As I’m ever reminding myself, The Elder Scrolls 6 sure isn’t coming any time soon. To be clear, neither is the game currently in development by former The Elder Scrolls: Arena and Daggerfall developers Ted Peterson and Julian LeFay. They and their studio OnceLostGames have just revealed a teaser trailer for their upcoming open-world RPG The Wayward Realms with some massively ambitious plans for scale and roleplaying.
OnceLost Games say they’re creating what they believe will be “a new open-world fantasy RPG where choice, consequence, scope and role-playing will be experienced like never before in a realistically-scaled open world in a new class of game: The Grand RPG.”
The trailer is, admittedly, not much more than we’ve seen of TES6, really. You’ll get a quick look at a knight on a white horse following a tiny ball of light through a dark forest before emerging into—ah yes, a grand vista to demonstrate the scale of the world. That’s it up top there. There are a good handful of spiders too—you’ve been warned. RPGs do love their spiders.
Alongside the teaser trailer, OnceLost Games have unveiled a Steam store page for The Wayward Realms, which gives some extra details on their ambitions. They explain that the game takes place across “one hundred, realistically scaled, islands, known collectively as the Archipelago,” referencing competing factions, dungeons, and a virtual game master that reacts to your decisions.
It’s all very grand, ambitious stuff from a pretty high-concept angle. One of the more grounded details is OnceLost’s mention of “customized skills and abilities to craft your own spells, potions, and enchantments.” Creating custom spells was a feature of Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion, but was left out in Skyrim. It would be neat to see the feature get revived in what seems to be positioning itself as a spiritual successor to the early Scrolls series.
This is the first major push to reveal The Wayward Realms, but OnceLost have done quite a bit of kicking ideas and concepts around on Twitter already.
Daggerfall was home to thousands of cities and towns something which we are aiming to replicate with WR. Daggerfall tended to lack variety though, which we plan to improve this time around. So let us ask you this: What is your favorite city in a videogame and why?
— OnceLost Games (@OnceLostGames) June 19, 2021
Their work on Daggerfall is clearly a big inspiration for the scale that OnceLost are hoping to achieve in The Wayward Realms, which they talk about often.
It seems like details about The Wayward Realms will remain relatively nebulous for a while yet. OnceLost Games caution that the reveal of their store page “does not mean that the game is coming out soon,” and is more a way to start building a following.
On that note, you can add The Wayward Realms to your wishlist over on Steam if you’re keen.
