Hi all. I have been a fan (at least an amateur) of The Elder Scrolls series, aka the Elder Scrolls, since TES III Morrowind (aka Mora), and, despite the development of the series from game to game, I watch with alarm its simplification. And we’re not talking about fast travel, we don’t have to use it, not about quest markers, which deprived us of colorful descriptions of quests, leaving only basic summaries of what’s happening in the quest log, but about a set of spells that our character can master in each part.
Morrowind and the hell of a level designer.
There are just a lot of spells in the Sea. In fact, there is an infinite number of combinations of spells of varying complexity, since we can craft the spells ourselves. We just go to a special teacher, select the effect of the spell, its strength and other properties, on which the cost of crafting and the cost of casting will depend.
What spells were these?! The most important thing is that we knew how to fly! You could just fly across the entire island. All cities were open, yes, with loads, but there were no walls that could not be overcome, the world felt united. Flight was needed to find both quest items (I still remember the storyline Dwemer ruins, where you had to fly to the second floor, where there are no stairs, to find the story item), and just rarities (I remember a bow hidden in a cave so that you had to fly to the very top and find a ledge). But it was not safe to fly, everyone who played a lot of Mora remembers the rock riders and their obsession. This must be one of the ways to balance the flight, which did not solve all the game’s problems anyway. But I wouldn’t want to make vertical levels knowing that there is a spell in the game that will simply allow the player to take a shortcut. However, the players tried to walk everywhere anyway, because the world was interesting to explore, here and there there were some unusual places or quests, the storytelling through the environment was still in its infancy, but it was definitely possible to entertain yourself.
There were useful spells for unlocking and locking locks. The latter was not needed, except for roleplaying or to improve spell skills.
There were interesting ones, like “blindness”, which simply dimmed the screen brightness, which was used on some damned boots that give blindness, but then double the speed of movement.
Previously, it really was a world of enormous magical possibilities and rare unique artifacts that one wanted to collect as a souvenir; a second copy might not have been found.
Oblivion and the last teleport.
You can list Mora’s spells for a long time, but for the most part they still migrated to the next part of the Scrolls, to Oblivion.
Let’s look at the change in the number and variety of spells in the TES world using the example of the school of restoration. Compared to 22 types of spells in Morrowind, here there are 16, not terrible, but clearly less. Now we can’t protect ourselves from the elements, we’ve apparently forgotten how.
This excellent site has a complete list:
https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/ru/wiki/%D0%97%D0%B0%D0%BA%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F_(Oblivion)
The teleportation and levitation point spells have https://senatorcasino.co.uk/login/ also disappeared. This is understandable, fast travel has been introduced here, there is no longer a need to teleport from the Mages Guild to the Mages Guild. Well, what about the surroundings?? What about the laws of the world that have been accepted by so many players?? Moreover, teleports remain in the magician guilds, but you can no longer put a point on the ground and transfer to it yourself. And in this part there are no carts or silt striders that you can ride on, in this part of Tamriel everyone moves on their own two feet (or on horses), except for magicians.
But how convenient it was to move not just to the main gate of the city, but precisely in front of the store owner, in order to quickly sell him loot. I can understand why it was forbidden to do this, because some houses simply won’t need to be sneaked into, but it would have been possible to prohibit placing teleportation points in buildings? At least only on the street, there’s nothing special about it. However, the game designers decided as they decided. One can imagine that this could also be due to the high scripting of the game, because in this part there are places where we are only for the plot, where we can’t return again. And there is also the world of Oblivion, where we can only get through the gate. And these same reasons deprived us of wings, or rather, flight.
Flight would introduce a wild imbalance into the game structure of Oblivion: the warrior must break through to the tower in battle and forcefully tear out the sigil, stepping over the defeated dremora, while the magician flies up and ignores everyone in his path. You need to get out of the besieged city in the story? Here, heir to the throne, take the flight potion, let’s drink it and fly away from here to a safe place.
No, unfortunately, flying would ruin everything. At least with this level design.
Fortunately, you can still craft cool spells, you can craft useful items by casting cool spells on them. Now you can cast by pressing one key on the keyboard, without switching to “cast” as a separate weapon, and there are still a whole bunch of unique items that you want to save for your collection and never use them.
Skyrim and the cursed/cursed gamepad
Many Western gamers moved to the sofas with their gamepads, instead of an overly complex keyboard and mouse. At least that’s what the Bethesda developers apparently thought when they made Skyrim.
They just took a scalpel and castrated the magic in this part. And with it half the loot. The number of effects available for casting can be counted by the legs of a centipede. I would say on my fingers, but that would be a lie, after all, there are more than 10 of them.
There are five schools of magic here: restoration, illusion, change, witchcraft, destruction.
And for example, here are all the spells of the school of restoration at the “Adept” skill level:
I chose this skill level because it has the maximum variety of spells; at “Expert” not all spells get their improved version (there isn’t even a spell for drawing 7 lines perpendicular to each other).
When leveling up the skill, the essence of the spell remains the same, it just becomes a little stronger. It’s as if the number of spells is more than nine, but, returning to Morrowind, there are only twenty-two types of restoration spells! Moreover, each can be made stronger or weaker.
The only clarification is that this does not include two spells obtained after a special quest for skill level 100, so +2, total 11. Eleven! Local magicians forgot half of the spells, it’s scary.
Follow this link to view the entire list of spells in Skyrim:
As you can see from the link above, the list of spells is much more modest and much more monotonous compared to Morrowind and even Oblivion.
By removing the mage guilds from this part according to the plot and lore, we were completely deprived of teleportation. Local magicians are a shadow of the magicians of the past, which, of course, can be explained by the locals’ dislike of magic in principle, which is also based in lore.
But as a player, I see degradation, because we could be quite powerful wizards from another region, gifted in magic, we could meet alien magicians who use the power that they gained while traveling in other provinces, but this is not here. It’s not for nothing that the quest line for the College of Mages (analogous to the Guilds of Mages in the singular) is as flawed as possible. You can literally become an archmage by being able to cast only a series of basic spells that are needed for the entrance exam and that’s it. Moreover, you can pass this exam using scrolls, like a bad student using cheat sheets.
But what prevented you from doing at least an arc of quests for each school of magic within the college of magicians? Here we calm the crowd with an illusion or, conversely, anger someone to start a fight. Here we need to call on someone who will fight for us, etc.d. And in the game there are ideas similar to this, take at least an optional labyrinth, where we need to use spells from different schools in certain places. But even there they immediately give us staves that can do this, why?? Why lead players by the hand?? Give them the opportunity to enter the labyrinth without the required spells, but with a hint of which ones will be required. Give intrigue of what awaits us at the end and an appropriate reward to show that everything was not just like that. But no, here is a piece of paper and 4 staves. You need to go through a boring labyrinth and cast spells at the right points, the end.
The only joy I’ve had when casting spells in Skyrim is the top tier spell quests. When you level up your spell casting skill to high levels, you can get a quest to obtain really powerful spells. They really feel like something magical, but unfortunately this is not enough.
Hammerfell and data extrapolation
Unfortunately, the series becomes simpler in everything, when playing for any class, but the world is still addictive. I recently started replaying Skyrim and have already played 150 hours in a couple of months, barely touching the main plot, everything is according to canon. I’m just afraid that in the upcoming sixth part of the Elder Scrolls there will be even more simplifications. It’s not that I’ve been waiting for a sequel every day for all these 10 years, but every day the degree of expectation will increase and it will be a shame if only three spells are available to us: cause damage, heal and hide.
After Starfield, the degree of anticipation for the sixth scrolls was diluted by the bitterness of doom. Will these same authors be able to do something cool?? Hardly. Only a grain of hope whispers: “They cheated for the sake of the publisher’s money, but they will make the scrolls well,” but this whisper is getting quieter.