Oblivion and Skyrim’s gap was bridged by forward-looking books about a murderous floating island, so why is The Elder Scrolls 6 stuck reanimating a world that’s stood still since 2011

Long waits between mainline entries in a series aren’t a new phenomenon, if perhaps a bit more common nowadays due to big games’ ballooning development cycles. It took about 23 years for BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate 2 to be followed up by Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3, though there were a decent amount of spin-offs and remasters peppered between the two.

The wait for The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel hasn’t stretched on that long quite yet, but as Bethesda finally revealed concrete details about it just in time for Skyrim’s 15th birthday, it really hit home for me that TES VI will be tasked with restoring motion to a world where calendars have been stuck in the 201st year of the 4th era since 2011. Perhaps it’s because I’m still in my twenties and haven’t lived long enough to see that many things I like pause their forward march for this long before returning. There’s also a good chance my expectations of timelines rolling forward on a regular basis without the need for a whole new entry are coloured by the constant stream of new stuff fed into most games via updates and live service passes these days.

However, when I look back at the interregnum between the last two Elder Scrolls games, Oblivion and Skyrim, I can’t help but feel that what Bethesda and ZeniMax have packed into the gap between Skyrim and Sentinel might have done the latter no favours. Sure, The Elder Scrolls Online has arguably meant that there’s been far more for series fans to sink their teeth into between mainline games than ever before, but because the MMO’s a prequel, none of its tales and lore push the Elder Scrolls’ timeline forwards. Meanwhile mobile and card game spin-offs like The Elder Scrolls: Blades, The Elder Scrolls: Legends, and The Elder Scrolls: Castles have all either slotted in before Skyrim or not been tied to a specific point in time.

On one hand, that leaves the devs a nice clean slate to take the sixth entry wherever they like narratively upon the conclusion of the Dragonborn’s adventures. On the other, Bethesda has missed the opportunity to paint out the world and further set up the stakes for Sentinel in the interim. Back when we were waiting for Skyrim’s original release, the developers were pumping out spin-off books that daubed some fresh adventures onto the Elder Scrolls’ canvas.

I bought these books – 2009’s The Infernal City and 2011’s Lord of Souls – ages ago upon hearing their tales referenced in the sorts of Elder Scrolls lore videos which appeal to sad nerds of my ilk, but have only gotten around to reading past the opening chapters in recent months.

In hindsight, I think I bounced off them that first time because it just felt a bit weird to be reading about set characters getting up to adventures in Tamriel rather than setting off on them in the boots of my own custom created protagonist. I didn’t run into the same with The Witcher, as you’re seeing that world through Gerry from the River’s eyes no matter where you turn. Anyway, the two Elder Scrolls novels by American author Greg Keyes tell the tale of the Umbriel crisis which took place 48 years after the Oblivion crisis and about 153 years before Skyrim’s dragon crisis (Tamriel does love a crisis). The Umbriel crisis saw a floating island powered by souls and formed via some Daedric drama, carve a path of destruction from Black Marsh to the Imperial City. Yep, the empire’s not-Roman soldiers had to fight a flying hunk of land. At one point some mages had to float a legion up in the sky so they could get their bottoms kicked by Umbriel’s defenders.

As you might’ve gathered, the books take the opportunity to tell a story which – especially in terms of where tech was in 2009 – wouldn’t necessarily fit an Elder Scrolls game. Or, at least, not one of the more straight-laced variety Bethesda have made in their post-Morrowind days. A lot of time’s spent looking through the eyes of two characters who’ve snuck aboard Umbriel, the floating island, after it destroyed their hometown and have to adjust to the strange customs of its inhabitant lords and their underlings before finding ways to help take it down. On the ground, things take a more familiar form, as a very serious Dark Elf named Sul and a nepo baby Imperial prince trek across bits of Cyrodiil, Morrowind, and Elsweyr on a quest to do their bit in vanquishing the threat. Then, there’s a Penitus Oculatus spy named Colin trying to figure out if the Umbriel Crisis is an inside job of some sort and a few tales of regular Imperial troops working to evacuate citizens living in the floating island’s path. In an Elder Scrolls game, you’d get some of that, but not be able to hop from person to person chapter by chapter in the fashion the books do.

Umbriel slowly floats across Black Marsh, southern Morrowind and Cyrodiil with an army of zombies in tow, much like this article’s about to float into mildly spoilery territory for the two books. You see, The Infernal City and Lord of Souls outline what happened to cause the red year, a volcanic eruption which took the land of the Dark Elves from the beautifully alien place it was at the time of The Elder Scrolls 3 and reduced it to the ash-covered wasteland it’s outlined to be at the time of Skyrim. As the latter game’s lore books would subsequently set in stone, Baar Dau – the meteor suspended in the air above Vivec City at the time of Morrowind – fell and destroyed the city following the disappearance of the metropolis’ namesake ex-Tribunal god-king. The books reveal that the big rock didn’t fall the moment Vivec vanished, but was kept afloat by a device called the Ingenium, which is essentially a magic box powered by regular soul sacrifices. Two Dunmer, Vuhon and the aforementioned Sul, ended up having a fight rooted in the tech’s murderous nature and that’s actually what led Baar Dau to finally hit the ground.

Either way, the meteor falls, but that’s not an insubstantial bit of backstory for a source outside of the games to add to the Elder Scrolls’ canon. Also wound into the tale of how Umbriel came to be is a bunch of extra flesh on the bone of the relationship between Daedric prince Clavicus Vile and Umbra. In the games, the latter’s always just been a powerful sword which imprints a new personality onto its wielder, but in the books it’s portrayed as a being capable of nicking some of Vile’s godly power and plotting to escape the prince’s realm of Oblivion via the building of Umbriel. Beyond those, the books also offer a chance to get to know emperor Titus Mede I, the warlord who took over the Empire following a post-Oblivion crisis interregnum and whose offspring you murder during Skyrim’s Dark Brotherhood questline.

None of this is anything close to required knowledge for playing Skyrim. No characters from the books pop up to say hello, likely because enough time’s passed for most to perish of natural causes. The sole reference I can recall comes via a chat about a location called Sleeping Tree Camp, which isn’t tied to any of the main questlines. You can, and I did for a long time, totally ignore these time-bridging tomes. That said, I do feel that having now taken the time to read them has helped me see the history of Tamriel as something not as strictly limited to the specific snapshots in time presented by each of the games.

Tales like these, which aren’t conveyed with as much natural emotional detachment as I tend to feel when reading much-condensed accounts of historical events or far off places on the pages of in-game lore books, really help in creating the illusion that The Elder Scrolls’ world is growing and evolving as our own does. It’s not just a snow globe that only shifts whenever some prophesied hero piloted by a controller or keyboard rocks up to shake it.

I do think, in large part due to the size of the real world gap between it and Skyrim, The Elder Scrolls 6 would have and still could benefit from having spin-offs like these to keep gently nudging the timeline forwards. A complicating factor is that judging by this week’s teaser, Sentinel seems like it could be set in the 206th year of the fourth era, a mere five years after the events of Skyrim. That’d mean no 200-ish years of wiggle room in which to slot some spin-off stories without serious risk of influencing things that’d have to be reflected in the new game. Unless Bethesda wanted to either put serious barriers up around where the spin-off could tread or get into a game of arbitrarily deciding what is or isn’t canon. With some collaboration, it could certainly be done, but it could also be a headache the studio wouldn’t want.

It’s likely too late to start the ball rolling now anyway, but that doesn’t stop it being worth asking why Bethesda and their famously adaptation-loving corporate bosses at Microsoft didn’t make sure they had something akin to these books in the works when Sentinel was punted down the road in favour of Starfield.

You did this well once, why haven’t you managed to pull it off again this time? I’m hoping that isn’t the inquiry which’ll come to define The Elder Scrolls 6 as much as questions about where a chunk of the old Bethesda magic had gone did with the studio’s trip to space. Lest the next long wait for a game from them be packed with even more uncomfortable silence.