User blog comment:The Joker~/Is The Elder Scrolls series overrated?/@comment-3492791-20120914182908

Grammatical errors...must...look...away.

As an industry this is something that happens with every popular series. The older the series, the more credibility it earns, and reviewers have a tendency to let more get sweep under the rug. Most new games in a series get compared to the previous ones in it. Thus the game is rarely judged on its own merit. If you compare Skyrim to Morrowind, it seems to be lacking. But if you only look at Skyrim, it's not a bad game. It's a good game, even if not a great one.

And to be fair, not every single cave can have it's own personal quest and back story. The aesthetic differences make it good enough to be able to walk into one dungeon and be able to tell it's not the same one you were in before. They are distinctive enough that I can tell where it is just by seeing the dungeon (not like in Oblivion Xp).

Hype is a byproduct of ignorance. Hype is literally getting excited about something you know little to nothing about. Everyone wants hype, some of them get it. It's not a factor in the relevance of any work or series.

The bottom like is that asking if the Elder Scrolls series is overrated is sort of a trick question. Granted following a series shows the developer's progress as a game maker to see them evolve and get better (or worse in some cases), but not much else. In truth a series is just a collection of separate works that follow the same story or are set in the same universe. You don't judge someone by who their parents were (or at least you shouldn't), and you don't judge a game by the previous game in that series.