We may live long enough to see The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5 after all - Todd Howard says Bethesda is "finding ways to increase our output"

Todd Howard says Bethesda is working on getting games into players' hands more quickly.

Waiting for upcoming Bethesda games, particularly The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5, often puts me face to face with my own mortality. Although I'm only in my early 30s, anything can happen at any time and there's no denying the reality that Bethesda games take a long gosh dang time to make.

Yes, The Elder Scrolls 6 is in active development and could release in 2026 (at the soonest), but what about Fallout 5? That hasn't even been officially revealed beyond the simple confirmation that it exists in Bethesda's pipeline, and worse yet, Bethesda veteran Emil Pagliarulo recently dashed all hope of playing it any time soon.

Thankfully, Howard recently gave us a small glimmer of hope when he told Kinda Funny Games (timestamped here) that Bethesda has been trying to speed things up.

"If I didn't make these games, I would just be playing them all the time," he said. "Even this weekend I was jumping between Starfield and Fallout 76 and Fallout 4; that's how I spent my weekend playing games. And they do take a long time, and so I think one of the things that we're focused on here is obviously making sure they're of the highest quality, but also finding ways to increase our output, because we don't want to wait that long either. That's never our plan, but we want to make sure we get it right."

It's genuinely encouraging to hear Bethesda, essentially, acknowledging what is a very real issue to fans of the studio's IP. I don't need to remind anyone that the last mainline Elder Scrolls game was released 13 years ago, and if the next one is released as early as possible, it'll have been 15 years in-between releases. It needn't be said that that's simply too damn long, my half-serious existential crisis aside.

Skyrim's magic system is "absolutely going to continue" into The Elder Scrolls 6, according to a former Bethesda designer.