The Elder Scrollswas originally known as a unique fantasy series withincredible lore. Nowadays, the series is far moremainstream. Some say it’s lost its teeth, but maybe that’s just a matter ofopinion. After all, thetechnological stridesmade by the series are impressive, if slow. Skyrim’s engine is far morestablethan any of its predecessors, its world isbeautiful, and its gameplay ispretty solid. It’s important to see how far we’ve come. There have been sometruly awfulTES games, and someamazingones. It’s very much amixed bag.
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We tend to thinkstory is king. Therefore, this list is focused on the Elder Scrolls games with thebest,most impactfulstories, but we’ve also factored ingameplayandtechnical stability. With all that in mind, here are our rankings forevery Elder Scrolls game in existence.
11The Elder Scrolls: Blades
Announced at the Bethesda 2018 E3 Showcase alongside Fallout 76 was Blades, afree-to-play iOS game. It has a surprisinglynice art style(many assets are ripped straight out of Skyrim) and aninteresting premise. The player character is a member of the Blades who’s rebuilding a town as a safe keep, since the Blades have beenoutlawedby the Thalmor. And sadly, that’s just about it for this game’s positive qualities.
Blades is bloated withmicrotransactions, the most egregious of which asks forover $100. That might beforgivableif the gameplay were good, but it’s not. The gameplay isboring and repetitive. The modern mobile game scene has lots of competition, and Bladesjust doesn’t stand up.
10The Elder Scrolls Travels
In 1999, a small developer namedVir2L Studioswas acquired by Zenimax. Vir2L developed a number of Elder Scrollscell phone gamestitledThe Elder Scrolls Travels: Stormhold,Dawnstar,Shadowkey, andOblivion, the latter being a “demake” of TES IV. Despite them being lumped together on this list, the games arefairly different. Stormhold and Dawnstar are old-school dungeon crawlers.
Travels: Oblivion is a janky isometric RPG, and Shadowkey is a first-person game almost comparable to Daggerfall. It’s not exactly fair to hold these games up to amodern standard. They were all made a long time ago, using ridiculouslylimted hardware. They’re generally not worth playing today, althoughShadowkey(for the NokiaN-Gage)holds up best.
9The Elder Scrolls: Legends
Legends is a computer card game thatnever really caught on. It’s ranked low on this list because it’sabout as far as one can getfrom atraditional Elder Scrolls experience. Despite that, it’snot a bad card game.
Legends feels inspired by Hearthstone and MTG. The matches arefast-paced and exciting, with plenty of unique mechanics. Some card art is downrightbeautiful. However, it’s a card game through-and-through, and one has to questionwhether TES fans are interested.The Witcherhandled this well by mixingGwentinto the actual games, but many Elder Scrolls fans havenever played or even heard of Legends.
8The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard
Redguard is a muchsmallerand morelinearexperience than what Elder Scrolls fans are used to. It’s a third-person adventure game inspired by Tomb Raider. It’s also a difficult game to recommend. The gameplay isslow and awkward, the controls arerough, andgetting it to runon modern hardwarecan bepainful. The Steam version of the game isnotoriously broken.
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Even putting all that aside, what we have is ahackneyedgame. No one was asking for a mix of Tomb Raider and TES, which might explain why Redguard is theonly entry in the Adventures series. The story should still be interesting to fans — it’severything around the storythatsucks.
7The Elder Scrolls I: Arena
The Elder Scrolls has its roots in a very clunky CRPG called Arena. Originally conceived as a game aboutgladiatorial combat, the scope of the game ballooned more and more until it containedthe entire continent of Tamriel. These days, the game isn’t revisited all that often. The movement isawkward, the dungeons aredifficult to navigate(in classic RPG tradition), and the procedurally generated world can feelempty.
However, despite its shortcomings, Arena is aninteresting gamewith astaggering scopeanda world of possibilities. Sadly, to pile on top of its old-school jank, Arena suffers from memory management issues which can lead tofrequent crashing, and in the worst of cases,corrupted save data.
6The Elder Scrolls: Battlespire
Battlespire is unique among Elder Scrolls games in that it’s verylinear, similar to Adventures: Redguard. It came out when Bethesda werestruggling to nail down a releasefor TES III: Morrowind. They wanted a smaller game to tide fans over, inspired by the likes ofUltima: Underworld.
Battlespire is aproduct of its time, but that doesn’t change the fact that most modern players will find itboring. It cuts out nearly everything that makes Elder Scrolls great, leaving behindonly dungeon crawling. It’s not all bad, though. One interesting thing about Battlespire is itsdialogue. The player can stopmid-fightto chat withdifferent types of monsters, learning about them, seeking peaceful resolutions, or even finding new quests. The game isfully voice-actedand the dialogue trees are surprisingly deep.
5The Elder Scrolls Online
ESO is arelatively simpleMMORPG, with gameplay that mixes Skyrim’s first person combat style with the one-click strategic combat of MMO games. Thesheer amount of contentin the game is simplystaggering. For those who want to explore the continent of Tamriel in all its beauty, it’s not a bad option.
It’s not onlyexpansive, it’s alsoexpensive. On top of the base game, there areDLCs, there’s asubscription model, and there areloot boxes. There’s also apaid in-game currencythat must be used to unlock basic features such asplayer homesandthe crafting system. Combat and exploration are the focus of the game, and they are executed well. However, for fans of RPGs, ESO can feelshallow. Most of itsquests are linear, and there’snot much opportunityfor actualrole playing.
4The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Most readers have likely already played Skyrim, or at least heard of it. It’s astreamlined, modernElder Scrolls experience,for better or worse.There’s an awful lot to say about the game, and it’s sometimes divisive among Elder Scrolls fans. On one hand, its streamlined mechanics allowease of useandplayer freedom. On the other hand its mechanics areperhaps too simple, making the game as a whole moreshallow. On one hand, the game world isvast and beautiful.
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On the other hand, the story is oftenboring, lacking in standout quests or complex moral dilemmas. At the very least, Skyrim Special Edition isone of the most stable things Bethesda has ever released. Modern day Skyrim is amodder’s paradise.
3The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall
In 1994, Bethesda Studios hired a man by the name ofTodd Howard. One of the first games Howard worked on wasDaggerfall, a follow-up to the sleeper hit game Arena. Daggerfall was a marked improvement over Arena, utilizing a new engine and adding new features while still allowing the player to explore Tamriel in its entirety. And while it is more than 25 years old at this point, it’s an incredibly deep game that easily holds up.
For those looking to get into an old-school Elder Scrolls game and explore all of Tamriel, Daggerfall is the clear choice over Arena. It not only looks better, it runs better and its community has kept it alive more than Arena’s ever could. With the Daggerfall Unity project, the game runssmooth as buttereven on modern machines. There’s no excuse not to at least check it out.
2The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Despite being atechnical messon many levels, Oblivion might very well be the mostcharminggame in The Elder Scrolls series. From itsinteresting storiesto itsbeautiful musicto itshilariously broken NPCs, the game is huge and consistently entertaining.
Oblivion is certainly a must-play for fans of the series, but ithas not aged well. It was released at a very transitional time for Bethesda. They were just starting to experiment with a little something calledlevel scaling. Without going into too much detail, the level scaling in Oblivion isbonkers, and new players can really beoverwhelmedby itsrandom difficulty spikes. Mods arenotoriously finicky; the game will crash if you so much as look at it the wrong way. And, famously, the NPCs all reside deep within theuncanny valley. Still, for all its faults, Oblivion is aclassic, well-loved game.
