One of the reasons people care so much about The Elder Scrolls series is all the incredibly memorable adventures you can have, which even make great stories for your friends. Does that mean we all have the same favorite memories of the series? Let’s find out.
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Morrowind sowed the seeds of my love for Dark Souls
Long before we got a series known for tricking players into the wildest deaths imaginable, we had Morrowind. This game tasked players with becoming a hero on an alien land, which occasionally also had players getting themselves killed in ways so funny they legally couldn’t even get mad.
The moment that sold me on this game’s machinations was encountering the “Scroll of Icarian Flight”. Actually, what we encounter is the scroll’s owner, though he falls from the sky and immediately craters to his death right in front of us with no explanation given, forcing us to loot his corpse, for investigative purposes, naturally.
On this man, we found a scroll that boosts the player’s ability to jump, like, by a lot, but not their ability to withstand fall damage, meaning that using that scroll will cause players to become just like the corpse they looted.
This is not the only hilarious gag to be found in this world, but it’s so infuriatingly hilarious that it immediately leaves an indelible mark on the souls of players.
Morrowind just effortlessly oozes old-school charm
Despite the gorgeous graphics and epic scope, the thing that I believe more deeply fuels fans’ desire to play TES 6 is the smaller moments that the devs clearly put a lot of heart into creating, whether players notice them or not. Some of these moments don’t even have dialogue since they aren’t scripted. Bethesda created these beautiful worlds not knowing when players would stumble upon their coolest parts, but they still made them, hoping the players’ hunger for adventure would guide them there. You don’t know when they’ll occur, but should you dare to enjoy the ride enough, they will.
One of the most hauntingly beautiful moments to me was a surprisingly simple one. It took place soon after I began playing Morrowind and decided to stray from my expected path to pursue a sidequest of my own making. Day gave way to night, and for some reason, I looked up, and there it was, a huge and menacingly beautiful blood red moon. This was long before games had photomodes and social media was a thing, but I had to find the best angle for a rare screenshot.
How many games nowadays make you stop and stare just to marvel at their beauty for a while, temporarily freed from your duties to the main quest gods, or those of the PlayStation Trophies? Though it might feel like nothing in text, most players who were fortunate enough to stumble upon the blood moon likely still cherish that memory.
What’s the greatest quest in Elder Scrolls history?
We should probably go beyond just talking about one great moment and refer to a great questline. I might be wrong, but I’m pretty sure I never heard anyone talking about any quest in the series as much as they did about the Dark Brotherhood’s questline in Oblivion. And I agree.
I won’t spoil it, not because I’m secretly a member who knows what happens when secrets get spilled, but because it features some pretty cool twists and turns that you should experience yourself. Quite a testament to the quality of these games that one of the most popular missions is one you can easily miss while beating the game’s (considerably less thrilling) main questline.
Great Elder Scrolls moments expand far beyond the games themselves
I remember once reading that to come up with the world and plot of Morrowind, writer Michael Kirkbride spent a lot of time completely high on Skooma, Moon Sugar, and Sleeping Tree sap’s real-world counterparts, if you catch my drift. There was even a very convincing, hilariously unbecoming photo of Kirkbride making the rounds to prove that. I won’t share it here because the man doesn’t deserve the unflattery, but I assure you it’s but one Google search away.
Though the photo is real, the story isn’t, officially, at least. Still, to anyone who’s ever ventured into the eerie world of Morrowind, the wild dev tale will always remain head canon, one of such power it’s deserving of preservation via real-life Elder Scroll. That’s the thing about a game like Morrowind: one that features so much magical whimsy it spills out, creating meta lore that goes viral in the community to the point that nobody is really sure whether it’s real or not. I’ll take that over the repetitive memes about arrows and knees any day.
And what about you, what is the greatest Elder Scrolls moment in your opinion, or the most underrated one, the one you can’t believe didn’t touch others in the way it touched you?
