“Sorry to say this game is still more than 2 years away!” That was Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier dropping a bucket of cold water on The Elder Scrolls community — roughly 24 hours after Bethesda finally gave its long-awaited RPG a name. The Elder Scrolls 6 is officially Sentinel. It is also, if Schreier is right, officially nowhere near your hands.
The name reveal on 3 November ended eight years of silence since that infamous E3 2018 teaser. Bethesda paired it with a caveat, though: development continues, but “it’ll be some time before we’re ready to share more.” Schreier, one of the industry’s most reliable reporters, then translated that into numbers — more than two years, putting the earliest plausible launch somewhere in late 2028 or early 2029. Jez Corden of Windows Central echoed the timeline.
Why Schreier doubled down
The reaction was heated enough that Schreier took to Reddit to elaborate. Pointing to his accurate calls on Fallout 76 and Starfield, he wrote: “I’m a reporter. I am not telling you this because I enjoy watching people get mad about having to wait for sequels to their favorite video games. I am telling you this because it is true, and because my job is to report accurate facts and clear up misinformation.”
Did that calm things down? Partially. Plenty of replies were understanding, even sympathetic. But a vocal chunk of the community suspects the two-year window is educated guesswork dressed as reporting — and the optimists are clinging to a dream of 2027 that emerged from frame-by-frame analysis of the Skyrim Switch 2 reveal trailer.
Why reveal the name now if the game is years away?
That is the question puzzling even the level-headed fans. Todd Howard has previously expressed regret about announcing The Elder Scrolls 6 so prematurely, so why repeat the pattern with a title reveal and nothing else? Schreier himself has the historical answer: the game was only announced in 2018, alongside Starfield, to soften the blow of Fallout 76 — a promise that single-player projects were coming while Bethesda shipped its multiplayer misfire.
Theories from the copium generation
With no release window on offer, Elder Scrolls fans have done what they always do: built elaborate theories. Redditor Reacryoum thinks Bethesda is winding up to a surprise trailer drop on 11 November — arguably the most grounded idea of the past 24 hours. Another user, Jayehemcee, believes the game’s theme is “time” itself and that the whole marketing campaign is part of the puzzle. Minimum-Act-7571 floated the theory that Bethesda is deliberately feeding Schreier false information out of spite for his leaks — a claim its own author admitted was “new copium”.
The most entertaining entry comes from Any-West7160, who insists the Sentinel name reveal trailer contains the actual release date: 11 November 2027, supposedly readable in the stars. Nobody believes it. Everybody likes it.
The one theory that was right
Here is what complicates dismissal of all this: one bonkers theory already proved correct. The Sentinel subtitle sat hidden in a Starfield easter egg for years before anyone noticed. A name, though, is a far easier thing to bury than a launch date — dates slip, and Bethesda knows it better than most.
Where does that leave fans? Two more years of waiting at minimum, a mountain of hopium, and the quiet acceptance that active development only truly began in 2023. As one Redditor put it in advice that will almost certainly go unheeded: enjoy Skyrim again while you can. See you in 2029?
