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."

Comments

Daggerfall stank

[Dark Paladin]

Sadly, while Morrowind and so far Oblivion have been filled with goodness (I'm working on an Oblivion quest wiki in my meager spare time), Daggerfall was - blech. Crashes, needed patches, the whole "randomizing" dungeons just made it too hard to go anywhere and know what the hell was going on - and the map system was this 3d thing of horror. Towns were full of people, most of whom were just empty bodies, and there was hardly any way of keeping track of quests.

Luckily, they learned from their mistakes - the only thing I need in Oblivion to make it "near perfect" is the ability to write notes on the map and in the journal myself, like "to do: check out that little island at location X".