While union members outside Bethesda’s Maryland office celebrated a recent Microsoft visit by positioning a field of red flags representing laid-off workers and a giant inflatable rat on the lawn, inside the building CEO Asha Sharma was apparently having a delightful time watching a playthrough of The Elder Scrolls 6. So that’s nice.
“The scale and grandeur are incredible”, Sharma said, referring to the game and not the huge blow-up rodent covered in scabs.
Sharma was careful to refer to the game’s subtitle with a string of asterisks—eight asterisks to be precise, which sent us down a rabbit hole of trying to guess what eight-letter name it could have.
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Coming in with 14% of the votes in our subsequent poll on the subject was Sentinel, which is the name of a prominent city on the Iliac Bay and also the kingdom it’s the capital of. Sentinel is a strong contender because the rumored development codename for The Elder Scrolls 6 is Guardian, a synonym for Sentinel, and naming the game for a city would make for a nice throwback to The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall—which was also named after a city and is still beloved by hardcore fans of the series.
It’s now an ever stronger contender thanks to an easter egg in Starfield, as unearthed on Reddit. During character creation in Bethesda’s sci-fi RPG, your employee number is displayed on the bottom of the screen: 190514-2009140512. Divide those numbers into pairs and you get 19, 05, 14, 20, 09, 14, 05, and 12. The 19th letter of the alphabet is S, the fifth letter is E, the 14th letter is N, and you get the idea. Yep, it spells Sentinel.
This might not be the only hint hidden in Starfield. Eagle-eyed watchers noticed a suspicious scratch on a spaceship console in the trailer, and suggested it was shaped like the Iliac Bay, sometimes called Starfall Bay all the way back in the first Elder Scrolls game, Arena. To find any more easter eggs we’d have to go back and replay Starfield, though. Er, you guys have fun with that.
