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

<3 TES!

[Southpaw018]

Morrowind was my first TES game. And I loved it. The greatest kick I got out of it wasn't even the game - it was screwing with the system and the dev kit, building my own house, doing crazy superhero-like things in game with my character, fucking with the physics and the game's backend - and, of course, playing through the storyline. It was really cool. The best part of the whole thing was the total freedom. And while I didn't follow this example, I remember seeing a quote from one of the Morrowind devs that summed up how I actually played the game (I must have gone through the main story line half a dozen times with different characters). He said something like "If you want to spend $50 on a game and create yourself an invincible sword and beat it in a few hours, that's your perrogative."

And I remember thinking YES! Someone gets it!

First Time playing TES... and loving it

[9mm Censor]

Oblivion is the first time I have played a TES game. Being someone who loves FPS (hardcore UT and Battlefield player), it takes some thing special for me to play something that doesn't have quad damage and a rocket launcher. I can count the number for non FPSers I own in two hands. A need for speed game that I bought when I got my first car (which I played breifly and haven't touched since) and Oblivion. Having put 30 hours into one character, mostly in 6 hour spurts after work, I am hooked. Who would have though bows and arrows were as cool as rocket launchers?

Re:TES

[Entropy248]

Absolutely not. No. The most ambitious of their titles is called "The Elder Scrolls:Travels" and it's for your cell phone. It is a "Bard's Tale" style RPG on your cell phone. It doesn't have an immersive plot, but it does have 4 classes, a huge dungeon that I got extremely lost in, and portability that I just can't fight. I had the game for 6 months or so (Yes, you can save the game) before I beat it. It's difficult to find, but it worked on my Sanyo SCP 5200. It was such a great game, I transferred it to my next phone. After that was stolen, I downloaded it again. These are not Treo/Pocket PC type phones either, they are regular flip phones. It's such a great game, it got me interested in the PC versions, which I love. At $2.99, it was absolutely the best value I have ever gotten out of any game. No, I don't work for them. Peace.

Re:Daggerfall stank

[Vo0k]

# The leve system should've been dropped a long time ago. It doesn't really make sense anyway, just grow the stats from the attributes. And because of the redesign, to get the ability to improve the statistics you need enough to not make the game too hard (especially if you're a magicka-oriented character) you have to make primary skills the skills you will NOT use. That is annoying.

Or not trying to game the system and just follow on with the standard skills you're going to use most as 'majors', then playing the level of difficulty the authors intended, making the game as challenging as it should be.

# The interface is much worse than Morrowind for a computer user. It's good for console, it's not too bad for a computer (except that it's far too big, the font is frigging huge and stuff), but Morrowind's was mostly better

The mods are on the way :)

# Water was better in morrowind. Strange, but quite a few people feel like that, it felt more natural (if you had a card handling shaders that is)

heh. Nope. This one feels more natural. MW was more shiny and beautiful, beyond reason. Go visit some RL lake and see for yourself. It's common WATER for god's sake, not quicksilver or some odd polymer stuff.

# In Oblivion, the ennemies level with you. So do the merchants (most of what they could sell is locked, they sell only a selection that is considered "interresting" for your current level). This completely breaks the immersion.

Merchants - *shrug*. Enemies - uh well, keeps the game challenging :) Think of it as 'they level with time', the Oblivion gates open, more powerful enemies appear.

# Seems like they removed the levitation thingie.

Yeah, sucks. What about Icarian Flight stuff? Jumping really high etc?

# Fast travel is idiotic.

Never used it yet :)