Bethesda cheekily confirms early builds of The Elder Scrolls 6 are already being played by devs, and they sound pretty fun

We’ve all been waiting to hear more about The Elder Scrolls 6 for years now, and, in a nice post celebrating the series’ 30th anniversary, Bethesda’s offered us a nice little update. People at the studio are apparently playing early versions of the game, and from the sounds of it, they’re having fun.

While the game’s no doubt still ages away from actually, you know, being a thing the rest of us can play, it’s nice to actually hear things about it from Bethesda. After all, it took about 5 years for us to actually have it confirmed by the now retired Pete Hines that the game was actually in early development, following its announcement at E3 2018, via a teaser that feels a bit like we all dreamed it at this point.

This latest update came within a nice message from Bethesda commemorating The Elder Scrolls’ 30th birthday, with today, March 25, being the same date that The Elder Scrolls: Arena released on way back in 1994. After running down how much TES has grown and evolved over that time, as well as impacted loads of fans and developers, the studio touched on what it’s currently got going on with the series and what’s in the works for the future.

“Last but not least, yes, we are in development on the next chapter - The Elder Scrolls VI,” Bethesda wrote, “Even now, returning to Tamriel and playing early builds has us filled with the same joy, excitement, and promise of adventure.” Wahey, there we go then. It sounds to me, even though this is obviously a bit corpo-speaky, that they’re having fun working on the game and firing up those early versions of it.

Obviously, it’s way, way too early to tell whether the game’ll be as good as we’re all hoping, or that it arguably needs to to be following the rather mixed reaction to Starfield, but at least the idea that its developers are glad to be back on Nirn is a comforting image in the interim. While we’re waiting, we can all still spend way too long replaying the existing entries in the series, with Bethesda having pointed out that it’s made sure all of them are pretty easy to get ahold of, as well as acknowledging that at this point “Skyrim is on…everything.”

It also mentioned The Elder Scrolls: Castles, which is, er, a thing, and Skyrim’s Creations initiative, which proved just as controversial on release last year as all of the similar systems that came before it.

But hey, forget all that for now, we've had a little Elder Scrolls 6 update rather than a continuation of the expected relative radio silence, so today's a good day.