We’ve become the Nerevarine and defeated Dagoth Ur. We’ve foiled Mehrunes Dagon and closed the Oblivion gates. We’ve destroyed Alduin and absorbed his soul. We’ve bought horse armor, stolen an Elder Scroll, and even once pickpocked a note from the butt of a fully-dressed assassin without him noticing.
In other words, we’ve done it all, and with a combined 2,500+ hours across the series, five PC Gamer editors have come together to say few things about the past and future of The Elder Scrolls series.
Below, we’ve shouted some of our strongest opinions about TES—and don’t worry, Dragonborn, we’ve left some room for you to Fus-Ro-Dah yourself. After each opinion, you can click a button to tell us if you agree or disagree with our scalding hot takes.
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The Elder Scrolls should be an RPG again
What gets Todd Howard out of bed every morning is the possibility of removing yet more numbers from Tamriel. Stats? Delete them. Skill points? Crush them. You want to play a distinct class, you sick freak? Absolutely not. Please hand yourself into the authorities.
But what this has done is turned the general experience of playing a Bethesda game into a uniform mush. Not in the sense that we’re all stealth archers now (though that is a problem), but in the sense that, play any of these games for long enough and you simply become a master of everything. A lack of limitations, a willingness to tell a player they can’t do something, that this or that skill is simply outside their remit, has made Bethesda’s games more accessible but also more boring. It’s time to go back to the old ways.
Joshua Wolens, News Writer
Skyrim’s main quest is better than most of its sidequests
There was an intense contrast between how fun Oblivion’s Thieves Guild, Dark Brotherhood, and Daedric Prince sidequests were and how boring its main questline was. Even the Fighter’s Guild had some twists. I think that experience must have traumatized a generation of players, because I can’t think of any other reason why people say the same thing about Skyrim.
In Skyrim, the Thieves Guild are a pack of losers and to get anywhere with their story you have to level them up by doing procedurally generated filler jobs. The Dark Brotherhood quests have little of the Hitman flair of Oblivion’s, and mostly just end with you killing targets the same way you’d murder a bandit. Rare highlights like A Night to Remember aside, Skyrim’s sidequests are nothing special.
But its main quest has you fighting dragons, climbing mountains, and travelling to the land of the dead. It’s full of spectacle and also Paarthurnax, one of the few memorable NPCs in the entire game. Best of all, it doesn’t demand you run a single Oblivion Gate.
Jody Macgregor, Weekend Editor
Oblivion’s spellmaking should’ve never gone away
Look, I know that Oblivion’s spellmaking feature—wherein you could create your own custom spells—completely broke the game. It was possible to make absolutely absurd combinations of abilities that’d render a sufficiently-talented mage effectively immortal. As such, I’m not entirely surprised such a feature wasn’t in Skyrim.
However: As Josh correctly identified above, TES has been less of an RPG with every installment anyway. And more to the point, I don’t think it’s ever been a particularly engaging RPG in recent years. This isn’t Diablo, it’s not Baldur’s Gate—the amount of min-maxing you can do usually involves picking what type of armor you’d like to wear and a weapon, and that’s pretty much it.
There’s no real grist or art to making a strong Elder Scrolls character anyway, so why not let us have fun breaking the game over our knee? More to the point, the idea of a wizard starting out as a little weenie, then achieving godlike power? That’s pure oldschool D&D, baby, and Oblivion’s spellmaking was delightfully flavourful for that exact reason.
Harvey Randall, Staff Writer
Morrowind is great, but they didn’t know how to do side quests yet
When you’re a Serious Critic who loves RPGs, you’re required by law to say that Morrowind is the best Elder Scrolls game—I might even agree still, grousing aside—but I feel like Oblivion and Skyrim do not get their proper due for the leaps they made in side quest design.
Morrowind’s final Thieves Guild mission is a straightforward assassination of some Nord guy. Oblivion’s is the stone cold classic, first round hall of famer, The Ultimate Heist, a multipart infiltration where you steal an Elder Scroll from the Imperial Palace. There are twists and funny moments in Morrowind’s side content, but nothing as shocking as A Night to Remember in Skyrim.
Morrowind’s atmosphere, worldbuilding, and main quest are still some of Bethesda’s finest, and I’m pretty reliably the person who prefers a crusty old RPG to the new hotness. But it always bugs me that people (mostly RPG Codex guys and YouTubers) are always in such a rush to not be seen liking the popular thing that they miss the nuances of what they’re criticizing.
Ted Litchfield, Associate Editor
I don’t think current-day Bethesda has another good Dark Brotherhood questline in ’em
The Dark Brotherhood questline from Oblivion is generally regarded as one of the best—and for good reason. Not only is the story pretty stellar, but “Whodunnit?” is a stand-out in that it’s a genuinely impressive spiderweb of potential outcomes. The Summitmist Manor is almost like a miniature immersive sim. Obviously not as complex, sure, but a delicious bite-sized playground in which to murder its guests.
But after Starfield? Man, I don’t know. No questline I played in that deeply beige game had any of that same Dark Brotherhood juice. And given what we’ve heard out of the studio—namely, tighter and tighter constraints on what its developers can do—I’m not sure that the magic’s there for a good Brotherhood questline anymore.
I’d like to be wrong, but in my mind? A Dark Brotherhood questline requires more weirdness, creativity, and gallows humour than modern-day Bethesda seems capable of.
Harvey Randall, Staff Writer
Bethesda should ditch handwritten stories and turn TES into first-person Dwarf Fortress
Bethesda’s writing took a dip in Oblivion and has been generally anodyne since Skyrim (the studio tried for something more interesting with Fallout 4—and I genuinely admire it for doing so—but it didn’t work out), with Starfield’s bland, sexless galaxy providing the absolute nadir of its narrative efforts so far. You might say the answer is to change how it approaches writing its games. I say no.
Bethesda has flirted with emergent, systems-driven gameplay since Oblivion, but it’s never truly committed. NPC schedules and relationship values are garnish on a stubbornly hand-crafted meal. It doesn’t have to be that way, though. Go all in, guys. Do what you’re best at, which is creating rich, wide worlds to explore, then fill it with mechanics and systems that drive the action rather than your half-baked plots. You know, like Mount & Blade. You guys should just make Mount & Blade.
Joshua Wolens, News Writer
I don’t care if I have to pass through a loading screen for interiors as long as I can still pick up garbage and wave it around
Cyberpunk 2077 may be one of my favorite RPGs ever, but do you remember its inventory screen? It feels so videogamey, so disconnected from the world you’re exploring. What about clutter in that world, its interactivity? All those drinks and snacks you can pick up are fairly static objects, no fun physics interactions, no soul.
The fact that you can just wander into somebody’s house in The Elder Scrolls and read the books on their shelves, drag their dinner off the table, rearrange their cutlery, it has such a profound pound-for-pound effect on the games’ immersion. Other games have managed a similar magic—Baldur’s Gate 3, Deus Ex, Prey—but nobody does it in an open world simulation like Bethesda can. These granular, interactive environments are truly something special.
So I say let TES6 get diced up into a billion discrete loading zones. That’s not the problem I had with Starfield, and if it’s somehow required for the interactive environments I’ve loved from this studio, it’s a price I’ll gladly pay.
Ted Litchfield, Associate Editor
It’s ridiculous there’s not an Elder Scrolls TV show on right now
I don’t get Bethesda sometimes. They have a massively popular Fallout TV series yet they don’t fast-track a new Fallout game (until they’re forced to by Microsoft), and they have a massively popular Elder Scrolls game series and don’t get a TES television show into production (as far as we know). All the ingredients to cross-polinate are there. Just, like… do it?
With so much source material, an Elder Scrolls TV show could go absolutely hog wild without ever treading on the lore or events of the game. The world is massive, the history spans thousands of years, there’s all sorts of avenues a TV series (animated, I assume) could explore.
I know there are pitfalls. I’m sure every TV executive would stare blankly at nerdy writers pitching a show about the devastating death toll and political consequences of the Thrassian Plague before saying “But we still have a guy in a horned helmet shouting at dragons, right?” The show would definitely feature a white, male, musclebound John Skyrim in the lead role instead of the dozen or so far more interesting options.
But, c’mon, Bethesda. You announced The Elder Scrolls 6: Subtitle Pending 35 years ago (it feels like), at least give us some TES to watch while we wait for more TES to play.
Christopher Livingston, Senior Editor