Global Delirium Over Elder Scrolls 6: How One Missing Game Unites—and Exhausts—the Planet
The Elder Scrolls 6: A Global Waiting Room Where Time Itself Levels Up
By Rémy Devereaux, Senior Misanthrope-at-Large
GENEVA—The last time the planet was this collectively fixated on a non-existent artefact, we were hunting for weapons of mass destruction. Now, in a delightful twist of geopolitical priorities, the United Nations hasn’t scheduled a single emergency session on the whereabouts of The Elder Scrolls VI. Perhaps they should. After all, the game’s absence is doing more to unite humanity in shared despair than any climate accord ever managed.
From Lagos to Lima, Discord servers hum with the same question: where in Oblivion is it? Bethesda’s four-year-old teaser trailer—essentially a drone shot of some rocks with a synth stab—has racked up 42 million views, outperforming the World Health Organization’s last 47 public-service clips combined. If global frustration were a cryptocurrency, TES6-coin would have already rug-pulled the entire metaverse.
The wait is, of course, exquisitely on-brand for 2024. We live in an era when elections are live-tweeted coups and billionaires cosplay as space explorers between tax write-offs. Bethesda has simply weaponised uncertainty more elegantly than most governments. Each year of silence functions like a soft-power embargo: fans embargoed from closure, journalists embargoed from facts, modders left to remodel Skyrim for the 17th time, turning dragons into Thomas the Tank Engine in a desperate bid to feel something.
Meanwhile, the knock-on effects ripple through real economies. In Seoul, PC-bang entrepreneurs report that “Skyrim Grandma” speedruns still out-earn half the indie titles on Steam. In Warsaw, CD Projekt RED engineers allegedly maintain a Slack channel called “pressure-valve” where they post fake TES6 leaks just to watch Reddit burn. Even the Russian Ministry of Defence got in on the act last winter, tweeting a screenshot of a frost troll with the caption “Winter warfare training simulator”. NATO declined to confirm whether the troll had been formally enlisted.
Culturally, the vacuum has become its own ecosystem. Brazilian favelas host rooftop “Skyrim choirs” belting out the Dragonborn theme while Colombia’s former FARC rebels livestream role-play campaigns to at-risk youth—“If we’re going to raid dungeons,” one ex-guerrilla told me over Zoom, “better they be fictional.” In Tehran, an underground mod collective replaced every Draugr with figures from Persian mythology; the morality police reportedly gave up trying to ban it after their own kids got hooked.
The cruel irony, of course, is that by the time TES6 finally launches—presumably sometime after the heat death of Todd Howard’s career—nobody will have 300 unmodded hours left. The average global attention span now clocks in at 8 seconds, roughly the time it takes a mudcrab to sidestep your axe. Our grandchildren will inherit a climate-ravaged planet and a day-one patch the size of Liechtenstein.
Still, the anticipation serves a purpose. In a fragmented world, shared delusion is the last neutral zone. When the trailer eventually drops, you can bet the YouTube live-chat will scroll in a dozen languages—Korean hangul bumping up against Arabic script, Portuguese memes elbowing Polish jokes—everyone united in the same primal scream of “Please don’t be another Fallout 76.” For six glorious minutes we’ll forget tariffs, tectonic plates, and the fact that Twitter is now legally required to show you ads between missile alerts.
Then the game will release, inevitably, to a chorus of 2-star Steam reviews titled “Not Morrowind” and “Microtransactions broke my marriage.” Some enterprising nation-state will ban it for depictions of necromancy; another will adopt the sweet-roll as legal tender. The cycle will reset, because hope, like a Bethesda bug, clips through walls and keeps respawning.
And somewhere in Maryland, Todd Howard will smile that enigmatic smile—the one that says he knows exactly how long you’ll wait, and charge you for the privilege. In the end, the real Elder Scroll was the monetisation strategy we believed in along the way.
