The Elder Scrolls - All the information you will ever need!

[FrozenEye]

This thread is for everyone who enjoys the Elder Scrolls series. I know that there has been a few of these topics in the past, but I am trying to create a thread to talk about the series as a whole. Please note that there is quite a lot to read, but it is all interesting stuff, and worth your time.

The Elder Scrolls release timeline:
1994   The Elder Scrolls: Arena
1996   The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall
1997   An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire
1998   The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard
2002   The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
2002   The Elder Scrolls III: Tribunal
2003   The Elder Scrolls III: Bloodmoon
2003   The Elder Scrolls Travels: Stormhold
2004   The Elder Scrolls Travels: Dawnstar
2004   The Elder Scrolls Travels: Shadowkey
2006   The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
2006   The Elder Scrolls IV: Knights of the Nine
2007   The Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles
2011   The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Development of The Elder Scrolls:
The first product — The Elder Scrolls: Arena — was released in 1994 for DOS PC systems. The game was intended for players to assume the role of an arena combatant, but development shifted the game into a role-playing game (RPG). The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall was published in 1996. Fueled by the modest success of The Elder Scrolls: Arena, The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall was even more ambitious than its predecessor. The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall featured one of the first true 3D worlds on a large scale, a game world the size of Great Britain. Glitches were experienced by players. A game critic commented the game as "tortuously buggy". Despite Daggerfall's commercial success, the game critic remarked, "the game still bears the mark of bad code". Following the release of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, Bethesda Softworks ceased development of the numbered title of the series until 1998 to develop in the interim The Elder Scrolls Legends: Battlespire and The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, which were released in 1997 and 1998, respectively. Both games had a smaller focus than the numbered series titles: The Elder Scrolls Legends: Battlespire limited itself to dungeon-romping and The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard was a linear third-person action-adventure game.
The release of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind in 2002 saw a return to the old-style expansive and non-linear gameplay, and a shift towards individually detailed landscapes and items with a smaller game-world than past titles. It was released on PC and later ported to the Xbox. The game achieved commercial success and sold over 4 million units by mid 2005.[4] Two expansions were released between late 2002 and early 2003: The Elder Scrolls III: Tribunal and The Elder Scrolls III: Bloodmoon. A Game of the Year Edition encompassing the original game plus both expansions packs as well as the latest patch and modding tools was released later exclusively for PC.
Development of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion began in 2002, and focused on artificial intelligence (AI) improvements that interacts dynamically with the game-world, proprietary radiant AI, implementation of Havok (physics) engine and improved graphics. The game was released on PC and Xbox 360 in early 2006 and for PlayStation 3 in early 2007. Bethesda Softworks released one content collection and expansion pack in late 2006 and early 2007: The Elder Scrolls IV: Knights of the Nine and The Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles respectively. A Game of the Year Edition was later released featuring the original game plus all expansion packs and updates for all three platforms with the PC version getting exclusive mod tools and other bonuses.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was announced on December 11, 2010, at the Spike Video Game Awards 2010. The game is not a direct sequel to its predecessor, Oblivion, but instead takes place 200 years later in the land called Skyrim in Tamriel. Skyrim also makes use of an entirely new graphics engine.






The Elder Scrolls: Arena

The Elder Scrolls: Arena is the first game in the Elder Scrolls series. It is a first-person computer role-playing game for MS-DOS, developed by Bethesda Softworks and released in 1994. In 2004, a downloadable version of the game was made available free of charge as part of the 10th anniversary of The Elder Scrolls series, but newer systems may require an emulator such as DOSBox to run it, as Arena is a DOS-based program.
Like its sequels, Arena takes place in the continent of Tamriel, complete with wilderness, dungeons, and a spell creation system that allows players to mix various spell effects into a new spell as long as they have the money to pay for it.

The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfell

The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall is a first-person, traditional role-playing video game for MS-DOS developed by Bethesda Softworks and released in 1996. It is a sequel to the RPG The Elder Scrolls: Arena and the second installment in The Elder Scrolls series. On July 9, 2009, it was made available as a free download on the Elder Scrolls website; it is the first game in the series to be rated M.

The Elder Scrolls: Battlespire

An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire is a 1997 first-person action computer role-playing game developed and published by Bethesda Softworks, set in the world of The Elder Scrolls.
In Battlespire (named so after the training facility for battlemages), the player takes the role of an apprentice who, on the day of his final test, discovers that an army of Daedra led by Mehrunes Dagon has invaded and killed nearly everyone. On top of that, his partner is being held captive by Mehrunes Dagon himself. Over the course of seven levels, you must travel through various realms of Oblivion to reach Mehrunes Dagon, defeat him and escape back to Tamriel.
Bethesda introduced a multiplayer feature that included a cooperative mode to follow the single player storyline online as well as a team-based versus mode to fight using all the same strategies from the single player. This was done through the Multiplayer multiplayer network which is now GameSpy. Though no longer supported by Mplayer/GameSpy Arcade, one can still play through the Kali multiplayer network client, which supports and works with all the features in the game.

The Elder Scrolls: Redguard

The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard is an action-adventure game developed and published by Bethesda Softworks with a third person style, set in the world of The Elder Scrolls. The game takes place in Tamriel in the year 864 of the Second Era, some 400 years prior to the events of Arena and the rest of the series. The story is about Cyrus, a young Redguard, who arrives on the island of Stros M'kai in order to find his missing sister, Iszara, and subsequently finds himself in the middle of political intrigue.
Redguard runs on MS-DOS, however the CD-ROM shipped with the Windows-only InstallShield installation program,[1] and features a software renderer as well as a hardware accelerated Glide renderer. The game's manual also included a section called the Pocket Guide to the Empire (often abbreviated as PGE, or PGttE), in which details were given on all the provinces of the Empire during that Era. This guide is written from the point of view of an Imperial, and has several handwritten notices in it written by an anti-imperial. Lastly, in some distributions of the game, the map that was provided in the box was partially burnt to provide an additional level of verisimilitude.
Bethesda Softworks has never released a patch for this game.
Early copies of Redguard also shipped with a comic book depicting the events that led up to Cyrus' adventure on Stros M'kai. The main character Cyrus is referenced in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: in a song sung by the first mate of the ship, the Marie Elena.

The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, often simply referred to as Morrowind, is a single-player computer role-playing game developed by Bethesda Game Studios, and published by Bethesda Softworks and Ubisoft. It is the third installment in The Elder Scrolls series of games. It was released in North America in 2002 for Microsoft Windows and the Xbox. Well-received publicly and critically, with over four million sales and more than 60 awards (including Game of the Year), Morrowind holds an average review score of 89% from both Metacritic and Game Rankings. The game spawned two expansion packs for the PC: Tribunal and Bloodmoon. Both were eventually repackaged into a full set containing all three, Morrowind: Game of the Year Edition, which shipped on October 30, 2003 for both PC and Xbox.
The main story takes place on Vvardenfell, an island in the Dunmer province of Morrowind, which lies in the empire of Tamriel and is far from the more civilized lands to the west and south that typified Daggerfall and Arena. The central quests concern the deity Dagoth Ur, housed within the volcanic Red Mountain, who seeks to gain power and break Morrowind free from Imperial reign. Morrowind was designed with an open-ended free-form style of gameplay in mind, with a lessened emphasis on the game's main plot. This choice received mixed reviews in the gaming press, though such feelings were tempered by reviewers' appreciation of Morrowind's expansive and detailed game world.

The Elder Scrolls: Tribunal

The Elder Scrolls III: Tribunal is the first expansion for Bethesda Softworks' The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. It takes place in the temple/city of Mournhold, the capital of Morrowind, located in the larger city of Almalexia. The title refers to the three "Living Gods", known as the Tribunal.
Instead of directly modifying the original game world, the city of Mournhold is only accessible by teleportation. While the city of Mournhold appears to be similar to the open-air towns of the original game, Mournhold is actually akin to an interior room. Players cannot levitate while in Mournhold, because levitation would reveal that the "sky" of Mournhold is little more than a ceiling (although the game states it is forbidden so not to offend Almalexia). Should a player go over the walls of Mournhold (using spells or scrolls such as Scroll of Icarian Flight) they will find the area of Mournhold they were in floating in an endless ocean. The other districts of Mournhold will be absent from the ocean. This was probably done because the original game included only the islands of Vvardenfell, and Mournhold, in the fictional geography of Tamriel, lies on the mainland and a considerable distance inland.
The most notable aspect of Tribunal is the modification of Morrowind's journal system. In the original game, a player's journal can become extremely lengthy and cumbersome. Tribunal allows a player to sort his journal by quest (instead of chronologically sorted) in order to determine what is required for a specific quest. Another notable feature of the expansion is the Museum of Artifacts. The owner of the museum will pay the player half of the value of an artifact (up to 30,000 gold) for one of the very rare artifacts of Morrowind. This is more than the player can get for the artifact at any other store. The museum starts with one artifact (Stendarr's Hammer), and puts the new artifacts on display cases as they are sold to the museum.

The Elder Scrolls: Bloodmoon

The Elder Scrolls III: Bloodmoon is the second expansion pack for Bethesda Softworks' The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. While it was originally released as an expansion set for Microsoft Windows, Bloodmoon is included within the Morrowind: Game of the Year edition for Xbox.
Unlike the first expansion Tribunal, which added a city separate from the world map consisting of interior cells, Bloodmoon adds a large new island to the original world map, a cold northern territory named Solstheim. Rather than the Dunmer (dark elves) that are the indigenous race in the nearby Vvardenfell, Solstheim is populated largely by the Nord race. This is largely because the island sits more or less astride the border between Morrowind and the Nord homeland of Skyrim.
This expansion adds new enemies, the East Empire Company as a joinable guild, and the possibility to become a werewolf, akin to the inclusion of vampires seen in Morrowind. Bloodmoon also uses larger and more detailed environments, including snowfall, thus raising the computer hardware requirements, though the ash storms of the original game are much more graphically demanding than the snow of Bloodmoon.
As with Morrowind and Tribunal, Bloodmoon has many side-quests to finish and many caves to explore aside from its main quest. Unlike Tribunal, which is intended to be played after the completion of Morrowind's main-quest, Bloodmoon's main-quest is self-contained within the expansion.

The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (often referenced as Oblivion) is a single-player role-playing video game developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks and the Take-Two Interactive subsidiary 2K Games. It is the fourth installment in The Elder Scrolls action fantasy video game series, following The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Oblivion was released March 20, 2006, for Windows PCs and the Xbox 360. A PlayStation 3 release was shipped March 20, 2007, in North America and on April 27 in Europe. After a number of smaller content releases, a major expansion pack—Shivering Isles—was released. The Game of the Year Edition became available for PC on September 10, 2007, and it was released on Steam on June 16, 2009.
Oblivion's main story revolves around the player character's efforts to thwart a fanatical cult that plans to open the gates to a realm called Oblivion. The game continues the open-world tradition of its predecessors by allowing the player to travel anywhere in the game world at any time and to ignore or postpone the main storyline indefinitely. Developers opted for tighter pacing and greater plot focus than in past titles.
Development for Oblivion began in 2002, directly after the release of Morrowind. In order to achieve their goals of designing "cutting-edge graphics" and creating a more believable environment, Bethesda made use of an improved Havok physics engine; high dynamic range lighting; procedural content generation tools that allowed developers to quickly create detailed terrains; and the Radiant AI system, which allows non-player characters (NPCs) to make choices and engage in behaviors more complex than in past titles. The game was developed with fully voiced dialogue—a first for the series—and features the music of BAFTA-award-winning composer Jeremy Soule.
Oblivion was well received and won a number of industry and publication awards. The game had shipped 1.7 million copies by April 10, 2006, and sold over three million copies by January 18, 2007. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Game of the Year Edition, a package including both Shivering Isles and the official plug-in Knights of the Nine, was released in Autumn 2007 for Windows PCs, the Xbox 360, and the PlayStation 3. The fifth Elder Scrolls game, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, is to be released November 11, 2011. Also a 5th anniversary edition of Oblivion has been announced and will be released in North America on July 12 2011. Versions for other regions have been confirmed, although details on their release is yet to be released.

The Elder Scrolls: Knights of the Nine

The Elder Scrolls IV: Knights of the Nine is an official expansion pack for the computer role-playing game The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Announced on October 17, 2006 for release on November 21, 2006, the expansion was developed, published, and released in North America by Bethesda Softworks; in Europe, the game was co-published with Ubisoft.[4] The Windows version is available either as a downloadable plug-in from the company website or as part of the retail-released Oblivion Downloadable Content Collection CD—a release that also includes all previously released official downloadable content available for Oblivion. The Xbox 360 version is available via Xbox Live Marketplace, and the PlayStation 3 version of Oblivion includes Knights of the Nine in its packaged release.
Knights of the Nine centers on a faction of the same name, devoted to locating and preserving a set of "Crusaders' Relics". Once found, these relics must be used to defeat the sorcerer-king Umaril, who seeks revenge on the Nine Divines. Knights of the Nine was generally well-received in the gaming press. Although it made little change to the basic mechanics of Oblivion, it was judged by reviewers to be a brief but polished addition to the game's main plot.

The Elder Scrolls: The Shivering Isles

The Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles is the largest official expansion pack for the role-playing game The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Announced on January 18, 2007, the expansion was developed, published, and released over the Xbox Live Marketplace by Bethesda Softworks; its retail release was co-published with 2K Games. It was released for Microsoft Windows in a boxed retail edition on March 27, 2007, while the Xbox 360 version was released digitally on the Xbox Live Marketplace. Shivering Isles takes place on the eponymous isles ruled by the Daedric Prince of Madness, Sheogorath. The player becomes Sheogorath's protégé, and together they try to defeat the Daedric Lord of Order, Jyggalag, thus preventing the isles from being destroyed.

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[FrozenEye]

The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim

With the nearing release of Skyrim, many TES fans are getting quite excited. But for those of you who have never heard of Skyrim, Bethesdas newest release (Please note that it hasnt came out yet, I was just saying that because it will be their next release.) here is a bit of Info:

 Skyrim retains the traditional open-world gameplay found in the Elder Scrolls series. The player is free to roam the land of Skyrim at will, either on-foot or on horseback. Within Skyrim lie five major cities and numerous smaller towns, and expanses of wilderness and mountain ranges. Each city or town has its own economy, which the player can either stimulate by completing jobs such as farming and mining, or harm by sabotaging industrial buildings. The player can train in eighteen different skills, and the player character is leveled up by raising skills. The class system traditional in role-playing games, which had been present in Oblivion, is removed to allow the player's play-style to develop naturally. Perks are skill-specific abilities, organized in a system of branching groups called "skill trees." The player can choose from one of 280 perks each time their character is leveled until the player character has leveled fifty times. Leveling is possible past level fifty, but the rate at which the player levels is significantly reduced. The on-screen heads-up display only appears when the player's health, stamina, or magicka are being depleted. Items and equipment layouts can be saved to a quick-access menu, and the pause-screen inventory menu is presented in a compass-style overlay; while in the inventory, the player can rotate and zoom in on acquired items.
Weapons can be created by the player at a forge, and are assigned to each hand individually, allowing for dual-wielding. At the cost of stamina, the player can sprint and jump. Shields can be used with a bashing attack, and timing is required for blocking with a shield. Blunt, bladed, hacking and stabbing weapons each have specific advantages and roles; as an example, the player is granted the ability to perform finishing moves. There are over eighty-five spell types, which can be used in ranged and close combat forms. Spell types have specific qualities; a frost spell slows and drains stamina, while a fire spell causes prolonged damage through burning, and may also ignite the environment. Players can equip one spell per hand and will be able to charge up spells before casting for greater power. When practicing archery, arrows take longer to draw back than in previous Elder Scrolls games, but do greater damage. Because of this, arrows are expensive and considered rarities. A player equipped with a bow can use it defensively in close combat, in a charging counterattack. The player can sneak, and non-player characters (NPCs) become alerted if the player's movements are detected.
Skyrim makes use of the Radiant AI artificial intelligence system created for Oblivion, which has been updated to allow NPCs to "do what they want under extra parameters". The updated system allows for greater interaction between NPCs and their environments; NPCs can perform tasks such as farming, milling and mining in the game world. NPCs can interact with the player character through conversation, and can request favors and training for the player, or challenge the player character to a duel. Events such as dueling are randomly-generated encounters, taking influence from Bethesda's previous game Fallout 3. Skyrim introduces the Radiant Story system, which governs quests and how they function. Side-quests are dynamically altered based on the player's actions, and are tailored to the player's abilities and progress within the game. As an example, the player might be sent off to a dungeon that has not been previously explored, and face enemies that are defeated most effectively with the player's preferred combat style.

TL;DR

The Elder Scrolls is a fun game series.

[Bisjac]

i be waiting

[uno_da_cat]

Can't Wait :D

[Unwritten Calender]

Is this going to be on Xbox, because I definitely can't run this on my computer :o

[FrozenEye]

Is this going to be on Xbox, because I definitely can't run this on my computer :o

xbox, ps3, and pc.

[Unwritten Calender]

xbox, ps3, and pc.

I AM GETTING THIS

[FrozenEye]

I AM GETTING THIS

I have it preordered. <3

[Jacob/Lee]

I am going to get Skyrim, I swear.

Now, to wait for some dumbass to try to steal boxes full of the game a couple of days before the release, again.

[FrozenEye]

I am going to get Skyrim, I swear.

Now, to wait for some dumbass to try to steal boxes full of the game a couple of days before the release, again.

Didnt know people did that.

[Jacob/Lee]

Didnt know people did that.

Some guy (maybe 2, I don't remember) stole several boxes of Black Ops from a game store via armed robbery. They were promptly gunned down by the police I believe.

[FrozenEye]

Some guy (maybe 2, I don't remember) stole several boxes of Black Ops from a game store via armed robbery. They were promptly gunned down by the police I believe.

Thats quite funny. Psychopath nerds ftw.

[Jubel]

I'm buying it for my dad.

Even though I don't like Medieval style games, I have to admit it looks loving lovey.

[FrozenEye]

I'm buying it for my dad.

Even though I don't like Medieval style games, I have to admit it looks loving lovey.

Why cant your dad buy it for himself.

[fred da kiko]

Why cant your dad buy it for himself.

because he wants to give it as a gift, derp.