The Elder Scrolls Anthology is going to bring back a lot

of happy memories for some of us. This bundle packages all five major

Elder Scrolls titles into one massive collection that can potentially

consume literally hundreds of hours of your gaming time. Personally, I've

sunk between 100 - 200 hours apiece into each of the last three games. I

can therefore attest that the Anthology is absolutely worth the money,

especially if you are new to the Elder Scrolls universe and want a crash

course before the

Elder

Scrolls Online goes live next spring.

So here's a look at each of the games included in the Elder Scrolls

Anthology: the stories, the connecting threads, the recommended mods, and

why you should play each one.

src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/253334">The Elder Scrolls:

Arena

March 1994

PC Only





The first game in the series introduces the familiar game opener: you are

a prisoner escaping from a dungeon and becoming embroiled in an epic

political plot. In Arena, your goal is to assemble a

collection of artifacts to take down the Imperial Battlemage, Jagar Tharn,

who has imprisoned the Emperor Uriel Septim IV in another dimension.

Arena is a very difficult game. The introductory dungeon contains

powerful monsters and zero decent weapons. You may, for example, wander

into a room - quite near the new-character spawn-in cell -

containing a hard-to-hit Imp. Or you may attempt to rest and heal back up, only to be bushwhacked by an archer or assassin, and attempt to fight it using your crappy rusted

iron dagger and no armor. This is not a fight you will win, even if you

have already mastered the awkward non-standard controls. Arena was

released in 1994, after all, and RPG designers had not yet figured out the

now-ubiquitous WASD keyboard control scheme.

If you do manage to survive this intro dungeon, you will discover a

massive game world covering essentially the entire continent of Tamriel.

Characters will visit major cities in every province. Wilderness areas

outside the cities are randomly-generated and do not actually connect the

cities together, but there are still hundreds of towns and dungeons to be

found and explored. The name "Arena" refers to the continent of Tamriel -

life in Tamriel is as bloody and violent as a gladiatorial arena.

Arena has been available as a freeware download directly from Bethesda

since 2004, but because it was originally designed to run in DOS, it

requires the use of an emulator (like DOSBox) to run on modern machines.

Arena turns 20 in March, 2014, so that's not all that surprising for a

game that's older than many college students. The version that ships with

the Anthology also requires a DOS emulator to run on modern operating

systems, but there are modified

versions available for download that have built-in, pre-configured

emulators and Windows installers.

src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/253336">The Elder Scrolls

II: Daggerfall

August 1996







PC Only



The second title in the series started out the same way as its

predecessor - in a dungeon, as a prisoner tasked with an epic quest. This

one takes place entirely within the provinces of High Rock, homeland of

the Bretons, and Hammerfell, home of the Redguards. The player character

is sent to High Rock by the Emperor to deal with the ghost of a murdered

king, and to find a key called the Mantella, which will resurrect an

ancient iron golem called the Numidium. Daggerfall has a

number of different endings, depending on what the player chooses to do

with the artifact he has found and which factions he has aided.

As one might expect, Daggerfall is more advanced than Arena, and is

arguably the most complex Elder Scrolls title to date. It features a

bewildering array of different skills, including languages and other

non-combat skills, and new systems for enchanting items and creating new

spells. Players are able to become vampires and werewolves, which became

staples in the later games, and also had the option of becoming a

wereboar, which, sadly, fell out of favor later in the series. While Arena

featured set classes, Daggerfall gave players the opportunity to create

their own classes to play the game however they wanted.

It is also the largest Elder Scrolls game - not just within the series,

but of any game. The game world encompasses about 188,000 square miles,

twice the size of Great Britain. Most of the explorable terrain is

randomly generated and lacks the kind of detail found in later games, and

because of the small number of "building blocks" used in its construction,

a lot of that terrain seems monotonous... but 188,00 square miles is still

frickin' enormous. 15,000 cities, towns, villages and dungeons. Fifteen

thousand.

Graphics-wise, Daggerfall isn't a vast improvement over Arena. They both

look like nearly-20-year-old games built for DOS. But if a player can get

past the horribly dated mid-90s look and clunky playstyle, it's a very

rich and deep game, and has been available as freeware from Bethesda since

2009. It's worth noting, however, that Daggerfall was specifically aimed

at an adult market, and features full frontal cartoon nudity on the

character sheet "paper doll" by default and without mods.

There are a number of community-built mods for Daggerfall, but these are

not the same easy-add mods that are available for later games. And because

of the age of the game and the degree of complexity of getting it to run

on modern machines, these mods may have limited appeal to most young

gamers.

The version that comes with the Anthology requires a DOS emulator to run

in modern versions of Windows. But if you are interested in playing the

game without a lot of added hassle, there are tweaked

versions available for download that come with pre-configured DOSBox

emulators and Windows installers, so it can be played on modern operating

systems.



src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/253338">The Elder Scrolls

III: Morrowind

May 2002

PC, Xbox





The first of the "modern style" Elder Scrolls games, Morrowind

stands as one of my personal all-time favorite RPGs. Set in the province

of Morrowind, it tells the story of a pardoned prisoner arriving by boat

on the island of Vvardenfell, where he fulfils the prophecy of the

Nerevarine, the mortal who challenges the immortal Dagoth Ur, who wants to

conquer all of Tamriel and infect everyone with the blight disease,

Corprus. But, like all other Elder Scrolls games, the character is free to

do whatever the hell he wants as soon as he leaves the Excise Office in

Seyda Neen.

Morrowind features a stripped-down, minimal UI compared to the previous

two games, and the more modern WASD keyboard movement setup. It's the

first truly 3D Elder Scrolls game, and can be played in first or third

person perspective. The skill system is less bewildering than

Daggerfall's, but is more varied than later games. The character creation

system of Morrowind is probably one of the best ever designed - rather

than a boring option screen where you just pick a bunch of options all at

once and then jump into the game, it's part of a fleshed-out process that

takes place over a series of voiced conversations with NPCs. By the time

you're finished your character, you've learned the basic mechanics of the

game.

It's also worth noting that this is the first game in the series to

feature ten playable races: Altmer, Bosmer, Dunmer, Breton, Nord,

Redguard, Khajiit and Argonian have been available since the beginning,

but Morrowind is the first game in the series to add Imperial and Orc as

playable races. It is also the first in the series to feature music by

composer Jeremy Soule, who wrote about 30 minutes of music for a game that

can take hundreds of hours to play through. Luckily for us, those 30

minutes are golden, and the haunting themes of Morrowind are instantly

recognizable to the players who have heard them repeated over and over

again during their play time.

The Elder Scrolls Anthology also features Morrowind's two expansions - Tribunal,

which follows the continuing stories of the Dunmer ancestor-gods after the

events at the Red Mountain, and Bloodmoon, which extends

the explorable area of Morrowind to the island of Solstheim, northwest of

the main island of Vvardenfell and introduces lycanthropy to the land of

the Dunmer.

Morrowind shipped with the Elder Scrolls Construction Kit, which gave

players the power to modify the game world and create their own

adventures. The game was also built to make it easy to install and play

community-made mods, and as a result, there are thousands of mods

available. Morrowind mods were the impetus behind the launch of NexusMods,

a website dedicated to mods for a number of games. And despite the game

being over 10 years old, people are still making new mods for it and

posting them on NexusMods.

One of the most recommended mods, however, is not hosted on the NexusMods

site: Morrowind Sound and Graphics Overhaul (MGSO), which is hosted by its

creators at Ornicopter.net.

This mod does exactly what is says on the label, bringing the decade-old

graphics up to a more modern standard, and is the mod I use in my

screenshots. It won't quite bring it up to Skyrim levels - the character

models still have those weirdly-long legs and polygon counts are still

fairly low - but it will be enough to make the game a lot more appealing

to the younger gamers who are spoiled by more current games. Though the

game was cutting-edge and resource-intensive when it was new, it hasn't

aged particularly well. Start with MGSO, then grab a few interesting

weapon and armor mods from NexusMods, and your whole game experience can

change.

Morrowind was the first Elder Scrolls game to be ported to a gaming

console, but the PC version's moddability did not make the transition to

the Xbox version. Another first: Morrowind can be installed and run on

modern versions of Windows without the use of a DOS emulator.

src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/253340">The Elder Scrolls

IV: Oblivion

March 2006







PC, Xbox 360, PS3, mobile phone



The fourth title in the series sees the pardoned prisoner in the province

of Cyrodiil, homeland of the Imperials, failing to save the life of

Emperor Uriel Septim VII, the last of the Septim line. The Emperor is

assassinated by members of a Daedric cult named the Mythic Dawn, and with

the death of the Emperor, the way is clear for the opening of a number of

gateways to the hellish plane of Oblivion. The player is

tasked with finding Septim's bastard son, Martin, and then with gathering

a collection of powerful artifacts that will allow Martin to do battle

against Mehrunes Dagon, the Daedric prince behind the Mythic Dawn cult.

While the "deus ex machina" ending may leave you feeling a bit flat, the

journey up to that point is awe-inspiring.

Oblivion takes the character creation process even deeper into the game.

You may be playing for over an hour before your character is finalized and

you are ready to leave the starting dungeon. Character skills are somewhat

stripped down from the Morrowind set, with a number of related skills

lumped together and others streamlined out of the game entirely. Armor

sets were made much simpler in order to accommodate more realistic

character models. NPCs were given "Radiant AI" which allowed them to make

decisions and engage in complex behavior rather than simply follow rigid

scripted routines.

The soundtrack for Oblivion is twice as long as it was for Morrowind, and

Jeremy Soule almost died in a car crash while he was in the middle of

writing it. Evidently, his brush with death left him appreciating life all

the more, and the soundtrack for Oblivion is a celebration of the beauty

of life. The game also features some top-notch celebrity voice acting from

Wonder Woman, Captain Picard, Ned Stark and General Zod.

The Anthology also includes Oblivion's two expansions - Knights

of the Nine, which is more of a collection of official mods

than a proper expansion, and Shivering Isles, which

takes the player to the realm of Sheogorath, Daedric prince of madness.

And of course, there's more to do in Oblivion than just troll around

killing monsters and grinding quests. There are loads of unscripted

distractions, as well; for instance, you can build a sizable skull

collection to store and display in one of your houses. You can gather up

all the watermelons and cabbages you come across and go bowling down the

side of a mountain. You can rank up your Sneak skill and go around picking

pockets. You can become a vampire and feed on sleeping innocents. You can

try to make everyone love you by using the Persuasion wheel on everyone

you meet. These are the things that make all Elder Scrolls games truly

great.

Oblivion is just as moddable as Morrowind, and the graphics are far

superior. There are nearly 10 times as many mods for Oblivion than there

are for Morrowind on NexusMods, but the one I would recommend most

strongly is the Oblivion Mod Manager. At one point, I was running over 100

mods at a time, and the mod managers from NexusMods make that a lot easier

to do. I also recommend the Unofficial Oblivion Patch, which fixes a huge

number of minor bugs and glitches not tackled by any of the official

patches. Start with those two things, and build your own massive

collection up from there.

src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/253342">The Elder Scrolls V:

Skyrim

November 2011

PC, Xbox 360, PS3





The Dovakhiin starts out 200 years after the events of Oblivion, as a

prisoner in the Nord province of Skyrim, headed for an execution at the

hands of the Imperials. Just before the axe falls, the prisoner is saved

by the intervention of a fire-breathing dragon, who burns the town of

Helgen as the prisoner and a few other lucky survivors - including Ulfric

Stormcloak, leader of a Nord rebellion - flee to spread the tale. Dragons

are the stuff of myths by the Fourth Era, and few believe the stories of a

dragon attack on Helgen... at first. As the story unfolds, it becomes

clear that the prisoner is the Dovakhiin, a Dragonborn who can use words

of power, called Thu'ums, in the same way as dragons. It is his task to

take down Alduin, the world-eating dragon.

Skyrim, arguably the most popular title in the franchise, follows the

natural curve of progression in the Elder Scrolls series. It is far and

away the best-looking Elder Scrolls game, and set the bar for what

single-player RPGs should be. The UI is even more stripped down than

previous games, and was clearly designed to work well with a console

controller rather than a mouse/keyboard setup. The selection of skills has

been pared down to pretty much just combat skills, with few considerations

for non-combat activities. The character class system has been eliminated

in favor of a more "organic" approach - instead of trying to shoehorn your

playing style into one cramped set of key abilities, you play the game the

way you want and improve your skills by using them. And composer

extraordinaire Jeremy Soule returns with an epic 4-CD soundtrack filled

with choirs of chanting barbarians.

One of the key improvements in Skyrim over previous games is the ability

to dual-wield, and to use magic and a melee weapon at the same time. A

character can hold a sword in one hand and a healing spell in the other,

or use a sword in either hand, or the same spell in both hands to cast a

more powerful version of it.

The Anthology comes with all three Skyrim expansions: Dawnguard,

which makes Skyrim's vampires even more fearsome and powerful; Hearthfire,

which adds three huge customizable manor-style homes to the landscape and

allows the player to adopt kids; and Dragonborn, which

opens the way to the island of Solstheim in Morrowind, which features some

of the creepiest dungeons I've ever seen. Seriously - like a cross between

Lovecraft's Chthulhu stories and the library episode of Doctor Who where

the shadows eat people right out of their space suits.

Again, NexusMods is the go-to place for Skyrim mods. In addition to the

mod manager and unofficial patch, try the Skyrim HD high-resolution

texture pack, which retextures the whole of Skyrim in ways that will make

your video card bleed. Also worth checking out are UI-improvement mods

like SkyUI, which makes the user interface less console-y and more

PC-friendly, or mods that upgrade the world map to make it less confusing.

The Elder Scrolls Anthology is retailing for about 80 bucks, but when you

break it down, that's actually a pretty solid deal. You get around 500

hours' worth of gaming glory, all on physical media instead of digital

downloads, complete with gorgeous maps and packaging, for the approximate

price of two new games. If you're new to the series, or if you got started

with Skyrim and want to know the rest of the story, or even if you just

have money to burn and want the fancy maps and packaging, you won't be

disappointed with this collection.