Todd's Starfield Detour Left Handheld Fans Waiting on Elder Scrolls 6

After Fallout 4 shipped, Bethesda’s rhythm seemed set: Fallout, then Elder Scrolls, then back again. Former Skyrim co-lead Kurt Kuhlmann tells FRVR that most of the studio expected The Elder Scrolls 6 next. Instead, Todd Howard had another mandate: “No, we’re doing Starfield. I got that approved.” What read as a bold new-IP pitch inside Bethesda became one of the longest waits handheld players have ever been asked to absorb for a flagship RPG.

Eight years after Elder Scrolls 6 was announced, there is still no release window. In that time, the Switch normalized portable Skyrim, Steam Deck turned PC RPGs into commute-sized sessions, and Oblivion Remastered is already eating Switch 2 weekends. The portable appetite for Tamriel only got stronger while Bethesda’s mainline fantasy game drifted further away.

The Starfield Order Nobody Voted For

Kuhlmann credits Fallout 4’s success with giving Howard enough leverage to sell a strange new IP to Zenimax. But he makes it clear the team wasn’t asking for that pitch. “It wasn’t like Starfield was this big internal, ‘Hey, we all want to make this space game, Todd,’” he says. “It was very much, ‘Guess what, team? We’re making this space game.’” He says he would rather have made TES6, and that was true for most of the studio.

Fallout 76 complicated the timeline by growing beyond its intended size, but Starfield was the real reset button. Howard admitted in 2023 that it took seven years just for Starfield to become fun, and those seven years cover the precise window when handheld gaming went from novelty to mainline platform. A cross-generation Elder Scrolls built for that era could have met the Switch generation and the first wave of Deck owners on their terms. Instead, those players watched Bethesda build a space colony while Tamriel waited.

Starfield’s 17 Million Players Won’t Shorten the Portable Wait

Did Starfield work? By player count, yes: Bethesda says 17 million people have played it, and Year 3 support is still coming. But success in space never bought a faster road back to Tamriel. Elder Scrolls 6 now carries pressure from Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, who is reportedly pushing Bethesda for faster releases and described a recent playthrough as “incredible” in scale. That’s a signal that Microsoft wants the wait to end, but it is not a signal that portability is part of the design conversation.

Meanwhile, the series has been kept alive on handhelds by reissues and remasters. Oblivion Remastered is the Switch 2 RPG moment of the season, and Deck owners can still revisit Skyrim and the Fallout catalog. No amount of polished nostalgia changes the calculus: The Elder Scrolls 6 has no release date, and these re-releases are not a stand-in for a new Tamriel on Deck or Switch 2. When Bethesda finally talks specifics, handheld players don’t need another promise of scale; they need a target that respects a machine built to travel without checking a bag.