I’ve talked about my love of Skyrim somewhat briefly in regards to my love of lists and how it helps with that. There have been rumors of Elder Scrolls VI since Skyrim came out and yet, it’s nowhere to be seen. Why is that?

Well, I think because Bethesda made a game that was so good that you don’t need to make anymore. It gave you the ultimate character to play that it would be difficult to figure out where to go from there. The Dragonborn. The last of their kind to exist, born to learn the language of dragons and then use that power to slay them. They can become the head of the wizarding college, a bard, head of both an assassin and thief guild and all kinds of other things. The minute you were done with the opening, the world opened up to you and you could just do whatever you wanted. I heard about a guy that just spent hundreds of hours playing as an NPC. The game despite being a buggy mess is utter perfection.

So, how do you build on perfection? Valve haven’t figured that out and they’ve possibly be working on a follow up to one of the greatest FPS shooters of all time, Half-Life 2. There’s nowhere to go but down if you were to try and continue on that. They did pretty good with Half-Life: Alyx, which I still think that it shouldn’t have been part of the gimmicky VR, but they keep waiting for new innovations to build around.

It’s the powerset though with Skyrim that I think is what’s kneecapping it. As I stated up above, the Dragonborn is so fucking cool that you would be hard pressed to create something that would equal it. I’m sure if you didn’t play as the Dragonborn, people would make mods to enable it. Thus we arrive at the Saints Row IV problem.

Saints Row started as a copy of Grand Theft Auto 3 considering that game did gangbusters. The first Saints Row did okay but started making a name for itself by leaning into the goofiness in the second one. That kept going with things like dildo bats, a dubstep gun and any other number of funny weapons. The dialogue was legitimately funny at times. They were good games.

Then Saints Row IV came out and you straight up just had super powers. And that’s where the games just kind of… stopped being good. Because you really couldn’t go back to not having superpowers but you also just couldn’t keep doing superpowers. It would become stale after a long while.

And that brings me to what to do about the Elder Scrolls. Embrace the open world aspect of it. Just send the player out without any real direction and let them figure it out. Just start talking to people and finding out what’s happening. Someone mentions that bandits are in the local cave. Go take them out. Alchemy and conjuration can be specialized to the point that you could spend hours just learning those. Give them their own quests. Have different ways to get into the main quest based on who you talk to so people are trading stories about how they got into it. Baldur’s Gate 3 has proven that people aren’t afraid of big games anymore. Make it bigger and the true medieval rags to riches hero journey. You have the winning formula to do more. So do it.