It’s fitting that my gaming career started with Skyrim and ended with Oblivion. Skyrim was my obsession, and Oblivion was something I hated, for reasons I’ll detail later.
Gamers are drawn to Elder Scrolls more than to anything else. It’s not escapism per se, it’s like an Oblivion Gate that leads to a virtual reality that, for a long time, felt better than real reality. Plenty of us have troubles relating to society, even if we manage to integrate, because society is flawed and shatters the spirit. This isn’t new, and it’s not the subject of this essay.
But it’s required context to understand how is it possible that so many years later, almost 20 to be exact, legions of fans held their breaths in anticipation for the weakest’s of the Elder Scrolls remastered version. There, I said it. 2006 Oblivion is the weakest entry in the Todd Howard trilogy, and you should know my bias going forward.
I disliked the world because it felt apathetic due to procedural generation, dungeons lacking in context, terrible leveling system, and goofy NPCs. The remaster brought needed improvements to the leveling system, even if it removed the visual charm of trekking through a green fairytale. Even interacting with the NPCs is better and more functional because they don’t look like potato-faced freaks any more.
Fans hold onto these titles because it reminds them of a time when there wasn’t necessary to engage with society that much. Roleplaying games tend to do this to people to varying degrees, but Elder Scrolls caters to so many different fantasies that it’s easy to find your specific niche.
Morrowind was nice for me, but I think the game lacks content. Factions are a mish-mash of fetch quests and mechanics boil down to spread-sheeting and macro grinding. Those who were most drawn to Morrowind tend to look down on subsequent titles because they embraced the truth: that traditional, spreadsheet-based RPGs are too niche, and most audiences crave a mix of action and story that’s awfully absent from the Elder Scrolls III.
It’s the primary reason why Oblivion was remastered. To re-work Morrowind, you’d need to:
Even so, Morrowind succeeds at stimulating the imagination, which is what Elder Scrolls does better than any other franchise. We don’t need detailed graphics, insanely expensive voice acting, or cutscenes with Joel. We only need roleplaying prompts, a consistent virtual world, and mechanics that don’t get in the way. We even put up with bugs and modding community scandals, and spend money on multiple versions for the same game because the imagination part is what matters.
This is what most Skyrim haters don’t get, in the end. If you copy mechanics from games that do them better (stealth from Dishonored, combat from Mount & Blade, dialogue from Disco Elysium, level design from Thief) neither Morrowind, nor Oblivion, nor Skyrim will be better games because those mechanics will get in the way of the story the player crafts for themselves.
I don’t think people find Elder Scrolls, it’s Elder Scrolls that finds them. It was the beginning of the 2020 pandemic when I became obsessed with Skyrim because my life was so drab and devoid of meaning that I had nothing else to do all day. I was unemployed. Depressed. And depression, according to Sopranos, is rage turned inwards, which is consistent with what I’ve experienced. I was angry, and wanted to disappoint the world by doing fuck all with my time.
Playing any game for 3000 hours is the equivalent of doing fuck all with your time, that’s undeniable. People replay these titles and argue online about their strengths and differences and produce massive amounts of content that attack and criticize its developers for no reason other than anger that stems from the expectation that a video game that replaces reality doesn’t replace it well enough.
See, it’s Todd’s fault they axed attributes from Oblivion and that the magic system in Skyrim is trash and that all dungeons are linear and that Bethesda can’t write anything but garbage. But Todd doesn’t exist. He is a strawman, the face of a company of people paid with salary and bonuses to work on a product that makes money for shareholders.
Anybody who played Elder Scrolls knows damn well how inconsistent factions were. How the writers and quest designers stepped on each other’s toes to write their own stories independent on what build Todd likes to play.
Of course we know the games we like suck, to some degree. I know how bad Oblivion’s questing structure is, and I played the shit out of the remaster for two weeks anyway. I was part of the hype train, the first and last impulse purchase of my life. I had to play a better version of the game I despised because the Fighter’s Guild was just a to-and-fro simulator and sequences of abusing the T key because most quests involve waiting for NPCs to do nothing.
They changed this in Skyrim. In Skyrim, during the Thieves Guild, if you bring Gallus’ encoded journal (in Falmer), Enthir will translate it on the spot. It’s goofy, but it’s less annoying. And it’s copium either way, it’s just replacement for character writing that doesn’t exist.
Karliah is the antihero in Skyrim’s Thieves Guild, and she’s a goofed up bimbo who puts the Dragonborn’s life in danger after 25 years of trying to nab at Mercer Frey. We are sent to a ruin to get Gallus’ journal, which Karliah should’ve gotten before, and Enthir is just some guy at the College who knows the Falmer language because Gallus encoded his journal in a language only some guy at the College knows. Yes, read the sentence twice.
These aren’t people, they are quest markers. The actual questline isn’t “interact with people and discover lore”, it’s “go to this dungeon, find stuff, sell stuff, level up”.
But do you see the issue?
This nitpicking is meaningless. It doesn’t translate the player’s experience, because the player is wrapped up in their own heads about the story they are projecting onto the screen. When Emille Pagliarulo (whom I adore for working on the Life of the Party level from Thief 2) said that KISS thing in one of his conferences, so many lost their marbles. As if they didn’t know. As if there was ever a good story, from a literary sense, in any of the Elder Scrolls titles.
But nitpicking and drama is just bargaining for time because we’ve gone so long without new content. Because there isn’t enough content. There aren’t official novels, no TV shows, no movies, nothing else but fan-made mods and 20-hour “analysis” videos.
Fan-made mods like Enderal, Beyond Reach, and Fallout London, are also a form of bargaining for time. I like Enderal, but it’s nowhere near the quality of any base game, and redditors who spew this nonsense do an active disservice to SureAI because people who play Elder Scrolls don’t want Enderal. They want more Elder Scrolls. Telling them they have bad taste for not singing praises for amateur work is goofy.
I point out Enderal because it’s the most accomplished fan-made modification for Skyrim. It’s a massive game that overstays its welcome with Oblivion-style dungeons and voice acting. It borrows many ideas from too many action-RPGs without developing them to their full potential. XP based leveling is a terrible addition to the ES formula when your actual leveling happens through currency, but there are so few quests that involve a payout that you’re compelled to explore even if the combat is still Skyrim. And, no. Apologies, but Enderal changes absolutely nothing with Skyrim’s combat except adding more trash mobs and stagger.
Enderal is beautiful and has great companions (Calia, my heart), but it’s a lesser version of Skyrim, and true sons of Skyrim know, and don’t want to be part of the discussion. If anything, it’s weird how so many of these mods try to overshadow the base game with length, and it’s a testament to a modder’s commitment to length how the Oblivion Remake (created by modders in Skyrim’s engine) was forgotten after the shadowdrop; a footnote in mediocre articles that congratulate Bethesda for handing the Skyblivion team free keys to the remaster.
Before the remaster came out, I tried playing Enderal again, and realized that GOG is so dead I can’t fathom why would anyone use it in Steam’s detriment.
Last year GOG introduced a cloud save limit for game saves. The limit is 200mb and the launcher warns me time and time again they’ll “delete” my cloud saves for the only big RPGs I have on the platform (Skyim Anniversary Edition and Enderal), whose saves exceed the treshold.
Ok. So fucking delete it already? I can’t play with cloud saves turned on because you won’t let me save, but I also can’t bulk delete more than 10 saves because your UX designers are too busy with jerking off, aren’t they? It’s a UX atrocity that could have been avoided if you simply deleted all my cloud saves older than 12 months. Shivering Isles-type people already have their saves backed up, and wouldn’t care, and I already don’t care about a save file from 2023, so what’s the point in keeping it if you’re so adamant about your precious little save limit? It’s goo-goo gah-gah type shit; all those memes about how Gaben doesn’t need to fuck-all because his competitors are idiots are true.
So I got angry again, but I got angry at myself for wasting my time with all of this. And I felt the pull of Elder Scrolls because Enderal wasn’t cutting it. The problem with Enderal is a commitment to telling a drawn-out story that, ultimately, doesn’t go anywhere because stakes haven’t been portrayed well before the climax. The game ends with reveals “storytelling nerds” will claim were foreshadowed all along, but those reveals diminish he player’s choices. Somewhere in-between the dozen cutscenes and grinding dungeons lacking context for leveling, there is an interesting story about fate and choice, but it’s muddied by a perverse desire to “outdo” Skyrim without understanding why so many people flock to it.
And I’ve been through this cycle before. Claiming I’m ready to give up on Elder Scrolls only for me to fall for mods again. Like, the moment I purchased Oblivion: Remastered was my defeat, because I was dreaming of Skyrim and vouched to stop playing Skyrim after launching this fucking blog.
One good thing came out of this, however, because I was able to experience Shivering Isles for the first time. Back when I first played Oblivion, I burned out after 45 hours because the combat turned into the biggest slog fest imaginable. And Shivering Isles, and I’m sorry to say this, might even be better than Dawnguard.
Of course it’s not the correct comparison, since Shivering Isles is more comparable to Solstheim, but Dawnguard was my favorite thing ever at one point. I went through hundreds of hours just to see the Forgotten Vale again and again because it was such a desolate, remote place, that I’d imagine living there and feeling good about whatever it was my life turned into.
I even liked the faction, and the fantasy of a guerilla army of rejects banding together to kill vampires. I wasn’t too hot on the Volkihar side, mostly because Harkhon was a genuine idiot, and Serana waswritten with a Dawnguard player in mind. My favorite roleplay with the Volkihar clan was with a Destruction master who used charms to get into Serana’s heart for social points with the clan, which further emphasizes my idea that we overlook bad character writing in favor of our own stories.
And then I got to Dementia, which, in Oblivion, should be called Depression, but it would be too on-the-nose. The people of Dementia are morose, suicidal, and hypochondriac, while the people of Mania are psychotic and compulsive. The Mad God, the Big G himself, is supposed to be a chaotic blend of these two traits, which forms a tapestry of bipolar symptoms.
That wasn’t exactly my take on it, to be honest. I find that Sheo is more akin to someone driven by his wild emotions, and his counterpart, Big Jig, to be an accountant with spreadsheets up his ass. Like a Morrowind fan. For a time, I’ve been both in my life, and it was fascinating to see the conflict between rationality and being driven by emotion. Of course, no side prevails, because these two aspects have to co-exist in a balance.
The Greymarch is an interesting metaphor for inspired bursts of self-hatred that make you look either for reason or emotion for salvation. In the end, the Listener-Gray-Fox-Hero of Kvatch-Archmage (there’s no point in doing separate playthroughs for these in Oblivion) ends the questline as a sort of messianic figure. Neither overly emotional, nor mechanical, just using whatever tool seems more appropriate to the situation.
Elder Scrolls is also a tool. It’s a tool we use to stop our internal Greymarches (I’ll stop with this, I promise), whenever life gets too complex and we need a blanket. We create a character, we project a story, things develop from there.
But self hatred lingers, and it manifests into projects like my first attempt at writing a Skyrim analysis, which was a 100,000-word atrocity that nitpicked every inconsequential detail of the game. The question lingered: why haven’t I used that creative energy for something less… unattractive? It remained in the back of my mind until I gained the courage to pursue prose. All of a sudden, I feel like I might not need Elder Scrolls any more because I’ll be writing my own fiction, in a way that doesn’t need attribute tuning or spell crafting.
Speaking of– I made this beast of a character in the remaster which reached Chameleon 100 at level 15. There is nothing in that game that resists a character with 100% chameleon, and I took down Mankar Camoran in 3 slashes with Mehrunes’ Razor. I love irony.
Each game takes its different approach with character building. Morrowind is best for playthroughs that last somewhere between 10 and 15 hours because of how easy it is to skyrocket your skills artificially. Oblivion is best for playthroughs where you do everything because you level up at a snail’s pace and enchanted items are the best at high levels. Skyrim is a goofy breed between these two, where you level up too fast in the beginning, but after 15 hours, perks become slim pickings and good luck trying to get all you want in less than 50 hours.
Sometimes I long to trek the plains of Whiterun on a sturdy chestnut horse, or to freeze to death in the Forgotten Vale while Serana complains about the sun (what sun, love?). It’s almost evil the effect these games have on people, like a hole that can never be filled because all Elder Scrolls are flawed experiences mostly kept alive by fans of the series.
I felt good deleting Oblivion Remastered after Martin’s. Should’ve known Martin’s fate the moment I heard him speak.
A lot of us watch derogatory Elder Scrolls content and subreddits as a method of coping with our longing. Sometimes it helps, but other times a brand new remastered is shadow dropped and brings all of it– all the anger, defeat, bargaining, and self hate– back, all at once. This is why it’s difficult for people to let go of Elder Scrolls. It’s the cycle that brings everyone back for a Sanguine party.
I’ve accepted that, if Elder Scrolls VI ever comes out, it won’t be for me. It will be for the next generation, and it’s unlikely Todd will have a hand in it, except from an advisory role, which means that no matter how good the game is, it will feel alien to me. A relic of a future we’re unable to see. Dozens of legions of fans bemoaning a transitory era, stuck in the past because to let go of those memories is to let go of an identity.
It’s stupid to play over 2000 hours of something, write thousands of failed words about it, then pretend it’s not part of your identity. But identities either change, or stagnate, and wither.
Thanks for reading.