Say if the next Bethesda game had no date planned like 11/11/11, how long would you guys be willing to wait if it meet your "standard" of approval?

If it is good. And no bugs. 7 years.

Skyrim is good and for me at least, it has no bugs.

so long as its designed for hardware that's available when the game is released, not 6 years prior, then I'll be happy.

Of course, this wont happen. consoles are demanding games be designed for their specs and their audiences only, leaving pc gamers in the dust. the development companies are sellouts

Really bro really? Can we have at least one discussion without pointing fingers? I would honestly play a game that was made for the PC in mind and it was ported to consoles, but you would complain about it if it happened in reverse.

6 years.

If Xbox 720 is going to be announced soon, that means Bethesda already has a target dev kit. Their next game may be next-gen.

4 years at most. I'd rather they have a full team that works on TES for the whole 4 years and a different team for Fallout.

I don't understand the question, or maybe I just don't understand why people are answering what they're answering.

I'd wait pretty much my whole life for a new TES game. I mean, if it takes 10 years, I'm not just going to decide "OKAY IT'S BEEN TOO LONG, I REFUSE TO PLAY THIS SERIES ANYMORE." That's just silly. I mean, it's been over 10 years since the release of Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, and that's my favorite standalone game. If they made a sequel today, that'd be amazing, and I'd totally play it.

So how long would I wait? Forever. How long do I WANT to wait? I think 5 years is plenty of time. I'd prefer around 3 or 4 years, maybe, as I want to spend a lot of time playing Skyrim and modding Skyrim and seeing other people's mods and things like that, but, of course, I'm excited for new areas and new gameplay and new stories and new lore. However long it takes to make a huge improvement over the last game. I really respect that Bethesda doesn't just shoot out a new game every year with the same engine and same graphics and same everything, where it's basically just a full expansion of the previous game. Instead, they make whole new games.

3 or 4 years is a good cycle. I hope I live to play all the provinces of this continent at least.

Well, I would still buy it if it was released 15 years later, but obviously I owuldn't be happy about it. I just want the next game to be noticeably bigger and done in a reasonable time frame if possible. Give Fallout to Obsidian and/or a smaller group of your employees. Ideally, I say do this, make it so you have at least 100 people working on tes VI (they've got plenty of money for new employees with Skyrim's success) and spend 4 or 5 years making a game that HONESTLY has more content and complexity than Morrowind (They claimed this in several respects for Skyrim, not true) with the technological and AI advances of Skyrim and Oblivion, and is in a much larger world. More than 6 years I guess I'd just get pissed off and then start to fade away from the series (except possibly modding) until the next game was announced.

QFT. Fallout and Tes hurt each other's development time. Skyrim could have had deeper customization and polish in a 100% dedicated 4 year production time. Bethesda clearly has the money to work these franchises separately.

Each TES game should come out "When it's done." This is why I disliked Skyrim's release: they announced the 11/11/11 release date way in advance; this tied them to it.

Overall, I'd want each TES game to have 4-6 years or so of solid, intensive development given to each. Moreover, I'd like to not see more than one flagship TES game released for the same console. Skyrim, graphically, was one of the weakest titles to come out on the PC in a long while; in spite of the intimidating-looking system specs, a few mistakes made it in that showcased just how technologically lagging the game was:

• While the "recommended" specs claimed Skyrim would need a quad-core processor, http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/skyrim-performance-benchmark,3074-9.html. (the difference between the i3 and i5 shown comes from having more L2 cache)
  
• Similarly, even a low-end video card proved sufficient to run the game even on "ultra" settings at a good resolution, and still get a smoother framerate than most of us played Oblivion at.

I'm not some silly "impatient gamer" that gets mad if I don't get a frequent, regular release from the series. Rather, I see that it definitely cheapens the games: take a look at Madden NFL and Call of Duty to see what I mean: annual releases makes the game absolutely terrible. (CoD has been going downhill after MW1)

That's because when it's done as a console game ported to the PC, it suffers in a way that isn't seen the other way around. In fact, this suffering actually often extends to the console version, too: the most impressive-looking console games made through history were the result of PC games being ported to the console after their initial PC release... To name a few, Morrowind on the Xbox, Battlefield 3 and Crysis on the 360, (while the former was a same-day release, PC development finished well before console development) and perhaps the biggest example of all, Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine on the Nintendo64, which nearly looked like a DreamCast game upon release.

Graphically, this can be seen quite well with TES games: neither Oblivion and ESPECIALLY Skyrim represented bleeding-edge visuals upon their release on the PC; this was on account of the games being clipped to the Xbox 360's capabilities. Hence why, for instance, you might notice http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=de1M4Q_g2eg. (notice the lack of "dynamic soft shadows?")

Until it's out. I got other things to occupy my time.

If it was in the same style as Morrowind, as long as it took, if its gonna be like Oblivion and Skyrim, couldn't care less...