This is an IGN opinion piece from Ryan McCaffrey, IGN’s “Xbox guy” and host of Xbox Unlocked.
The Elder Scrolls 6 finally has a full title: The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel. That means we know where it’s set (in the region of Hammerfell), and we know…well, that’s about it for now. We don’t know how it’ll look, what the story will be, or when it will be released. By all accounts, Sentinel is still years away – likely at least two – which leads to a couple of very interesting and very critical questions for Xbox: will it be a day-one launch title for the next-gen Xbox console/gaming PC hybrid codenamed Project Helix? And the even bigger question, will it be an Xbox console exclusive?
Before you laugh at the mere suggestion of that latter question, let’s review our gaming history. It wouldn’t be the first time an Elder Scrolls game was exclusive to Xbox. In fact, it’s happened twice before! The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind introduced Bethesda’s RPG series to the console audience, and it did that solely via the original Xbox in 2002, as Morrowind never came to PlayStation. Its next-gen follow-up (and my favorite game in the series so far), The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, was supposed to be a launch title for the Xbox 360. It didn’t quite make day one, but it helped usher in the HD Era just four months later in March 2006, and became a de facto Xbox exclusive by virtue of the fact that the PS3 didn’t come out until the Fall of that year. In fact, PS3 didn’t get its Oblivion port until March of 2007, giving Xbox a full year of exclusivity.
Skyrim, meanwhile, was a multiplatform release right out of the gate in 2011, and has gone on to become one of the ten biggest-selling games of all time, with over 65 million copies sold. And therein lies Xbox CEO Asha Sharma’s dilemma when it comes to the upcoming Sentinel. Without question, it is the biggest game Xbox has in its portfolio, by any metric: sales potential, hype level, critical potential, you name it. Next week marks the 15th anniversary of Skyrim, giving The Elder Scrolls a Grand Theft Auto-like buildup between entries in the series. 13 years between GTA 5 and GTA 6? “Hold my ale,” says The Elder Scrolls. “Try 17 years – at least – between the last one and the next one!” The point is, no matter how you slice it, the launch of The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel is going to be enormous.
Which brings me back to my original questions. First, might Sentinel be a day-one launch title for the Helix? By sheer luck, it’s entirely possible that the timelines of both projects might converge. It’d be a boon for Microsoft if they did, certainly, though the company definitely isn’t going to force the issue. Or at least, it’d be a massive mistake to try and rush Bethesda. It didn’t end well when Halo Infinite was announced as a day-one Xbox Series X release; 343 Industries needed another year, and thankfully the studio got it. The 2028 timeline is largely guesswork; it could easily end up being 2029, I admit. But what I’m certain of is that it’s definitely too early to know. Heck, The Elder Scrolls director Todd Howard tried to call his release-date shot way in advance on Starfield, and that didn’t work out.
But – and it’s a big but – there is a chance that both the Helix and The Elder Scrolls 6 might both be ready to go at the same time in the Fall of 2028. To be clear, I imagine there’s a 99.9% chance that there will also be an Xbox Series X version of Sentinel as well; if this generation has taught us anything, it’s that publishers are not willing to start over with each new console generation and instead they want cross-gen games they can sell to hundreds of millions of players rather than an audience of just a few million on a new machine.
If the two timelines match, it represents a massive opportunity for Xbox to push its next-gen console, particularly if the Helix version has tangible player benefits. Sure, higher-resolution textures and zippier load times are nice, but I’m talking about things like running Sentinel’s inevitably huge and highly detailed open-world at a rock-solid 4K/60fps at all times – something even GTA 6 likely won’t be doing on the current-gen Series X or PS5 (or PS5 Pro, for that matter).
It gets even more interesting for Microsoft if, to return to the second question, Sharma decides to make The Elder Scrolls 6 exclusive to Xbox. After all, the new CEO has pledged a return to exclusives, starting with the outstanding Gears of War: E-Day this year and inXile’s promising first-person steampunk RPG Clockwork Revolution in 2027. If Sharma plays the Sentinel-sized ace up her sleeve, it’s going to tempt a not-insignificant number of gamers who jumped ship from Xbox to PlayStation since the Xbox One/PS4 era to consider coming back. Sure, The Elder Scrolls’s biggest audience has traditionally been and will likely continue to be on PC, but with nearly 100 million PS5s in living rooms around the world, that’s a lot of gamers to potentially withhold the biggest game of the decade not named GTA 6 from. But it also just might work, because Sentinel’s release will be both a pop-culture event and first chance to return to the beloved world of Tamriel in a very, very long time (with all due respect to the very-much-alive MMORPG, The Elder Scrolls Online, and the Oblivion remaster, of course).
There’s another potential scenario where Xbox does publish Sentinel on PS5…but not on PS6, meaning the place to play the best version of The Elder Scrolls 6 is only on Xbox. However, that’s admittedly a half-assed measure that I don’t think would really move many consoles for Microsoft. In that case, I suspect most gamers would happily buy it on PS5 and forget all about a Helix version – especially when both Helix and PlayStation 6 are likely to be extremely expensive.
Regardless of what happens with Helix, though, if the past few years of Xbox’s multiplatform experiment have shown anything, it’s that inconsistency isn’t helping. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was exclusive to Series X for a few months. Avowed and South of Midnight came to PS5 after a year. Halo: Campaign Evolved and Gears of War Reloaded were multiplatform straight away. There was no clear-cut strategy. Now that Sharma has put Xbox back on the exclusives bandwagon, the brand has to be all-in. If it hopes to win gamers back, it can’t be selective about its biggest first-party games. The Elder Scrolls isn’t Call of Duty. It doesn’t ship every year with a long history of being on both Xbox and PlayStation. It will have been nearly two decades since Skyrim by the time Sentinel finally ships, and more to the point, no platforms have been announced as of yet. Plus, as I mentioned, Xbox does have an established history of exclusivity with this franchise.
Looking at the bigger picture, Sentinel almost certainly won’t sell nearly as many copies as Skyrim did, regardless of how good it is or how many platforms it’s on. With gaming hardware of all kinds being roughly double the price it was when Skyrim came out, with no relief in sight, it was always going to sell fewer copies than its predecessor. I’d say the same about GTA 6 for the same reason; GTA 5 is the second best-selling game of all-time. Even under the best of circumstances, it’d be unlikely for GTA 6 to meet, let alone beat, GTA 5’s 230 million copies. And so Microsoft need not worry about trying to hit 65 million units sold with The Elder Scrolls.
Still, it will take some serious intestinal fortitude to keep Sentinel off PlayStation platforms. With roughly five years of development time (give or take a year) by a large triple-A studio – not to mention the numerous support studios that will no doubt be contributing to the project – it’s a massive investment for Microsoft, and Sharma would be leaving a lot of money on the table by making The Elder Scrolls 6 an Xbox console exclusive.
But as we’ve already repeatedly seen in her first year on the job, Sharma is not afraid to rock the boat, whether it’s lowering the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, killing unpopular marketing campaigns, swooping in to snag Hideo Kojima’s upcoming Metal Gear Solid spiritual successor Physint, or getting Obsidian going on a new Fallout game. But with Halo a shell of its former self, Fable already confirmed to launch day and date on PS5, and Gears of War: E-Day having just shipped, Sentinel is by far Xbox’s best chance to try and convince gamers to come back to its platform. Sharma needs to take it.
About the Author
