On March 25, 1994, The Elder Scrolls: Arena was released - the role-playing game that began the history of the great Bethesda Softworks series. Since then, four more licensed parts and several offshoots have been released, including the MMORPG The Elder Scrolls Online, which, on the occasion of the holiday, will be free for a week. The developers are currently working on a full-fledged sixth game, which fans hope will be shown at E3 2019, as well as The Elder Scrolls: Blades, which will first launch on mobile devices. Some information about new projects may be announced at the end of this week at the Bethesda Game Days event.
In honor of the anniversary, the company is giving away the original version of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. To get it, you'll first need to create an account with Bethesda.net if you don't already have one. After logging into your account, you need to activate the code TES25TH-MORROWIND. The offer is valid for one day only - March 25.
From March 28 to April 3, the base The Elder Scrolls Online, as well as the prologue of the Elsweyr expansion (official release on June 4), will be free on all platforms for all users. The MMORPG also launched special events in honor of the 25th anniversary of the series and the fifth anniversary of the MMORPG itself (it was released on April 4). Players are waiting for five weeks of daily tasks for the completion of which you can get rewards. You can learn more about them on the official forum. Another conditional gift is The Elder Scrolls: The Official Cookbook, which will be available on March 26. Also, Bethesda has temporarily reduced the prices of games in the series in its store. All the details of the holiday promotions can be found here.
The Elder Scrolls: Arena, released for MS-DOS and made free in 2004 (to celebrate the series' tenth anniversary), was inspired by Ultima Underworld. Its lead developer was Vijay Lakshman. The "fathers" of the series are also called designer Ted Peterson (Ted Peterson), programmer Julian Lefay (Julian LeFay) and producer Christopher Weaver (Christopher Weaver). At the time, the RPG was praised for its huge world (perhaps the largest in gaming at the time), advanced graphics, many side quests, and a compelling story.
The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall in 1996 was created under the direction of Lefay and was also released for MS-DOS. Like its predecessor, it received rave reviews from the press and was named the best RPG of the year by many publications. But the real glory of Bethesda brought Morrowind, which appeared in 2002 for Windows and Xbox. Its development was led by Todd Howard (Todd Howard), who began his career in the company as a tester (he checked the performance of Arena). It is still one of the genre's favorite games, although in 2003 GameSpy named it one of the most overrated titles of all time due to its massive bug count and "repetitive and stupid" gameplay. Not so long ago, fans released a set of textures for her, improved with the help of a neural network. Many are also waiting for Skywind - an amateur remake of the game on the engine of the fifth part, one of the projects of The Elder Scrolls Renewal.
In 2006, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, produced by Howard, was released on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, which also collected many awards and proved to be commercially successful. But the most profitable was The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the development director of which again was Howard. In 2011, it appeared on the same platforms, and was subsequently re-released for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. By November 2016, its sales exceeded 30 million copies.
The latest offshoot of the series is the 2017 free-to-play card RPG The Elder Scrolls: Legends, available on all current platforms including Nintendo Switch, Android and iOS. In addition to MMORPGs, Bethesda also created An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire (1997) and The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard (1998). The cumulative sales of all parts of the series are more than 50 million units.
Announced at E3 2018, The Elder Scrolls VI remains as mysterious as ever. According to Howard, its release should be expected after the premiere of the sci-fi RPG Starfield, another mysterious game from the company. Last year, the game designer noted that the developers had already decided on the location of the sixth part (fans have assumptions about this). Then he explained that the early announcement was made only to confirm the rumors that had been circulating on the Web for a long time. The studio did not plan to show the project anytime soon, and Howard assumed that fans would begin to pester the authors with questions about The Elder Scrolls VI. And so it happened - they are regularly asked in the comments to the messages that the company publishes on its official microblogs.
Bethesda Game Days will take place on March 29 and 30 as part of PAX East 2019 in Boston. The developers will be hosting a livestream to celebrate The Elder Scrolls 25th Anniversary, as well as streams of The Elder Scrolls Online, The Elder Scrolls: Legends, Fallout 76, and RAGE 2. The event schedule below does not mention any new Scrolls β, but the players hope that the creators just want to surprise the fans.
Source: 3dnews.ru