The Elder Scrolls 6 has ‘incredible’ grandeur according to Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, as she tries to divert attention from a giant inflatable rat outside Bethesda’s offices.
Despite being announced eight years ago, The Elder Scrolls 6 is still a distant proposition.
All signs suggest the sequel to 2011’s The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim will launch in 2028 at the earliest. However, there’s now concern it could take even longer, after Microsoft laid off staff at developer Bethesda Game Studios’ and across ZeniMax at large.
Despite those concerns, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has reassured fans that the sequel is well underway – and apparently she’s already seen it in action.
Sharma paid a visit to Bethesda Game Studios this week, where she was treated to a ‘live playthrough’ of The Elder Scrolls 6. That phrase is, perhaps purposefully, ambiguous and doesn’t make it clear whether she played it or watched someone else.
In a post on X, Sharma shared her very-not-biased thoughts, while teasing the subtitle for the sequel with eight asterisks.
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‘Live playthrough of The Elder Scrolls 6: ******** this morning,’ she wrote. ‘The scale and grandeur are incredible. The story is even greater.’
While we have some questions about how you can gauge the merits of a story from a presumably short demo, most of the attention has focused on the subtitle tease.
It’s unclear if these eight asterisks are an accurate reflection of how many letters are in the title, or just random typing, but a response to Sharma’s tweet from the Bethesda Game Studios account used the same amount – so there might be something in it.
Past games in the series have been named after one of the provinces in Tamriel, the continent where The Elder Scrolls is set. The only one which bucked this trend was The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, which was set in the province of Cyrodiil, with Oblivion referring to the game’s equivalent of Hell.
Past rumours suggest The Elder Scrolls 6 is set in Hammerfell, but that’s more than eight characters. The only province which does fit that amount is Cyrodiil or, if you’re not counting spaces, High Rock.
It seems unlikely that The Elder Scrolls 6 would have the subtitle Cyrodiil (it’s an ugly word and it’s not clear how it’s pronounced) so it’s possible that, like Oblivion, it could be named after something else in the universe. Either that or the number of asterisks really are just random.
Unfortunately, the actual motivation for this tweet might be connected to something else entirely.
On the same day Sharma visited the studio in Rockville, Maryland, members of the Bethesda Game Studios Union protested mass layoffs by planting 800 red flags outside the office, with each one representing a person who has lost their job since July 2025.
As reported by journalist Chris Kerr on Bluesky, these red flags were accompanied by a giant inflatable rat. This rat, known affectionately as Scabby, is often brought out as a symbol during labour disputes in the US to shame employers.
Sharma’s tweet was posted a couple of hours after news of the rat appeared, so it could certainly be a diversion tactic, which is pretty cynical.
According to the Bethesda’s union OneBGS (via Kotaku), 440 union positions were eliminated across the Bethesda and ZeniMax unions during the layoffs, which are set to affect 3,200 people before the end of the fiscal year.
Many developers have been outspoken about the layoffs. A developer at Doom’s id Software recently called out Xbox executives, saying they ‘don’t understand art’.
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