The Elder Scrolls, a revisiting and analysis by me

Its no secret that I LOVE the Elder Scrolls video games. I never played any at release until Skyrim, however. I've played all of the main series though, and I'm about to share some analysis on each. I've not beaten any except Skyrim and Morrowind, however. Arena - For the time, this was an ambitious game, but it is one with serious flaws I've noticed. First off, its relentlessly difficult. Second of all, as a 2.5D game with prerendered sprites, its notably less deep. I've played through probably a half dozen dungeons on my three playthroughs before I'm just drained and shelve my CD copy of the game. Its ambitious, and it was enough of a success that it paved the way. Daggerfall: I know Chizmad is gonna hate me for this, but I don't like this one. Its technology, the XEngine, is outdated. It was due to arrive in 1994, and thus missed the mark. The BUILD and Quake engines, released the same year, have more capabilities under their belts as far as rendering goes, with the former being capable of everything short of room-over-room ( essentially, 3D floors ) and the latter being full 3D. While the game's sprites look nice enough, everything else such as the wall texturing is stretched, and the game's scale, while impressive ( equaling 66k sq miles ) is cookie cutter and randomly generated by algorithms, and the game, as such, feels more shallow and undetailed compared to later games. The soundtrack is nothing to write home about, and for a game with three years of development under its belt, and delivered two years late, it leaves a lot to be desired. Then comes Morrowind. Not gonna lie, this is by far one of my favorite games of all time. I completed it recently, and while a lot of things in it frustrate and baffle me at times, the game still delivers a top notch adventure, and compared to its closest competitor, Fable, another franchise I liked, the game is far more immersive and detailed. OpenMW is coming along, when Morrowind is playable enough I plan to replay it, in the meantime, I'm considering doing so in Morroblivion. It has the best music, by far of the series. Oblivion: A very good successor to Morrowind, but one that missed a lot of opportunity. I replayed this recently for a while. It has a lot of bugs which can mar the presentation, but the third party has done a good job of reducing these. The one trouble is, that I find that the game's music isn't as good, and the atmosphere is not as well delivered. The ruins feel... dark and scary for sure, but not really finished. The Oblivion gates are more annoying than anything else, and the game's dialogue and NPC AI is shockingly bad. Skyrim: I love this game too, but again, the engine of the game appears unstable, and unlike Morrowind, I find myself crashing to the desktop or the game locking up even with very few mods loaded, on a computer with 8GB and 32 GB alike. Bethesda made a good game, for sure, but they really need to improve these problems so that others don't have to deal with this bullshit when playing the game modded.

I think it's a pretty good little analysis, but personally I think Arena was alright and Daggerfall was great but Morrowind is definitely my favourite too (Easily one of my favourite RPGs ever made). I still feel that's Bethesda's peak when it comes to writing, pacing and the sense of going on a truly epic adventure in the seemingly alien continent of the Dark Elves' homeland; Morrowind. Oblivion is great and a ton of fun with some great places to explore but the bugs and issues did bring it down and Cyrodiil is very standard fantasy affair compared to Morrowind which really did feel like exploring a fantasy alien planet but I suppose it's for the sake of the lore. Skyrim was very disappointing for me. VERY disappointing... But only when I played the vanilla version on PS3 - it's very much a game where I need to heavily mod it to get a pretty fantastic game out of it to fix the combat which I found dull as hell apart from the magic where I believe the game's combat shines with it's strong diversity of spells but it's nice to have even more through modding. I feel the soundtrack is at its best on this one by far but the story and writing was piss weak, Morrowind knowingly tells you that you can ignore the main story and just do your own thing (Where Caius Cosades tells you himself to just wander and explore and do your own thing and you can feel free to come back whenever) whereas Oblivion and Skyrim try to create a false sense of urgency where it wants you to go through the story from start to finish in a single go. Oblivion a little less so but Skyrim REALLY hammers this, like when Jarl Balgruuf tells you to make haste to the Greybeards for example but there's no need to rush. It's a real annoying dissonance where I wish Bethesda learned from their writing in Morrowind or from Obsidian's excellent writing and narrative methods in Fallout: New Vegas. I really wish a passionate team of modders and voice actors make an effort to completely redo the entire main story where it doesn't suck (Other people might like the story of course which is fine but when I have Morrowind and Fallout: New Vegas to compare it to then, well y'know.) which plenty of modders have done in Oblivion and Morrowind before. Oh and when it comes to mods I suggest you use LOOT: https://loot.github.io/ - due to the engine using some stupid load order style of sorting content, this tool will simply rearrange everything into the correct load order - I've only ever had one small crash after 15 hours with over 100 seperate mods and everything works perfectly as it should. I didn't expect to type as much as I did but I too love the Elder Scrolls games so I couldn't help myself to say things about it.

Vvardenfell is only a teeny portion of Morrowind, unless you count Solstheim and the Tribunal cities as well, that's the only sad part about Morrowind's scope. Skyrim I liked the writing, but I hate that I'm in the minority with siding with Stormcloaks it seems. I use BOSS, and have since fixed the issue. All of the moddable games are glitchy as fuck. I would say its because of their scope more than anything.

Even with just Vvardenfell alone, it's pretty amazing and pretty large - I do wish the game did take you to the mainland outside of Mournhold since I reckon there would probably be even more interesting landscapes to explore there. Though there have been a couple of mods that explore Morrowind's mainland thankfully. The magic of TES games is their modding flexibility (Despite the stupid load order thing, I swear they need to change that engine because no other game engine does that load order nonsense. It's funny knowing they're still using the same engine since Morrowind albeit modified to such a ridiculous extent) and ease of use to make stuff from it.

Mine will be short and sweet. Oblivion Dislikes: fuck the oblivion gates Vampirism is should be sexy, not a disease Likes: This one I played on all consoles and then towards the end modded on PC. It had some great mods though at times it would make the game buggy. There were Minotaurs. And a unicorn which they protected. You could ride the unicorn- sadly if you tried completing the Daedric Lord quests you had to kill the only unicorn left 8( Skyrim Dislikes: ... ... Oh, wait... No.... Uhh I'm sure there are some. OH okay got it. So to play Skyrim in ultra mode you have to have a pretty jacked computer, not the hamster CPU and crackerjack video card I have. *sigh* ... I'm sure there's something else. Oh yeah, couldn't marry certain main NPCs. That sucked. Oh and I missed the arena from Onlivion. That was a great place to level up. No unicorns 8( unless you mod but I haven't got to PC it up yet. All the kids look alike. Why were there no Argonian/Kajiit/Orc/Elven/Redgard kids?!?! Likes: Dragons. Eermehgerdmarite?! Werewolves/werebears Vampirism can be sexy. Dragons. More Daedric Lord quests with schnazzy items as rewards :3 Dragons. Nightingale quest line and Nightingale armor. The elves don't look weird anymore and lots of improvements on the Argonian and Kajiit races as well as Orcs. Dragons and dragon armor. The SNOW elves! Ahhh homestead building. I could go on and on, so much for being short.

OH and I forgot. Neloth. I want to shrink him and carry him around in a locket. Who doesn't love sassy wizards that live in mushrooms?