Todd Howard revealed the full name of Elder Scrolls 6 at the end of a video celebrating 40 years of Bethesda Game Studios. The game is called The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel. The reveal runs for one minute and four seconds amidst the end of an 8m46s ‘Celebrating 40 Years of Bethesda Game Studios’ video (which you can see below).
Sand blows across an Elder Scroll, the sand falls away, and the logo appears while a familiar piece of Skyrim music plays. A quote closes it out, credited to Yazar, Moth Priest of High Queen Iradne of Hammerfell, 4E 206: “The scroll offered only a shimmer, a veil thinly lifted to my eyes. A future lost. A victory undone. Sands of time scattered by fate.”
That is a lot of prophecy for a trailer with nothing in it to prophesy about. Bethesda handed us a future lost and a victory undone, and the audience would have settled for ten seconds of a horse.
The name itself had been leaking for months. In August, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma posted that she had watched a live playthrough of the game that morning and blanked out the subtitle with eight asterisks. Bethesda replied with the same eight asterisks, which told everyone how long the word was and gave the internet a puzzle. Fans landed on Sentinel almost immediately, since it has eight letters and is also the capital of Hammerfell, the province people have expected the game to visit ever since the 2018 teaser. The Verge’s Tom Warren later reported the name ahead of the announcement, and Wccftech says players even found it hidden in the employee number on Starfield’s character creation page, where splitting the digits into pairs and converting them to letters spells Sentinel.
The community did more detective work than this reveal portion of the trailer did.
Here is the full tally of what Bethesda has shown the public since the game was announced in 2018. A teaser with a title card, and now a teaser with a logo. Gameplay footage, in game footage, and cutscenes have all been left off the list. Eight years of waiting have produced a name and a location, and Bethesda’s own post about the reveal said it was great to finally share both.
The same post said development continues and that it will be some time before the studio is ready to share more. There is still no release date and no confirmed platform list. Earlier this year Bethesda said the game is its primary focus, built on Creation Engine 3 with most of the team working on it. Fans have been told for years that the game exists, and they have now been told what it is called.
