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."

<3 TES!

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!

Is it a continuing story?

Is the Elder Scrolls story an epic saga that continues through all the sequels, or is each game completely stand-alone? Obviously the "same world" is used, unlike, say, the Final Fantasy series, but do the storylines of the previous "episodes" affect the new games?

Re:Is it a continuing story?

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.

Daggerfall stank

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".

other games

Just in case anyone is interested there are 2 other non-RPG TES games:
battlespire [avault.com]
Redguard [bethsoft.com]

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).

So ready your purse

So ready your horse, grab your finest set of gauntlets, and get the newest super-mega gfx card.
The gfx is wonderful, the idea great, the execution of the idea neat, but I'm completely dizzy from riding the horse really fast through the forest during storm at 3 frames per second.

First Time playing TES... and loving it

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?

Restricted RPGs

Some RPGs take the restricted world premise so far that they are practically on rails.

Yeah, they are more commonly called 'Console RPGs'.

prison.. again?

I've missed daggerfall but have played the others.. is it me or are you always a criminal in the beginning of the game??? I was experiencing some MAJOR deja-vu in the beginning of Oblivion in the dungeon.

Hats off to Daggerfall!

Some of those new innovative features attributed to Morrowind actually have their roots in Daggerfall. In particular, vampirism and lycanthropy in Morrowind are based on nearly identical features in Daggerfall. Morrowind is the impressive engineering feat while Daggerfall is the inspirational work of creative genius. Hats off to Daggerfall!

TES

Daggerfall is still the most ambitious of all of their titles. I played through the game, then went back to look at some of the spoilers for it, and... WOW. There's a gajillion things you can do in the game that I hadn't even touched upon. Not only could you become a vampire, but they had 12 different clans of vampires, with different abilities, inter-clan politics. The most detailed character generator yet, which just played up to the powergamer in me (fear of animals flaw FTW). Werewolves. Unique Artifacts. Quests for different religions, guilds, etc. A crazy awesome magic item creation system (My top gear only worked during the full moon, to keep costs low. I spent a lot of time sleeping.)

And I thought that my flying horse was pretty cool.

Sure, they used a "dynamic map" system of pseudo-random generating the dungeons and towns, but you know what? I liked the fact that there was 20,000 dungeons in the world. Every so often, I'd hop down into one for a nice randomly-generated-ala-diablo-2 experience. The sucky part was when you'd get quests to fish items out of the dungeons -- the dungeons were litterally huge, and could take hours to complete sometimes, especially if you couldn't find the one secret door behind the double-hairping corridor turn. So if I was doing quests for the mages guild (which I spent maybe 75% of my game time doing), I'd just drop any dungeon fetch quests and request a new one.

I wish they'd do a "digitally-remastered" version of Daggerfall, kinda similar to what they did with FF1&2 (improved the graphics, added a lil' bit of new content). If it looked as good as Oblivion, I'd never leave my computer.

The trouble with TES games is the fact that Bethesda doesn't believe in that whole whacky "quality assurance" thing. Daggerfall wouldn't run on my computer. Period. Until the 18th patch or so -- had a Cyrix CPU in 1996, remember those? Battlespire was almost a great game (online multiplayer with real working castles, catapults, drawbridges!) but was so buggy I had to stop playing. Redguard wouldn't run for more than 5 minutes without crashing. Morrowind once corrupted a section of the world (forcing a reinstall), and another time ate one of the quest items I needed to complete the game (had to go into the TES Construction set and drop a new one on the ground for me). Oblivion crashes every time I quit (ironically enough), but then also if I alt-tab, hit the windows key, reload too fast, click too fast, hit the keyboard too fast... or basically any time your hard drive can't keep up to speed (I have a Raid0 hard drive, so it rarely happens). It did crashed once on my girlfriend after she'd spent an hour without saving, which is really the only way I got to get my computer back from her after she spent her entire spring break on my own computer playing Oblivion. =) I was relegated to doing work with an old laptop.

Oblivion is great though. Maybe not as big in scope as Daggerfall, but damn. It looks awesome if you have the rig to run it, the quests (and the quest system) are about 100x more interesting than Morrowind's. All in all, it's one of the better RPGs I've played (and I thank the lord it's not an interactive movie like FFVII or FFX), and if the only time it reliably crashes is when I quit... well, I can deal with that.

First with a freely explorable world? Wrong...

I read in the article that Arena is from 1994, but I know a german computer game "Das Schwarze Auge" (based on a german pen&paper RPG similar to D&D) which had exactly the same principle that you could go wherever you wanted and find little quests etc. and only go for the main quest when you felt like it.
Sorry, The Elder Scrolls were not the first (but hey, I'm playing Oblivion right now as much as I can find time... (: ).

Re:I hate that line...

Its in reference to video games. Video game RPGs specificically. For that Genre TES did break the mold.

Re:Wine?

I havn't been able to get Arena (freely available on the Elder Scrolls site) to run under Cedega.

Havn't tried II.

III works about as well under Cedega as it does under Windows (so, expect the occasional crasy). Doubt it'd run under stock Wine, though.

Re:I hate that line...

I think they'll mod it 'flamebait' and mod you 'stupid, ignorant, and a hoodlum'.

Thanks you, and good night.