The Elder Scrolls 6: Will It Support VR?

Bethesda have been making a surprisingly strong push for VR- they are, in fact, one of the few major publishers to be making any attempts to support VR in a meaningful capacity. In a way, this makes sense- after all, this is the publisher that also houses id Software, the developer once known to be on the cutting edge of new tech.

This E3, Bethesda showed off some early fruits of their VR experimenting and tinkering- Fallout 4 and DOOM, both in VR, and both translating to the format exceedingly well, which isn’t always true of traditional games converted to VR post facto. Both of these were strictly shown as tech demos, though Fallout 4 VR will actually be coming to the HTC Vive next year– but the general question now stands: is Bethesda going to make VR a part of its products going forward?

If so, then that raises some very interesting questions and implications about the company’s upcoming The Elder Scrolls 6– the title is not currently in development, and it won’t be for a while, but that actually works more in the favor of an argument for why it may have VR functionality of some kind. By the time The Elder Scrolls 6 is out, VR will definitely have gained traction- more traction than it has right now, which is essentially none. Making a game VR compatible at that point will even make some financial sense.

That said, the reverse of this could also very well be true- if The Elder Scrolls 6 isn’t due out for a few years at least, as is likely, then there is every possibility that the current VR push has fizzled and died out by the time the game ever enters development. And if that is the case, Bethesda likely won’t want to waste any resources on having any VR functionality at all, no more than they wanted to include Kinect functionality in the Skyrim remaster.

In the end, then, the question of whether or not The Elder Scrolls 6 will have any VR functionality comes down to whether or not VR actually survives until the time the game enters development. If it does- then I feel comfortable in saying that yes, The Elder Scrolls 6 will have some kind of VR component after all.