Skyrim lead designer says he hopes The Elder Scrolls 6 adds boats and naval combat, as it would be a ‘natural’ fit

One of the leads who worked on The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim says he hopes The Elder Scrolls 6 adds boats and naval exploration.

In an interview with GoHumanize, Bruce Nesmith – who was at Bethesda from 1995-1998 and again from 2004-2021, where he was lead designer on Skyrim and a quest designer on Fallout 3, 4 and 76 – was asked what he’d like to see in The Elder Scrolls 6, which he isn’t working on.

Nesmith replied that he hoped fan theories that The Elder Scrolls 6 will be set around Iliac Bay and Sentinel City are true, because that would potentially lead to the ability to use boats and explore the water for the first time in the series.

“What will be the big new feature for Elder Scrolls 6? I think boats and potentially even naval combat are the natural ones,” he said.

“Moving vehicles is not something that the Elder Scrolls has never really had. You had carriages that would take you from place-to-place, but most players only did that once. It didn’t really add anything.”

Nesmith added that adding the ability to use a boat and explore the sea could make for more than just another way to get around, but the introduction of entirely new game mechanics and enemies.

“Setting Elder Scrolls VI in Iliac Bay, you’re setting yourself up for a big expansion into seafaring stuff, and even if you never go under the water, think about all the things you could do on top of the water,” he explained.

“It could be really cool. We might get entire skill trees allowing you to walk on water or have boats that allow you to do more than just sail your boat. There could be all kinds of unique creatures and spells that could work with water too.

“To me that would be an opening you take real advantage of, because there is a lot of stuff there and I think it would be very exciting for the team working on it too.”

Despite his wish for boats, Nesmith doesn’t want underwater sections

Nesmith added: “Boats and gameplay over water, that would be a dragon-level feature, in my opinion, but of course you could have kraken to contend with at sea.”

“You’d have to have a kraken. I mean sharks and and krakens are the two obvious ones, and Sea Elves. Sea Elves are a thing in the lore but I don’t think they’ve ever made an appearance in the games in any significant way and their lore is so broad.”

Despite this, Nesmith said he hoped that if The Elder Scrolls 6 was to add water exploration, it would keep things above the surface and not have the player able to go underwater too, because that would lead to an entirely new set of developmental challenges and may stretch the team too thin, something he had experience of in the past.

“One of the designers was pushing very hard for an underwater environment in Fallout 4, and they made a bunch of proof of concept stuff to show how cool it could be, but at the end of the day, it proved to be just too much, and they didn’t pull the trigger on it in a broader way,” he recalled.

“I don’t believe it is true to say that there was a plan to do that underwater section, with the vault, and that it didn’t make it into the game. I think it was more a matter of somebody on the team who was really pushing for it, and he had a lot of really good ideas, but it’s that old adage. You can’t do everything.

“When it comes to Elder Scrolls VI, if it were me, I would probably kibosh anything underwater and keep everybody focused on the surface in that same spirit, not because it wouldn’t be cool, but because I’d rather do this part really well rather than do both of these parts not so well.”