. I don’t know if a corpo mind like hers is capable of empathy or regret, but she didn’t mention any of that publicly, even though her being there only amplified the bad publicity from it all, once everyone found out about it.
So then she gets a ‘live playthrough’ (presumably someone playing the game at her) of The Elder Scrolls 6 and she says: ‘The scale and grandeur are incredible. The story is even greater.’ Plus, she seemed to reveal the name of the game has eight letters in it, which made everyone think the previous rumour about it being called Sentinel is true.
We all know that making announcements in the most boring way possible has become a bit of a trend lately. I don’t know why, maybe they’re trying to save money on marketing, but what should have been a massive reveal of the name was, as usual, just a couple of tweets from people I’ve never heard of.
A former Bethesda dev confirmed the name was Sentinel and someone posted a graphic that showed that there’d been a hint to the name in Starfield. So why pay for a trailer to be made when you can have some guy on X just go, ‘Yes’ when someone asks if the game’s called Sentinel.
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The thing is, the name in The Elder Scrolls is very important, because it’s always of a place and that gives you a very clear idea of what the game’s going to be like, because it’s all set in the same fictional world that’s been around for decades.
Sentinel is an area in Hammerfell, where the rumours have always said the game is based, so we know we’re getting deserts and sea pirates, and a vaguely Middle Eastern look and feel to everything. That sounds great, but why did I have to learn that through a tweet (that could still be wrong, but probably isn’t) and a bunch of rumours?
Then let’s look at what Asha Sharma wrote. How long do you think she watched the game for? Half an hour or so? So how did she know the story was good? What does she know about the scale of open world games? It’s not a knock on her, I don’t think she’s done anything particularly wrong so far, apart from laying off thousands of people – but it’s obvious that was going to happen with or without her.
But I’d bet a lot of money that she just hung around for 20 minutes, listened to what some lackey told her about the game – including that it had a great story – and went home. It never occurred to her (or apparently anyone around her, because I doubt she actually wrote that tweet herself) that it would seem unlikely that anyone would get a good grasp on the story in such a short time.
Bethesda games aren’t exactly known for their dense plots. The story is usually just about the least interesting part of the game, which is all about exploration and discovery on your own terms, but I’m sure she doesn’t know that either.
So the game I’ve been looking forward to for over 10 years is finally revealed and in the worst way possible, with no trailer, no big event, and no one actually involved in making it to talk about it. I couldn’t be less hyped and the worst thing is I bet the real reason Sharma was there was to tell Bethesda to get a move on and get the game out ASAP or she’ll lay off more people. Which is definitely the sort of motivation you need to help improve the quality…
By reader Taylor Moon
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