More time will pass between Skyrim and The Elder Scrolls 6 than between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace.
Last week, Phil Spencer said that The Elder Scrolls 6 is still at least five years away. If it arrives on the early side of that estimate, a decade will have passed since Bethesda announced it at E3 in 2018. And it will have been 17 years since its predecessor Skyrim launched on PC, PS3, and Xbox 360. The newborns whose parents coped with sleepless nights by exploring the wintry province will play its sequel in their dorm rooms.
For the record, the gap between TES 5 and 6 – if the latter ever even comes out – is a year longer than the gap between Half-Life 2, which launched right after George W. Bush was reelected in 2004, and Half-Life: Alyx, which hit headsets at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Valve, notoriously, took a long time to follow up Half-Life 2. For years, people joked that the studio couldn’t count to three, given that Half-Life, Team Fortress, Portal, and Left 4 Dead all stalled out after two entries. When Valve returned to the world of Half-Life after 16 years it was a triumphant, long-awaited return that many fans thought they would never see.
But, for The Elder Scrolls, it all feels so much more normal. Games take a long time to make now, and Xbox’s Matt Booty recently said that gamers are just going to have to get used to the new status quo. You might have played a new GTA game every year during the PS2 era, but now new entries are separated by over a decade. That means that every triple-A sequel, by virtue of swollen development cycles, has the potential to be a legacy sequel.
In movies, this is a familiar phenomenon. This weekend, in fact, Harrison Ford is returning for the Indiana Jones series’ second legacy sequel. And last month, Michael Keaton donned the Caped Crusader’s cowl for the first time since 1992 for The Flash (alongside a roster of CGI abominations attempting to accomplish the same thing for long-dead actors). The Flash represents a newer, more craven approach to the legacy sequel, using the multiverse as a corporate deus ex machina to maneuver unrelated characters from older films into new movies with a conveniently IP-friendly sci-fi concept. The Flash, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Space Jam: A New Legacy, and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, all feature characters from classic movies returning to press the audience’s nostalgic buttons.
Video games haven’t yet followed this path. Multiverse stories are still fairly rare in the medium, and in the cases that these crossovers do appear, they tend to be small Easter eggs, not full-blown cameos and side stories. God of War Ragnarok alluded to many other Sony franchises, but through optional lore pick-ups, not portals opening to reveal Aloy and Nathan Drake.
When I say that most triple-A video games will eventually be legacy sequels, what I mean is that each will be freighted with the added meaning that a long time away imbues. When The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers arrived a year after The Fellowship of the Ring, audiences expected it to continue telling the story. But, when The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey came to theaters nearly a decade after Return of the King, it carried a greater weight of expectation. It couldn’t just be a good sequel, it had to recapture the magic of movies that its audience watched in a vastly different context.
If developers want to try something new before returning to a familiar franchise, suddenly 10 years have passed. We’re headed into a future where every video game sequel is The Force Awakens. Most games can’t live up to that, and they shouldn’t have to.
