It's difficult to place where Bethesda sits in the public consciousness. The RPG studio turned publisher has a great deal to be proud of—in recent years, it has bankrolled the beloved Dishonored franchise , overseen the resurrection of DOOM , and perhaps most impressively has built Fallout , a niche series largely thought deceased at the turn of the millennium, into a blockbuster property that makes a ridiculous amount of money across its mobile and triple-A iterations.

But if your only impression of the studio came from specialist forums, gaming Twitter, and the like, you'd be forgiven for thinking it maligned. Hated, even. Its games are subject to a number of recurring complaints—poor combat, dated tech, and bad writing among other grievances. Bethesda's self-developed RPG series, Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, occupy the same bizarre no man's land as the Call of Duty franchise: Apparently nobody likes it, and yet everyone does. The charts don't lie, and neither does Activision's bank balance.

Much of this dissonance can be explained by taking the temperature of the community's impression of Morrowind, the third Elder Scrolls game that set the template for both of its blockbuster RPG strands back in 2002. That game, and its sequels: 2006's Oblivion, which became a massive, studio-defining success for Bethesda during the early Xbox 360 era, and 2011's Skyrim, the soon-to-be-reissued (and remastered) last entry in the series to date (discounting The Elder Scrolls Online, of which the less said the better).