The worst-kept secret in gaming has finally been confirmed: yes, The Elder Scrolls 6 has a title. It’s called Sentinel, and will take place in Hammerfell, the province of northwest Tamriel previously featured in Daggerfall and Elder Scrolls Online (also Arena, but anyone who says they played that recently is lying). The point is, more than any previous mainline entry in the Elder Scrolls series, Sentinel will be depicting a fairly well-trodden location. But given its geographical location and significance in The Lore, I think there’s a fairly good chance that TES 6 will feature two distinct elements: ships and giant robots. Stay with me on this.
So what is Sentinel? Well, it’s a city and kingdom – think New York, New York – on the southern shores of the Iliac Bay, the northern edge of Hammerfell province, stretching from the Alik'r Desert and coastal regions in the west to the Dragontail Mountains in the east.
It’s a hugely important maritime city in Tamrielic lore, being the founding settlement of the Redguards. Its geography and architecture are heavily inspired by North Africa and the Middle East: the city of Sentinel is often depicted almost like classical Baghdad, with its beautiful domed palace and spires in the centre, river canals lined with palm trees, and sandblasted common districts full of markets and street vendors. It is one of the preeminent locations of TheElder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall, second only perhaps to Daggerfall itself, its opposite number and historical rival across the water. Like Rome and Carthage squabbling over Sicily, Sentinel and Daggerfall’s shared past mostly pivots around a dispute over the island of Betony, a strategically significant fishing community off the coast of High Rock which used to be a protectorate of Sentinel until Daggerfall decided to sink their navy over it.
It’s a region rich with naval tradition, arguably with lots of parallels to the Mediterranean. The northern province of High Rock may be taken as a composite of Latin and Germanic Europe as a counterpart to Sentinel’s obvious riffs on the Arab-descended Moorish people who once colonised the Iberian Peninsula. Which is fitting, because if Elder Scrolls is anything, it’s extremely moreish.
What’s important is that the Iliac Bay is full of tiny islands. The lore is steeped in boat stuff. The Redguards themselves are a seafaring people in the same way that Bretons are a magic one, or that the Imperials are really good at accountancy: it’s at the heart of their culture, their DNA. Which, given that Sentinel is named for their home nation, would seem to track with the rumour from several billion years ago that The Elder Scrolls 6 would feature, or at least was once intended to feature, some sort of ship-based component. That could mean anything or nothing, of course, but if every Elder Scrolls game is to be its own proposition, then this would certainly be a defining trope for the new one. Skyrim had dragons. Oblivion had portals to hell. Morrowind had big mushrooms. Yum.
Beyond the bay itself, we have the fallen continent of Yokuda, where the Redguards originally hail from, and the large island nation of Stros M’Kai, the setting of Bethesda’s one-time experiment in doing a third-person adventure spin-off of the Elder Scrolls. The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard wasn’t a huge success in itself, but it did teach the studio a great deal about the relationship between scale and hand-crafted detail that resulted in a massive difference in approach between Daggerfall and Morrowind. Where the former boasted a map twice the size of the UK, Morrowind crammed infinitely more intrigue into a region barely a full percentage of the size, brought the series to consoles, and subsequently made the studio a household name.
Bethesda would stick to this philosophy of staunchly hand-crafted worlds until Starfield, which depicted a thousand-planet galaxy of endless walking, pocked with procedurally generated identikit outposts and very little incentive to go off the laid-out path, which many would argue – myself included, and I like Starfield – betrayed a studio that had lost touch with its core appeal.But think of the parts of Starfield which are successful, at least as a proof of concept: a mobile home in the form of a starship, to which you can assign crew, and go adventuring with them. A hugely popular ship builder that simplified the process of pimping your ride down to a snap-together kitbash, that allowed for enormous creativity within a deceptively rigid framework.
It’s not a given that any of this will be relevant to Sentinel, or that if any of these systems carried over they would retain their complexity. But it does demonstrate that, if TES 6 were to think about this sort of direction, it’s hardly unprecedented at this point.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/elder-scrolls-6-sentinel-lore-explained
