Earlier this month, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma shared that she watched a live playthrough of The Elder Scrolls 6, boasting that the game's "scale and grandeur" were "incredible" and that the story was "even greater." Curiously, the Xbox executive referred to Bethesda's next RPG as "The Elder Scrolls VI: *." *What do the eight asterisks stand for? Well, fans have a mighty convincing theory about the game's apparent title.

Three years ago, one Starfield player noticed that during the space exploration game's character creation menu, the screen displayed a specific employee number. The number, 190514-2009140512, could've been chosen randomly — but the fan found a pattern that was hard to ignore. If you divide the numbers into pairs and assign them a letter based on their placement in the alphabet (A equals 1, and so on), a specific word is revealed: "Sentinel," the player declared.

As it happens, Sentinel is an eight-letter word — just like the missing sub-title in Sharma's tease. Players further discovered that the specific number that appears on that screen was changed by Bethesda between the gameplay reveal in 2022 and the playable version in 2023. This, alongside the fact the number is the same for everyone, suggests the change was intentional.

What really convinced fans was an apparent confirmation from a former Bethesda employee, Michael Kirkbride, a writer and artist on The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion and The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. Kirkbride replied with a simple "yep" on a recent social media post that guessed "Sentinel" was Sharma's omitted word.

If true, that's pretty neat! The mini-puzzle is also an effective distraction from news that Bethesda union workers protested mass Xbox layoffs the same day Sharma visited to watch the playthrough. The Xbox CEO was greeted with a giant inflatable rat standing on the lawn in front of the Bethesda offices. The rodent was surrounded by small red flags, each of which represented a laid-off ZeniMax worker.

The Elder Scrolls 6 doesn't have an official release date, but the open-world fantasy adventure is expected to be released in 2028 or later. Earlier this year, workers at Bethesda expressed concern about the number of veteran developers who had been laid off, saying the loss of experienced staff, much of it in the RPG's quality assurance team, undermined confidence in TES6's future.