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I want to discuss accessibility because it is the most important thing for making websites. Other A List Apart articles give you innovation and insight. This article will give you homework. These are just my personal views, but they’re pretty good.

I want to start off with a couple of statements, and you will agree:

1. Designers are good people. I have never heard a designer say, “I don’t care if somebody can’t read this text”, “Not my fault if somebody can’t use this device”, or “Who cares if this is confusing?”
2. Some designs exclude people. You have seen people unable to read the text on a website or app that somebody designed. You’ve seen people unable to use a physical device that somebody has designed. You’ve seen people utterly bamboozled while trying to use a service that somebody designed.

So what?

The first question is, “Is this life-or-death stuff?” The answer is, “Yes.” In my favorite essay, This Is All There Is, Aral Balkan makes the point that pretty much everything that we design can affect life events and death events. Aral gives the example of how even a straightforward bus timetable app can affect life and death events, if we design it badly:

• somebody might miss a life event, such as their daughter’s fifth birthday party; or
• somebody might miss a death event, such as the chance to say goodbye to a dying grandmother.

The next—and frustrating—question is, “Why do some designs still exclude people?” After all, we know that:

• not everybody can see perfectly;
• not everybody can hear perfectly;
• not everybody thinks the same way; and
• not everybody moves the same way.

I think the answer is that there’s too much to recall. Consider, if you will, the wide variety of topics that A List Apart articles cover. Designers are expected to remember all of that guidance, plus all of the accessibility guidance, plus so much more. It is too much.

Recognizing accessibility issues while designing

I’d like to point toward one possible solution, starting from Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design. These are from the mid-1990s, and—although there’s a good chance that you, gentle reader, are a lot younger than that—please bear with me. 

Seeing as the problem is that there’s too much to recall, I want to look at heuristic № 6, “Recognition rather than Recall.” Jakob Nielsen said that for users, information required to use the design should be visible or easily retrievable when needed. I suggest we tweak that to make life easier for designers. Let’s say that the information required to produce the design should be visible or easily retrievable when needed. In other words, let’s make it easier to recognise accessibility issues while we’re designing.

How are we going to do that? I really like the book A Web for Everyone—Designing Accessible User Experiences by Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery. I really like this book not only because it includes a quote from me—actually two quotes, but I don’t like to boast—but because it includes personas that are perfect for helping us to recognise accessibility issues. That’s the good news. The even better news is that these personas are available now for free on the companion website to the book What Every Engineer Should Know About Digital Accessibility, again by Sarah Horton, with David Sloan this time.

Meet your users

I’m going to introduce you to these personas now:

• Vishnu, an engineer and global citizen with low vision says, “I want to be on the same level as everyone else”, “If I can adjust my screen, I can read comfortably”, and, “Translating in my head is easier with simpler sentences.”
• Trevor, a high school student with autism, says, “I like consistent, familiar places on the web”, “When I can learn the pattern, I can find my way”, and, “Reading is hard for me”.
• Steven, a deaf graphic artist and American Sign Language speaker, says, “My only disability is that everyone doesn’t sign”, and, “Without captions, it’s meaningless to me”.
• Maria, a bilingual community health worker, says, “I love this. It’s all here … when I can find it”, “When a site is confusing, I just leave”—fair enough, Maria!—and, “When I hear and see it, health information makes more sense”.
• Lea, an editor living with fatigue and pain, says, “No one gets that this really is a disability”, “Don’t make me work so hard”—please do not bombard this lady with drop-down lists—and, “Links at the top of the page make navigation easier for me”.
• Jacob, a blind paralegal and a bit of a geek, says, “The right technology lets me do anything”, and “This makes it possible to do my job”.
• Emily, who has cerebral palsy and is living independently, says, “I want to do everything for myself”, “Simpler screens are easier screens”—hell yeah, Emily!—and, “Tell me what I need in advance”.
• Carol, a grandmother with macular degeneration which affects her sight, says, “My grandkids are dragging me into the world of technology”, “I don’t understand what the screen is saying”, and, “Why can’t the text be just a little bit larger?”

I want to throw one more persona at you now, because, well, A List Apart readers are overachievers. One of my favorite authors, Cennydd Bowles—who literally wrote the book on Future Ethics—says to create Personas Non Grata. In other words, every time we design something, we have to think about what a bad guy could do with that thing, and whom that might affect.

To actually use these personas while designing, I like what Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher in Design for Real Life call the Designated Dissenter: for each project that you work on, one of your teams should be responsible for asking, “Will this work for Vishnu?”, “How’s Trevor going to get on with this?”, and so on. 

Then, once you’ve used the personas to recognise the accessibility issues, you can look up the guidelines for whichever platforms you’re designing for: 

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2
• Accessibility designing — Material Design 3
• Accessibility — Windows apps
• Accessibility | Apple Developer Documentation
• Check your interface for accessibility (Ubuntu)

Your mission, should you choose to accept it

I told you in the introduction of this article that I would give you homework. You thought I was joking. So, here’s your homework: I want you to grab the personas from the Know About Accessibility website, and use them throughout every design project to help you recognise accessibility issues while you work—and reclaim design for everyone.

NOTE: This article is based on “Recognise,” my five-minute presentation from Interaction Design Association (IxDA) Dublin’s Defuse (Design for Use) event in 2025.

Every language app in your pocket inherited a teaching method built for Latin. Understanding why that happened is a more useful design lesson than anything the apps themselves will teach you.

In 1788, Prussia introduced the Abitur, a standardized national examination required for entry into universities and the civil service. To pass it, students needed to demonstrate measurable, gradable knowledge. The system needed to teach language to large classrooms, produce consistent outcomes, and do it with one teacher and thirty students. The educators responsible for designing this system reached for the only teaching template they had, one that had been used in European schools for two centuries: the method developed to teach Latin.

Latin, by 1788, was a dead language. Nobody needed to speak it. The scholars who studied it were reading Cicero and Virgil, not conducting conversations. The method built around it, memorizing grammar rules, constructing translations, analyzing written texts, reflected that reality exactly. Oral skills were irrelevant. Comprehension of written form was everything. The method was not designed to produce speakers. It was designed to produce readers of texts in a language nobody spoke.

When Prussia applied this template to French and German, living languages spoken by living people, the premise did not change. Johann Valentin Meidinger’s textbook Praktische Französische Grammatik, published in 1804, ran to 37 editions across Europe by 1857. Karl Plotz formalized the approach into what became the dominant model for teaching modern languages across Europe and eventually the United States, where it became known simply as the Prussian Method [1]. Each institution that adopted it trained teachers in it, who trained students who became teachers. The constraint that created the method, how do you grade language at scale with limited resources, became invisible inside the method itself. What remained was the assumption: language is a body of rules to be learned consciously and measured. It was a design decision dressed up, over time, as a pedagogical truth.

The observation that should have ended it

There are people in the world who cannot read or write a language and speak it fluently. There are children who hold full conversations years before they can read a single word. There are immigrants who arrive in a country knowing nothing of its language and come out, years later, speaking it naturally, not because they studied it, but because they lived inside it. Literacy and fluency are separate things produced by entirely separate mechanisms. The Grammar-Translation method, as it became known, assumed they were the same thing. That assumption was inherited from a method designed for a language nobody needed to speak, and it was wrong the moment it was applied to a language people actually used.

The evidence against it accumulated slowly. In the mid to late nineteenth century, reformers including François Gouin in France and Maximilian Berlitz in the United States argued independently that language should be taught the way it is actually acquired, through immersive exposure to real communication in the target language, not through analysis of its rules. Berlitz built an entire school network around this principle. The reformers were correct. They were also largely ignored by mainstream education systems, because the Grammar-Translation method had one decisive advantage that direct immersion did not: it could be graded.

In 1982, the linguist Stephen Krashen gave the argument its most formal articulation in what he called the Monitor Model of second language acquisition. His distinction was precise: language acquisition, the unconscious process through which children absorb their native language and through which adults succeed in immersive environments, is categorically different from language learning, the conscious study of grammar rules and vocabulary that classrooms deliver [2]. Acquisition produces fluency. Learning, at best, produces the ability to pass a test. The evidence supporting this distinction, and the observation that immersive exposure to real native-speaker communication is the mechanism that produces genuine fluency, has only grown since.

I went to Brazil without a word of Portuguese and came out speaking it. I studied French in a classroom for years and cannot hold a conversation in French today. This is not an unusual experience. It is the expected outcome, and it has been the expected outcome for as long as we have had formal language education.

The same decision, made again in a different medium

Prussian educators faced the question: How do you deliver language learning at scale, measure progress, and retain users over time? The answer it arrived at was structurally identical to the one arrived at in 1788. Duolingo gamified the grammar drill into a streak. Anki formalized the translation exercise into a spaced-repetition flashcard. Babbel organized grammar lessons into structured modules. The interfaces were new. The underlying assumption, that language is a thing you study rather than an environment you inhabit, was not.

This was not a failure of design skill. The products that emerged from these decisions are, in many respects, genuinely well-crafted. Duolingo’s retention mechanics are sophisticated. Anki’s spaced repetition is grounded in real cognitive science. They are excellent at what they actually do. The problem is what they actually do: produce measurable engagement with a proxy for language rather than the conditions that produce language itself. A streak is measurable. A vocabulary score is measurable. The moment a user walks out of an app and holds a real conversation in another language, that happens in the world, outside the product, and cannot be instrumented.

When the outcome a user needs is difficult to measure directly, the design process tends to reach for something that can be measured. The proxy becomes the goal. The interface optimizes for it. The gap between what the product delivers and what the user actually needed grows. This is not a pattern unique to language learning. It is a pattern that repeats across product categories whenever a design constraint—the need to measure, the need to scale, the need to produce a grade—gets built into a system so deeply that it stops being visible as a constraint and starts being mistaken for a truth about the problem itself.

What happens when the constraint changes

The constraint that made the Grammar-Translation method necessary in 1788 was real and rational. One teacher. Thirty students. A standardized exam. You cannot grade a conversation at scale. You can grade a translation exercise. The method was not chosen because it produced fluency. It was chosen because it produced a score.

That constraint no longer exists in the same form. Technology has made it possible to deliver immersive, real-time conversation practice to anyone with a smartphone, at a cost that continues to fall. The design problem is no longer how to make language learning gradable at scale. It is how to make the conditions of genuine language acquisition accessible to people who cannot move to another country or afford a native-speaker tutor.

The products that are now closest to solving the actual problem are not the ones that invented a new pedagogy. They are the ones that removed the access barrier to an old one. Praktika builds AI conversation partners with distinct personalities, regional dialects, and cultural context, replicating the specificity of a real native speaker rather than a generic language-learning voice. Langua clones native speaker voices so that the interaction feels like a real conversation rather than a lesson. Rosetta Stone’s foundational methodology, image association in the target language with no translation, was built on the same insight Berlitz arrived at in the nineteenth century: language is acquired through immersive exposure, not through analysis of its rules [3]. A 2025 meta-analysis of 31 studies found that AI conversation tools produced a statistically significant improvement in language learning outcomes, a result that no amount of flashcard optimization has consistently matched [4].

None of these products invented a new theory of language acquisition. They translated an existing one into something more people could reach.

The design question this leaves

The Grammar-Translation method persisted not because educators were wrong about design, but because a design decision made under a specific constraint became, over two centuries, indistinguishable from the thing itself. The constraint, how do you grade language at scale, was forgotten. The method it produced was inherited as if it were a description of how language works, passed from Prussia to Europe to America to the App Store, from the grammar drill to the streak.

Every time a design team optimizes for a metric because the actual outcome is hard to measure, they are making a version of the same decision. It is often the right decision given real constraints. The question worth asking is whether the constraint that made it necessary still exists, or whether it has simply become invisible inside the system it originally produced.

Before reaching for what can be measured, it is worth asking what the user actually needs to do, and what stopped them from doing it before. Sometimes the answer is a new solution. More often it is an old one that was always out of reach.

Everyone has that one movie they’re apparently supposed to love but just can’t stand. Maybe it’s a beloved comedy that never gets a laugh, a romance that feels painfully ridiculous, or a blockbuster that everyone insists is a masterpiece. Admitting you dislike certain movies can practically start an argument at dinner. On Reddit, people shared the popular films they struggle to sit through, and some of their choices would probably upset entire fan communities. A few couldn’t even finish watching, while others stuck around hoping things would improve. These are the movies that left some viewers wondering what everybody else was enjoying.

The post 15 People Share the Movie They Secretly Think is Unwatchable appeared first on Den of Geek.

After eight long years of waiting, Elder Scrolls fans were rewarded for their patience with a minute-long teaser of a windswept sandscape and a blue-gemmed scroll gleaming in the dunes. 

Today we're sharing with you all the name of the next Elder Scrolls title (did you guess correctly?). pic.twitter.com/zjhpJXQNtF

— Bethesda Game Studios (@BethesdaStudios) November 3, 2026

The full title of the game, The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel, was revealed by Bethesda Game Studios via X/Twitter on Nov. 3, as part of a video celebrating the studio’s 40th anniversary. The company thanked fans for years of “shared memories” and said it “feels great to finally reveal the name and location” of the long-awaited game. 

Elder Scrolls 6 was first teased at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) in 2018, but development didn’t begin in earnest until 2023. In its anniversary Twitter post, Bethesda added that “development continues,” a reminder that the game is still unfinished, and warned that “it’ll be some time” before they share any further information, much to the dismay of fans who hoped for more. 

With no new details coming anytime soon, the natural question is how a game announced pre-COVID ended up this far from release. For those uninitiated or those who have waited for so long you can’t exactly remember why, let’s break down what the hold-up has been all these years. 

It all started with a premature announcement. Bethesda’s director, Todd Howard, delivered a now-notorious quote regarding the game in an IGN interview in March, where he joked, “Just pretend we didn’t announce it. Doesn’t exist,” when asked about the status of Elder Scrolls 6. When IGN pushed him to comment further on where the game actually stood, Howard interrupted with a resolute “Nothing.” Howard has famously expressed regrets about how the game was announced, too, which makes sense considering it was mostly to soften the blow of Fallout 76’s rocky launch. 

Then there’s how Bethesda traditionally functions. The studio has historically focused on one big game at a time, alternating between Elder Scrolls and Fallout. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim came out in 2011 and Fallout 4 followed in 2015, which should have put Elder Scrolls 6 next in line. Kurt Kuhlmann, a longtime Bethesda veteran and Skyrim co-lead, certainly thought so: “Why wouldn’t it be? That’s what we did, and that was kind of the expectation,” he said, calling it the natural next step given how the studio had always worked. Instead, Starfield, a brand-new space-faring IP that Todd Howard had long wanted to make, jumped the queue and broke the studio’s usual rhythm. 

On top of that, there were also staffing problems. Kuhlmann himself left the studio in 2023 after more than 20 years at Bethesda. An ever bigger blow came this summer, when Microsoft’s Xbox layoffs hit the studio, with staff telling IGN that more than 50 employees were cut, including veterans who had worked on major title games. Developers warned the cuts would have “substantial and cascading effects” on the game, and fans feared yet another extensive delay. Bethesda insists the roadmap for Elder Scrolls 6 is “unaffected,” however, and says the game is now a primary focus, with a majority of staff working on it. Still, losing that much experience on a project this size is unlikely to speed anything up. 

So where is all that effort headed? 

The game’s teaser points to Hammerfell, a desert province on Tamriel, the continent where the Elder Scrolls series takes place. Sentinel is one of Hammerfell’s major cities and the capital of the Alik’r Desert region, home of the playable race called the Redguards. Hammerfell also happens to be one of Tamriel’s largest regions, a mix of barren desert, coastal trading, and rugged highlands. It’s best known to Skyrim players as the province that broke away from the Empire during the Great War, a conflict that Skyrim’s story often references. 

The teaser itself is short on details, showing a metallic scroll being unearthed from the sand, along with an in-world passage attributed to Yazar, a Moth Priest to the High Queen of Hammerfell. In the lore, Moth Priests are the scholars who read the Elder Scrolls, the ancient artifacts the series is named after. The passage is dated 4E 206, which would place the game roughly five years after Skyrim. 

Longtime fans already know a fair amount about Hammerfell, the area having appeared in The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1996), The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard (1998), and The Elder Scrolls Online (2014), which gives Bethesda plenty of established culture, politics, and geography to draw on. The big question is whether Hammerfell can support the kind of sprawling, varied open world Skyrim delivered on. The 2011 game was set in a snowy northern province, so a desert setting will be a big change in look and feel for the series. How Bethesda keeps it interesting across a map that size is still anyone’s guess. 

The same goes for the release date. The hopeful estimate is 2028 or 2029, but there’s really no telling. Bethesda hasn’t offered an official date either, or even a window, so for now fans can only keep waiting. 

The post The Elder Scrolls 6’s Long Wait Explained appeared first on Den of Geek.

Watching an old favorite again can be a little embarrassing. That show you spent years defending suddenly has a whole episode about stolen brains, terrible computer graphics, or someone drinking magical beer. You remember the good stuff, of course. The characters you loved, the jokes you repeated, and the finales that had everyone talking. But nobody remembers every lousy episode until they accidentally watch it again. Even the biggest television classics had weeks when the writers seemed completely out of ideas. Some of these episodes were criticized when they aired, while others have aged especially badly. A rewatch can bring back a few unpleasant surprises.

The post 15 TV Shows That Are Actually Much Worse Than You Remember appeared first on Den of Geek.

After eight long years of waiting, Elder Scrolls fans were rewarded for their patience with a minute-long teaser of a windswept sandscape and a blue-gemmed scroll gleaming in the dunes. 

Today we're sharing with you all the name of the next Elder Scrolls title (did you guess correctly?). pic.twitter.com/zjhpJXQNtF

— Bethesda Game Studios (@BethesdaStudios) November 3, 2026

The full title of the game, The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel, was revealed by Bethesda Game Studios via X/Twitter on Nov. 3, as part of a video celebrating the studio’s 40th anniversary. The company thanked fans for years of “shared memories” and said it “feels great to finally reveal the name and location” of the long-awaited game. 

Elder Scrolls 6 was first teased at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) in 2018, but development didn’t begin in earnest until 2023. In its anniversary Twitter post, Bethesda added that “development continues,” a reminder that the game is still unfinished, and warned that “it’ll be some time” before they share any further information, much to the dismay of fans who hoped for more. 

With no new details coming anytime soon, the natural question is how a game announced pre-COVID ended up this far from release. For those uninitiated or those who have waited for so long you can’t exactly remember why, let’s break down what the hold-up has been all these years. 

It all started with a premature announcement. Bethesda’s director, Todd Howard, delivered a now-notorious quote regarding the game in an IGN interview in March, where he joked, “Just pretend we didn’t announce it. Doesn’t exist,” when asked about the status of Elder Scrolls 6. When IGN pushed him to comment further on where the game actually stood, Howard interrupted with a resolute “Nothing.” Howard has famously expressed regrets about how the game was announced, too, which makes sense considering it was mostly to soften the blow of Fallout 76’s rocky launch. 

Then there’s how Bethesda traditionally functions. The studio has historically focused on one big game at a time, alternating between Elder Scrolls and Fallout. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim came out in 2011 and Fallout 4 followed in 2015, which should have put Elder Scrolls 6 next in line. Kurt Kuhlmann, a longtime Bethesda veteran and Skyrim co-lead, certainly thought so: “Why wouldn’t it be? That’s what we did, and that was kind of the expectation,” he said, calling it the natural next step given how the studio had always worked. Instead, Starfield, a brand-new space-faring IP that Todd Howard had long wanted to make, jumped the queue and broke the studio’s usual rhythm. 

On top of that, there were also staffing problems. Kuhlmann himself left the studio in 2023 after more than 20 years at Bethesda. An ever bigger blow came this summer, when Microsoft’s Xbox layoffs hit the studio, with staff telling IGN that more than 50 employees were cut, including veterans who had worked on major title games. Developers warned the cuts would have “substantial and cascading effects” on the game, and fans feared yet another extensive delay. Bethesda insists the roadmap for Elder Scrolls 6 is “unaffected,” however, and says the game is now a primary focus, with a majority of staff working on it. Still, losing that much experience on a project this size is unlikely to speed anything up. 

So where is all that effort headed? 

The game’s teaser points to Hammerfell, a desert province on Tamriel, the continent where the Elder Scrolls series takes place. Sentinel is one of Hammerfell’s major cities and the capital of the Alik’r Desert region, home of the playable race called the Redguards. Hammerfell also happens to be one of Tamriel’s largest regions, a mix of barren desert, coastal trading, and rugged highlands. It’s best known to Skyrim players as the province that broke away from the Empire during the Great War, a conflict that Skyrim’s story often references. 

The teaser itself is short on details, showing a metallic scroll being unearthed from the sand, along with an in-world passage attributed to Yazar, a Moth Priest to the High Queen of Hammerfell. In the lore, Moth Priests are the scholars who read the Elder Scrolls, the ancient artifacts the series is named after. The passage is dated 4E 206, which would place the game roughly five years after Skyrim. 

Longtime fans already know a fair amount about Hammerfell, the area having appeared in The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1996), The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard (1998), and The Elder Scrolls Online (2014), which gives Bethesda plenty of established culture, politics, and geography to draw on. The big question is whether Hammerfell can support the kind of sprawling, varied open world Skyrim delivered on. The 2011 game was set in a snowy northern province, so a desert setting will be a big change in look and feel for the series. How Bethesda keeps it interesting across a map that size is still anyone’s guess. 

The same goes for the release date. The hopeful estimate is 2028 or 2029, but there’s really no telling. Bethesda hasn’t offered an official date either, or even a window, so for now fans can only keep waiting. 

The post The Elder Scrolls 6’s Long Wait Explained appeared first on Den of Geek.

TV friendships can survive just about anything. Someone dates their best friend’s ex, ruins an important relationship, or tells a spectacular lie, and somehow everybody is hanging out again by the next episode. It’s great television, but try pulling some of that stuff with your actual friends. Plenty of beloved shows feature groups that spend more time arguing, keeping secrets, and interfering in each other’s lives than enjoying anyone’s company. Some have been together since childhood, while others barely seem to like each other. We love watching them, but we’d probably leave their group chats within a week. These TV friendships deserve a closer look.

The post 15 TV Friend Groups We Aren’t Buying in Real Life appeared first on Den of Geek.

After eight long years of waiting, Elder Scrolls fans were rewarded for their patience with a minute-long teaser of a windswept sandscape and a blue-gemmed scroll gleaming in the dunes. 

Today we're sharing with you all the name of the next Elder Scrolls title (did you guess correctly?). pic.twitter.com/zjhpJXQNtF

— Bethesda Game Studios (@BethesdaStudios) November 3, 2026

The full title of the game, The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel, was revealed by Bethesda Game Studios via X/Twitter on Nov. 3, as part of a video celebrating the studio’s 40th anniversary. The company thanked fans for years of “shared memories” and said it “feels great to finally reveal the name and location” of the long-awaited game. 

Elder Scrolls 6 was first teased at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) in 2018, but development didn’t begin in earnest until 2023. In its anniversary Twitter post, Bethesda added that “development continues,” a reminder that the game is still unfinished, and warned that “it’ll be some time” before they share any further information, much to the dismay of fans who hoped for more. 

With no new details coming anytime soon, the natural question is how a game announced pre-COVID ended up this far from release. For those uninitiated or those who have waited for so long you can’t exactly remember why, let’s break down what the hold-up has been all these years. 

It all started with a premature announcement. Bethesda’s director, Todd Howard, delivered a now-notorious quote regarding the game in an IGN interview in March, where he joked, “Just pretend we didn’t announce it. Doesn’t exist,” when asked about the status of Elder Scrolls 6. When IGN pushed him to comment further on where the game actually stood, Howard interrupted with a resolute “Nothing.” Howard has famously expressed regrets about how the game was announced, too, which makes sense considering it was mostly to soften the blow of Fallout 76’s rocky launch. 

Then there’s how Bethesda traditionally functions. The studio has historically focused on one big game at a time, alternating between Elder Scrolls and Fallout. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim came out in 2011 and Fallout 4 followed in 2015, which should have put Elder Scrolls 6 next in line. Kurt Kuhlmann, a longtime Bethesda veteran and Skyrim co-lead, certainly thought so: “Why wouldn’t it be? That’s what we did, and that was kind of the expectation,” he said, calling it the natural next step given how the studio had always worked. Instead, Starfield, a brand-new space-faring IP that Todd Howard had long wanted to make, jumped the queue and broke the studio’s usual rhythm. 

On top of that, there were also staffing problems. Kuhlmann himself left the studio in 2023 after more than 20 years at Bethesda. An ever bigger blow came this summer, when Microsoft’s Xbox layoffs hit the studio, with staff telling IGN that more than 50 employees were cut, including veterans who had worked on major title games. Developers warned the cuts would have “substantial and cascading effects” on the game, and fans feared yet another extensive delay. Bethesda insists the roadmap for Elder Scrolls 6 is “unaffected,” however, and says the game is now a primary focus, with a majority of staff working on it. Still, losing that much experience on a project this size is unlikely to speed anything up. 

So where is all that effort headed? 

The game’s teaser points to Hammerfell, a desert province on Tamriel, the continent where the Elder Scrolls series takes place. Sentinel is one of Hammerfell’s major cities and the capital of the Alik’r Desert region, home of the playable race called the Redguards. Hammerfell also happens to be one of Tamriel’s largest regions, a mix of barren desert, coastal trading, and rugged highlands. It’s best known to Skyrim players as the province that broke away from the Empire during the Great War, a conflict that Skyrim’s story often references. 

The teaser itself is short on details, showing a metallic scroll being unearthed from the sand, along with an in-world passage attributed to Yazar, a Moth Priest to the High Queen of Hammerfell. In the lore, Moth Priests are the scholars who read the Elder Scrolls, the ancient artifacts the series is named after. The passage is dated 4E 206, which would place the game roughly five years after Skyrim. 

Longtime fans already know a fair amount about Hammerfell, the area having appeared in The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1996), The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard (1998), and The Elder Scrolls Online (2014), which gives Bethesda plenty of established culture, politics, and geography to draw on. The big question is whether Hammerfell can support the kind of sprawling, varied open world Skyrim delivered on. The 2011 game was set in a snowy northern province, so a desert setting will be a big change in look and feel for the series. How Bethesda keeps it interesting across a map that size is still anyone’s guess. 

The same goes for the release date. The hopeful estimate is 2028 or 2029, but there’s really no telling. Bethesda hasn’t offered an official date either, or even a window, so for now fans can only keep waiting. 

The post The Elder Scrolls 6’s Long Wait Explained appeared first on Den of Geek.

Ben Affleck can’t even take a cigarette break without becoming a meme. The internet has turned his exhausted expressions into a universal response to everything from bad Mondays to expensive grocery bills. He’s hardly alone. Some celebrities have been caught making ridiculous faces at award shows, while others have accidentally created reaction images during interviews or movie scenes. A few have even embraced the jokes and recreated their most famous moments. It doesn’t take much, either. One awkward pose or perfectly timed facial expression can keep people entertained for years. These celebrities have given the internet plenty of material to work with.

The post 15 Celebrities Who Just Keep Making Memes appeared first on Den of Geek.

After eight long years of waiting, Elder Scrolls fans were rewarded for their patience with a minute-long teaser of a windswept sandscape and a blue-gemmed scroll gleaming in the dunes. 

Today we're sharing with you all the name of the next Elder Scrolls title (did you guess correctly?). pic.twitter.com/zjhpJXQNtF

— Bethesda Game Studios (@BethesdaStudios) November 3, 2026

The full title of the game, The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel, was revealed by Bethesda Game Studios via X/Twitter on Nov. 3, as part of a video celebrating the studio’s 40th anniversary. The company thanked fans for years of “shared memories” and said it “feels great to finally reveal the name and location” of the long-awaited game. 

Elder Scrolls 6 was first teased at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) in 2018, but development didn’t begin in earnest until 2023. In its anniversary Twitter post, Bethesda added that “development continues,” a reminder that the game is still unfinished, and warned that “it’ll be some time” before they share any further information, much to the dismay of fans who hoped for more. 

With no new details coming anytime soon, the natural question is how a game announced pre-COVID ended up this far from release. For those uninitiated or those who have waited for so long you can’t exactly remember why, let’s break down what the hold-up has been all these years. 

It all started with a premature announcement. Bethesda’s director, Todd Howard, delivered a now-notorious quote regarding the game in an IGN interview in March, where he joked, “Just pretend we didn’t announce it. Doesn’t exist,” when asked about the status of Elder Scrolls 6. When IGN pushed him to comment further on where the game actually stood, Howard interrupted with a resolute “Nothing.” Howard has famously expressed regrets about how the game was announced, too, which makes sense considering it was mostly to soften the blow of Fallout 76’s rocky launch. 

Then there’s how Bethesda traditionally functions. The studio has historically focused on one big game at a time, alternating between Elder Scrolls and Fallout. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim came out in 2011 and Fallout 4 followed in 2015, which should have put Elder Scrolls 6 next in line. Kurt Kuhlmann, a longtime Bethesda veteran and Skyrim co-lead, certainly thought so: “Why wouldn’t it be? That’s what we did, and that was kind of the expectation,” he said, calling it the natural next step given how the studio had always worked. Instead, Starfield, a brand-new space-faring IP that Todd Howard had long wanted to make, jumped the queue and broke the studio’s usual rhythm. 

On top of that, there were also staffing problems. Kuhlmann himself left the studio in 2023 after more than 20 years at Bethesda. An ever bigger blow came this summer, when Microsoft’s Xbox layoffs hit the studio, with staff telling IGN that more than 50 employees were cut, including veterans who had worked on major title games. Developers warned the cuts would have “substantial and cascading effects” on the game, and fans feared yet another extensive delay. Bethesda insists the roadmap for Elder Scrolls 6 is “unaffected,” however, and says the game is now a primary focus, with a majority of staff working on it. Still, losing that much experience on a project this size is unlikely to speed anything up. 

So where is all that effort headed? 

The game’s teaser points to Hammerfell, a desert province on Tamriel, the continent where the Elder Scrolls series takes place. Sentinel is one of Hammerfell’s major cities and the capital of the Alik’r Desert region, home of the playable race called the Redguards. Hammerfell also happens to be one of Tamriel’s largest regions, a mix of barren desert, coastal trading, and rugged highlands. It’s best known to Skyrim players as the province that broke away from the Empire during the Great War, a conflict that Skyrim’s story often references. 

The teaser itself is short on details, showing a metallic scroll being unearthed from the sand, along with an in-world passage attributed to Yazar, a Moth Priest to the High Queen of Hammerfell. In the lore, Moth Priests are the scholars who read the Elder Scrolls, the ancient artifacts the series is named after. The passage is dated 4E 206, which would place the game roughly five years after Skyrim. 

Longtime fans already know a fair amount about Hammerfell, the area having appeared in The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1996), The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard (1998), and The Elder Scrolls Online (2014), which gives Bethesda plenty of established culture, politics, and geography to draw on. The big question is whether Hammerfell can support the kind of sprawling, varied open world Skyrim delivered on. The 2011 game was set in a snowy northern province, so a desert setting will be a big change in look and feel for the series. How Bethesda keeps it interesting across a map that size is still anyone’s guess. 

The same goes for the release date. The hopeful estimate is 2028 or 2029, but there’s really no telling. Bethesda hasn’t offered an official date either, or even a window, so for now fans can only keep waiting. 

The post The Elder Scrolls 6’s Long Wait Explained appeared first on Den of Geek.

A great film score can make a scene unforgettable, and few composers understood that better than John Williams. Across decades of cinema, his music has announced heroes, given monsters a presence before they appear, and made quiet emotional moments hit even harder. Some of his best work is instantly recognizable after just a few notes, while other pieces reveal their brilliance when you remember exactly what was happening on screen. His career is packed with musical choices that changed the way audiences experience movies, and these moments show just how much a composer can bring to a great story.

The post 15 Moments Where John Williams Was at His Best appeared first on Den of Geek.

After eight long years of waiting, Elder Scrolls fans were rewarded for their patience with a minute-long teaser of a windswept sandscape and a blue-gemmed scroll gleaming in the dunes. 

Today we're sharing with you all the name of the next Elder Scrolls title (did you guess correctly?). pic.twitter.com/zjhpJXQNtF

— Bethesda Game Studios (@BethesdaStudios) November 3, 2026

The full title of the game, The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel, was revealed by Bethesda Game Studios via X/Twitter on Nov. 3, as part of a video celebrating the studio’s 40th anniversary. The company thanked fans for years of “shared memories” and said it “feels great to finally reveal the name and location” of the long-awaited game. 

Elder Scrolls 6 was first teased at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) in 2018, but development didn’t begin in earnest until 2023. In its anniversary Twitter post, Bethesda added that “development continues,” a reminder that the game is still unfinished, and warned that “it’ll be some time” before they share any further information, much to the dismay of fans who hoped for more. 

With no new details coming anytime soon, the natural question is how a game announced pre-COVID ended up this far from release. For those uninitiated or those who have waited for so long you can’t exactly remember why, let’s break down what the hold-up has been all these years. 

It all started with a premature announcement. Bethesda’s director, Todd Howard, delivered a now-notorious quote regarding the game in an IGN interview in March, where he joked, “Just pretend we didn’t announce it. Doesn’t exist,” when asked about the status of Elder Scrolls 6. When IGN pushed him to comment further on where the game actually stood, Howard interrupted with a resolute “Nothing.” Howard has famously expressed regrets about how the game was announced, too, which makes sense considering it was mostly to soften the blow of Fallout 76’s rocky launch. 

Then there’s how Bethesda traditionally functions. The studio has historically focused on one big game at a time, alternating between Elder Scrolls and Fallout. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim came out in 2011 and Fallout 4 followed in 2015, which should have put Elder Scrolls 6 next in line. Kurt Kuhlmann, a longtime Bethesda veteran and Skyrim co-lead, certainly thought so: “Why wouldn’t it be? That’s what we did, and that was kind of the expectation,” he said, calling it the natural next step given how the studio had always worked. Instead, Starfield, a brand-new space-faring IP that Todd Howard had long wanted to make, jumped the queue and broke the studio’s usual rhythm. 

On top of that, there were also staffing problems. Kuhlmann himself left the studio in 2023 after more than 20 years at Bethesda. An ever bigger blow came this summer, when Microsoft’s Xbox layoffs hit the studio, with staff telling IGN that more than 50 employees were cut, including veterans who had worked on major title games. Developers warned the cuts would have “substantial and cascading effects” on the game, and fans feared yet another extensive delay. Bethesda insists the roadmap for Elder Scrolls 6 is “unaffected,” however, and says the game is now a primary focus, with a majority of staff working on it. Still, losing that much experience on a project this size is unlikely to speed anything up. 

So where is all that effort headed? 

The game’s teaser points to Hammerfell, a desert province on Tamriel, the continent where the Elder Scrolls series takes place. Sentinel is one of Hammerfell’s major cities and the capital of the Alik’r Desert region, home of the playable race called the Redguards. Hammerfell also happens to be one of Tamriel’s largest regions, a mix of barren desert, coastal trading, and rugged highlands. It’s best known to Skyrim players as the province that broke away from the Empire during the Great War, a conflict that Skyrim’s story often references. 

The teaser itself is short on details, showing a metallic scroll being unearthed from the sand, along with an in-world passage attributed to Yazar, a Moth Priest to the High Queen of Hammerfell. In the lore, Moth Priests are the scholars who read the Elder Scrolls, the ancient artifacts the series is named after. The passage is dated 4E 206, which would place the game roughly five years after Skyrim. 

Longtime fans already know a fair amount about Hammerfell, the area having appeared in The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1996), The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard (1998), and The Elder Scrolls Online (2014), which gives Bethesda plenty of established culture, politics, and geography to draw on. The big question is whether Hammerfell can support the kind of sprawling, varied open world Skyrim delivered on. The 2011 game was set in a snowy northern province, so a desert setting will be a big change in look and feel for the series. How Bethesda keeps it interesting across a map that size is still anyone’s guess. 

The same goes for the release date. The hopeful estimate is 2028 or 2029, but there’s really no telling. Bethesda hasn’t offered an official date either, or even a window, so for now fans can only keep waiting. 

The post The Elder Scrolls 6’s Long Wait Explained appeared first on Den of Geek.

Ti West knew he wanted to do something different. After writing and directing a decades-spanning trilogy of horror and cinematic homages via X, Pearl, and MaXXXine—films that count Martin Scorsese among their fans—the New England filmmaker needed to step away from the genre. If perhaps by only a few inches. “Everybody loves IP, and I […]

The post Ebenezer: Ti West on Johnny Depp, the Freddy Krueger Homage and a ‘Gray’ Scrooge You Can Agree With appeared first on Den of Geek.

After eight long years of waiting, Elder Scrolls fans were rewarded for their patience with a minute-long teaser of a windswept sandscape and a blue-gemmed scroll gleaming in the dunes. 

Today we're sharing with you all the name of the next Elder Scrolls title (did you guess correctly?). pic.twitter.com/zjhpJXQNtF

— Bethesda Game Studios (@BethesdaStudios) November 3, 2026

The full title of the game, The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel, was revealed by Bethesda Game Studios via X/Twitter on Nov. 3, as part of a video celebrating the studio’s 40th anniversary. The company thanked fans for years of “shared memories” and said it “feels great to finally reveal the name and location” of the long-awaited game. 

Elder Scrolls 6 was first teased at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) in 2018, but development didn’t begin in earnest until 2023. In its anniversary Twitter post, Bethesda added that “development continues,” a reminder that the game is still unfinished, and warned that “it’ll be some time” before they share any further information, much to the dismay of fans who hoped for more. 

With no new details coming anytime soon, the natural question is how a game announced pre-COVID ended up this far from release. For those uninitiated or those who have waited for so long you can’t exactly remember why, let’s break down what the hold-up has been all these years. 

It all started with a premature announcement. Bethesda’s director, Todd Howard, delivered a now-notorious quote regarding the game in an IGN interview in March, where he joked, “Just pretend we didn’t announce it. Doesn’t exist,” when asked about the status of Elder Scrolls 6. When IGN pushed him to comment further on where the game actually stood, Howard interrupted with a resolute “Nothing.” Howard has famously expressed regrets about how the game was announced, too, which makes sense considering it was mostly to soften the blow of Fallout 76’s rocky launch. 

Then there’s how Bethesda traditionally functions. The studio has historically focused on one big game at a time, alternating between Elder Scrolls and Fallout. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim came out in 2011 and Fallout 4 followed in 2015, which should have put Elder Scrolls 6 next in line. Kurt Kuhlmann, a longtime Bethesda veteran and Skyrim co-lead, certainly thought so: “Why wouldn’t it be? That’s what we did, and that was kind of the expectation,” he said, calling it the natural next step given how the studio had always worked. Instead, Starfield, a brand-new space-faring IP that Todd Howard had long wanted to make, jumped the queue and broke the studio’s usual rhythm. 

On top of that, there were also staffing problems. Kuhlmann himself left the studio in 2023 after more than 20 years at Bethesda. An ever bigger blow came this summer, when Microsoft’s Xbox layoffs hit the studio, with staff telling IGN that more than 50 employees were cut, including veterans who had worked on major title games. Developers warned the cuts would have “substantial and cascading effects” on the game, and fans feared yet another extensive delay. Bethesda insists the roadmap for Elder Scrolls 6 is “unaffected,” however, and says the game is now a primary focus, with a majority of staff working on it. Still, losing that much experience on a project this size is unlikely to speed anything up. 

So where is all that effort headed? 

The game’s teaser points to Hammerfell, a desert province on Tamriel, the continent where the Elder Scrolls series takes place. Sentinel is one of Hammerfell’s major cities and the capital of the Alik’r Desert region, home of the playable race called the Redguards. Hammerfell also happens to be one of Tamriel’s largest regions, a mix of barren desert, coastal trading, and rugged highlands. It’s best known to Skyrim players as the province that broke away from the Empire during the Great War, a conflict that Skyrim’s story often references. 

The teaser itself is short on details, showing a metallic scroll being unearthed from the sand, along with an in-world passage attributed to Yazar, a Moth Priest to the High Queen of Hammerfell. In the lore, Moth Priests are the scholars who read the Elder Scrolls, the ancient artifacts the series is named after. The passage is dated 4E 206, which would place the game roughly five years after Skyrim. 

Longtime fans already know a fair amount about Hammerfell, the area having appeared in The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1996), The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard (1998), and The Elder Scrolls Online (2014), which gives Bethesda plenty of established culture, politics, and geography to draw on. The big question is whether Hammerfell can support the kind of sprawling, varied open world Skyrim delivered on. The 2011 game was set in a snowy northern province, so a desert setting will be a big change in look and feel for the series. How Bethesda keeps it interesting across a map that size is still anyone’s guess. 

The same goes for the release date. The hopeful estimate is 2028 or 2029, but there’s really no telling. Bethesda hasn’t offered an official date either, or even a window, so for now fans can only keep waiting. 

The post The Elder Scrolls 6’s Long Wait Explained appeared first on Den of Geek.

After eight long years of waiting, Elder Scrolls fans were rewarded for their patience with a minute-long teaser of a windswept sandscape and a blue-gemmed scroll gleaming in the dunes.  The full title of the game, The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel, was revealed by Bethesda Game Studios via X/Twitter on Nov. 3, as part of […]

The post The Elder Scrolls 6’s Long Wait Explained appeared first on Den of Geek.

After eight long years of waiting, Elder Scrolls fans were rewarded for their patience with a minute-long teaser of a windswept sandscape and a blue-gemmed scroll gleaming in the dunes. 

Today we're sharing with you all the name of the next Elder Scrolls title (did you guess correctly?). pic.twitter.com/zjhpJXQNtF

— Bethesda Game Studios (@BethesdaStudios) November 3, 2026

The full title of the game, The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel, was revealed by Bethesda Game Studios via X/Twitter on Nov. 3, as part of a video celebrating the studio’s 40th anniversary. The company thanked fans for years of “shared memories” and said it “feels great to finally reveal the name and location” of the long-awaited game. 

Elder Scrolls 6 was first teased at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) in 2018, but development didn’t begin in earnest until 2023. In its anniversary Twitter post, Bethesda added that “development continues,” a reminder that the game is still unfinished, and warned that “it’ll be some time” before they share any further information, much to the dismay of fans who hoped for more. 

With no new details coming anytime soon, the natural question is how a game announced pre-COVID ended up this far from release. For those uninitiated or those who have waited for so long you can’t exactly remember why, let’s break down what the hold-up has been all these years. 

It all started with a premature announcement. Bethesda’s director, Todd Howard, delivered a now-notorious quote regarding the game in an IGN interview in March, where he joked, “Just pretend we didn’t announce it. Doesn’t exist,” when asked about the status of Elder Scrolls 6. When IGN pushed him to comment further on where the game actually stood, Howard interrupted with a resolute “Nothing.” Howard has famously expressed regrets about how the game was announced, too, which makes sense considering it was mostly to soften the blow of Fallout 76’s rocky launch. 

Then there’s how Bethesda traditionally functions. The studio has historically focused on one big game at a time, alternating between Elder Scrolls and Fallout. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim came out in 2011 and Fallout 4 followed in 2015, which should have put Elder Scrolls 6 next in line. Kurt Kuhlmann, a longtime Bethesda veteran and Skyrim co-lead, certainly thought so: “Why wouldn’t it be? That’s what we did, and that was kind of the expectation,” he said, calling it the natural next step given how the studio had always worked. Instead, Starfield, a brand-new space-faring IP that Todd Howard had long wanted to make, jumped the queue and broke the studio’s usual rhythm. 

On top of that, there were also staffing problems. Kuhlmann himself left the studio in 2023 after more than 20 years at Bethesda. An ever bigger blow came this summer, when Microsoft’s Xbox layoffs hit the studio, with staff telling IGN that more than 50 employees were cut, including veterans who had worked on major title games. Developers warned the cuts would have “substantial and cascading effects” on the game, and fans feared yet another extensive delay. Bethesda insists the roadmap for Elder Scrolls 6 is “unaffected,” however, and says the game is now a primary focus, with a majority of staff working on it. Still, losing that much experience on a project this size is unlikely to speed anything up. 

So where is all that effort headed? 

The game’s teaser points to Hammerfell, a desert province on Tamriel, the continent where the Elder Scrolls series takes place. Sentinel is one of Hammerfell’s major cities and the capital of the Alik’r Desert region, home of the playable race called the Redguards. Hammerfell also happens to be one of Tamriel’s largest regions, a mix of barren desert, coastal trading, and rugged highlands. It’s best known to Skyrim players as the province that broke away from the Empire during the Great War, a conflict that Skyrim’s story often references. 

The teaser itself is short on details, showing a metallic scroll being unearthed from the sand, along with an in-world passage attributed to Yazar, a Moth Priest to the High Queen of Hammerfell. In the lore, Moth Priests are the scholars who read the Elder Scrolls, the ancient artifacts the series is named after. The passage is dated 4E 206, which would place the game roughly five years after Skyrim. 

Longtime fans already know a fair amount about Hammerfell, the area having appeared in The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1996), The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard (1998), and The Elder Scrolls Online (2014), which gives Bethesda plenty of established culture, politics, and geography to draw on. The big question is whether Hammerfell can support the kind of sprawling, varied open world Skyrim delivered on. The 2011 game was set in a snowy northern province, so a desert setting will be a big change in look and feel for the series. How Bethesda keeps it interesting across a map that size is still anyone’s guess. 

The same goes for the release date. The hopeful estimate is 2028 or 2029, but there’s really no telling. Bethesda hasn’t offered an official date either, or even a window, so for now fans can only keep waiting. 

The post The Elder Scrolls 6’s Long Wait Explained appeared first on Den of Geek.

It’s been an interesting 24 hours in the world of superhero movies, with not just the news that James Gunn and Peter Safran have been removed as co-heads of DC Studios, but also with information about their dismissal coming clear. Initially, Gunn’s post to social media made it sound like he and Safran willingly stepped […]

The post DC’s Dismantling Could Be the End of Shared Universes appeared first on Den of Geek.

After eight long years of waiting, Elder Scrolls fans were rewarded for their patience with a minute-long teaser of a windswept sandscape and a blue-gemmed scroll gleaming in the dunes. 

Today we're sharing with you all the name of the next Elder Scrolls title (did you guess correctly?). pic.twitter.com/zjhpJXQNtF

— Bethesda Game Studios (@BethesdaStudios) November 3, 2026

The full title of the game, The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel, was revealed by Bethesda Game Studios via X/Twitter on Nov. 3, as part of a video celebrating the studio’s 40th anniversary. The company thanked fans for years of “shared memories” and said it “feels great to finally reveal the name and location” of the long-awaited game. 

Elder Scrolls 6 was first teased at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) in 2018, but development didn’t begin in earnest until 2023. In its anniversary Twitter post, Bethesda added that “development continues,” a reminder that the game is still unfinished, and warned that “it’ll be some time” before they share any further information, much to the dismay of fans who hoped for more. 

With no new details coming anytime soon, the natural question is how a game announced pre-COVID ended up this far from release. For those uninitiated or those who have waited for so long you can’t exactly remember why, let’s break down what the hold-up has been all these years. 

It all started with a premature announcement. Bethesda’s director, Todd Howard, delivered a now-notorious quote regarding the game in an IGN interview in March, where he joked, “Just pretend we didn’t announce it. Doesn’t exist,” when asked about the status of Elder Scrolls 6. When IGN pushed him to comment further on where the game actually stood, Howard interrupted with a resolute “Nothing.” Howard has famously expressed regrets about how the game was announced, too, which makes sense considering it was mostly to soften the blow of Fallout 76’s rocky launch. 

Then there’s how Bethesda traditionally functions. The studio has historically focused on one big game at a time, alternating between Elder Scrolls and Fallout. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim came out in 2011 and Fallout 4 followed in 2015, which should have put Elder Scrolls 6 next in line. Kurt Kuhlmann, a longtime Bethesda veteran and Skyrim co-lead, certainly thought so: “Why wouldn’t it be? That’s what we did, and that was kind of the expectation,” he said, calling it the natural next step given how the studio had always worked. Instead, Starfield, a brand-new space-faring IP that Todd Howard had long wanted to make, jumped the queue and broke the studio’s usual rhythm. 

On top of that, there were also staffing problems. Kuhlmann himself left the studio in 2023 after more than 20 years at Bethesda. An ever bigger blow came this summer, when Microsoft’s Xbox layoffs hit the studio, with staff telling IGN that more than 50 employees were cut, including veterans who had worked on major title games. Developers warned the cuts would have “substantial and cascading effects” on the game, and fans feared yet another extensive delay. Bethesda insists the roadmap for Elder Scrolls 6 is “unaffected,” however, and says the game is now a primary focus, with a majority of staff working on it. Still, losing that much experience on a project this size is unlikely to speed anything up. 

So where is all that effort headed? 

The game’s teaser points to Hammerfell, a desert province on Tamriel, the continent where the Elder Scrolls series takes place. Sentinel is one of Hammerfell’s major cities and the capital of the Alik’r Desert region, home of the playable race called the Redguards. Hammerfell also happens to be one of Tamriel’s largest regions, a mix of barren desert, coastal trading, and rugged highlands. It’s best known to Skyrim players as the province that broke away from the Empire during the Great War, a conflict that Skyrim’s story often references. 

The teaser itself is short on details, showing a metallic scroll being unearthed from the sand, along with an in-world passage attributed to Yazar, a Moth Priest to the High Queen of Hammerfell. In the lore, Moth Priests are the scholars who read the Elder Scrolls, the ancient artifacts the series is named after. The passage is dated 4E 206, which would place the game roughly five years after Skyrim. 

Longtime fans already know a fair amount about Hammerfell, the area having appeared in The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1996), The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard (1998), and The Elder Scrolls Online (2014), which gives Bethesda plenty of established culture, politics, and geography to draw on. The big question is whether Hammerfell can support the kind of sprawling, varied open world Skyrim delivered on. The 2011 game was set in a snowy northern province, so a desert setting will be a big change in look and feel for the series. How Bethesda keeps it interesting across a map that size is still anyone’s guess. 

The same goes for the release date. The hopeful estimate is 2028 or 2029, but there’s really no telling. Bethesda hasn’t offered an official date either, or even a window, so for now fans can only keep waiting. 

The post The Elder Scrolls 6’s Long Wait Explained appeared first on Den of Geek.