Skyrim lead designer wants boats and naval combat in The Elder Scrolls 6

Former Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith wants The Elder Scrolls 6 to give players boats — and possibly ship-to-ship fighting.

Nesmith is not working on the game. He set out his wishlist in an interview with GoHumanize published on 2 October 2026, speaking as an outsider looking in, according to Video Games Chronicle.

Nesmith led design on The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, the open-world role-playing game where players explore as a dragon-born hero. He worked at Bethesda from 1995 to 1998 and again from 2004 to 2021. His later credits include quest design, the writing and building of in-game missions, on Fallout 3, Fallout 4 and Fallout 76.

Asked where the next Elder Scrolls should go, Nesmith said he hopes fan theories are right. Those theories place the game around Iliac Bay and Sentinel City, a coastal region with port towns and trade routes.

That setting is why he is pushing boats. He called boats and gameplay over water the natural big new feature for the sequel. He described it as a dragon-level feature, a reference to the flying dragons that defined Skyrim.

A bay setting would open the door to seafaring content, he said. Players could sail between ports. Naval combat, fighting from ship to ship, could follow.

He would keep it on the surface. Nesmith said he would stop, or kibosh, anything underwater. He pointed to his own experience on Fallout 4, where he said one designer pushed hard for an underwater area and built proof-of-concept work that was never adopted more widely.

Bethesda has said little about the project itself. Its official support page describes The Elder Scrolls VI as the next chapter in the fantasy series and lists it as in pre-production at Bethesda Game Studios, an early planning stage before full development, according to Bethesda.

What makes this stand out is the source. Nesmith helped shape how Skyrim moved across land and sky. Now he is arguing the next leap should be by sea.