I essentially consider Arena and Daggerfall to be a separate series from modern Elder Scrolls

[Vorzak]

Yeah, if I have any complaints about the individual games (Oblivion and Arena especially,) it's not that they're "Different than the others", it's that they don't live up to their own goals.

Yes, I don't think any of the Elder Scrolls games fully lived up to their own goals or potential, and that is okay. For me, it didn't diminish my experience and enjoyment so much that I could no longer appreciate and accept each game for what they were and unable to continue playing them or confine myself to only the game that I might think does the 'best.'

[jayhova]

Morrowind issued in the new age - the construction set is what made Morrowind what it is, I'd wager more time was spent in the construction set than played overall.

Battlespire and Redguard were the precursors to what Morrowind became. Morrowind felt more like one massive dungeon adventure akin to the previous titles.
Funny enough, I'd say Oblivion was trying to capture the Daggerfall feel, and kind of does superficially in mechanics.

Morrowind fundamentally changed things by institutionalizing the new mindset that nothing that the team could not personally construct should be in the game. It should be noted that Daggerfall was the great experiment, Each subsequent game in the series was driven by criticisms of the game before.

• Arena
  Arena actually totally changed while in development. It went from a game where you traveled from city to city fighting in tournaments, to a high fantasy adventure.
• Daggerfall
  Daggerfall changed from Arena in that dungeons became fully 3D instead of Doom-like levels where you simply clicked the flat that took you to the next level. My guess is that one of the questions that came up in Arena was why can't I walk from one city to the other. My guess is that Julian said something like I could do that. Of course, it was clear he couldn't do all of Tamriel so Daggerfall
  Battlespire
  The challenge here was to create a multiplayer online version of Daggerfall. (Note: this was the only game I never bought in the store) This stopped Bethesda from doing multi-user games for a very long time. Battlespire was by necessity limited in scope because all players had to be in one place. The game did include some graphical improvements over Daggerfall
  Redguard
  Redguard dropped the use of sprites and went with full 3D models. The low amount of polygons made the models less than ideal. Redguard had a more guided story puzzle model as opposed to the previous outdoor open-world adventures. The game was essentially one big puzzle game with fights and other challenges. Because "The Chain" (an archipelago) was a very small location, Bethsoft could build it to a realistic 1:1 scale. This was the last game to feature this.
• Morrowind
  Morrowind was the last of the three projects that Bethsoft started when they completed Daggerfall. I was shelved because they did not feel they could overcome the challenges present in making it work. Even though Battlespire and Redguard were both financial failures they did teach valuable lessons: 1. Stick to the single-player, open-world, experience that players want in a TES game. 2. Create everything by hand to make every inch of the game world interesting. In addition, they sought to expand their market by making the game available for consoles. This meant removing all elements that required the use of a keyboard and mouse.
• Oblivion
  Oblivion was my least favorite game of the series. it was clear from the previous game that consoles would be a bigger part of the market. Bethsoft did their best to capitalize on this by further minimizing complexity in the game. Oblivion creates an opening sequence much like Half-life where things are predestined to happen and your actions have no effect on things. Much of the budget was for voice acting. The voice acting created a problem. You had to drastically limit the choices the player could make when talking to the NPCs since the responses were limited. Oblivion began eliminating the difficult portions of quests by basically handholding you through them
• Skyrim
  Skyrim became fun for me again because it gave up all the notions of being anything other than a pure video game. Quests are basically, do this thing, kill everything that gets in your way, at the end you'll get a new badass power. All your choices are meaningless because your choices don't affect anything really. All of the most important aspects of the game are determined by powers every character gets. The best parts of the game are the beautiful locations and eye candy.

[jayhova]

A couple of things of note: every TES game has featured separate locations. Only in the first game were you required to fast travel. In the second game it became technically possible to travel between cities without fast travel. In all other games since it has become practical to walk to another city. The first three major games required the player to use clues and really examine the game to understand how to solve the puzzles. After Morrowind, this was considered a limiting factor on marketability. Before Skyrim, quests were challenging. Now the only way to fail a quest is to die.

The TES games are not so much completely different from one another as a series of changes. Largely features that don't increase marketability are removed in favor of ones that do.

I was really disappointed that passwall was removed in Daggerfall due to the nature of dungeon construction. I would be super stoaked if someone figured out how to put it back.

[Falci]

As someone closing in on his 40th birthday (in a couple of years, mind you XD ) I understand the frustration of having something that cattered to my tastes, even sometimes, helped form them in the first place, be remade/repurposed or followed up with something less appealing to me or even outright against my tastes.

That said, we're at an age we all have access to thousands of games in an instant. Pages and pages of information on our games right next to us in a google search. Couple that with a lot of stuff professional and personal going on in my life and probably a lot of other people as well, and I definitely understand the appeal of overstreamlining stuff.

Personally, I know complex decisions in RPGs mean a lot of alt+tabing and reading webpages about how to make the choices for the outcomes I want. And if it is TOO complicated, I may end up phasing out of the game completely, because there's so much else to play.

Doom 2016 was right up my alley, specially being a fan of the original series and all. Doom Eternal became so difficult that I phased out of the game for a long while when I started playing. And I only got really into it and finished it after figuring out that I could farm extra lives from earlier levels to ease my play. But, then, this is me having to perform a boring repetitive task multiple times so that I can enjoy the rest of the game and finish it. And I'm not even taking into account how much playing through a single level stressed me beyond belief (again, there's so much stuff going on in my personal and professional lives that more is stress is not something that excites me in a video game).

[Werewolf]

Morrowind issued in the new age - the construction set is what made Morrowind what it is, I'd wager more time was spent in the construction set than played overall.

Battlespire and Redguard were the precursors to what Morrowind became. Morrowind felt more like one massive dungeon adventure akin to the previous titles.
Funny enough, I'd say Oblivion was trying to capture the Daggerfall feel, and kind of does superficially in mechanics.

Morrowind fundamentally changed things by institutionalizing the new mindset that nothing that the team could not personally construct should be in the game. It should be noted that Daggerfall was the great experiment, Each subsequent game in the series was driven by criticisms of the game before.

• Arena
  Arena actually totally changed while in development. It went from a game where you traveled from city to city fighting in tournaments, to a high fantasy adventure.
• Daggerfall
  Daggerfall changed from Arena in that dungeons became fully 3D instead of Doom-like levels where you simply clicked the flat that took you to the next level. My guess is that one of the questions that came up in Arena was why can't I walk from one city to the other. My guess is that Julian said something like I could do that. Of course, it was clear he couldn't do all of Tamriel so Daggerfall
  Battlespire
  The challenge here was to create a multiplayer online version of Daggerfall. (Note: this was the only game I never bought in the store) This stopped Bethesda from doing multi-user games for a very long time. Battlespire was by necessity limited in scope because all players had to be in one place. The game did include some graphical improvements over Daggerfall
  Redguard
  Redguard dropped the use of sprites and went with full 3D models. The low amount of polygons made the models less than ideal. Redguard had a more guided story puzzle model as opposed to the previous outdoor open-world adventures. The game was essentially one big puzzle game with fights and other challenges. Because "The Chain" (an archipelago) was a very small location, Bethsoft could build it to a realistic 1:1 scale. This was the last game to feature this.
• Morrowind
  Morrowind was the last of the three projects that Bethsoft started when they completed Daggerfall. I was shelved because they did not feel they could overcome the challenges present in making it work. Even though Battlespire and Redguard were both financial failures they did teach valuable lessons: 1. Stick to the single-player, open-world, experience that players want in a TES game. 2. Create everything by hand to make every inch of the game world interesting. In addition, they sought to expand their market by making the game available for consoles. This meant removing all elements that required the use of a keyboard and mouse.
• Oblivion
  Oblivion was my least favorite game of the series. it was clear from the previous game that consoles would be a bigger part of the market. Bethsoft did their best to capitalize on this by further minimizing complexity in the game. Oblivion creates an opening sequence much like Half-life where things are predestined to happen and your actions have no effect on things. Much of the budget was for voice acting. The voice acting created a problem. You had to drastically limit the choices the player could make when talking to the NPCs since the responses were limited. Oblivion began eliminating the difficult portions of quests by basically handholding you through them
• Skyrim
  Skyrim became fun for me again because it gave up all the notions of being anything other than a pure video game. Quests are basically, do this thing, kill everything that gets in your way, at the end you'll get a new badass power. All your choices are meaningless because your choices don't affect anything really. All of the most important aspects of the game are determined by powers every character gets. The best parts of the game are the beautiful locations and eye candy.

One thing I can appreciate about Skyrim is that it seemed to acknowledge that by then the series was hardly an authentic RPG and instead of being bogged down by clunky attempts at pretending to still be an RPG that bogged down Morrowind and Oblivion it went all-out in becoming a full-blown fantasy action-adventure game with levels and skill trees to add multiple play styles. Maybe that’s why there are numerous Daggerfall fans that also love Skyrim despite both games being almost the opposite of each other. Skyrim went full-blown action game with constant non-stop action where your character is the chosen one that can use every weapon and learn every spell, etc. it’s almost like it wasn’t afraid to stop pretending to be a complex RPG like Morrowind pretended to be and instead became an all-out console action game. Morrowind was far more dumbed down compared to Daggerfall whereas Skyrim was largely Morrowind if Morrowind didn’t pretend to be some massive intellectual game like it did.

At this point I’d almost welcome Elder Scrolls 6 to be Skyrim 2.0 rather then the Morrowind-like fake sophistication it may end up adopting if Starfield is any indication. I’d prefer Daggerfall 2.0 the most by far but that definitely will never happen with current Bethesda. But if Elder Scrolls 6 ends up being like Morrowind where it’s not big or deep but does a good job at looking like it is to people who haven’t experienced the scope of Daggerfall, it’d be worth it just to laugh. People are already poking fun at Starfield in how the engine is hideously outdated and it has nowhere near as many planets as No Man’s Sky despite that game being older and initially made by a much smaller team

[jayhova]

One thing I can appreciate about Skyrim is that it seemed to acknowledge that by then the series was hardly an authentic RPG and instead of being bogged down by clunky attempts at pretending to still be an RPG that bogged down Morrowind and Oblivion it went all-out in becoming a full-blown fantasy action-adventure game with levels and skill trees to add multiple play styles. Maybe that’s why there are numerous Daggerfall fans that also love Skyrim despite both games being almost the opposite of each other. Skyrim went full-blown action game with constant non-stop action where your character is the chosen one that can use every weapon and learn every spell, etc. it’s almost like it wasn’t afraid to stop pretending to be a complex RPG like Morrowind pretended to be and instead became an all-out console action game. Morrowind was far more dumbed down compared to Daggerfall whereas Skyrim was largely Morrowind if Morrowind didn’t pretend to be some massive intellectual game like it did.

At this point I’d almost welcome Elder Scrolls 6 to be Skyrim 2.0 rather then the Morrowind-like fake sophistication it may end up adopting if Starfield is any indication. I’d prefer Daggerfall 2.0 the most by far but that definitely will never happen with current Bethesda. But if Elder Scrolls 6 ends up being like Morrowind where it’s not big or deep but does a good job at looking like it is to people who haven’t experienced the scope of Daggerfall, it’d be worth it just to laugh. People are already poking fun at Starfield in how the engine is hideously outdated and it has nowhere near as many planets as No Man’s Sky despite that game being older and initially made by a much smaller team

While I found that Morrowind nerfed most of the openness of the prior game, I did like the fact that it still required real decisions from the player. In Daggerfall, it was not even possible to attack the nobles etc. In Morrowind killing a primary character made the path of the game impossible. I am not certain I like the "You are the Chosen One" narrative that Morrowind began. As the series went on the TES games became more about the story the developers chose and less about you.

In Skyrim, the missions were laid out, unfailable, and decisions you made were virtually meaningless. In the end, the only character that mattered was the bow-wielding assassin. The game was a straight-up shooter with pretty scenery. The goal was to find a hiding place and assassinate the monsters from as far away as possible. Magic was all but meaningless and all the characters got shouts that were far more useful in any case.

[Werewolf]

One thing I can appreciate about Skyrim is that it seemed to acknowledge that by then the series was hardly an authentic RPG and instead of being bogged down by clunky attempts at pretending to still be an RPG that bogged down Morrowind and Oblivion it went all-out in becoming a full-blown fantasy action-adventure game with levels and skill trees to add multiple play styles. Maybe that’s why there are numerous Daggerfall fans that also love Skyrim despite both games being almost the opposite of each other. Skyrim went full-blown action game with constant non-stop action where your character is the chosen one that can use every weapon and learn every spell, etc. it’s almost like it wasn’t afraid to stop pretending to be a complex RPG like Morrowind pretended to be and instead became an all-out console action game. Morrowind was far more dumbed down compared to Daggerfall whereas Skyrim was largely Morrowind if Morrowind didn’t pretend to be some massive intellectual game like it did.

At this point I’d almost welcome Elder Scrolls 6 to be Skyrim 2.0 rather then the Morrowind-like fake sophistication it may end up adopting if Starfield is any indication. I’d prefer Daggerfall 2.0 the most by far but that definitely will never happen with current Bethesda. But if Elder Scrolls 6 ends up being like Morrowind where it’s not big or deep but does a good job at looking like it is to people who haven’t experienced the scope of Daggerfall, it’d be worth it just to laugh. People are already poking fun at Starfield in how the engine is hideously outdated and it has nowhere near as many planets as No Man’s Sky despite that game being older and initially made by a much smaller team

While I found that Morrowind nerfed most of the openness of the prior game, I did like the fact that it still required real decisions from the player. In Daggerfall, it was not even possible to attack the nobles etc. In Morrowind killing a primary character made the path of the game impossible. I am not certain I like the "You are the Chosen One" narrative that Morrowind began. As the series went on the TES games became more about the story the developers chose and less about you.

In Skyrim, the missions were laid out, unfailable, and decisions you made were virtually meaningless. In the end, the only character that mattered was the bow-wielding assassin. The game was a straight-up shooter with pretty scenery. The goal was to find a hiding place and assassinate the monsters from as far away as possible. Magic was all but meaningless and all the characters got shouts that were far more useful in any case.

Not being able to kill nobles and shopkeepers in Daggerfall seemed because the devs just didn’t think to implement it. That would make a great mod though. And yeah Morrowind still had consequences for your actions but later entires dumbed that down.

[imsobadatnicknames]

I agree that Morrowind could in many ways be considered a reboot of the original series, but I don't really think it's switch to a smaller hand-crafted world necessarily represents a reduction in ambition as the original post implies, but more a redirection of ambition.

Personally, Daggerfall and Morrowind are tied as my two favorite games in the series, and it's precisely because, even though they have completely opposite game design philosophies, they both do a fantastic job of showcasing the strengths of their respective design philosophies.

Daggerfall stands out by the sheer force of its scope, even if in some places this scope falls completely flat due to techical limitations and/or lack of development time (such as the fact that its vast wilderness, despite being the biggest in the series, is completely barren, making vanilla DF the only game in the series where exploring the wilderness is entirely pointless). The more systemic elements of its design (such as randomly generated quests with time limits, the reputation interactions between different factions, the player's slow guild reputation lost if the don't do any quests, the passage of seasons, etc.) make the world feel remarkably alive for the time instead of static like later entries in the series, and the realistic scale makes it a great fantasy life sim.

On the other hand, while Morrowind has the scale of a theme park to the point that it really stretches suspension of disbelief, it uses its more focused design philosophy to do things that simply wouldn't be possible with Daggerfall's design philosopgy, my favorite being landmark-based navigation. The fact that NPCs could direct you to quest objectives by telling you to walk north until you hit landmark x, then head west until you hit road y, and follow the road until you get to landmark z made the world feel lived-in and immersive in a completely different way. That's why I have to politely disagree with the idea that Morrowind would have been more "epic" if it was 5 times the size and had fast-travel. To me that would feel like a watered-down world that succeeds at capturing neither Daggerfall's tremendous scope, nor Morrowind's tight, deliberate world design (which is exactly what Oblivion and Skyrim's maps feel like to me, tbh)

Another thing that the shift towards hand-crafted content allowed Morrowind to do in my opinion was to have the best variety in dungeon size and complexity in the entire series, which is something that, in my opinion, only Morrowind and Arena managed to succeed at. Morrowind and Arena both feature a good mix of small dungeons consisting only of a handful of rooms, medium dungeons to keep you occupied for a bit, and big sprawling underground complexes. Meanwhile Daggerfall's dungeons are either tiny chrypts or huge labyrinths with zero imbetween, Oblivion's dungeons all feel like they're in the medium range, and Skyrim's dungeons feel like they were designed by a focus group in order to make them the exact correct length for their demographic's attention span and to keep drip-feeding you enough loot to feel rewarding but not so much that you feel satisfied and decide to leave.

Ultimately, I don't think Daggerfall geting better makes Morrowind look any worse, because they both do things the other will never be able to do.

Also, to be quite honest I don't really spend as much time as I used to do lamenting what we could have had if TES had continued following Daggerfall's footsteps, because playing Dwarf Fortress' adventurer mode scratches that itch well enough for me (and it will scratch it even better when they flesh out the intrigue system, implement a proper magic system, and implement sea travel). I know it's not related to the Elder Scrolls Series, its presentation is completely different, and afaik the devs have never talked about taking any inspiration from TES, but in many respects Adventurer Mode in DF feels like the most simulationist elements of Daggerfall taken to their logical extreme. The fact that if you REALLY wanted to you could play out your entire life as a carpenter or a chessemaker or something. Being able to go to a monastery and look at walls engraved with a variety of scenes of the world's procedurally generated lore. The fact that your actions can permanently impact the world's politics and leave an impact in the lore, and not in a scripted "if player does this then do that" way but simply thought the way your action interact with the game's history simulation. To this day, hacking off a cyclops' arm only for him to grab his own severed arm and proceed to bludgeon me to death with it remains the most memorable moment I've experienced in any RPG.

[Werewolf]

I agree that Morrowind could in many ways be considered a reboot of the original series, but I don't really think it's switch to a smaller hand-crafted world necessarily represents a reduction in ambition as the original post implies, but more a redirection of ambition.

Personally, Daggerfall and Morrowind are tied as my two favorite games in the series, and it's precisely because, even though they have completely opposite game design philosophies, they both do a fantastic job of showcasing the strengths of their respective design philosophies.

Daggerfall stands out by the sheer force of its scope, even if in some places this scope falls completely flat due to techical limitations and/or lack of development time (such as the fact that its vast wilderness, despite being the biggest in the series, is completely barren, making vanilla DF the only game in the series where exploring the wilderness is entirely pointless). The more systemic elements of its design (such as randomly generated quests with time limits, the reputation interactions between different factions, the player's slow guild reputation lost if the don't do any quests, the passage of seasons, etc.) make the world feel remarkably alive for the time instead of static like later entries in the series, and the realistic scale makes it a great fantasy life sim.

On the other hand, while Morrowind has the scale of a theme park to the point that it really stretches suspension of disbelief, it uses its more focused design philosophy to do things that simply wouldn't be possible with Daggerfall's design philosopgy, my favorite being landmark-based navigation. The fact that NPCs could direct you to quest objectives by telling you to walk north until you hit landmark x, then head west until you hit road y, and follow the road until you get to landmark z made the world feel lived-in and immersive in a completely different way. That's why I have to politely disagree with the idea that Morrowind would have been more "epic" if it was 5 times the size and had fast-travel. To me that would feel like a watered-down world that succeeds at capturing neither Daggerfall's tremendous scope, nor Morrowind's tight, deliberate world design (which is exactly what Oblivion and Skyrim's maps feel like to me, tbh)

Another thing that the shift towards hand-crafted content allowed Morrowind to do in my opinion was to have the best variety in dungeon size and complexity in the entire series, which is something that, in my opinion, only Morrowind and Arena managed to succeed at. Morrowind and Arena both feature a good mix of small dungeons consisting only of a handful of rooms, medium dungeons to keep you occupied for a bit, and big sprawling underground complexes. Meanwhile Daggerfall's dungeons are either tiny chrypts or huge labyrinths with zero imbetween, Oblivion's dungeons all feel like they're in the medium range, and Skyrim's dungeons feel like they were designed by a focus group in order to make them the exact correct length for their demographic's attention span and to keep drip-feeding you enough loot to feel rewarding but not so much that you feel satisfied and decide to leave.

Ultimately, I don't think Daggerfall geting better makes Morrowind look any worse, because they both do things the other will never be able to do.

Also, to be quite honest I don't really spend as much time as I used to do lamenting what we could have had if TES had continued following Daggerfall's footsteps, because playing Dwarf Fortress' adventurer mode scratches that itch well enough for me (and it will scratch it even better when they flesh out the intrigue system, implement a proper magic system, and implement sea travel). I know it's not related to the Elder Scrolls Series, its presentation is completely different, and afaik the devs have never talked about taking any inspiration from TES, but in many respects Adventurer Mode in DF feels like the most simulationist elements of Daggerfall taken to their logical extreme. The fact that if you REALLY wanted to you could play out your entire life as a carpenter or a chessemaker or something. Being able to go to a monastery and look at walls engraved with a variety of scenes of the world's procedurally generated lore. The fact that your actions can permanently impact the world's politics and leave an impact in the lore, and not in a scripted "if player does this then do that" way but simply thought the way your action interact with the game's history simulation. To this day, hacking off a cyclops' arm only for him to grab his own severed arm and proceed to bludgeon me to death with it remains the most memorable moment I've experienced in any RPG.

I definitely agree that Morrowind still managed to be ambitious in a lot of ways and used the smaller map to it’s advantage by forcing you to pay attention to the environment and NPCs to find out where to go, which Daggerfall completely lacked. It’s unfortunate that future entires dumbed things down. Morrowind was good as a soft reboot but later entries became increasingly simplified.

[MrFlibble]

increasingly simplified.

At some point I thought that maybe I should play Oblivion, but then

Uhh... seriously?