Board Thread:Off Topic/@comment-24.158.236.107-20131005022905/@comment-93.109.251.174-20140711133435

Personally I'd say that if you want a good introduction to the older Elder Scrolls games, start with Redguard and Battlespire. They're adventure games, not open-world games, but Redguard in particular has a cracking story and they're both great fun.

In addition, Arena is barely a part of the series by today's standards. Its creation was a mess; it was supposed to be a completely different sort of game, and it got turned into an open-world game halfway through development. (The hint is in the name as to what it was meant to be.) Daggerfall is more TES-like, but Redguard and Morrowind are the points at which Bethesda started to solidify their current ideas about Tamriel and how it worked.

Daggerfall is pretty fun, although the towns and people are nearly all randomly-generated. From a modern perspective, it really hurts it as a game compared to Morrowind and beyond. The modern TES and Fallout games are known for the level of detail put into the landscape and the people (one reason why a single-player 'All of Tamriel!' game is never going to happen again... it'd take decades to make up to the standard we expect) and so it's a bit disappointing to walk around in Tamriel and find it bland and computer-generated. The Hackdirt conspiracy? The Rorikstead mystery? Drug paraphenalia under Caius Cosades' bed? Don't expect anything like that.

If you can get past that, seeing as it's free on Beth's website, go for it.