Xbox CEO Asha Sharma rocked the worlds of Elder Scrolls fans last week when she teased the subtitle to The Elder Scrolls 6 after playing it in a ‘live session’ behind closed doors. Blotting out the name with asterisks, fans have scrambled to figure out which combination of eight letters Bethesda could have chosen for the subtitle of the long-awaited RPG.
A few names have risen to the top. ‘High Rock’ has long been suspected as the setting for The Elder Scrolls 6, but the gap in the name throws a spanner in the works there. There is one other name that a former Bethesda developer even backed on Reddit, though – ‘Sentinel’.
While this might not sound like a typical ‘Elder Scrolls’ name at first glance, it’s actually the name of the capital city of High Rock. What’s more, PC Gamer reports that the internal codeword for Elder Scrolls 6 is ‘Guardian’, which if you get your thesauruses out is a common synonym for Sentinel.
Michael Kirkbride, a game developer who used to work at Bethesda in the late 90’s, put his weight behind this name when it was floated on Reddit, too. While he no longer works at the company, it stands to reason that he’d still have contacts and insider knowledge from those who still work there.
That’s not the only piece of evidence, though – and it turns out that Bethesda might have been hiding the name right under our noses from the very moment we loaded up Starfield.
As spotted on Reddit, there’s a string of 16 numbers that appear on the bottom left of the screen when creating your character in Starfield, Bethesda’s most recent sci-fi RPG. They read, “190514-2009140512”
One savvy gamer realised that if you split those numbers into pairs, they each correspond to letters of the alphabet. What does it spell out? You guessed it – ‘Sentinel’.
That might not be the only Elder Scrolls 6 easter egg Bethesda has crammed into Starfield, too. In the reveal trailer for Starfield, fans spotted an unusual marking on the console of one of the ships.
If we zoom and enhance it, the scratch appears to resemble the western coast of both High Rock and Hammerfell. Again, these locations are both home to geography similar to what we saw in the original tease for The Elder Scrolls 6 way back in 2016, with the latter home to Sentinel City.
With Sentinel City a coastal town, and other leaks hinting that we might see customisable and sailable naval ships, it’s all starting to add up.
All that’s left now is for Bethesda and Xbox to actually unveil The Elder Scrolls 6 to the world. Creative director Todd Howard has been explicit that he doesn’t want to do that until the game is almost ready to be put in the hands of players.
But with a significant chunk of the game fully playable for the Xbox boss to have a go at, we’re hoping it’ll be ready to ship sooner than later.
