Elder Scrolls 6 is Releasing in 2026, Confirms Microsoft Lawyer

The Elder Scrolls VI was announced back in 2018, more than 5 years ago. Since then, both Bethesda and its now-owner Microsoft have kept the game behind curtains. Apart from the announcement video, there are no teaser, trailers, or even concept art for the game released publicly.

Bethesda already made it clear that Starfield is their focus before ES6 and that they’ll only start sharing news about the next entry in the Elder Scrolls series after Starfield is done and dusted. That means there probably won’t be any nuggets of info dropping anytime soon and fans will have to wait till next year to get something.

Or at least that’s what we thought. As part of the FTC vs. Microsoft hearing, today, one Microsoft lawyer stepped up and gave a statement regarding the current landscape of the Elder Scrolls series. The FTC council had drawn comparisons between Elder Scrolls and COD and in an effort to rectify this, the lawyer ended up clarifying that Elder Scrolls 6 is slated for release in 2026.

Could I clarify one issue that council raised with you, when you were asking about Zenimax and asked him to find a game that was most similar to Xbox, he mentioned Elder Scrolls. That is incorrect. There are two Elder Scrolls games, one is online called Elder Scrolls Online — that is a multiplayer game, it is on PlayStation today. He’s talking about Elder Scrolls 16, that is projected for release in 2026 as a single-player game.

Microsoft Lawyer correcting the council’s mistake with his own

Funnily enough, the lawyer accidentally said Elder Scrolls 16 is releasing in 2026, taking us in the future ahead of 11 unreleased games. Clearly, it was a slip-up and The Verge highlight this error in their transcription of the hearing.

This is potentially the first concrete hint towards the release window of ES6. Before this, we only heard Todd Howard not deny how the game might not release until 2026 and that it will be the last Bethesda game he works on. From this statement, we can make a safe assumption that a 2026 tentative release window is being targeted internally at Bethesda.

Till then, Bethesda won’t be sitting duck as they have a lot on their plate already. The biggest of which is the upcoming sci-fi RPG Starfield that has been in the works for almost a decade. It’s the first new IP the company has created in 25 years so it’s a big deal, and it’s coming later this year on September 6, 2023.

It’s been 12 years since the last Elder Scrolls game, Skyrim, was released back in 2011 and since then a whole lot has changed, so it’ll be interesting to see how a modern Elder Scrolls game looks today. Unfortunately, it will be a while before we see that become a reality, maybe even after GTA 6.