Are Bethesda planning a surprise release this year?

 
It’s been a busy year at Bethesda HQ. The developer, best known for their popular RPG series The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, announced a range of exciting new releases at E3 2017 scheduled for the latter part of this year.

Dishonored: Death Of The Outsider is due out in mid-September, The Evil Within 2 is slated for release in mid-October and Wolfenstein II is set to follow at the end of the same month.

Bethesda are also set to bring popular existing titles to exciting new hardware. Their classic game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is to be ported to the Nintendo Switch in 2017 and will enter the world of virtual reality on November the 17th when Skyrim VR comes to the PSVR headset.

Doom VR will follow on 1st December, available for both PSVR and HTC Vive, while Fallout 4 VR is set to retail as an HTC Vive exclusive in December.

With such a hectic upcoming release schedule ahead of them it’s no wonder the company’s Vice President of Marketing and PR Pete Hines raised eyebrows when he told Tek Syndicate that “we even have a game coming out this year that we haven’t even told anyone about yet.”

Though Hines declined to give any further information and tried to retract the statement in a later tweet, saying “I probably just had a concussion from the beating I took online and was rambling. Ignore,” Bethesda fans have nonetheless been speculating feverishly as to what the game in question might be.

I probably just had a concussion from the beating I took online and was rambling. Ignore.

— Pete Hines (@DCDeacon) September 6, 2017

It’s notable that all of the upcoming Bethesda releases are either sequels or remakes of existing franchises, which has led some to speculate that the game Hines referred to may be a new IP.

If so, the company is certainly leaving it a little late to announce and promote a game due to retail in the next four months. Perhaps they’re hoping that a fanbase engaged by a raft of new releases will provide a healthy market for the unannounced game.

Either way, it seems unlikely that someone as high up in the company as Hines spoke in error. It seems that Bethesda have one more card up their sleeve this year. Hopefully we’ll find out sooner rather than later what the game is.