Almost a decade has passed and two generations of consoles have changed since the release of Skyrim in 2011. Since then, Bethesda has worked on other franchises: we saw two new Fallout games, and the studio is now working on an all-new sci-fi project called Starfield .
As for The Elder Scrolls series, so far we only have a trailer.consisting of the words "The Elder Scrolls VI" and the accompaniment to the theme song of the game. Todd Howard made it clear that the next Elder Scrolls won't be out soon after Starfield. However, Microsoft's recent purchase of the studio has raised questions about Bethesda's plans. Will Bethesda franchises become Xbox and PC exclusives? Is Microsoft planning to release Elder Scrolls VI earlier?
We have no answers yet. But since the franchise is 27 years old, it's time to find out where it all started. No, "Skyrim 2" is probably not planned anytime soon. But over the quarter-century history of the Elder Scrolls, it has had many interesting and fan-favorite moments. Let's find out about them!
early years
In the early 1990s, Bethesda was an inexperienced developer collaborating with EA on John Madden Football, before starting to create a fantasy arena-fighting game.
It was originally planned that players in The Elder Scrolls: Arena would travel from city to city and fight in various arenas, moving towards the Imperial City. Along the way, they had to complete randomly generated side quests for NPCs.
During the development of the game, side quests and world exploration became more and more important. Ultimately, Bethesda ditched arenas altogether and redoubled efforts to bring dungeon crawling and quests to a massive open world.
The early to mid-90s were the heyday of first-person dungeon crawler games. Games like Ultima Underworld and Wizardry 7 resembled Arena in appearance. However, they were much more limited in terms of scale and interactivity.
Through the use of procedural generation, Bethesda was able to create a huge open world almost the size of the continental United States. However, this solution turned out to be twofold. Across the continent of Tamriel, there were only 17 handcrafted dungeons. Almost everything else was created by the algorithm from a small amount of handcrafted resources. Arena's first-person combat and exploration borrows heavily from games like Ultima Underworld.
Arena doesn't look good today: a desolate world, simple 3D graphics, and limited quest options. It is immediately noticeable that this is the first test of the pen of a developer looking for his place in the RPG genre. However, Arena has created a foundation of lore and entourage for future Elder Scrolls titles. She also introduced players to the hallmarks of the new Elder Scrolls: vast open spaces, exploration, and total freedom. Its sequel, Daggerfall, has confirmed that Bethesda has a great future.
The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall
Daggerfall has improved all of Arena's innovations, creating better gameplay in every way. The main change was the increase in the density of the world. Arena had a vast open world with little content. In addition to the 10 quests of the main Arena storyline, there were many randomized quest types, but they all boiled down to completing another procedurally generated dungeon. Daggerfall's 227 quests allowed players to dive deeper into this world.
The xEngine renderer provided a significant improvement in the image, and although the procedurally generated rooms still looked pretty similar, compared to Arena, the environments were much more varied.
The world has become several times smaller than the size of the Arena world: 200 thousand square kilometers instead of 6 million. However, it was (and still remains!) Absolutely gigantic: more than 15 thousand cities, dungeons and villages. Daggerfall even has a built-in search engine for finding places of interest to the player.
With hundreds of quests, interactions with unique NPCs, and a fairly detailed open world, players could immerse themselves in Daggerfall for hundreds of hours. For mid-90s players starting out with tabletop D&D sessions, Daggerfall was a revelation.
Witchcraft, banking, sailing your own ship in the Iliac Bay - Daggerfall had many notable gameplay features and mechanics, most of which never appeared again in subsequent Elder Scrolls games. The new games put more emphasis on narrative and exploration, simplifying basic gameplay systems and cutting out the rest.
Is this game interesting today? Yes and no. You can get a complete picture of the game by running the original under DOSBox. But if you really want to give Daggerfall a try, then the community-driven Daggerfall Unity project is worth downloading. As the name suggests, Daggerfall Unity is an attempt at recreating Daggerfall from scratch on a modern Unity engine.
The project has come a long way over the past few years and now has almost all the features. In addition to making Daggerfall easier to run on modern machines, Daggerfall Unity also supports modding tools. Modders have added a bunch of features: 3D NPCs, AI-enhanced textures and dynamic lights.
If you lean more towards the vanilla Daggerfall gameplay, but with significant graphical improvements, then we recommend the DREAM mod pack, which replaces thousands of sprites, textures, models and sound files.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Six years after Daggerfall, in 2002, Bethesda released Morrowind, the third game in the main Elder Scrolls lineup. In many ways, Morrowind was the opposite of Daggerfall and Arena. The first two games actively used procedural generation to create huge spaces. Morrowind's Vvardenfell Island has an area of only 16 square kilometers. But every inch of it is handcrafted to deliver never-before-seen variety and attention to detail.
In terms of graphics, Morrowind is a huge step forward. Although Daggerfall xEngine used a 3D renderer strictly speaking, the characters and many objects were sprites. Thanks to the Gamebryo engine, Morrowind has made the transition to polygonal 3D, featuring fully modeled and textured characters with environments and day / night cycles.
While some systems still resembled the D&D mechanics of the first installments (for example, melee with a chance to miss), Morrowind created a template that all future Elder Scrolls games will follow.
In terms of lore, Morrowind began the process of creating a unique identity for the Elder Scrolls universe instead of using standard high fantasy tropes like Daggerfall and Arena. This is best seen in the narrative conveyed through the surroundings of Vvardenfell itself: a volcanic island with mushroom architecture, mysterious Daedric ruins and flying jellyfish. Although subsequent games have surpassed Morrowind technologically, its strange and wondrous environments still stand out from the typical worlds of Oblivion and Skyrim.
It's also important to note that Morrowind was the first Elder Scrolls game to hit consoles. While the gameplay was still more suited to the PC in terms of interface and depth, Morrowind's appearance on the first Xbox proved that deep open-world RPGs could work for consoles as well. Developers of the subsequent Elder Scrolls games have redoubled their efforts to improve gameplay on consoles, focusing on accessibility and simplification of gameplay systems.
In addition, Morrowind was also the first Elder Scrolls game to have an active modding community around it. Morrowind modders have created an amazingly diverse range of projects over the past twenty years. Graphical enhancements, gameplay enhancements, DLC volume additions like Tamriel Rebuilt - the Morrowind modding community has added far more to the game than any of the official expansions, and it continues to work.
Transition period
The four years that have elapsed between the release of Morrowind and the arrival of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion have been an odd period for the franchise. Bethesda worked with Vir2L studios to create Elder Scrolls games for phones in the early 2000s in The Elder Scrolls: Travels spinoff series. Most of these dungeon crawler games (frankly horrible) had little to do with the mainstream games. The most ambitious (and infamous) of The Elder Scrolls Travels' games is Shadowkey, released on the ill-fated Nokia N-Gage gaming phone.
Unlike its predecessors from the J2ME platform, Shadowkey was supposed to provide full-fledged Elder Scrolls gameplay on mobile devices. Unfortunately, the 104 MHz N-Gage processor was simply not designed for such tasks.
Shadowkey featured a fully 3D open world with exploration and Morrowind-style first-person combat. Unfortunately, the hardware limitations of N-Gage kept the Shadowkey draw distance so close that NPCs and objects literally jumped out onto the screen. Frame rates often dropped to single digits during active scenes, making N-Gage fights an annoying experience. In many ways, Shadowkey looked and felt like a fifth-generation Elder Scrolls demo (the fifth-generation consisted of consoles such as the Sony PlayStation, Nintendo 64, and Sega Saturn).
This game gives us an idea of what Morrowind would have looked like if Bethesda had released it two years earlier on the PlayStation 1.
Oblivion and Skyrim: when the Elder Scrolls went mainstream
In today's world, The Elder Scrolls (or at least Skyrim) have gained as widespread popularity as possible for a western fantasy RPG series. But it was not always so. Morrowind and older games were popular on the PC and still have a dedicated fan community, but they remained very niche games in the niche genre.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim have taken a step from the PC to the mainstream console audience. The Oblivion trailer, shown by Bethesda at E3 2005, was one of the first projects to motivate the purchase of the Xbox 360.
After Oblivion came out almost simultaneously with the release of the Xbox 360 console, it became apparent that Bethesda's priorities had changed. A lot of schools of magic, weapon types and interactions that could be found in Morrowind turned out to be cut (no more levitation boots for you, for example).
Most of the interactions in Morrowind were based on probabilities, determined by rolling an invisible die. Oblivion replaced this system with the standard hitbox-based combat and magic system. An optional but wonderful addition to this is the physics of the Havok engine.
Dialogue difficulty was greatly reduced, with most NPCs having only two or three choices. However, unlike Morrowind, they all had voice acting. Oblivion was also criticized for its entourage. In older games in the Elder Scrolls series, Oblivion's province of Cyrodiil was described as a lush jungle with villages scattered in between. In Oblivion, only the regions around Bruma and Leyawiin vaguely matched this description. The main body of Cyrodiil was a standard high fantasy pastoral setting. This was probably also due to the desire to increase the mainstream of the game, but because of it Oblivion lost part of its soul.
After the appearance in 2011 of Skyrim, the process of transition to the mainstream was completed. Crafting and customization options have been cut even further, and so have dialogue choices. Bethesda put exploration and combat at the center of the gameplay, and many quests were a go-and-kill cycle.
Bethesda has ensured a very long life for the game with its well-implemented open world and feature-rich Creation Engine modding tools. Even a decade later, Skyrim retains the most active modding community of all games. Major mods for a complete overhaul of the game like Enderal: The Shards of Order even have their own mods... In addition, thanks to the mods of models and textures, Skyrim's graphics can look even better than the more recent Fallout 4.
Skyrim 's only real problem is that it is too popular. This is a negative aspect for two reasons. First, this is probably the main reason for the long creation of The Elder Scrolls VI . Skyrim: Special Edition, Skyrim on Nintendo Switch, and Skyrim VR are all essentially Skyrim in new packaging, but all of these remakes are selling well. For Bethesda, Skyrim has become a cash cow.
The second problem was brand memory. Skyrim is so well integrated into the mainstream that many players have probably never heard of any other Elder Scrolls game. They're looking for Skyrim 2, not The Elder Scrolls VI. This will affect the gameplay that Bethesda will create in the next Elder Scrolls project and in games like Starfield.
While franchises like Assassin's Creed are leaning more and more towards basic RPG mechanics, Bethesda will likely continue to simplify things due to the obsession with Skyrim players. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Realistic animations, improved combat, and enhanced interactions with NPCs could lead to better Elder Scrolls, even if Bethesda decides to break with the series' roots. What will The Elder Scrolls VI be more like? Will we see a descendant of Skyrim or a return to roots?
The Elder Scrolls Online
The Elder Scrolls games have always set you up for a solo journey. In each game of the main line, research and quests were accompanied by long, brooding wanderings in natural landscapes.
The grassy meadows of Cyrodiil, the mushroom towers of Morrowind, and the valleys of Skyrim were often resting places in which one could simply "be." It would be sacrilege to turn something like this into a multiplayer game ... Or not?
Elder Scrolls Online is a brave attempt by Bethesda to bring its single-player RPG franchise to a world where fantasy fans spend hundreds of hours on World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2. Was this attempt a success? Not really. Was it a disastrous failure? Also no.
Having implemented interesting quests and narrative in the project, as well as a system of battles that outwardly resembles battles in Skyrim and Oblivion (although not based on hitboxes), Bethesda tried not to stray too far from the single-player roots of the series. While ESO can be played as a social game, the basic quest system has remained largely unchanged, with full voice acting greatly aiding immersion.
This is by no means The Elder Scrolls VI, but the cartoony graphics and rather static behavior of the NPCs can turn off some players. But ultimately, ESO is the best MMO Bethesda could make while staying within the Elder Scrolls template.
Waiting for The Elder Scrolls VI
In terms of graphics, the recently leaked Starfield screenshots give us a pretty complete picture of what technology Bethesda is using to create the next generation of its RPGs.
The Elder Scrolls VI is slated for release immediately after the release of Starfield, so it will likely use the same underlying technology. The leaked screenshots were taken in 2018 and in the finished game the graphics can be greatly improved. However, judging by what we saw, Starfield uses a pipeline of physically correct materials and models, and the polygon count is higher than in current Bethesda projects.
Fallout 4added PBR (physically-based rendering) to the Creation Engine, so you should expect high quality materials. Models with increased polygon count are perfect for next generation GPU consoles. In addition, The Elder Scrolls VI "trailer" showed a significant increase in draw distances. If the terrain in the trailer is really engine-driven, then you can expect much more impressive views and a reduction in the effect of objects that appear sharply on the screen.
What about all the things we don't know?
The most important improvement in The Elder Scrolls VI may not be the graphics, but the depth of the gameplay. Both ninth-gen consoles feature 8-core Zen 2 processors that are orders of magnitude faster than the weak Jaguar-based processors on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. This processing power can be used to create deeper interactions with NPCs based on artificial intelligence, increasing the granularity of worlds and branching structures of quests with many states.
Bethesda's RPG games have always focused on the atmosphere, the opportunity to get lost in a strange new world. While the graphics have gotten a lot better, the core interactions and quest designs of the Elder Scrolls haven't changed much since Morrowind. New RPGs like Cyberpunk 2077 are redefining the role of the player. It will be interesting to see how Bethesda leverages the new processing power to create more believable environments.
By the time The Elder Scrolls VI launches, The Elder Scrolls franchise may well be 30. Over the ten years and two generations of consoles since the release of Skyrim, we have seen significant progress in the RPG genre in terms of gaming technology.
Now that we are at the beginning of the era of the next generation of consoles, we have yet to find out what the developers will come up with using the full power of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. If you think about it this way, then a few more years of development could be beneficial for the game.
A fully fledged next-generation Elder Scrolls game may well turn into the RPG of the decade.
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