Arena:
- Innovative hear one thing at a time soundtrack (and resultant get surprise gang-banged by a horde of everything gameplay)
- Fucking huge, but repetitive due to procedural generation
- God awful combat even by 20 years ago standards
- But it gave us TES so I'll forgive them a little.
Daggerfall:
- Also fucking huge and less noticeably obvious in its repetitiveness, so can be played for forever and a day pretty satisfactorily
- Combat is pretty clunky by today's standards but it was good when it came out
- Story is actually worth mentioning here since the quests and background feel more real and fleshed out, though you still lose immersion from the rather obvious shit
- Has the kinda shit nerdy RP fucks like me enjoy like buying your own house just for the hell of it
- Had a pretty fucking brilliant balance of starting off feeling like you're not sure if you can rely on your past D&D/other RPG/previously read-up knowledge or if it's going to fail you and violate you with a rake when a bunch of the skills you choose end up being worthless - then going to pretty epic dominating bastard that destroyed everything over the course of the game. Most games now just try to keep the balance the same throughout the game, or even increase the difficulty as you go - if you ask me, a good RPG you should start off feeling like a crippled blind toddler trying to find your way in the world but end up feeling like a god/destroyer of worlds, it makes for more build variety and progression
- HALT! HALT! HALT!
Morrowind:
- In my opinion the best ratio of attention to detail to amount of landmass, the map was smaller than the other games but aside from when you were in the emptier parts of the ash valleys you were always 5-6 metres from some cave or building or village or secret item or quest NPC, I still find random shit today that makes me go "Wtf how was this right here all along"
- I know not everyone liked it but I think they handled what was in its core essence a really cliché main story concept by turning it into something that was gradually sprung onto the player over a series of gradual steps starting with little discovery quests and books leading up to the eventual realisation that oh all that shit they were talking about is actually deeply related to you and why you're there, and for that reason it still pulled it off pretty fucking well if you ask me
- Dunmer/Vvardenfell culture was pretty nifty, you gotta admit, had a weird Silk road/ancient China meets stereotypical sci-fi Alien planet vibe.
- Animations were terrible and dialogue while being awesome in content was bloody jarring at times with how every single NPC in one town would give the exact same line when asked about something, EVERY single time
- Combat relied on stats not player skill and although I was one of the people bitching about it at first after I figured out it wasn't fucked hitboxes and I was missing due to low agility/fatigue/weapon skill I started to enjoy it and it's a shame because I feel like it's the least likely thing to ever come back in a future TES game because so many people whined about it
- Levelling was terribly broken if you didn't want to min-max but had even the slightest OCD, but the redeeming factor for me was that it made RPing a Telvanni mage who'd be the kinda guy to research and plan out everything beforehand more fun when I *was* planning each and every level out manually before going and getting the levels. Masochistic though.
- Soundtrack A+++++
- Awesome UI. I know it was an *ugly* UI, but functionality wise it pretty much had everything we needed except for a better map and for smaller text on lower resolutions. Otherwise it's resizable, can show everything at once, any of the elements can be pinned to show when the menu is down at any time, I kinda shudder thinking about the new UIs when they had the concept down just fine already in TES III and just needed to make it look less ugly.
- It was nice that some enemies were levelled but some weren't, so some areas were naturally dangerous while others scaled, though I think the way they separated it out by creature encounters all being levelled and NPCs all being set levels was odd. (at least that's how I remember it being done)
- Now that the game's had a solid amount of years of the modding community making it better and better, with the Sound & Graphics Overhaul and a few other must have mods this one's my favourite in the series overall, I just wish the game world was larger.
Oblivion:
- The hype was real, real enough to get me to build an entire computer just to be able to play this on high settings, and at the time I was very glad I did. Though now Oblivion looks pretty crappy to me without a ton of graphical mods, too much bloom and moon-face
- Combat was smoother and better animated but like I said before I still prefer an entirely stat-driven combat system, if my character has the dexterity of late-stage parkinsons I shouldn't be able to hit everything so easily, if my character on the other hand is well trained then sure
- Actually hearing voices everywhere was pretty huge in terms of the difference it made to just reading the text as it was back in Morrowind, and honestly for me this was the biggest thing that made me sink so many hours into Oblivion, I just felt more like I was present in the world than having to try to remember the guy's last "Outlander" or "N'Wah" so I could emulate the voice in my head while reading the text
- What the fuck did they do to Argonians.
- The setting was refreshing as was the size, but the world between towns did feel kind of empty compared to what I'd been used to from Morrowind
- Main quest story core idea was kind of mediocre but the finer detail added to it was pretty awesome and I really like the lore that got added here, plus Shivering Isles was awesome
- Soundtrack was slightly less epic when compared to Morrowind's but still a solid A++++
- UI isn't great but is at least decently usable on both PC and console
- Why are these bandits wearing better armour than all the guards now. The economy in Cyrodiil must be worse than ours.
Skyrim:
- This was one of those titles that made me feel really iffy about it at the start and I wasn't sure whether I liked it or not, I felt like it was taking the things I didn't like so much about Oblivion, but after going back to it a few times and sinking a few hundred hours into the game I'm honestly liking it more than Oblivion and in some ways as much as Morrowind.
- UI is fucking terrible unless you're using a controller/console
- I feel like the environmental attention to detail came back here, while I didn't find the dungeons to be too new in their layout/look (other than some of the unique hidden spots that you'd find by say using whirlwind sprint etc) they were still well designed and had some nice little details about their occupants and what was going on inside with every dungeon usually having its own back-story, the same is true for almost every location in the over-world, and the landscape in between while obviously being somewhat limited by the icy climate of the province still has more variation than Oblivion's by far
- The cities/towns were disappointingly small, though the themes and layout of them were pretty awesome, I just wish more of them were like Markarth where they at least gave an illusion of bigger size where there wasn't any
- I spent a *LOT* of time hating the new levelling/perks, but, I'm gonna be honest, they've grown on me, and I actually think it's a good direction that'll allow for the kind of skill diversity that they had in Morrowind/Daggerfall while not throwing a bunch of redundant skills on new players who don't know what they're doing at the start, especially once they've improved it in future games. To add to that I'm glad they don't make you pick anything beyond a name and race at the start because I honestly thought they'd taken out the racial bonuses as a result and started just playing races that I wanted to play rather than letting my anal OCD take over and pick based on stats, and I had more fun as a result, especially since I normally spend 2139821983 hours planning a character before I play, and here I've never had to do that, but still end up with a similarly detailed build, it just grows as I play a character
- The levelling feels more natural here than Oblivion, particularly because the bandits don't look like they're trying to set up a bling enterprise in all their shiny shit like they did there.
- The sort of cinematic elements of the story where events occurred for the first time (climbing High Hrothgar, the first dragon fight etc) were well set out and actually had me taking note of those moments to praise later.
- Graphically the game is solid and the character creation is too, but I feel they need some more slider freedom like Oblivion (just not quite as much), as mods like RaceMenu that add it really make it 10x easier to get a nice looking character (and that'd do a lot for the game if it was applied to most of the NPCs, many of whom look a little too alike)
- Unfortunately I feel like they made the solutions to puzzles/quests a bit more one-track in nature here than previous games, for example there's a certain quest where you solve a murder much like the Ripper murders from Whitechapel in England, well my first time arriving there I'd guessed who the killer was right away, snuck into his house, found his fucking journal where he admitted to killing people, and still I had to progress through like 10 steps of investigation before the quest eventually allowed me to arrest someone, who wasn't even that guy, only for me to have to hop online, find a walkthrough, realise you have to get to that stage and then go to an entirely different guy and tell him he's suspect (when he blatantly isn't the killer) before you even get the option to investigate further, then you have to catch the guy red-handed.. So basically, a random shop-keeper accuses a highly noble in the Jarl's court of murder and I just have to accuse him and he's carted off, but I find said shop-keeper's written murder confessions and I can't question him, or tell anyone about it. Shame, these instances had some really good ideas but they were always executed in a very exact manner if you wanted to complete them, no freeform element, particularly with the civil war situation where you only really had one opportunity to change sides if you weren't happy with your initial siding.
- Main story is similar to the last games in many respects, but I like how it was handled
- Soundtrack was great of course, I like it as much as Morrowind's, particularly now that Morrowind tracks themselves have returned with the Dragonborn expansion.
Just my thoughts on the series as a whole.
I enjoy everything from Daggerfall onwards personally, and Morrowind is the one that will always stand out to me as the hallmark of what a TES game should feel like, but Oblivion tried a lot of new things, some it executed well, some pretty awfully, but I feel they actually had some balls with Skyrim and rather than just ditching the stuff people complained about in Oblivion they took the new concepts and improved them - I think in most areas Skyrim was an improvement on Oblivion, the only major downside when comparing the two is how small the towns in Skyrim tend to feel, or the environment colour since it has almost a slight sepia tint to everything and snow can get boring pretty quick if you don't travel far enough to be rid of it.
