has to come out this year, i refuse to think anything else otherwise. The team is much bigger now than it was pre oblivion, along with more experience. Therefor it may well be that it can take them less time to make a great game

wise words indeed, but my hunch is very different... their development teams fulfill a quite disparate performance

Bethesda has succeeded, where all others have failed. Yes, I'm speaking of... eldritch-priest colonies on Venus! Bethesda has landed first. From our sister planet's ideal relation to the Portals of Zglv'noix and the Line of Izhsqt, they shall develop for us, with secret heresies therein, a perfect simulation of Tamriel!

Do not ask me for my proofs, for I have none, and it would be no surprise to you why; such intelligence exerts a heavy price. Many Bothans died, to bring us this information.

Honestly, the game is already overdue. Even in depth games usually have only 2-3 year development cycles. If I were Bethesda right now, I would be hoping I was ready with an announcement next week, and a release no later than 1st Quarter 2011. Any later is only lost revenue, and they will be competing with new new versions of games that are just coming out now, (Fable 2, Dragon Age, Mass Effect 2) rather than having a meaningful place in between them.

It's common knowledge that ES5 will be announced next time there is a full moon.
And then it will be released on a night which the stars don't shine, the moon doesn't glow and the grass doesn't grow.

I also have an insider reporting to me, that Todd Howard is apart of a secretive US military group, in which they develop super soldiers made from binary algorithims. I managed to decode one of these, and buried deep inside the binaryness, was Todd Howards diary.

The diary states that TES5 will contain a executable code, that runs once upon first time launch, that will configure your computer into a mindless slave for his military division.

Again, all this is obvious.

Were... were you serious when you said that?

Also, 2014 is ridiculously unlikely.

I really hope they use the same engine as this will this drastically reduce the amount of bugs they have to squash and development time overall (and if anyone thinks the engine is "outdated" or "old tech" just go install Qarl, RAEVWD, OGE, and any of the lighting systems and weather mods). If so we could be looking at an announcement this year and a release late 2011 or early to mid 2012.

They already said they aren't.

Link please?

I'm not saying you're wrong, I just haven't read that. Granted, I haven't really read that much on ESV yet, but whatever.

I have heard about some changes too. I don't have a quote on the information, but it sounded like they were updating their engine instead of starting fresh.

So what Schnell said may be true. It says "adding to the engine", but he may just mean adding to their overall tech and not saying they'll use the same engine Oblivion used. That, or it will be ridiculously heavily modified.

The trouble is that the games you listed already have a decent engine that is considered 'up-to-date' and capable of producing games with a visual quality of today's standards. Oblivion was being developed before this console generation was released, and Fallout 3 was developed on the same engine (albeit slightly updated). Oblivion's engine is so out of date it can't even handle shadows, hence the need for a complete overhaul. It was fine 4 years ago, but not anymore.

A 2-3 year turnaround is fine for games like Fable 2 and Mass Effect 2, but due to this engine overhaul... I don't see TES:V being released for a while yet. Sounds like they've only really got down to working on the meat of the game if everything up until recently has been spent on engine work. Keep in mind it's not just TESV though - Final Fantasy XIII was in the works for over 5 years. Teams may be getting larger, but technical demands are also increasing. Seems the two don't balance out, so anyone claiming a larger team should result in a quicker development time is missing this point. Games are taking longer to develop as time goes on, despite having larger teams. Think back to the Mega Drive era where a team of 30 could publish a new game every year...

That sounds to me exactly what they did for Fallout 3. They added to the engine there. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.



Please. Fable 2, ME2, and DA have high visual quality engines? Oblivion w/mods looks a hundred times better and is able to handle large landscapes with nearly universal physics. And saying the Oblivion engine can't handle shadows is just completely wrong. It handles shadows as good as any game these days (barring the Crysis types) and if you remember back to when the first gameplay videos were released there were dynamic shadows on EVERY SINGLE OBJECT that were not implemented in the final game because it would have been too stressful on the current 2006 hardware.

The Oblivion/FO3 engine is able to produce vibrant sprawling landscapes, with thousands of creatures and lively NPCs, dynamic shadows, HDR, vast viewing distances, and randomly generated terrain (not on the fly, of course, but before the game ships to help with world building). To throw all that away just so to say "look we have a new engine! we're totally next-gen!" when it all depends on the quality of work put into the final game is ludicrous. Today's Morrowind looks a million times better than Mass Effect or Dragon Age, for christsakes!

Barring lively NPCs, I think you have a point. I'm not tech minded, but I think they'd free up loads of space, if they could condense the memory an NPC eats, with their AI packages. An npc's AI in TESV might clock at relatively same memory use as an Oblivion npc and still do ten times the tasks, with some extra development time.

They chucked out the shadows because the engine couldn't handle it. It's terribly written by today's standards, hence they've spent an entire year re-writing it.

Yes you can mod Oblivion to look like a modern day game, but it runs incredibly badly on even the most expensive computers, and that's without adding shadows to buildings and clutter. Consoles wouldn't stand a chance, and that's why it's being redesigned. Oblivion and Fallout 3 on a console could never look and perform anywhere near as well as Fable 2 and ME2. I know the moderators don't like us speculating on the engine capabilities here, so i'll leave it at that. We do know for a fact that the engine has been redesigned for the last year though, and that this could delay the release of TESV until at least next year.

If they can get Umbra and all the other stuff that we've been sigging for integrated in some way, then i think we can rest easy on how the graphics will be like. Anyways we are veering off-topic and i dont think the bear would like that so lets try getting back on topic.

Suppose they reach the expiry date for the Skyrim trademark without doing anything, what are the paths that this situation could go from there.

ESV will use Gamebryo, it's just being rebuilt from the ground up again.

I disagree with you on the specs (with a 3.3 ghz C2D and a Radeon HD 4670 I'm able to implement all the stuff I mentioned at 1680x1050 just fine, except I can't implement *everything* with RAEVWD). When I said "lively NPCs" I meant that it's possible, as it was improved upon with FO3, but yes that certainly wasn't the case with Oblivion! (although however the packages are optimized doesn't work well for large crowds, as crowded cities and such mods prove). I did forget about the consoles, and I guess that does limit options somewhat when it comes to the current engine. I don't know how FO3 played on consoles but on the PC it runs better than Oblivion does.

If the Skyrim trademark ran out, wouldn't they just renew it? Does anyone know if Oblivion or Morrowind was trademarked long before its announcement and if it was did it have to be renewed? (I'm thinking that Skyrim could have been a canceled ESTravels game)

They let the Oblivion trademark expire but they still filed for it again, so I assume they could do the same with Skyrim. Though I don't know if there's an amount of time you have to wait between when a trademark expires and when you can file for it again. Maybe they're waiting for it to expire so they can file a new trademark for a different province. While it'd definitely be more convenient for them to announce it before it expires, I don't think they're too concerned with using it before then.

if the next elder scrolls game doesn't come out in the next year it will never come out.
Morrowind came out in 2002 and oblivion came out in 2006, daggerfall came out in 1996
although bethesda allows large spans of time in between their games, i seriously doubt, even with a strong fan base, that they won't be moving on to newer, (but not necessarily better) projects

I don't see that happening, it's even less likely it will come out this year since they haven't even announced it yet.

Let me post the timeline I made again, showing when TESV should be released if it follows Bethesda's normal pattern. I don't know if it will really work out this way, but it's just my guess:

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Work started on Morrowind in 1998
It was developed all of 1999 with no info released
It was announced in March 2000
It was delayed in October and shown at E3 in May 2001
It was released May 2002
DLC was made until May 2003, GOTY edition released October 2003

Work started on Oblivion in May 2002
It was developed all of 2003 with no info released
It was announced in September 2004, featured in GameInformer September 2004 (October issue)
It was delayed in October and shown at E3 in May 2005
It was released in March 2006
DLC was made until October 2007, GOTY edition released September 2007

Work started on Fallout 3 and was announced in July 2004
It was developed all of 2005 with no info released
It was developed all of 2006 with no info released
The first trailer was released in June 2007, featured in GameInformer June 2007 (July issue)
It was shown at E3 2008 and was released in October 2008
DLC was made until August 2009, GOTY edition released October 2009

Work started on TESV in October 2008
It was developed all of 2009 with no info released
It was announced in 2010
It was shown at E3 2011
It was released in 2012
DLC was made until 2013, GOTY edition released in 2013

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

What I don't understand is how they are announcing Fallout New Vegas before a new TES. I love Fallout personally, but I was a TES fan before, and I think that TES should have a new game before Fallout. TES will probably look amazing compared to Oblivion. I think they should make it similar to the way Fallout 3 was. Going back and playing Oblivion after finishing Fallout 3, it's really bland, especially since you can pretty much max everything out and get they strongest armor/weps/spells on one account, compared to Fallout 3's way of leveling and stat usage.

Fallout: New Vegas is being developed by Obsidian while Bethesda works on their new game. So New Vegas has no effect on the development of TESV at all.

i remember someone from bethesda saying once "potentially theres a new elder scrolls for 2010". so back then they might have already had a small team set aside getting everything in place, im sure they would be aware that fallout 3 would take alot amount of time and people yet still said 2010. There for due to this information, i remain firmly convinced it will come out this year, its just bethesda keeping queit
Very soon, i predict the ball will start moving...

Yeah that was Paul Oughton. This slip up, along with the one in the review copy of The Infernal City, leads me to believe that the game has been in development for at least a few years. It also suggests that Bethesda may have intended for ES 5 to be out in '10 until a few months ago, until they realized that it wouldn't be finished until early 2011.

Or they could...just be random slip ups...

I always keep the same pattern in my head, I just have a hard time deciding whether development started right after Oblivion was released with a small part of the team or if that work is irrelevant and development basically started full-scale not until Oct 2008. Now let's assume it started in Oct 2008, and we'll follow your schedule.
Shown at E3 2011 usually means that the game is announced at Fall in the year before, so say September 2010.

Now we also have to squeeze Elder Scrolls Online into all this, which we definately know is coming and has been in full development since 2006 (the $300 mill funding Zenimax got was in 2007, but development of the MMO started the year before. I don't have the source but it's out there on the internet). You see, ESO can't overlap too much with TESV. Both games can't come out in the same year, both can't be announced in the same season, both can't be shown for their first time at the same E3 etc.
So where do we put Elder Scrolls Online, a game that has been over 3 years in development and by all logic should be announced pretty soon?

Which will be announced first? This puzzles me, and bothers me since I obviously want to have TESV first.