Win a Chance to Create Your Own NPC in The Elder Scrolls VI in Charity Auction - News

by William D'Angelo , posted on 17 February 2025 / 2,972 Views

Bethesda Game Studios announced one lucky winner has the chance to create their own NPC in The Elder Scrolls VI in a silent charity auction in order to raise money for Make-A-Wish Mid-Atlantic.

"One winner will have the opportunity to work with the Bethesda Game Studios development team to create a character to appear as a video game NPC in The Elder Scrolls VI," reads the description to the auction.

"Calling all gamers and fantasy fans! This once-in-a-lifetime opportunity allows you to immortalize yourself in one of the most highly anticipated video games of all time, The Elder Scrolls VI.

"The Elder Scrolls series, developed by Bethesda Game Studios, is renowned for its vast open worlds, deep lore, and immersive storytelling. With this exclusive experience, you'll work with the developers to create a custom character that will appear in the game, leaving your mark on the legendary franchise."

Todd Howard last year stated, "our focus as far as new development right now is Elder Scrolls VI."

We're offering one lucky winner the chance to create an NPC for The Elder Scrolls VI to benefit Make-A-Wish Mid-Atlantic.

Winning bid will go directly to Make-A-Wish so they can keep granting wishes.

Visit their silent auction to bid: https://beth.games/4b4bDPw

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— Bethesda Game Studios (@bethesdastudios.com) February 17, 2025 at 12:50 PM

A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Bluesky.

7 Comments

Wman1996 (on 17 February 2025)

This seems like a "Hard Drive" article. The game might come out before the end of the decade, but even that's uncertain.

shikamaru317 Wman1996 (on 17 February 2025)

I don't think it's quite that far behind in development. They've had at least a small team working on it since 2018, it has been in full active development for about a year and a half now, and they revealed last year that builds of the game were playable. I don't think development will take near as long as it did for Starfield, much smaller scope. Probably will release by 2028 or 2029.

Zkuq shikamaru317 (on 17 February 2025)

Skyrim took about three years after Fallout 3, and Fallout 4 took four years after Skyrim. I don't think that even with the pre-production phase there's much chance of TES VI taking 'only' five years after Starfield, considering how long games take to create these days and how Bethesda will probably have to support the next generation as well for TES VI. 2028 might be possible, but I certainly wouldn't bet my money on it. 2029 seems like a more reasonable year to me, and I'd be more willing to put my money on 2030 than 2028. I guess the ballpark is still roughly 2029 though, give or take a year.

shikamaru317 Zkuq (on 17 February 2025)

Starfield itself took 5 years of active development supposedly (late 2018 shortly after Fallout 76 went gold - September 2023), and it was a new IP with a massive scope, using systems that were all new to Bethesda. TES 6 should be a much less massive undertaking for them, a sequel rather than a new IP, a handcrafted map that will ultimately be much smaller than the grand sum of all of the handcrafted locations in Starfield + time spent on the procedural generation system, a comparable amount of content to Skyrim probably, and that is on top of the work the pre-production team already got done before active development began in 2023, we've seen footage of the pre-production team photogrammetry scanning world texture assets and character models for the game as far back as a 2019 behind the scenes video they released. The fact that it already had playable builds in 2024, only about a year after full development began, is a pretty positive sign I'd say.

Even factoring in AAA development taking longer these days, the smaller scope and higher amount of work done in the pre-production phase could possibly compensate and keep the dev time down to the same 5 years as Starfield I think. I think 2028 is possible, though I agree 2029 is probably more likely, due to likely cross-gen support (more platforms to optimize), likely upgrades to Creation Engine 2 to fix some the foibles it had in Starfield, and a desire to wow critics and try and climb their way back up to upper echelon of AAA developers.

Edit: It's also worth noting that Bethesda has expanded a good bit since Starfield released, I remember their LinkedIn showing about 450 employees not too long before Starfield released, they are now showing 627 employees there. Those employees are of course split between TES 6, the 2nd and likely final Starfield DLC, Fallout 76 live service support, and Fallout 5 pre-production, but still, growth is growth.

Zkuq shikamaru317 (on 18 February 2025)

Those are some good points, although I suspect you can't really draw very strong conclusions about having a playable build early (game development is iterative, so you really want to get something to iterate on as soon as possible). Additionally, handcrafted could mean more or less work, depending. I think we agree about the facts and might just be giving different weights to them. All in all, I still think 2028 seems unlikely at this point, but it's certainly possible - time will surely tell.