A Bethesda veteran behind Skyrim, Fallout, and Starfield has explained what Bethesda needs to bring to the table to ensure that The Elder Scrolls 6 is a successful sequel.
Bruce Nesmith, whose credits include Daggerfall, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Starfield, and a role as lead designer on Skyrim, recently spoke to Kiwi Talkz, outlining what makes a good sequel, and what Bethesda needs to do to make sure that The Elder Scrolls 6 lives up to Skyrim. "When we look at making sequels," Nesmith explains, "you're looking at a couple of different things.
You have to look at 'what should I do the same, what should I do different, and what should I do new?' And you have to have something significant in each of those buckets.
If a sequel does not contain something different than the previous ones, then it's only tangentially an actual sequel." Nesmith goes into the idea that players want a sense of familiarity between games, and points to one thing that The Elder Scrolls 6 will likely have to keep: "If Bethesda made a new Elder Scrolls game and it didn't have the material set that they were used to - the Elven, Daedric, Orcish, Glass, etc - that would probably disappoint some people." Of course, not everything remains the same.
Nesmith points to Fallout 4's dialogue system, which "didn't go over so well - you'll notice it got pulled out for subsequent projects.