Game Awards host Geoff Keighley posted a cryptic image on X on Monday, showing a hellish monument in a desert locale, accompanied by the text regal.inspiring.thickness. If you plug those three words into a website called What3Words, a map appears showing a location somewhere near Joshua Tree in California. If you visit that location, you'll see the viral artefact in question, just like YouTuber KingVision18 has done.
If you watch that video or visit the monument, you'll see that Geoff's initial image—posted above—doesn't really capture the real scale of the thing. In reality it's a large freestanding portal smothered in pained skeletons and the odd animal predator. Some kind of eye is pinned to this shuttered portal, or maybe it's a dying flower.
Speculation over what Game Awards announcement it's designed to tease has been endless ever since, but we know at least one thing: it's not the next God of War, as series director Cory Barlog confirmed himself. Meanwhile, journalist Jason Schreier writes on the ResetEra forum that it's not a Diablo 4 expansion.
So what is it? The imagery is so generic that it could be dozens, hundreds of things. There are so many videogames with anguished skulls, ominous looking doorways, and sinister leering eyes.
But the crocodile-looking thing shown prominently in Keighley's own photo is a bit of an outlier, and because it's an outlier it has inspired the one genuinely compelling line of speculation: that this is teasing a new expansion for Elder Scrolls Online.
As a Redditor pointed out on Monday, the crocodile's hand is a bit of a giveaway that it's not your everyday freshwater beastie. They argue that the croc is actually a Daedroth, or in other words, a croc-looking creature you can find roaming around Tamriel in Oblivion. And it's possible the desert theme could allude to various Elder Scrolls deserts, like Alik'r Desert in Hammerfell.
Look: There's every chance it's not Elder Scrolls Online. Perhaps it's Elder Scrolls 6, but I highly doubt that, and if it is shown, the showing will not be substantial. Todd Howard said last month that the game is "still a long ways off". Bethesda generally waits until just before launch to show games properly.
It could also be true that this is teasing something that no one, or at least very few people, will feel excited about at all, except perhaps the publisher paying Keighley and co. through the nose to execute on this marketing stunt. Whatever the case, The Game Awards takes place on December 11.
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