The Elder Scrolls
The Elder Scrolls is a series of action role-playing video games primarily developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. The series focuses on free-form gameplay in an open world. Most games in the series have been critically and commercially successful, with The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim all winning Game of the Year awards from multiple outlets. The series has sold more than 59 million copies worldwide.
Within the series' fictional universe, each game takes place on the continent of Tamriel. The setting combines pre-medieval real-world elements, such as a powerful Roman-like Empire, with high fantasy medieval themes, including limited technology, widespread magic use, and the existence of many mythological creatures. The continent is split into a number of provinces inhabited by humans and humanoid fantasy races such as elves, orcs and anthropomorphic animals. A common theme in the lore is that a chosen hero rises to defeat an impending threat, typically a malevolent being or an antagonistic army.
Since debuting with The Elder Scrolls: Arena in 1994, the series has produced a total of five main games as well as several spin-offs. In 2014, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, The Elder Scrolls Online, was released by Bethesda's affiliated ZeniMax subsidiary ZeniMax Online Studios.
Development history
Before ''The Elder Scrolls''
Prior to working on The Elder Scrolls series, Bethesda had worked predominantly with sports and action games. In the six years from its founding to Arena 1994 release, Bethesda had released ten games, six of them sports games, with titles such as Hockey League Simulator, NCAA Basketball: Road to the Final Four , and Wayne Gretzky Hockey, and the remaining four adaptations from other media, primarily the Terminator series. Bethesda's course changed abruptly when it began working on its first action role-playing game. Designer Ted Peterson recalls: "I remember talking to the guys at Sir-Tech who were doing Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant at the time, and them literally laughing at us for thinking we could do it." Ted Peterson worked alongside Vijay Lakshman as one of the initial designers of what became known as Arena, a "medieval-style gladiator game".''Arena''
Peterson and Lakshman were joined by Julian LeFay who, according to Peterson, "really spear-headed the initial development of the series". Peterson, Lakshman, and LeFay were longtime aficionados of pen-and-paper role-playing games, which greatly influenced the creation of the world of Tamriel. They were also fans of Looking Glass Studios' Ultima Underworld series, their main inspiration for Arena. Initially, Arena was not to be a role-playing game at all. The player, and a team of their fighters, would travel the world, fighting other teams in their arenas until the player became "grand champion" in the world's capital, the Imperial City. Along the way, side quests of a more role-playing nature could be completed. As the process of development progressed, however, the tournaments became less important and the side quests more. Role-playing game elements were added, as it expanded to include cities outside the arenas, and dungeons beyond the cities. Eventually it was decided to drop the idea of tournaments altogether, and focus on quests and dungeons, making the game a "full-blown ". Although the team had dropped all arena combat from the game, all the material had already been printed up with the title, so the game went to market as The Elder Scrolls: Arena. Lakshman, who then worked at Christopher Weaver's Bethesda Softworks, came up with the name of The Elder Scrolls and the words eventually came to mean "Tamriel's mystical tomes of knowledge that told of its past, present, and future". The game's initial voice-over was changed in response, beginning: "It has been foretold in the Elder Scrolls ..."Bethesda missed their Christmas 1993 deadline for releasing Arena, and the game was released in the first quarter of 1994 instead, a "really serious for a small developer/publisher like Bethesda Softworks". The packaging included a scantily clad female warrior, which further contributed to distributor concern, leading to an initial distribution of only 20,000 units. Having missed the Christmas sales season, the development team was concerned that they "had screwed the company". Nevertheless, sales continued to grow, month after month, as news of the game was passed by word-of-mouth. Despite some initial software bugs, and the formidable demands the game made on players' machines, it became a cult hit. Evaluations of the game's success varied from "modest" to "wild". Still, the game maintained traction with its audience. Game historian Matt Barton concluded that "the game set a new standard for this type of role-playing video game, and demonstrated just how much room was left for innovation".
''Daggerfall''
Work on The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall began after Arena release in March 1994. Ted Peterson was assigned the role of lead game designer. He endeavoured to make Daggerfall plot less "clichéd" than Arena and involve a "complex series of adventures leading to multiple resolutions". With Daggerfall, Arena experience-point-based system was replaced with one rewarding the player for conducting role-playing activities with their character. Daggerfall came equipped with an improved character generation engine, one that included a GURPS-influenced class creation system, offering players the chance to create their own classes, and assign their own skills. Daggerfall was developed with an XnGine engine, one of the first truly 3D engines. Daggerfall realized a game world the size of Great Britain, filled with 15,000 towns and a population of 750,000. It was influenced by analog games and literature that Julian LeFay or Ted Peterson happened to be playing or reading at the time, such as Dumas's The Man in the Iron Mask and Vampire: The Masquerade. It was released in September 1996. Like Arena, Daggerfall initial release suffered from some bugs, leaving consumers disgruntled. These early anomalies were fixed in later versions. This experience led to a more prudent release schedule for future games.''Battlespire'' and ''Redguard''
Following the release of Daggerfall, work began on three separate projects at once: An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire, The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Battlespire, originally titled Dungeon of Daggerfall: Battlespire, was the first of the three to be released, on November 30, 1997. Originally designed as an expansion pack for Daggerfall, it was eventually rebranded as a standalone game. Battlespire focused on dungeon romping and offered multiplayer gaming in the form of a player versus player deathmatch mode, the only series title to do so prior to the release of The Elder Scrolls Online in 2014. Redguard was the second of the three titles to be released, on October 31, 1998. It was an action-adventure game inspired by Tomb Raider, Prince of Persia, and the Ultima series. Redguard did not offer the player the chance to create their own character. Instead, players would play the prefabricated "Cyrus the Redguard". Both games did poorly with Bethesda's target audience. Players used to the vast open spaces of Daggerfall did not take well to the reduced worlds of Redguard and Battlespire. Based upon its customers' clear desire for massive role-playing game worlds, Bethesda redoubled its efforts to build the next major chapter.''Morrowind''
The third title in The Elder Scrolls series was conceived during the development of Daggerfall. Initially designed to encompass the whole province of Morrowind and allow the player to join all five Dunmer Great Houses, it was decided that the scope of the game was too much for the technology available at the time. At publication, it covered the province's central isle of Vvardenfell and allowed the player to join three of the Great Houses. The XnGine was scrapped and replaced with Numerical Design Limited's Gamebryo, a Direct3D-powered engine with transform, clipping, and lighting capacity, 32-bit textures and skeletal animation. It was decided that the game world would be populated using the methods the team had developed in Redguard; with the game objects crafted by hand, rather than generated using random algorithmic methods.The project took "close to 100-man-years to create". Bethesda tripled their staff and spent the first year developing The Elder Scrolls Construction Set. This allowed the game staff to easily balance the game and to modify it in small increments rather than large. Ted Peterson, who had left following the release of Daggerfall, returned to work as an author of in-game material, and as a general consultant on the lore-based aspects of the work. The PC version of Morrowind had gone gold by April 23, 2002, and was released on May 1 in North America, with the Xbox release set at June 7. On January 3, Bethesda announced that game publisher Ubisoft would take control of Morrowind European distribution, in addition to those of eight other Bethesda games.
The expansion pack The Elder Scrolls III: Tribunal went gold on November 1 and was released, with little fanfare, on November 6. Tribunal puts the player in the self-contained, walled city of Mournhold, which can be teleported to from Morrowind's land mass. Development on the expansion began after Morrowind shipped, giving the developers a mere five-month development cycle to release the game. The prior existence of the Construction Set, however, meant that the team "already had the tools in place to add content and features very quickly". Interface improvements, and specifically an overhaul of Morrowind journal system, were among the key goals. Morrowind second expansion, The Elder Scrolls III: Bloodmoon, went gold by May 23, and was released on June 6. It had been worked on since the release of Tribunal. In the expansion, the player travels to the frozen island of Solstheim and is asked to investigate the uneasiness of the soldiers stationed there.