The Elder Scrolls 6 location possibilities are… pretty vast. Or at least they are on first inspection of that super brief E3 2018 teaser trailer we saw – but we actually think it might be possible to narrow them down.
Below, we’re going to run through a series of potential locations and settings for the Elder Scrolls 6. We’ll rule some out – at least in principle – and highlight some others that we think are particularly likely, and then finally, further below, we’ll go through a quick rundown of everything else we know about The Elder Scrolls 6 – like its platforms and potential release date – so you’ve got all the information in one place.
Do bear in mind though that, really, this is a bit of fun – even if we do start to get quite into it as we go…
The Elder Scrolls VI – E3 2018 Announcement Teaser Watch on YouTube
It’s important to note, however, that Bethesda was acquired by Microsoft, announced on Monday 21st September 2020, and, currently, we don’t know if this has had any affect on the development of Elder Scrolls 6.
There’s also the 2020/21 New Year’s Eve teaser tweet from the Elder Scrolls account to consider, although we reckon that’s actually a tease for something else, sadly – but you can read what we made of it in (great) depth via that link.
On this page:
There’s really not a lot to go on here but, if we had to, we’d plant our flag in Hammerfell as the location of The Elder Scrolls 6. Just. Here’s why – and bear with us, because we’re going into speculation territory here…
Behold! 6 Possible Locations For The Elder Scrolls VI! Watch on YouTube
Basic assumptions:
Firstly, let’s make some assumptions. Let’s assume, for the sake of narrowing it down, that the following is true (and that you’ve watched that teaser trailer, above):
- It’s not set in Tamriel – it might be (and we’ll discuss the possibility of that below), but if we want to even try to narrow it down, we have to at least start with assuming this trailer isn’t just a generic mockup of “somewhere in the continent”. For now, let’s say the location of the trailer hints at the location of the game.It’s not set of Tamriel – again, we discuss the possibility of this below and again, for us to really narrow it down we need to assume it’s somewhere we already know a decent amount about.Temporally, it’s set somewhere at least to the dates of the events of Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim – if it’s set way before or way after those events, then again we lose all power of deduction from what we see in the teaser (big, land-mass-changing stuff happens over the course of Nirn and Tamriel’s history, after all, and Skyrim, for instance, was set 200 years after Oblivion). Let’s assume the maps of Tamriel that exist at the time of those other games, and the key locations depicted on them, are already in existence at whatever time this trailer and game is set.
Again, for emphasis: it may be that none of those assumptions are true, or some of them are – but for the sake of argument, and for the fun of it, let’s say they all are, so we can actually analyse what we’ve seen.
So, those assumptions in mind, here’s our reasoning for believing The Elder Scrolls 6 is most likely to be set in Hammerfell:
Step one: narrowing it down
Firstly, the trailer shows us several things. We get an idea of the landscape – dry, rocky and mountainous with thinning, shrubby greenery throughout most of it – as well as a clear shot of the sea, to the right. We can also clearly see a ruined, fort-like structure in the centre, near a crater-like drop to the left, and if you look closely, right in the distance on the coast, there is what looks like a city, set in a marshy, green area with some kind of watery passage or river just in front of it.
So, if we’re looking for places on Tamriel maps that represent the trailer, we need somewhere in a dry, arid climate, where the ocean would be on our right if the city was dead ahead of us, and crucially no other land mass appears behind the city if we look in its direction.