T w e n t y S i d e d

Hi, everyone, it’s Rutskarn. To goad Josh about his stalled Shogun LP I’ll be posting content to this site regularly–every Friday before Spoiler Warning, every other Saturday. Fridays will be old Altered Scrolls essays, edited and posted two at a time, until I’ve caught up and am onto the new ones. Saturdays? RPG stuff. You’ll see.

The Elder Scrolls games are some of the most popular in the world and almost no-one gives a desiccated ferret turd about half of them.

That's gaming in a nutshell, isn’t it? Nobody blinks an eye at going out of your way to rent a movie forty years old, but if a game was made before the Bush administration? Might as well be a stack of cuneiform punchcards buried in cow scrota in a haunted museum. Then again, “haunted museum” is a good way to describe many emulators, so perhaps our short memory's not such a mystery.

What I'm getting around to is that a year ago, I brushed all the bull scrota off of the Elder Scrolls franchise.

I wasn't planning to write a series. It was just clear, by the time I made it through Daggerfall's intro, that I'd have toâ€"because taken as a unit, this just might be one of the weirdest series of fiction I've ever seen in my life. Most franchises have a pretty straightforward arcâ€"games particularly so. There's a consistent thread of gameplay focus and purpose, a couple spinoffs to colonize new markets–and then at some point a big sea change happens and everything turns upside down and all the old fans hate it. Playing the TES games, I felt like that was happening every time. The lack of continuity of tone and objective is staggering.

The gameplay goals shift like crazy. The story and dialogue feel like they were written by five different authors who all can't stand each other. It's very easy to conceive of five diehard Elder Scrolls fans, each of whom can only put up with one of the games.

I feel like this is ignored in a lot of mainstream analysis, but Bethesda's absolutely aware of it. In a post celebrating the Elder Scrolls series' twentieth anniversary, Bethesda stalwart Todd Howard said of their design philosophy: “…as opposed to simply adding to the previous game for a sequel, we always started over. It was our desire that each game be its own thing; had its own tone, its own soul.”

I'm writing this series with one broad, overarching goal, and that's to capture and deconstruct the “soul” of each title in turn. I'll relate what they were doing and what they were trying to do. I'll demonstrate all the lessons they forgot and new eras they tried to bring forth. I'll share observations about the series that fall well outside the conventional wisdom–I'll tell you what the games have in common with James Bond and bad D&D campaigns, Soviet tanks and drunk college students. I'll tell you what playing each game felt like and why. And as we reach each game in the series, I will tell you why it's the greatest game ever made and why it's a loathsome piece of shit.

Let's start with Arena.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Altered Scrolls, Part 1: The Story of Arena”

Rutskarn is a writer, author, wordsmith, text producer, article deviser, prose architect, and accredited language-talker. If you enjoy his contributions to this site you could always back his Patreon.