Skyrim released nearly a decade ago, and as The Elder Scrolls 5 approaches its ten-year anniversary, the next game still seems to be a long way away. Although there has been little news about The Elder Scrolls 6 since its announcement all the way back at E3 2018, the long wait between the Elder Scrolls games does have its advantages.

The Skyrim modding community has kept the last game alive well beyond its release date, adding new content and mechanics for players to enjoy, much of which eclipses the ambition of the retail release. Not all mods fit well with the retail Elder Scrolls games, with many changing the art styles, taking players to settings that don't exist in the Elder Scrolls lore, and others adding silly details from lute-playing bears to replacing dragons with "Macho Man" Randy Savage. There are some mods, however, with long-lasting legacies that Bethesda should look at when developing The Elder Scrolls 6.

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It's harder to find a better-integrated mod than Frostfall, a survival mod which adds a huge amount of depth to Skyrim. With Frostfall, players can suffer exposure, frostbite, and death when facing down Skyrim's elements. They can camp, wear clothing with greater coverage, and buy cloaks and backpacks to help them on their journey through the wilderness. Frostfall encourages immersive roleplay across Skyrim, sometimes in very subtle ways.

Players will suddenly find themselves looking for bridges instead of running straight through water to get their destination, with wetness a surefire way to die of hypothermia. They may find themselves taking shelter during a snowstorm only to find another of Skyrim's ancient barrows, or ambushing bandits in the hope of using their fire to survive the night.

Frostfall and mods like it transform the setting of The Elder Scrolls from a scenic backdrop to a character, constantly generating dynamic and immersive stories as the Dragonborn travels from vista to vista. Although the setting of The Elder Scrolls 6 is unlikely to be as cold a clime as Skyrim, there are still plenty of ways Frostfall's innovations could make the next Elder Scrolls a generational step forward. Players could find themselves hiding in the shade from the heat of Hammerfell's sun, avoiding a convenient mountain shortcut through High Rock due to their lack of supplies, or simply sitting under the stars in the Summerset Isles by a campfire of their own creation.

There have already been rumors that The Elder Scrolls 6 will contain survival mechanics. Hopefully the developers looked to Frostfall when designing those mechanics, with the mod managing to transform the game while still maintaining the overall structure of Skyrim's gameplay.

Interesting NPCs is another early Skyrim mod, but it still has a lot to teach Bethesda about NPC design nearly a decade later. Interesting NPCs fills the world with new fully-voiced NPCs for the player to run into on their journey. While this helps pad out the world with new interactions, it's far from the mod's greatest achievement.

"Super Followers" are Interesting NPC's ace in the hole. Like the mod's other offerings these are new, fully-voiced NPCs. However, they have far more to say and far more unique characterization than almost any of the followers found in Skyrim's retail release. Fortunately, it seems Bethesda is already on the way to integrating some of the ideas found in Interesting NPCs. Fallout 4's followers were a huge leap forward for Bethesda, with characters like Nick Valentine tied to the main plot while containing their own unravelling stories.

However, this came at the expense of the number of available followers in Fallout 4. Hopefully The Elder Scrolls 6, like Interesting NPCs, strikes a good balance between breadth and depth that creates some more memorable characters than past Elder Scrolls games without limiting the number of available followers in-game.

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The Forgotten City is a quest mod which won its writer Nick Pearce an Australian Screenwriter's Guild Award, and is currently set to be released as a standalone game developed from the ground up. RPGs like Mass Effect and Dragon Age have always been known for their tight, character-driven storytelling and memorable companions. Games like Skyrim, on the other hand, are known for their vast open worlds but ultimate lack of depth. For a long time this was attributed to the first-person perspective, size of the map, and the lack of protagonist characterization.

The Forgotten City shows that you can tell a fantastic story even with a silent RPG protagonist and large open world. Instead of populating its world with a handful of voice actors playing into different character types, Bethesda needs to look at the ways The Forgotten City brought its setting to life. Every city in The Elder Scrolls 6 could have the depth of The Forgotten City, with as many memorable characters and mysteries.

Skyrim massively simplified the series' spell system compared to previous games. Odin - Skyrim Magic Overhaul is a fantastic mod that completely revamps TES 5's spell mechanics. Most notably, it expands the Alteration school of magic to allow players to do everything from set up magical alarms to anchoring teleportation points to seeing through walls.

It's a far more flexible and dynamic magic system that allows for some seriously creative ways to survive Skyrim's many dangers and dungeons. There has already been some indication that magic will work differently in the next game, with rumors that The Elder Scrolls 6 will bring back spell-crafting. Hopefully the next game's spell system has the same breadth as Odin - Skyrim Magic Overhaul.

Skyrim, like Oblivion, was populated by a huge number of NPCs and a small number of voice actors. It's unlikely The Elder Scrolls 6 will find unique voice talent for every quest NPC, but mods like Relationship Dialogue Overhaul have found a way to turn that flaw into an advantage. This mod expands the dialogue options for almost every NPC in the game by mixing lines already spoken by their voice actors elsewhere in the game. It adds a huge amount of depth and roleplaying options, while the line repetition is less noticeable than the reuse of different voice actors. Hopefully, The Elder Scrolls 6 will find similarly crafty ways to make its world feel more alive.

The Elder Scrolls 6 is in development.

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