First, a confession. I love The Elder Scrolls series. I love the RPG genre, and the open world format. Bethesda, for all its reputation for bugs, has a solid backer in me.
Still, when I saw in the PC Gamer magazine that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim had gained first place in a list of the best PC games of all time, I had to object. Because for all it's a great game, and it really is, it has some serious flaws.
Now, I'll admit that this sort of ratings table isn't entirely to be trusted. To some extent, the top game on the list always had to be a recent and popular one, because of PCGamer's readership. More people have played Skyrim than Deus Ex or any other of the usual contenders, so why upset them? To some extent, magazines pander to the readership - they have to.
Besides, Bethesda are almost certainly working on something new right now, something exciting. It may only be a subconscious thought for PCGamer's editor, but it's there. So naming a developer's game the best ever can only enhance prospects of getting that exclusive preview.
Still, it's as good an excuse as any to look at The Elder Scrolls series as a whole, to see how it started, how it developed, and what it learned on the way. Skyrim is a mess of influences - and developers took as much from the second installment (Daggerfall), as they did from Oblivion, the fourth. For obvious reasons, I'm only going to deal with the games I played, from Daggerfall onwards. Ready?
The Origin of the Western RPG:
I'm dangling from a steel wire, wrapped around my ankle. Below me is a very long drop, while above me the hulk of a vast airship is in flames. Welcome to the skies of Victorian London. This is an RPG, as they used to be: five friends around a table, pretending to be someone they're not.
My 'someone I'm not' is a very stupid character. After the first dice rolls to decide my base stats, I pumped additional numbers into strength and endurance, completely ignoring the fact that if my character sat GCSEs, he'd not only fail, but probably eat the paper. He's good in a fist fight, God awful at negotiations. He's a balanced character.
It's in pursuit of balanced characters that RPGs have a class system. Traditionally in videogames, that's been the trio of the thinker, the fighter, and the rogue. Each has strengths, and each has weaknesses, and in early RPGs like Daggerfall, we even have dice rolls, as if this was a roleplaying game acted out around the table. Class systems also open up different playstyles - you can pick locks or negotiate your way through a game. You can batter all goblins with an axe, or set them alight with magic.
Traditional RPGs established complex worlds and systems to deal with many different playstyles - if you could think of a solution to a problem, the Game Master would try to accommodate it. It all went towards deep worlds and rules that accommodate a number of different playstyles - and this translated into the videogame equivalent.
The world of The Elder Scrolls, with Argonians, Daedra, Orcs and all the rest of it, was all constructed over the course of several tabletop games between those who would go on to become videogame developers. And the entire genre owes much to Dungeons and Dragons, or Fighting Fantasy. It's all obvious stuff, but it's worth stressing, because it explains a lot, particularly about the second game in the series.
The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall
If you've only played Skyrim, and have the time, download Daggerfall for free from Bethesda. You can play it using DosBox. I guarantee that after half an hour of play, you'll hate it. You'll absolutely hate it. Perhaps, after a longer stint, you'll grow to adore the game, but it's likely that the sheer difference between Skyrim and Daggerfall will be enough to put you off.
Provided you look past the graphics, it seems quite cool and retro at first. You answer questions about your background - these all go to affect your stats and class, and your starting relationship with the game's many factions. You're free to add or subtract a few points to each stat if you wish (note the dice by the side as you do so?). It all adds to the feel of a more complicated character, a character with a history, one that you can truly roleplay.
That's fine. These are all features commonly found in a tabletop RPG. Take my guy, hanging from the airship. He's a pirate. A dumb pirate, sent on an undercover mission by a captain who doesn't expect or want him to return. And, roleplaying the dumb pirate, I decide to stop the enemy airship by setting fire to the balloon, while I'm on it. It's great fun.
Of course, the Game Master didn't really expect me to roleplay quite so well. So he swears at me a little, and has to invent a whole new scenario from scratch - where we crashland, who lives there, and so on. He could just kill us all, but we're buying rounds, and he's bought one more than the rest of us. So he sets about making a whole new neighbourhood, off the hoof. And he does it through the use of a randomiser, which creates entire areas from the roll of a dice.
You see, the world of the traditional tabletop RPG is infinite, and very flexible. And this was a feature that the developers of Daggerfall attempted to put into their game. Daggerfall is big, very big. It's roughly the size of Great Britain. The cities are large, and can take half an hour to walk across.
But they're also dull. Because by very nature of a randomiser, you can't put in particularly specific touches. Each dungeon is huge, randomly generated, and just a little dull. If you leave it, it resets, as if you never entered. Unlike more modern RPGs, you don't feel that you're making much of a mark on the world.
That's not to say that Daggerfall didn't get anything right. It still has a cult following, and if you can get past the issue of a large, random world, you might be able to see why - there's a certain depth to the gameplay, if not the world. But it's too much like a tabletop RPG to me, without the personal, humorous touches often added by the Game Master getting pissed off by your actions. So, after feedback from players, you can see why, with Morrowind, Bethesda went completely the other way.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Of the ten playable races of Tamriel, only four are human. So it's odd that after five entries in the series, only one game has been set in a non-human province of the ruling Empire. But then, Morrowind is odd in many ways. It's almost as if the developers set out to be different - as if the best way to add a personal flavour is to create mushroom cities, and beetles the size of houses.
It was much smaller than Daggerfall of course. However, as with Skyrim, the developers found that the more mountainous you make a world, the larger it seems. It was a principle abandoned in Oblivion, where, set in a gigantic basin, you could always see how close you really were to the Imperial City.
What about the gameplay elements of Daggerfall? Well, Morrowind still has questions about your background, but these are optional. And factional relationships seem to have been done away entirely - these are something you develop through play, and joining various guilds.
Combat is still based on dice - you can fire an arrow at point blank range, and it will miss because the dice rolled behind the scenes exceeded your skill level. While Oblivion did do away with this system, it did so in a way that made arrows feel less lethal. Only Skyrim seems to have got it completely right.
Other similarities between Daggerfall and Morrowind are in how quests are treated. In Daggerfall, quests had time limits, and could be failed if the wrong choices were made. In Morrowind however, there is no time limit. It's also hard to fail a quest (bar dying). However, it is possible to kill characters needed to complete the quest. The game notifies you when this happens, warning you that you've effectively broken it, but you're free to continue if you wish.
In Oblivion of course, it's impossible to kill essential characters. With the leveling system creating some pretty lethal bad guys, that's probably fair enough, particularly in quests like the saving of Kvatch. Still, what Oblivion did wrong here was to come up with a message every time a character was low on health. Reading 'Martin is Unconscious' a dozen times kind of breaks immersion.
Back to Morrowind, and what the game does right. The answer is, quite a lot really. The world feels large enough, and different enough, to not be dull. There are more factions than you'll see in the more recent games - you can join different vampirics tribes, religions, the traditional Guilds, and the Great Houses of Morrowind. What's more, once you've chosen a Great House, you're stuck with it. In Oblivion however, you could play through every questline, regardless of how little sense it made to have a Arch Listening Gray Fox wandering around. Morrowind takes your choices seriously. It's good, in a way.
Other than that, Morrowind does lore exceptionally well. You get a really good feel for the game. This is partly due to the conversation system. There was no voice acting. In the case of Morrowind, this was a good thing. Sound files add to a game's space requirements dramatically, so if you have voice acting, you are necessarily going to have to cut down on the amount and variety of dialogue.
Morrowind didn't have that problem. So it's able to maintain what's effectively a fantasy Wikipedia. Conversation with characters can reveal a lot of genuinely interesting information, with a variety of topics, and a variety of opinions. And, unlike with Oblivion, you're unlikely to be jolted out of your geeky reverie by awkward or just plain bad voice acting.
And the lore of the world is interesting too, made better by the world. You don't discover caves or ruins by following a marker. You discover them by accident - they feel like your secrets. Nothing you find is ever marked on map, and fast travel is impossible. It makes for a more mysterious world, and you genuinely are interested in issues like what happened to the Dwemer, the secretive dwarven race that has apparently disappeared.
Finally, as the one who has been 'chosen', with dungeons that don't reset, you feel like you really can have an impact on the game. You can free all the slaves in the market, and they will stay free. Morrowind did a lot of things right. But then came Oblivion...
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Oblivion was a good game in its own right. Graphically, it appears more dated than Morrowind, but that's largely due to the faces of the characters - they are unappealing. In terms of size, the map is larger, and so are the dungeons. That was actually a problem though - the dungeons weren't different enough to justify the size. It grew too easy to get bored. Skyrim changed this a little, thankfully. Caves in Skyrim are often small, with little personal touches. You can dip in and out of them in twenty minutes.
I've mentioned the voice acting already, and this was one reason why the world didn't feel quite as deep - the lore couldn't be expanded upon properly by characters. It was left to the books, the majority of them having been copied over from Morrowind in any case. And when speaking to people, you zoomed in on them in a way that smashed immersion to pieces.
Regarding justice, guards knew that you had accidentally stolen a jug from a shop at the other end of the map, and weren't going to give you leeway. Levitation, present in previous games, had been axed, as cities were moved to cells separated from the main world. In fairness, that was necessary. Had the cities been open to the world, the frame rates would have been terrible. Still, the loss of levitation was a serious blow to player freedom. Meanwhile, dungeons didn't feel like your secret any more. Wander within a mile of them, and you'd see a marker on your map.
As a final damning blow, creatures leveled with you. This was likely an attempt to prevent new players from getting screwed over by something stronger earlier on, but it made matters worse. Not only did it make levelling feel pointless, but it also reduced the fear factor of meeting something that you know can two-hit you. I count among my fondest memories of gaming the time when I had to flee my first daedra in Morrowind, after a less-than-appropriately-cautious raid on a temple.
Still, Oblivion does have standout features that are worth commenting on. It was one of the few games that let you move each individual item around, making fireballs feel fun. The Radiant AI was a decent attempt at giving characters lives, routines and secrets. The Guilds, while fewer, still had long, engaging questlines. The main questline was still a bit crap, but that's practically a traditional feature of Elder Scrolls games. It doesn't matter - the main questline is not what you came for.
Oblivion wasn't bad, in the same way Deus Ex 2 wasn't bad. It just wasn't its predecessor. And neither, as it turns out, was it worthy of its successor.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Now, I've met people who prefer Oblivion, for various reasons. One prefers the main storyline of Oblivion, which is fine, because the main storyline in Skyrim (particularly in the case of Alduin) is uninspiring, made great by the characters (dragons!), rather than the plot.
Still, for the most part, Skyrim is excellent. It's not 'best game ever' excellent, but it has learned well from those that came before it.
From Daggerfall it takes a crime system that splits the realm up into different jurisdictions. A murderer in one hold will not be arrested in another.
From Morrowind it takes a mountainous terrain, making the world seem bigger. It takes small dungeons, ones you can pop in and out of, and not grow bored of.
From Oblivion it takes a combat system where you hit no matter what your level, making the dice seem less obvious. It takes voice acting and improves it. It adds more variety to the map. It adds creatures that don't all want to kill you, and adapts the levelling system so that you do occasionally encounter the weaker creatures that used to terrify you.
Other than that, it adds flying creatures (dragons most notably), and moves further away from the tabletop RPG tradition by removing class systems and backgrounds altogether, streamlining the combat. The result is a more fluid game experience, where immersion is rarely broken, and you can spend hours forgetting that it's a game at all.
It's not all perfect though. It's the first Elder Scrolls game where you can tell the User Interface was designed with console players as the priority. It feels much easier to use keys than a mouse to select what you want - and it doesn't gel so well on a PC. Certain questlines, in particular that of Winterhold College, are cut so short as to feel cheap. Compulsory fistfights (as in Markarth) are slow and dull. Cities are also still slightly too small (Riften and Winterhold in particular). But the move to a darker tone is very much to be welcomed, and overall Skyrim comes out very much in credit. It's come a long way from its RPG routes, but with the single player open world formula, it's unlikely the series will die anytime soon yet.
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Further notes:
If you're a Morrowind fan, wander over to Tamriel Rebuilt. Whereas Morrowind is based only on the island of Vvardenfell, TR aim to build the rest of the province. They produce high quality work, and have made three fantastic releases so far.
You might also want to check out the trailer for the latest Skyrim expansion - it looks very much like Solstheim from Bloodmoon.
Oblivion fans should take a look at the modding community. Favourites of mine are The Lost Spires, which adds an Archaeology Guild, and Castle Ravenpride. But there are so many other gems out there.
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FUTURE EDIT: Sorry for the wall of text. I will add screenshots. Morrowind required me to edit the game files. Oblivion and Skyrim seem to plainly disallow it. When it's not two in the morning, I'll have another go. I'll put the links in then too.
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