Lord Sheogorath has survived the Grey March. The voice actor almost died in the last few days. He has pulled through and is still alive.

Dammit Todd Howard! You are taking so long working on TES VI that one the best voice actors of the game almost died! Hurry the fuck up!

Anyway, I want to send cheese wheels to Wes to let him know I care.

So I think I figured out something that may be a huge game changer in the gaming industry. TES VI has taken more than a decade to even be a thing. We got an announcement a few years ago about TES VI, but really nothing since. At that time they said TES VI would be in production after Starfield release. Another odd thing they said was that the technology needed to create TES VI was not quite ready yet. I am unsure as to when they said this last bit. I think before they mentioned Starfield release. What is this tech?

I think to understand what this tech is you have to go back to the roots of TES. One of their early games was called Daggerfall. I think this was TES II. The next one was TES III Morrowind. Then TES IV Oblivion. Finally TES V Skyrim. What has been happening on each release? The world of Daggerfall was huge, it was also generated content. That was the only way to go to that scale at that time. Then Morrowind came along and was big, but no where near Daggerfall big. Oblivion came along and decent size, but I think it was still smaller than Morrowind. I think similar with Skyrim. The worlds were getting more detailed, but due to shear manpower it became expensive to fill these large worlds.

I think you have probably figured out where I was going with this. What is the missing tech TES series wanted for large worlds? I think AI is the next big step for generating large worlds like this. From generating textures, terrain, models, cities, forests, etc. Obviously there will be procedural gen mixed in with this.

People keep wondering why TES VI is taking so long. I think Bethesda wanted to go big again on its worlds. But at the scale they wanted to do it would take way too much manpower to create all the assets for the game under any kind of budget. TES V has made them a shit ton of money. So maybe they have the wiggle room to do something truly groundbreaking with TES VI.

Anyway, that is my guess. They were waiting for the AI tools to be available to go big on their open worlds.