Every mainline Elder Scrolls RPG ranked from worst to best.
Obviously the Elder Scroll of Chim is the best, though the Elder Scroll (Blood) is certainly memorable—wait, this is supposed to be a ranking of the Elder Scrolls videogames? Silly me, I thought this was a ranking of those prophetic texts beyond the contemplation of mortal minds. I’ve been struck temporarily blind and permanently mad for daring to gaze on them, when I could have just told you whether Morrowind is better than Skyrim and called it a day.
Over the years the Elder Scrolls series has become a core part of PC gaming even as, following Morrowind’s success on Xbox, it became more console-oriented (most noticeably, the interfaces). What makes them the kind of PC games people buy PCs to play is their modding scene, which is the most thriving in all of gaming. Thanks to its Special Edition re-release, Skyrim is the number one and the number two game on Nexus Mods. Oblivion’s in the top 10, and Morrowind’s not far outside it.
Part of the reason there are so many mods for the Elder Scrolls games is that people want to fix the infamous Bethesda jank—and those clunky interfaces—but there’s more to it than that. Their open-ness inspires a degree of self-insertion that makes us want to change them, to add new systems and places, clothes and people.
We mod them not just to paper over their flaws, but to make them our own so we can truly roleplay in ways their developers could never anticipate. While these rankings will mostly be based on how the base games play, I couldn’t let the essentialness and vitality of the Elder Scrolls’ modding scene pass without comment.5. Arena
Games Bethesda Softworks made before the Elder Scrolls include The Terminator and Hockey League Simulator. They may seem impossibly far apart, but Arena actually began as a cross between the two. Though it deviated from this original idea, at its conception Arena was a game about running a team of gladiators, borrowing management systems from Hockey League Simulator, set in an open world like the Los Angeles you’re chased through in The Terminator.
Obviously things changed quite a lot in development, leaving only fossils of the original idea like the tacky gladiators on the cover art, the name Arena, and a focus on combat in enclosed spaces. The Terminator-style overworld, meanwhile, grew during development to become a gigantic backdrop for dungeon-crawling across.
It’s quite thin and samey though, as are the procedural dungeons generated for sidequests. The real fun of Arena comes from the bespoke dungeons designed for the main storyline quests—beyond that, Arena’s most notable for the glimpses of what was to come you can see between its cracks.4. Daggerfall
While Arena’s sidequests were nothing special, players devoted enough time to them that Bethesda focused on making more of them in the sequel. In Daggerfall sidequests don’t just come from innkeepers and nobles, you can take on jobs for various guilds, temples, and knightly orders, as well as the Dark Brotherhood, covens of witches, and a vampire clan should you end up joining the undead. Each one will let you rank up in the relevant organization, gaining titles and access to services like spellcrafting, teleportation, and summoning Daedric Princes who offer quests with unique artifacts as their reward.
