The name took eight years. Bethesda announced The Elder Scrolls VI at E3 2018 with a short teaser of an empty landscape, and only on November 3, 2026, in its 40th-anniversary video, did Todd Howard confirm the full title: The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel. The video shows the name rising out of sand and nothing else: no gameplay, no release date.
Here’s what’s actually confirmed, what’s still rumour, and the question this site cares about: what kind of PC it’s likely to need, and whether you should buy anything for it yet.
What Bethesda has confirmed
- The title: The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel.
- The engine: Creation Engine 3, a new version of the engine behind Starfield, according to Howard in February 2026.
- The kind of game: Howard has called it a “classic Bethesda” RPG in the line of Oblivion and Skyrim, rather than another Starfield.
- Platforms: PC and Xbox are the only ones Bethesda and Microsoft have pointed to.
- Release date: none. Bethesda says it will “be some time” before there’s more to show.
The title had been guessed long before. Fans decoded “SENTINEL” from an employee number hidden in Starfield, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma teased the subtitle in August with eight asterisks, and The Verge reported it a few days before the reveal.
Hammerfell, almost certainly
Sentinel is one of the main cities of Hammerfell, the desert province of the Redguards on Tamriel’s west coast. Bethesda hasn’t said where the game is set, but the title and the sand in the reveal video leave little doubt. The Verge’s Tom Warren reports that it’s Hammerfell and that the main story deals with the origins of the Elder Scrolls themselves.
The last single-player Elder Scrolls game set there was Daggerfall in 1996; Elder Scrolls Online covers parts of it, but that’s a different kind of game. For long-time fans, the setting is a bigger piece of news than the name.
When it’s likely to come out
Not soon. In July 2026, Bethesda Game Studios lost more than 50 staff in Xbox’s layoffs, and Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier said afterwards that the game is at least two years away. Microsoft has also said since 2021 that it comes after Fable, which is now dated February 23, 2027.
So 2028 is the realistic best case. Given Bethesda’s history, I wouldn’t be surprised by later. Starfield took five years from announcement to release, and Sentinel is already at eight.
What it will probably need on PC
There are no system requirements, and there won’t be for a long time. The best guide is the studio’s last game. Starfield runs on Creation Engine 2, and its requirements were steep for 2023:
| Starfield minimum | Starfield recommended | |
|---|---|---|
| Graphics card | GTX 1070 Ti / RX 5700 | RTX 2080 / RX 6800 XT |
| Processor | Core i7-6800K / Ryzen 5 2600X | Core i5-10600K / Ryzen 5 3600X |
| Memory | 16 GB | 16 GB |
| Storage | 125 GB, SSD required | 125 GB, SSD required |
Those numbers undersold how heavy it was. In launch testing by Tom’s Hardware, an RTX 4070 only just averaged 60 fps at 1080p Ultra, with 1% lows in the mid-40s, and TechSpot measured it at about 50 fps at 1440p on High. It was also one of the first big PC games to list an SSD as a requirement rather than a recommendation.
My guess for Sentinel, based on that: an SSD will be required again, 16 GB of RAM will be the minimum rather than the recommendation, and a 16 GB graphics card will be the comfortable choice for 1440p. Open-world RPGs full of trees and long view distances are exactly the kind of game that runs short of video memory first. But that’s a guess about a game that’s years away, on hardware that doesn’t exist yet.
Don’t buy hardware for it yet
This is the practical point. If Sentinel arrives in 2028 or later, buying a graphics card for it today means paying 2026’s inflated prices for a card that will be two generations old by launch. Memory is even worse: 32 GB of DDR5 costs about four times what it did in 2025, because of the shortage.
Upgrade for the games you’re playing now. Our 1440p graphics card guide covers what’s worth buying today, and the 16 GB RAM article explains why 16 GB is still fine for now. When Bethesda publishes real requirements, we’ll cover them.
Will it come to PlayStation?
Unknown. Microsoft owns Bethesda, and leaked documents from 2023 listed The Elder Scrolls VI as an Xbox and PC exclusive. But Microsoft has since released several of its games on PS5, including Bethesda’s own Doom: The Dark Ages on launch day. I think a PS5 version is more likely than not, but nobody has said so, and it may depend on what PlayStation hardware exists by the time the game ships. What’s close to certain is that it will be on Game Pass on day one, like Starfield was.
It’s in our upcoming releases calendar as TBA, and we’ll update it when there’s a date.
Sources
- Engadget: The next Elder Scrolls game is officially called Sentinel (November 3, 2026)
- PC Gamer: The Elder Scrolls 6: Sentinel is finally made official and GameSpot
- Wikipedia: The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel (development history, engine, layoffs and release estimates, with links to the original reports)
- Starfield on Steam (system requirements)
- Tom’s Hardware and TechSpot: Starfield launch performance testing (2023)
