User:Elder Scrolls Facts

There’s a theory that no one ever loves one of Bethesda’s open-world games as much as they love their first. Whichever Elder Scrolls you first lost yourself in will be the one that sticks with you forever, the theory goes, and none of the others will measure up. But although there certainly is a format shared by all the single-player RPGs in the Elder Scrolls series, there isn’t a formula—each new game makes significant changes, and many of those changes seem like responses to common criticisms of the previous fantasy epic.

It feels like Bethesda pays attention to the things people complain about and use mods to fix, though the company rarely gets credit for it. It’s especially noticeable when you put all five central games in the series—ignoring the spin-offs—side by side to see how they’ve evolved, and how different they are. This is our history of The Elder Scrolls, from Arena to Skyrim, republished with the release of Skyrim

Speaking of evolution, The Elder Scrolls: Arena went through some famously massive changes even before it was properly begun. Initially conceived as a game about a team of gladiators competing in turn-based battles (hence the subtitle), what started as a series of sidequests in dungeons and cities took over during early development and became the core of the game, reshaping it into a first-person real-time RPG in the mold of Ultima Underworld.