Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-11276487-20130713025241/@comment-3076045-20140123124301

Dark Jeto wrote: Elder Scrolls was still just an experiment back in Daggerfall. The first game, Arena, had just started getting a strong following and the creators wanted to see if they could pull off an actual series. Arena was made more for the gameplay than the story, since it mainly just used your standard RPG monsters and races. Daggerfall was when they started laying down the structure for a story, and Morrowind was when they began tightening it down and coming up with constants.

If it was a building project, Arena was the initial blueprint drafts being played around with until they found a good investor, Daggerfall was building the metal frame, and Morrowind was when they put up the walls, doors, windows, and began refurbishing the place. And every few years they just add another wing/floor onto it.

I feel that I must correct you slightly there. (Sorry)

Because there are two important additions that need to be made to that list, that help explain the major difference.

After Daggerfall, they began to further explore the series, and had what was (then, at least) going to be a bunch of spinoffs off the series. The first was Redguard, which was a first-person adventure. The second was Battlespire. Both of these were major flops, financially. This then meant that the company was on the verge of financial ruin.

Fortunately for Bethesda, a large financial backer saw the series' potential, and came to their rescue. (Ill give you a hint, it sarts with "Z").

Morrowind, then, meant that the company had the finances to pour a lot more time and effort into the development of the series, and focus on things that they probably wanted to do in the first place - which was to build up the lore around them (and yes, the constraints too). They couldnt really do that earlier, as the projects were financially nowhere near as massively funded. (There's a reason they used such a lot of random-generation software in those two).

Anyways, hope that helps.