Thirty years of Tamriel, one console generation at a time. This is a real chronology, each entry follows from the one before it, so we've kept it a timeline rather than a list.
Bethesda Softworks' first entry began as a straightforward arena-combat game and grew, mid-development, into an open first-person RPG across all of Tamriel. Arena set the template the series never really left: go anywhere, do almost anything.
Set in the Iliac Bay between High Rock and Hammerfell, Daggerfall used procedural generation to build a map reportedly the size of Great Britain, an ambition the hardware of the era could barely keep up with, bugs and all.
A sharp turn away from Daggerfall's scale toward a smaller, hand-crafted, deeply alien island province of giant mushroom towers and ash storms. Morrowind is still the game most veteran fans point to when asked which entry felt most unlike anywhere else in games.
Set in the Imperial heartland of Cyrodiil during a Daedric invasion, Oblivion brought the series to a much wider console audience and introduced radiant AI systems that made the world feel like it kept living without the player watching.
Dragons return to Tamriel, and so does nearly everyone else. Skyrim became one of the best-selling games of its era, and for a huge number of players it's simply what "Elder Scrolls" means. It has been re-released across multiple console generations since.
A massively multiplayer entry set roughly a thousand years before Skyrim, letting a whole continent's worth of provinces (Morrowind, Elsweyr, High Isle, and more) be visited and continually expanded in one persistent world.
A mobile-first dungeon crawler focused on town-building and bite-sized combat, aimed at bringing the series to phones between the console-scale entries.
At E3 2018, Bethesda confirmed The Elder Scrolls VI was in development with a brief teaser trailer, and then went quiet on it for years while finishing other projects. That wait is the subject of Hall Three.
