Slashdot Mirror
An Elder Scrolls Retrospective
With the release of the fourth chapter in the Elder Scrolls saga last week, UGO has put together a piece looking back on the long and successful history of Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series. From the article: "Some RPGs take the restricted world premise so far that they are practically on rails. Thankfully, the team at Bethesda Softworks decided back in 1994 that that wasn't the way things would be for their series The Elder Scrolls. Now at its fourth installment, we have decided it was about time to take a look back at the series that broke the mold on what an RPG should be and that gave players the most important ability of all - the ability to choose how to play the game. So ready your horse, grab your finest set of gauntlets, and prepare to embark on a journey through the history of the series that brought the amazing world of Tamirel to life, and don't be afraid to slay an orc or two in the process."
No, you get references to each past game but they dont affect the current game. Like in oblivion you are told that slavery was ended in the province that morrowind was in, but other than that....
Just in case anyone is interested there are 2 other non-RPG TES games:
battlespire
Redguard
I stil maintain that daggerfall was the best, barring it's incredibly nasty habit of eating your saved games every 10 minutes or so. I really liked the ability to buy horses with wagons, houses, and boats (I haven't played Oblivion yet so I'm not sure if they brought those features back).
abort, retry, fail?
Each game stands by itself, but every installment has an impact on the following games (mostly in books, sometimes in quests that are somewhat related to what happened in the past).
Oblivion, for example, has a lot of references to Daggerfall's storyline. But having played daggerfall isn't a requirement, because the Daggerfall events have become part of Tamriel's history. In a word, when you play oblivion you might realize that some books are talking about what happened to you while you were playing Daggerfall, Arena or Morrowind, but if you haven't played them then it's still part of the world's history, it's just slightly personal. You don't feel like you lost anything though, because you don't actually know that it was part of a game's previous plotline.
You couldn't say that it's an epic saga, because you don't impersonate twice the same characters, and your characters aren't related, but the world is truly the same and coherent, and the what happened in the previous games stays part of the current game's history.
The Lore is part of what makes the Elder Scrolls so amazing. These are the only games in which people try to collect and read every single book just for the sake of knowing Tamriel's Lore.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
There is already an interface mod that (among others, like making fonts smaller and displaying 12 items/page instead of 6) gives you a much larger map (map basically takes the whole screen). Not resizable though.
shift+click itemF2. F1 to access stats, F2 for inventory, F3 for spells and F4 for map & journal.
shift-click item takes care of the dropping, it always works.
Just read the manual, they're all there on like a single page.
There are already, like, 3 mods for that.
Agree, but there are already directions to get smaller fonts, which is a first step.
Agree here.
hehe. Quite a lot of people (probably rightfully) feel that way. Oblivion's interface is way too console-oriented :/
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler