We’re all celebrating Microsoft’s acquisition of Bethesda, surely if you’re reading this it’s because you have a game from the company among your favorites, or have been mesmerized by incredible technical and narrative displays like Skyrim and Fallout, but the label also had much darker days that even brought it to the brink of bankruptcy.
Prior to Skyrim, Bethesda developed several sports titles such as the Wayne Gretzky ice hockey series for MS-DOS and NES and even several Terminator titles which were released under license. However, the company’s biggest step would come when they decided to branch out into adventure RPGs, an incredibly niche territory in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Elder Scrolls: Arena, which managed to conquer a fairly large audience and this pushed the directors of the developer to dare to make The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, which would become a resounding success that would give way to Morrowind, the third installment of the saga. Despite the success that the name Elder Scrolls seemed to impose, there were two not so auspicious titles that caused great economic damage to the company.
Bethesda’s success and experiences with The Elder Scrolls
Perhaps the oldest or most fanatical remember 1997’s ‘An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire’ and 1998’s ‘The Elder Scrolls Adventures – Redguard’, the original idea of which was to create some sort of expanded universe of The Elder Scrolls, in fact, in the Battlespire Handbook, Christopher Weaver, co-founder of Bethesda, referred to the game as “the start of a hybrid genre based on what players wanted.”
What happened to these games? Why are there no new adventures from these spin-offs? Perhaps this research will serve to answer these questions.
This conclusion about a “hybrid genre that gamers wanted” came from users sending (by physical mail) to the Bethesda offices on small cards that were included in those precious, giant boxes of PC games from that era that They included all kinds of manuals, maps, etc.
An Adventure Called Battlespire
In the case of Battlespire, for example, it was spent mostly in dungeons fighting creatures almost constantly, something believed to be, for many, Daggerfall’s best and for many others the worst. The game had levels, mostly labyrinthine, full of puzzles and battles. Occasionally there were platform sections too, which some cafe-headed devs must have thought was a great idea, but in practice it was about as nice as taking an arrow in the groin. On the innovative and positive side, we can say that the game already had multiplayer, something very unusual in those years.
While it graphically fell short of first-person games of the era like Hexen 2, as far as RPGs go, Battlespire included some great elements, like the ability to converse with various monsters (with voice and everything). ) in dungeons and even avoid fights if all went well. It was even possible to get the occasional side mission from them.
The Elder Scrolls from another angle: Redguard
Redguard’s case is quite different, for starters, it’s the first and only game in the Elder Scrolls saga that was designed in third person. It was set on a tropical island and had regular graphics for what was 3DFX technology at the time, which produced unpleasant jerks and gave very little fluidity to movement.
“I was in charge of Redguard, a game that I loved, but it was not good for the company. The period between 1996 and 2000 was very difficult, then Bethesda joined Zenimax and that brought us back to life.
Christopher Weaver and Robert Altman, the founders of Zenimax, however, indicated that the idea that Bethesda was nearly bankrupt by those two games was a bit of a stretch but that the investment in these titles was excessive and that several key programmers began to emigrate, for which they had to cancel several experimental productions.
The domino effect of these games even caused a delay in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind which for many was the straw that broke the camel’s back and, perhaps, what definitively sealed the fate of these separate editions of the main saga. The truth is that the development paradigm was also changing with the complexity of new titles and the cost of producing them with much larger teams. Perhaps inadvertently, Battlespire and Redguard were among the last ambitious productions to be made with a relatively small team of developers practicing what players wanted based on their recommendations on cardboard maps.