Morning Save Point: Elder Scrolls VI Reportedly Titled Sentinel, and More

Friday morning. Bethesda’s next Elder Scrolls could get its name next month, Rockstar opened up GTA 6 for Edge, and a wuxia action RPG from a studio better known for phone games just posted one of the year’s biggest Steam launch peaks. Here is your brief.

The big one

The Elder Scrolls VI is about to get a subtitle, if Tom Warren at The Verge is right. Warren reports that Bethesda is close to announcing the game as The Elder Scrolls VI: Sentinel, and that the announcement could come as soon as next month. He expects a name and nothing else, which is how these things tend to go. If it lands, the timing lands awkwardly well. Skyrim turns 15 on November 11, and Bethesda first teased the game at E3 in June 2018, more than eight years ago.

The setting is the part worth hanging on to. Warren says Sentinel is set in Hammerfell, the province that has turned up in Redguard and Elder Scrolls Online but never had a game of its own, and that it will be the first Elder Scrolls to dig into the history of the Elder Scrolls themselves and the secrets of the ancient artifacts behind them. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has already played it. She posted in August about a live playthrough: “Live playthrough of The Elder Scrolls VI: ******** this morning. The scale and grandeur are incredible. The story is even greater.” Eight letters in that post, and Sentinel is eight letters too. Bethesda has confirmed nothing so far.

The distance between a name reveal and a game reveal is where this one gets interesting. A subtitle and a Hammerfell setting would be enough to pull a game that has been silent since 2018 back into the conversation, and Xbox is short on exactly this kind of news. Hardware revenue fell 29 percent in Microsoft’s latest filing, and the first-party slate has been shrinking rather than growing. A November reveal would also land right before The Game Awards, when the audience is at its largest, and it would give the company something to say that is not a studio merger or a layoff. None of that makes November likely. It makes November the date to watch.

Also happening

• GTA 6 has a smell reaction system, and Edge saw it fire. Rockstar’s cover feature for Edge’s November issue, on sale from October 29, confirms a bus and train system you can ride as a passenger, a fuel gauge and an engine health readout on every vehicle, and Jason grimacing at a bad smell with no script written for it. Rockstar also puts Leonida’s landmass at nearly the size of the playable maps of GTA IV, GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2 combined, roughly twice the size of GTA V’s map. The game launches November 19, and our release-time guide has the unlock details.
• Phantom Blade Zero opened with a 722,976-player Steam peak. S-GAME’s wuxia action RPG launched on PC and PS5 on October 29 at $59.99. We measure Steam player counts hourly, and our player-counts page logged that peak in its first day: 722,976 players, with 577,077 playing right now. The day-one patch adds roughly 5GB, improves ray tracing and path tracing, and S-Game is asking NVIDIA players on driver 621.01 to roll back to 617.42 until NVIDIA ships the next one. Our beginner’s guide covers where to start.
• Dan Greenawalt is retiring after 27 years with Forza. The Verge reports that Turn 10’s studio head is stepping down as the Forza Motorsport maker folds into Playground Games, now split across Playground Games Leamington Spa and Playground Games Redmond. He stays on as an adviser to studio head Trevor Williams and the newly appointed chief operating officer, Michel Bastien.
• Celeste and TowerFall are off the Xbox store. Co-creator Maddy Thorson confirmed on Bluesky that pulling both games from sale on Xbox was deliberate, in support of the BDS boycott of Microsoft’s ties to the Israeli government. Both games are still on sale on PlayStation and Nintendo. Rock Paper Shotgun has the story.
• Sony Pictures bought the film rights to Mouthwashing. Karyn Kusama is directing, with Matt Manfredi and Phil Hay writing, and the 2024 psychological horror game has close to a billion views on TikTok. Developer Wrong Organ is already working on a co-op tank horror game.
• Ubisoft says no other Assassin’s Creed remake is in development. Its Fall 2026 franchise update says teams are on the next chapter, including “projects you haven’t heard about yet”, with Hexe’s next major update due in 2027 and Invictus still in development. The same post says production on Netflix’s live-action Assassin’s Creed series is nearing completion in Rome, and our Valhalla New Game+ story covers the other update in it.

Out today

Our Look Outside release-time guide has the per-region unlock table, and the Release Calendar has everything else on the way.

Deal of the day

No Man’s Sky is 60% off at $23.99 on Steam, down from $59.99, through November 9. If it has been sitting in your wishlist since 2016, this is the price that makes it a cheap weekend. Epic’s giveaway runs the other way: Sorry We’re Closed is free on the Epic Games Store until November 5.

One more thing

Star Trek Online lined up ships for Sir Patrick Stewart. His Instagram account announced on Thursday that the actor had died at home in Los Angeles, surrounded by friends and family, at 86, following “a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s Disease and Lewy Body Dementia”. Bethesda paid tribute to Emperor Uriel Septim, and the Star Trek Online community did something better: players arranged their spaceships in long lines to mark the passing of Jean-Luc Picard. Stewart also narrated both Castlevania: Lords of Shadow games, because the man had a habit of turning up in games you did not expect him in.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report