26 Years of The Elder Scrolls

I'm very bearish on the future of the Elder Scrolls and of Bethesda. If Fallout 76 and their awful Creation Club have proved anything, it's that they've either become, or have been revealed to be, as greedy and soulless as EA itself. The modding community has basically been this company's battered wife since Morrowind; patching up their bugs and egregious mistakes while enduring the broken compatibility and frustration of their updates. That they're seeking to basically strip-mine that community the way they have by making their games pay-to-mod with Creation Club and pay-for-single-player with Fallout 76 shows that this is a one-way relationship. I would not put it past them to make it so you can only mod TES VI through Creation Club or to add microtransactions into a single-player experience.
 
"This level of CPU horsepower could be harnessed to build in deeper, AI-based NPC interactions, more detailed worlds, and branching, multi-state quest designs."

^ LOL. It's adorable that people still believe CPU horsepower determines game complexity. The reality is complexity will still be constrained by publisher deadlines and Bethesda will always give their developers only 3/5ths of the time required to actually finish the game upon release. Given that the modding community had to patch up very simple scripted quest chains, I wouldn't hold your breath for ultra-leet adaptive AI coding skills falling out of nowhere.

What I'd like to see is stuff that's actually possible like better writing (more unusual Sanguine / Sheogorath style quests and fewer generic fetch quests). Or simply better writing for factions (Skyrim's Thieves Guild chain was boring as hell compared to Oblivion's The Grey Fox). What I'm actually expecting is more of the same : even more things stripped out "for the casual audience", the same heavily consolized 'designed for 10ft view distance with FOV 70 & size 36 font' UI that virtually requires Darnified UI 3 / SkyUI 2 for PC gamers to be playable on a monitor up close, the same modding comunity built script extenders, etc).

The big plus will be better visuals. The big minus (based on Skyrim) will be massively more over-monetization "Creation Club On Steroids", with the ultimate goal of locking as many formerly free mods behind a paywall as possible.
 
Last edited:
I have to ask: In what way has Cyberpunk 2077 redefined player agency? I like the game and am having fun with it, but it hasn't redefined anything!

Furthermore, the power of bosex/ps5 is completely irrelevant to the depth that Bethesda will put into TES6. CPU horsepower has no bearing on quest branches or depth of gameplay. Dragon Age Origins was greatly deeper that DA:I.

This was a decent article, but the hope placed in the upcoming consoles is just ridiculous nonsense.
 
Making the Elder scrolls VI is like trying to make Half Life 3. It will be very difficult to live up to expectations. I hope if they do make it they do it in secret and surprise it on us, hopefully that way the hype train won’t go out of control like it did for Cyberpunk, which is an outstanding game with a user score of like 3/10 on metacritic due to the rushed launch to meet overwhelming demand.

Skyrim was realised on 11/11/11. So I’m hoping TESVI comes out on the 22/2/22? That’s the 22nd of February 2022 to all the Americans out there wondering what the 22nd month is...
 
One of my favourite series of all time. Morrowind was one of the games that got me into PC gaming when I was young and just getting into building PCs. I walked into a video game store in 2004 and saw it sitting on a shelf in the PC section. I knew nothing of the game and bought it based on the pictures and text in the foldout and back of the cover. It was 2 years old at that point, so it was selling for pretty cheap too. (I think I might have bought Deus Ex that same day come to think of it, so I scored pretty well!). A truly immersive experience for the time and I still went back to play it even after Oblivion came out (partly because my PC couldn’t run Oblivion very well at that point!). After thoroughly enjoying the sequels though, I have come to love Elder Scrolls Online as a way to just immerse myself in the world of Tamriel. It may not be as interactive as the base games, but it’s a great escape and a soothing familiarity for me every time I play.

Another thing that must be said about the Elder Scrolls series is the great music. Beautiful scores in games like these deserve to be recognised for the atmosphere they create. The dungeon music in Morrowind is still my favourite.
 
Loved morrowind and fallout 3 but they have fallen a long way. unlike bioware I still think they can come back, they just need to use a different engine. the amount of bugs in their games is no longer acceptable.
 
I absolutely loved Morrowind. I put hundreds and hundreds of hours into and the expansions....at one point I was so lost in all the side quests I couldn't find my way back to the main story line. I kept exploring and enjoying what was before my eyes. I created dozens and dozens of characters and even did a little modding of items and spells.

I was so excited about Oblivion. I built a new gaming rig right about the time this game was coming out, so I was ready! The day it released and I got it and installed, it was taken back by the graphical leap and thought this would be great! But the game felt hallow compared to Morrowind. I even ended up going through the whole main story of the game at level 3....level fricking, 3! Everything scaled with your player level...what a joke.

I was skeptical of Skyrim so I didn't pick up a copy. I was gifted a copy a couple years after the game released so I tried it and it was kind of dull and lacking, almost like Oblivion. After about 12 hours of game time I wasn't interested and I haven't played the game since.

I'm pretty much expecting TES:VI to be kind of like an extension of Oblivion and Skyrim....graphically a leap forward, but a side-step or even a step-backwards over what the series used to be.
 
Meh I fear the largest achilles heel of the series is the scope and ambition since Morrowind players have gotten less, on an RPG level of complexity and an actual level of a full living world with stuff in it, don't get me wrong I love Skyrim, but its just a watered down empty experience.
BGS needs to step up their game especially with CD project Red and Obsidian putting out games of scope that make them look like a small indie studio rather than a large AAA title fully funded studio.
Also the eye candy is part of the immersion, and the shear fact they will not create a new engine but in Blizzard style of laziness just keep jigsawing the old one is a sign the next game make make or break if they keep their fans or not.
 
Nice article, although I always wonder why people feel the need to tie articles to some number of years when that number seems pretty random. At 25 years I could understand the cause for a retrospective, but at 26?

Shadowkey was probably my second most played Elder Scroll title after Daggerfall.
 
The thing that developers don't understand about immersion is that it's not about the graphics but the gameplay, storyline and interactions.

To this day, the most immersive game that I've ever played had (by todays standards) horrible graphics and a remarkably simple interface. However, the map was GARGANTUAN, the NPCs were crafted with a mastery that I don't think has ever been exceeded and there were artifacts scattered all over the map. Places that you could go were so big that they themselves had large maps and there were SO MANY places that you could go. I would say that it was the greatest game that I've ever played except that its successor was even better.

It came out in 1986 with its successor coming out in 1989. Among long-time gamers it has a near-mythical status in what it was able to do with the technology available at the time.

The name of the game... is Starflight. Just try to imagine, with 1986 technology, this game had 270 unique star systems (including Sol, if you could find it) with 800 unique planets. Many of these stars were hidden in various nebulae which meant that they weren't on the starmap.

There were 11 races of star-faring beings that were completely dissimilar from each other:
Human (Mammalian), Velox (Insectoid), Thrynn (Reptilian), Elowan (Plant), Mechan (Synthetic), Spemin (Protoplasmic), Gazurtoid (Aquatic), Uhlek (Amorphous), Minstrels (Space-Born, Emotional), Mysterions (Space-Born, Logical) and Ancients (Mineral).

There was a starport with multiple departments, a terrain vehicle for exploring planets (and the planets were/are just huge), ship-to-ship combat with hostile aliens using lasers, missiles, (for the uhlek) plasma bolts, terrain vehicle-to-hostile creature combat during planetfall with a stunner and a laser, commerce and humour.

Starflight guaranteed literally months of great gameplay (even years if you wanted to find and do everything). With all that it had, it was astonishingly small. Starflight was only 720kB in size and was distributed on two 5¼" floppy discs. Immersion doesn't require great graphics, it requires great intellectual captivation.

Its successor, Starflight 2 - Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula, was a massive step-up in graphics, story and gameplay. It was literally twice the game that Starflight was, which made sense because it used a single 1.44MB floppy disc. Just try to let that sink in for a second. It still blows my mind to this day.

I had the good fortune of trading emails with Rod McConnell, the lead programmer of the Binary Systems programming team that made this early EA title. The thrill was similar to that of talking to Roberta Williams of Sierra On-Line. You could just tell that this person was an absolute genius.
 
Last edited:
Lets make something very clear.
TES was and is such a long-lived and enduring game becuse of 3 main reasons:

1. Its just a decent game. Big world, lots to do ok story. Basically it has a good defualt experiance and just-good-enough updates.
2. The modding community.
3. The modding community.
a. the​
b. modding​
c. community​


Modding this game is a hobby in and of itself. Sometimes fun, sometimes heart-wrenching. Bethesda did an OK job by mostly leaving the community alone. This is the best way for it to thrive. A properly modded Skyrim still gives todays triple A titles a run for their money in terms of visual appeal. The last vestiges of tell-tale signs it isnt a 2020+ title is poly count for very far away things and general atmospheric stuff that is mainly the engine being a damn decade old!

I highly recommend some of the modding packs. They may take you a few days to peice together using the guide, but remember, approach it as a hobby/project and youll have more fun. One of my favorites makes Skyrim a much darker, harder game. More realistic and in my opinion, fit the games story and atmosphere better. https://www.ultimateskyrim.com/

Here is to hoping the make TESVI open enough so the modding community can start working its magic so it also stays relevant for 10+ years.
 
I'm very bearish on the future of the Elder Scrolls and of Bethesda. If Fallout 76 and their awful Creation Club have proved anything, it's that they've either become, or have been revealed to be, as greedy and soulless as EA itself. The modding community has basically been this company's battered wife since Morrowind; patching up their bugs and egregious mistakes while enduring the broken compatibility and frustration of their updates. That they're seeking to basically strip-mine that community the way they have by making their games pay-to-mod with Creation Club and pay-for-single-player with Fallout 76 shows that this is a one-way relationship. I would not put it past them to make it so you can only mod TES VI through Creation Club or to add microtransactions into a single-player experience.
Well they'll get as much money from me as FO76; which is to say, $0.
 
Loved morrowind and fallout 3 but they have fallen a long way. unlike bioware I still think they can come back, they just need to use a different engine. the amount of bugs in their games is no longer acceptable.
I'll be honest; I recall hardly anything gamebreaking when I played TES III-V without mods.
 
Sadly, like with Fallout 4 and Skyrim, it's very likely that the only reason to play TES VI will be for the mods, preferably at least several years after the release(assuming they don't manage to mess that up with some Creation Club shenanigans - it's unlikely, but I wouldn't put that past them). At least to me it really feels like every open world RPG Bethesda has made since Morrowind has been a downgrade over the last one except visually.
 
Sadly, like with Fallout 4 and Skyrim, it's very likely that the only reason to play TES VI will be for the mods, preferably at least several years after the release(assuming they don't manage to mess that up with some Creation Club shenanigans - it's unlikely, but I wouldn't put that past them). At least to me it really feels like every open world RPG Bethesda has made since Morrowind has been a downgrade over the last one except visually.
Come on. Fallout 4 had its faults, but Skyrim is an amazing game by itself and much better than morrowind or oblivion that are absolutely outdated by now.
 
Come on. Fallout 4 had its faults, but Skyrim is an amazing game by itself and much better than morrowind or oblivion that are absolutely outdated by now.
I have to admit, Skyrim will always be one of my favourite games. As an RPG, I rank it up there with Witcher III and Assassin's Creed: Odyssey.
 
Last edited:
This article is very informative on the history of the elder scroll franchise. For me the elder scroll morrowind oblivion and skyrim has to best designed dark fanstasy world. Most of the games were dark and depressing majority of times with a funny side of dark comedy. It also The single player franchise features a byzantine roman empire theme that not alot games feature on romans or byzantine elements . Also I like the these games how they keep things simple and easy to understand as for example the single breed khajits as tribal beastmen from deadric curse by azura but elder scroll online completely ruined the single players by having multiple breeds of khajits as simply a talking house cat which is completely stupid and adding lore that make sense such as a imga monkey people, which is reality was a private in game joke to refer humans slaves by the wild elves in the first era. The elder scroll online screams to much world of Warcraft not elder scroll morrowind oblivion and skyrim dark fantasy setting therefore I don't consider canon in whole series in my personal opinion.

Afterall the elder scroll morrowind oblivion and skyrim allows the player to choose who want you be and live life within a dark medieval fantasy setting.
 
Come on. Fallout 4 had its faults, but Skyrim is an amazing game by itself and much better than morrowind or oblivion that are absolutely outdated by now.
Morrowind's mechanics may be janky, but it features an absolutely amazing setting. Skyrim is slightly less janky, but the setting is just bland.
 
Back