One of the teases that were announced during Bethesda’s E3 press conference was for The Elder Scrolls VI. The game is a long ways off from release… in fact, according to Bethesda’s design director, Todd Howard, the next chronological entry in the Elder Scrolls franchise won’t arrive until after they release Starfield.

In fact, Starfield is being positioned as a next-gen game, so we know for a fact that The Elder Scrolls VI won’t be released likely until the middle of next-gen. So what’s taking so long? The technology.

During the YouTube interview, Geoff Keighley brought up how Todd Howard mentioned in the past that the team was waiting for the technology to catch up with what they wanted to do for their upcoming games, and Keighley asked Howard if the technology was finally there, and Howard responded by saying…

“…It’s getting closer.”

This seems to indicate that the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X are not quite at the level where the team at Bethesda feel comfortable enough in which to utilize those platforms exclusively for The Elder Scrolls VI.

Keighley also attempted to pry from Howard exactly are the systems not living up to the standards of what they wanted – whether that was from the CPU side, the RAM side, or the GPU side – but Howard wouldn’t bite, simply sticking to the principle that when the tech is finally there then The Elder Scrolls VI will arrive.

According to Todd Howard, Starfield is currently playable and under full production, but The Elder Scrolls VI is still in pre-production. So it’s still a fairly long ways out from release. The release for Starfield is also still fairly far off so you’ll likely have to wait until next E3 before we finally get some solid gameplay footage of the upcoming game. And this means that you may as well not expect any new Elder Scrolls info until two E3s from now.