The Elder Scrolls v. Chim is for bitches, Amaranth is the real deal - Games

The Elder Scrolls OP IN PROGRESS The Elder Scrolls is a series of video games, most of which RPGs, known for its memorable and esoteric lore, colorful characters, and active mod community. Mainline Games The Mainline games in the franchise are called after the region in which they take place, or an important locale directly related to that region. Each game is a significant departure from the previous one in terms of design, engine, setting and even tone, although the more modern and current format of TES, the one which people now associate the most with the franchise, started at the third installment. TES: Arena RELEASE: 1994 REGION: Tamriel ARENA was never meant to be an open world RPG at first. A game set in a titular arena, the title went through some severe design alterations during development to the point of completely changing its goal as a game. In its final iteration, Arena became an open world game mostly centered around side quests, with a randomly generated worldscape and dungeons. It set the basis for the lore although most of it has since been changed rather substantially. The main events of the game are still referred to in all of the following games as the Imperial Simulacrum. It is technically the game with the largest worldspace of the entire series, but most of it is randomly generated flatlands with very little detail. Generally speaking, Arena tends to be forgotten as it was quickly outclassed by its successor. TES II: Daggerfall RELEASE: 1996 REGION: The Iliac Bay DAGGERFALL is a natural improvement over Arena with very little changed on a substantial level. It is better in almost every way but is, fundamentally, the same experience, just with better polish and no randomly generated world - the dungeons however are still randomized, and are notoriously massive and hard, if not impossible, to complete. It is entirely possible to get lost in a dungeon and spend an absurd amount of time into it. Daggerfall has a dedicated cult following but is a far cry from what modern TES appears to be on many levels. It is however still an odd and interesting game which exists as a stepping stone to what the series would eventually become in terms of design philosophy and world building. TES III: Morrowind RELEASE: 2002 REGION: Vvanderfell After the release of a few spinoffs and a significantly longer development cycle, Morrowind came out in 2002 and quickly became a cult classic. The first mainline game in the series to receive the artistic touch of Michael Kirkbride, Morrowind is an unmistakably unique game with a particularly distinctive tone and artstyle to it. Praised for its alien and deeply unconventional setting, it is the first game in the series to hinge so heavily on the concept of the lost player: you are dumped into this unknown, deeply hostile world and it is up to you to discover it and familiarize yourself with it, getting the locals to either appreciate or despise you. It also helped cement the plot format which the rest of the mainline series would end up using and introduced significant lore elements which remain relevant to this day. It is still considered to be the best entry in the franchise by many. It was also the first game to garner a significant mod community, thanks to the introduction of a mod development kit. Morrowind is still modded to this day, and a Total Conversion mod aiming to recreate the entire title in the newest release title in the franchise is in development. Morrowind received two expansions, Tribunal and Bloodmoon. The former is set in Morrowind's capital of Mournhold and acts as an epilogue to the events of Morrowind's Main Quest. Bloodmoon brings the player to the island of Solstheim, which would be revisited nine years later in a different game, and notably reintroduced the ability to contract lycanthropy and subsequently turning into a werewolf every night. TES IV: Oblivion RELEASE: 2006 REGION: Cyrodiil Oblivion was the first game in the franchise to be released on the seventh generation of consoles, and also the first game from Bethesda to be developed with consoles in mind in terms of UI. While the decision lead to some notable backlash from the PC community as a result of the noticeably simpler and clunky UI, the game was overall very well received and is still considered a classic to this day. TES IV is a game which possesses many unique quirks which originate from its status in the series as somewhat of a stepping stone between the more hardcore aspects of Morrowind and what would become the streamlined direction of Skyrim. While it retains some of the more traditional aspects of the series such as Attributes, Classes and Skills, it also took several steps to give less harsh consequence to the player's actions (such as being able to join several rival factions at once) and introduced some systems which were as experimental as they were clunky, such as level scaling (where the level of the enemies as well as the loot found in dungeons would scale with the player rather than be fixed) and radiant AI, a system which was noticeably bugged to the point of being cut in its majority from the game as a result of severe mishaps. It was also the fist game to include full face customization for the player character's face, although the results were even for the time rather comical. Nowadays, Oblivion still holds a reputation of being a very quirky, but ultimately charming game with some of the best side content the series has ever had, while being simultaneously criticized for its monotone dungeons and relatively boring landscape. Oblivion's post-release content simultaneously has a reputation for quality and controversy. Notably, it was one of the first games to harbor DLC with a series of minor content packs which could individually be purchased via Xbox Live and similar services. While most of them were player houses, one particular piece of DLC simply added armor for your mount. "Horse Armor" became a punchline in of itself and a running joke both inside and outside of the TES community, to the point of Bethesda directly referencing it when introducing the Creation Club ten years later. All of those small pieces of DLC were eventually packaged into one expansion called Knights of The Nine, named after the largest piece of content within the pack. Besides those small bits of content, TES IV also received a major expansion called Shivering Isles which received critical acclaim and is still praised today for its content, notably the introduction of Sheogorath's modern depiction and Wes Johnson as his designated voice actor. The modding community for Oblivion has notably given birth to the German Total Conversion Nehrim: At Fate's Edge, besides other significant additions to the base game. TES V: Skyrim RELEASE: 2011 REGION: Skyrim Skyrim is the point where the franchise reached true mainstream popularity. Before Fallout 4, it was Bethesda's highest selling title of all time and is now rather infamous for the sheer amount of re-releases, having come out on two separate generations of consoles and received VR versions. Before this however, the game was already divisive for drastically simplifying some of the RPG elements, notably getting rid of several skills and the complete removal of attributes as well as classes: instead, the player can infinitely level up and will receive experience from increasing the level of any skill, rather than the ones chosen during class selection. The story and side content also received negative attention for being of generally poorer quality than Oblivion or Morrowind, and the dungeon design was criticized for its simplicity, while some features were noted as missing (such as spellmaking). While Oblivion had already introduced level scaling, Skyrim drastically increased its relevancy and notably introduced Radiant Quests, which replaced a good chunk of previously handwritten side content with generic, simple tasks which could be repeated infinitely. Skyrim was the first game in the series to introduce dual wielding. It also introduced a shout gimmick wherein the player could learn words of power and unlock them with the souls of dragons they would slay, earning them powerful spells with no hard level requirement. TES V received three pieces of post-release content. Large portions of this content was made by the development team during mod jam sessions which served as the basis for all three expansions. The first expansion, Dawnguard, introduced the titular group and a rival faction of vampires, leaving to the player the choice of which to join. It also added crossbows and sought to improve some vanilla features such as vampirism and lycanthropy by giving them dedicated skill trees. The second expansion, Hearthfire, is the smallest one and gives the player the ability to adopt children and purchase three plots of lands for holds which do not sell existing houses, on which the player may build a house to their liking. It was a compilation of smaller additions with relatively little significant content to speak of. The third expansion, Dragonborn, adds an extra step to the Main Quest wherein the player returns to the island of Solstheim for the second time since Morrowind and discovers it covered in ash following the explosion of Red Mountain. Besides being a good throwback to the aesthetics and tone of TES III, Dragonborn also introduced improvements to dungeon design and is generally regarded as a better written and designed story than the vanilla main quest. The game was re-released in 2016 as Skyrim: Special Edition on the eighth generation of consoles, with a PC version given for free to owners of the game with all DLC on steam. It also received a dedicated Nintendo Switch version with extra exclusive content and VR ports for PS4 and PC. The modding community for Skyrim is still active. Oblivion's TC Nehrim got a sequel named Enderal, and several large community-made expansions have come out and are in development, such as the Beyond Skyrim series, which so far has released one full episode set in Bruma and aims to release several others, notably set in post-red year Morrowind and Atmora. A full, authentic remake of Morrowind, called Skywind, is currently in development, and a similar remake of Oblivion is also being worked on. TES VI RELEASE: TBA REGION: TBA Nothing significant is known about The Elder Scrolls VI. It was teased at E3 2018 but no details were mentioned or shown at that time. SPIN-OFFS (in progress) The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard RELEASE: 1998 REGION: Stros M'Kai After Daggerfall, Bethesda set out to work on several spin-off games for the series while Morrowind was in early stages of production. Redguard was an attempt to start a side series of games set in the TES universe without complying to the usual chronology of the mainline games and without sticking to the typical RPG aspects of the franchise, even going as far as to cut away the blank slate player-character in favor of a voiced protagonist. While Redguard failed to captivate at release and nowadays is more of an oddity in the series, it introduced some lore elements which have stuck to this day, such as the modern look of Khajiit. The existence of Cyrus is even referred to in Oblivion and his voice actor kept voicing redguards in TES III and IV. As a fun anecdote, the buggy appearance of the seascape as the player approaches the world boundaries became canon as a natural occurrence within the world of The Elder Scrolls. It was also the first game to see Michael Kirkbride involved in its story and worldbuilding. The Elder Scrolls: Blades RELEASE: 2018 REGION: Unknown TES: Blades is a game set to come out on mobile and PC about a dishonored member of the Blades who returns to his hometown and tasks himself with rebuilding it. Not much is known about the game other than the base premise and that it will be free to play.

OP forgot Battlespire. Lore RUINED

I've never played Arena (it came out when I was 3), but I've always loved how it started as a game where you have to fight in an arena but by the time it was done and released the game didn't even have and arena. They couldn't have flipped the game's scope harder.

I predict Elder Scrolls: Blades is gonna be great!

What about Quake starting as a sprite-based MMORPG set in a Norse-esque fantasy world and ending up becoming Lovecraft Doom in 3D?

Emil Pagliarulo's moved to design director now, this combined with ES 6's early state may mean ES 6/FO5 may have good writing, with Starfield possibly being the last Bethesda game with Emil's writing, Equally exciting news, Fallout 76 is the first Bethesda game with more complex RPG mechanics from the previous one, which ES 6 may also benefit from.

I forgot that playing Skyrim (SE in this case) with a controller plugged in aggressively hijacks the KB+M controls until you unplug it. Even when I disable the Controller in the options it decides apparently I didn't and doesn't cooperate anyway.

Change your .ini

Not just an MMORPG, a VR MMORPG.

Wasn't there a VR Wolfenstein 3D? John Carmack was always about that virtual reality even back in the day.

It was a 3rd party thing without much id involvement. Carmack hated it because the headset was connected via camcorder.

I'll say that the E3 Smash Presentation was long but I understand their idea: It was focused on appealing the competitive players. New fighter changes, new techniques, stage hazard being able to be turned off, all stages have Battlefield and Omega version. Not only that, they had the Invitational on that same day with top smash players. The next Smash Direct is definitely going to be focused for the casual side of players, especially single player mode. All-Star Mode, Adventure Mode, Classic Mode, Training Mode, Event Match, Special Smash, Trophies, a new "party mode" somewhat like they tried to do with Smash Tour (burn it with fire) and Smash Run (pretty fun actually).

I was surprised too when I saw it, I thought when I heard Todd mention Mobile "ugh not this shit again". But like endless dungeons? PVP? Sounds awesome. Now we just have to see how they balance the pvp model

To be honest, I'm not expecting it to be deep as an actual Elder Scroll, but exploring caves and ruins was really fun for me in Skyrim, and it if's just that on Blades with some customization to your town/house, I'm sold.

https://youtu.be/0XsprHWaS90 Who's exited by blades?

I have yet to see a game that did procedural generation right so that's where Blades lost me.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/958586341175160486/EDC3C9FC73299A8CD3E211694C78B2FE3E5EC93F/ Oh hi, Mr guard!

Make sure you plant your guards at least half a meter deep to insure that he gets plenty of sunlight and room to sprout

Sorry, can someone explain what the fuck the Creation Club is? I heard a whole hubbub about paid mods or something a while back for Fallout 4, but I recently reinstalled Skyrim (now a special edition or something), and all of my mods in the steam workshop still exist and are subscribed to, but I can't find any ingame? It's all through the Creation club, so I have to redownload all the mods again? Why does the Steam Workshop for Skyrim still exist?

Creation club is commissioned DLC from community modders. Not very big DLC, typically skins, small workshop packs, a weapon or armor. However it uses an obfuscated currency much like XBox Live used to use, and that's inherently consumer unfriendly. CC points used to purchase CC DLC come in packs that are deliberately designed to where you'll never have zero CC points, and will try to trigger in your mind that any CC points still left is wasted if you don't buy more CC points to then buy more CC content to try to reduce your balance to zero.

It should be clarified that Skyrim's Steam Workshop only exists for the original version of Skyrim, and the Creation Club (and Bethesda.net, basically Bethesda's version of the workshop) only exists for Skyrim Special Edition. There's a lot of mods that only exist for one version, and while you can port at least some mods to the other version, it can be more difficult if you don't really know what you're doing.

Is the special edition on pc really worth playing over the original?

Can’t get shot in the knee if you can’t see his knees.

If you don't have either of them then go with the special edition. It's even on sale right now for the same price as the original but it comes with all the DLC. The only reasons for not getting the special edition are if you already have the original and don't care about any of the DLC, or if there's a specific mod you like for the original that hasn't been converted over to the special edition yet. In my experience the special edition looks a lot nicer by default (obviously mods can fix the original) and runs a lot smoother.

If the mods you want to use are on SSE it's better, but if they aren't it might be more worth your time to play the older version. If you're just comparing base game to base game SSE is better because it crashes less and AFAIK is generally more stable, plus 64-bit is always good.

I'm really torn, because I had a mod on the workshop that made you fart if you eat beans, and I can't find it on the Nexus.

Did you lose Charisma too?

I honestly think it may have, it was the Baked Beans mod, not updated for Special Edition sadly. It actually punished you for the Elder-Scrolls-special of opening your Food Menu and eating 9 wheels of cheese, 12 apples and 4 legs of lamb in one go, because you'd be farting for hours on end. A lot of different fart sounds too. They also alerted enemies so you had to be careful not to eat beans before raiding a dungeon, just incase you farted and tipped off the Vampires and Draugr Lords to your presence. Hell, sometimes I forgotten I'd eaten beans and was just enjoying a nice walk to Whiterun before letting out a squeaky fart.

what the fuck

IMMERSION