It’s no state secret there’s a lot of hype for The Elder Scrolls VI. It’s also gotten to the point that we can look at news articles about the mysterious project from four or more years ago with a cheeky Todd Howard stating its release won’t happen anytime soon. More years have passed between the releases of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and Skyrim than from Skyrim until… whenever the heck we get this next one.

The Elder Scrolls VI has become its own time capsule.

Turning Points

I’ve recently gotten my grubby gamer paws on an Xbox Series X. Not to turn this into an advertisement piece or anything, but Game Pass is pretty darn cool. In-between bouts of Star Wars Battlefront II (yes, I really do still play) and efforts to complete every Halo campaign there is, I’ve also been replaying The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.

I came to the game quite late. It was roughly three years ago that I finally sat down with this wild, studio-saving adventure. Needless to say, Morrowind feels outdated in certain ways. The character models, while not quite the brightly lit potatoes of its successor, are hideous and suffer from a bad case of “sameface.” The leveling system takes time to get the hang of, the bulk of your guild quests will involve fairly rote objectives, and worst of all, there’s a very good chance you’ll fail to hit anything for a long time.

But there’s a lot to love here. A lot to love that hasn’t necessarily made the two-game jump to smash-hit Skyrim at that. Things that have long been forgotten; things that could improve The Elder Scrolls VI in meaningful ways should they be remembered. Let’s mull over a quadruple of them today.

1) Full-Blown Customization

Listen, I’m sure it’s been said before. And without feeling like a loser by reading everybody else’s lists as I pen my own, I bet it’s on at least half of them. We need to say it, anyway.

Let me craft a spell that simultaneously makes every tavern patron abruptly naked, running into the cold of night in abject horror and untold shame.

No, but seriously. There’s something magical about The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind throwing caution to the wind and allowing players to go nuts with this stuff. The calculations available on that page tell us how much it will cost to create a spell, whom you can speak with throughout the province to get started, and all the various results therein. Far from the simple “I cast magic missile” knockoffs (mind you, every good game needs a magic missile knockoff), you can detect keys in dungeons, make people less resistant to nasty diseases, absorb their own skills and abilities to temporarily make them your own… the list goes on.

Now, let’s imagine what Bethesda can do in a post-Skyrim world. And what I mean by that is that part of Skyrim‘s breakout success stems from the sensation it gives players that they can do all sorts of crazy things and bear witness to their often-hilarious effects. Somewhere between the game’s intentional openness and adorable jank exists a rare gleam in which you can lure giants into towns and watch them slaughter en masse.

Combine that with Morrowind‘s spell-making. Season it with all the crunchy, number-based stuff you can compel fellow NPCs to do on your behalf. Watch the magic, literally and figuratively, unfold in The Elder Scrolls VI.

Give Players a “Hardcore” Toggle

Morrowind didn’t hold our hands. Quest markers, as we’ve known them for years, were a rarity. Morrowind is from an earlier age in gaming, an age when Western RPGs scoffed at their more linear and easily navigable Japanese cousins. If you wanted to go someplace, you had to pay close attention to your instructions. Failing that, Morrowind at least kindly insinuates that the player character is penning this all down in their life-saving journal, sparing us the need to go all the way back to a quest-giver.

Roads are invaluable assets in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind because venturing off the beaten path can and often will result in death. Overpowered enemies may linger upon nearby bridges. Disease-infested foes await your patronage. You can’t even expect your map to guide you back to safety — you’re filling in your map step-by-step as you explore.

I’m sure plenty of these things can happen in Skyrim… via mods. Not unlike many of Morrowind‘s niftier aspects. But those won’t exist for some time with The Elder Scrolls VI. Let’s give those hard-working modders a break and let them flex their creativity muscles on other stuff right from the get-go, shall we?

More In-Depth NPC Interactions

One thing Oblivion and Skyrim both have over Morrowind is a serious uptick in voice acting. In fact, the sequels give every voice a line. And while there are quite a bit of reused lines, especially in Oblivion but still plentiful in Skyrim, the immersion is still (arguably) enhanced a great deal through the voicework.

While I’m at it counterintuitively making loving fun ofThe Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, I’ll also say that its labyrinthine investigation-oriented conversation system is so archaic, I have a friend who absolutely swears by the game to this very day and even she admits she cannot imagine replaying it without dialogue mods.

So where exactly am I going with this? Well, look past its flaws and I think you’ll not only see what Morrowind‘s NPC interactions can bring to the table for The Elder Scrolls VI but also how those welcome additions can blend with the more modern bells and whistles of its successors to create that proverbial perfect cup of coffee.

See, here’s the thing. What Morrowind does really, really well gives you meaningful dialogue options at various points in the game. They’re not as in-your-face frequent as, say, what Mass Effect and Dragon Age offer. But this is Bethesda, not BioWare. Morrowind didn’t need all that. What it needed was to convey the feeling that the player is truly in control of their character’s actions. Sure, Skyrim has some funny dialogue options here and there, but Morrowind‘s lengthy NPC exchanges feel much more visceral, realistic, and appreciated.

Marry this with a major uptick in voice acting. (Maybe don’t give the player character much of a voice, though, like a certain more recent Bethesda title.) Now we’re cooking with fire. An exponential plethora of script lines should be more feasible given the power of current-gen consoles and Microsoft’s hefty investment in the company.

An Eerier World

There’s a growing faction in the Elder Scrolls fandom this month of people who are now convinced we’ll be visiting (or rather, revisiting) the region known as Iliac Bay and its surrounding provinces of High Rock and Hammerfell. It might seem abundantly silly to take a small scratch on the interior of a starship in the Starfield trailer as some kind of real evidence, but then, Todd Howard did say we should be on the lookout for all sorts of easter eggs in that trailer.

Taken at face value, neither Brit-inspired High Rock nor the sandy deserts of Hammerfell sound like regions that are nearly as alien as The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind‘s Vvardenfell. The latter has massive mushrooms shaped into villages, tick-like fast travel creatures called silt striders, a city of stone that feels almost downright Neolithic, and more. Neither Oblivion‘s Cyrodiil nor Skyrim‘s, well, Skyrim, are so strange.

And that’s fine! But a big part of the reason The Elder Scrolls III‘s Vvardenfell is still so commonly praised is that it’s unlike anything else in gaming. Don’t be afraid to turn a portion of Hammerfell’s desert into a stretch of purplish haze where travelers are lost forever. High Rock’s chock full of magically-inclined folk, right? Let’s see the terrifying aftereffects of spells gone wrong in a crater-like area that will tear flesh asunder. I don’t know — I’m tossing out random ideas, here. Bethesda has a long time to develop lore for The Elder Scrolls VI. Let’s see some eerie results.

And We Shall Call It… Rockfellwind

It’s been three summers since Bethesda handed us this official announcement trailer. The United States had a different president. No one on earth knew that COVID would be a thing. You probably couldn’t start typing “milk, bread, eggs” into a Google search without running into five guys and at least one alligator ranting about how The Last Jedi killed their hopes and dreams forever.

We still have a ways to go. There’s still another big project that needs to arrive at our doorsteps before we hear another murmur about The Big 6. I can only assume The Elder Scrolls Online will have fully charted every square inch of the moon by the time The Elder Scrolls VI is ours. Maybe, while we wait, we can look to the past. To the east. To Morrowind.

And if the Daedra are just, perhaps Bethesda Game Studios has been looking eastward a little, too.