Bethesda has tweeted about the Elder Scrolls. Yes, friends, we’re starting 2021 with a bang: one of the world’s most notable videogame studios has acknowledged one of its most popular videogame series. But with the Elder Scrolls 6 release date still years away, hype-starved fans have a lot to read into this message – and there might be a good reason for that.
The tweet, posted on December 31, reads “Transcribe the past and map the future. Here’s to a Happy New Year!” You could choose to read that as a slightly-cryptic New Year’s message, but it comes alongside an image of a map with just enough weird imagery to hint that ‘map the future’ is an invitation to look for clues about TES6.
The map shows Skyrim, and there are three bright lights sitting on it. One is on a box above the map, one is in Skyrim itself, and the third is below the map, in an area marked simply by the word ‘Hammerfell’. Popular speculation among the community (as noted by Game Informer) is that the Skyrim light represents the ‘past’, the Hammerfell light represents the ‘future’, and the third light… well, nobody seems to have a solid idea of what the third light represents.
Either way, the lights hint that the future of The Elder Scrolls is in Hammerfell, and indeed, popular speculation has suggested that this will be the setting of TES6. The original teaser trailer from E3 2018 showed a rocky landscape that looks very much like how Hammerfell has traditionally been depicted in Elder Scrolls lore.
Transcribe the past and map the future. 📖
Here's to a Happy New Year!🕯 pic.twitter.com/bL44CzLDIE— The Elder Scrolls (@ElderScrolls) December 31, 2020
Of course, the last time a storied developer of beloved RPG games randomly tweeted about one of its apparently-dormant series, it was BioWare with Mass Effect – and now we’ve got a remastered trilogy on the way and a teaser trailer for Mass Effect 5. Who’s to say what might follow for Bethesda and The Elder Scrolls, then?