A lawyer’s hurried correction and a slip of the tongue suggests that The Elder Scrolls 6 is due for release in 2026. Possibly.
In a week that has already seen sensitive triple-A game budgets and Call of Duty data made public thanks to the slip of a black marker, the FTC versus Microsoft trial has brought with it all kinds of drama and juicy information.
To the list, we can add this latest legal slip-up: a Microsoft lawyer may have accidentally revealed that The Elder Scrolls 6 is pencilled in for release in 2026. Possibly.
The morsel of (possible) information emerged during a discussion about Zenimax, the Microsoft-owned parent company of Bethesda. Microsoft’s lawyer stepped in to “clarify” a point raised about the Elder Scroll series, only to muddy the waters further.
Here’s a transcript of the lawyer’s words, as reported by The Verge:
Could I clarify one issue that council raised with you, when you were asking about Zenimax and asked him to find a game that was most similar to Xbox, he mentioned Elder Scrolls. That is incorrect. There are two Elder Scrolls games, one is online called Elder Scrolls Online — that is a multiplayer game, it is on PlayStation today. The game he’s talking about Elder Scrolls 16… the projected release is 2026 as a single-player game. It is not anywhere similar to Call of Duty, which as you know is multiplayer and multi-platform.
The eagle-eyed among you will have spotted the mistake here: at the rate Bethesda puts out Elder Scrolls games, we aren’t likely to see an Elder Scrolls 16 until at least the 22nd century – long after we’re all dead.
What we do know, though, is that The Elder Scrolls 6 is a live project, and was first announced about five years ago. It seems likely, then, that this is the “single-player” game that Microsoft’s lawyer suggests will launch in 2026.
There’s another problem with this assumption, though: it contradicts what Microsoft Gaming boss Phil Spencer said on 23 June, which is that Elder Scrolls 6 is “likely five-plus years away.”
Now, we aren’t mathematicians by any means, but by our calculations that would place Elder Scrolls 6's release nearer the space year 2028 than 2026.
Spencer also added that Elder Scrolls 6 is so far from release that he couldn’t even say for sure whether it would be an Xbox exclusive, or what consoles it would appear on. “It’s so far out it’s hard to understand what the platforms will even be at this point,” Spencer said. “It’s the same team that’s finishing Starfield, which comes out this September.”
So, to sum up: Elder Scrolls 6 may come out in 2026. Or it could be 2028. Or maybe Microsoft’s lawyer was right, and the next game in the series will be Elder Scrolls 16, released in the year 2103, and beamed directly into our minds via the Xbox LaserTron One.
