The Elder Scrolls franchise has been somewhat paused over the last decade. While Elder Scrolls Online continues to produce new content, the mysterious sixth entry in the main franchise has left fans waiting an awfully long time for its eventual release.
In the meantime, players who were too young to enjoy the older entries in the franchise have gone back and found them. Frequently, what they find is a lot of darkness. The Elder Scrolls games are known for including many dark missions, but sometimes other themes offset that darkness with humor, brighter visuals, or unusual music choices.
5 Morrowind
The third game in the main Elder Scrolls series is Morrowind. This was the first game to really level up the franchise, and it is still regarded with a lot of love by fans of the series. Despite being over twenty years old now, many gamers still return to Morrowind for another playthrough time and time again. There are a lot of missions and aspects to this game that appear light-hearted on the surface, like a sad sorcerer who has been imprisoned by his own magical companions. But players continuing on will discover this sorcerer was force-fed his former friends and realize the more terrifying darkness hiding in the depths of Morrowind.
The darkness of Morrowind is apparent between the deep lore, the political aspects of the story, and in particular, the Bloodmoon Expansion. Skyrim fans will be intrigued by this expansion, where the player helps to found Solstheim and has the option to become a werewolf. This darker storyline, and the other quests available throughout the main campaign of Morrowind, had a darker aspect and many surprisingly adult themes when compared with some of the relatively light-hearted Elder Scrolls games which were being released around the same time. For example, The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard had come out a couple of years prior to Morrowind and was comparatively a fun, light-hearted, colorful romp.
4 Elder Scrolls Online
The original base-game Elder Scrolls Online has given fans of the Elder Scrolls franchise a lot of joy while they continue to wait for Elder Scrolls 6 to be released. The MMORPG has changed the franchise and yet kept many things the same. The darkness of the previous games in the franchise has not been changed here, and missions like Questionable Contract stay with players long after they finish the game.
Questionable Contract sees the player help a mage hired by a village to clear a forest. If the mage fails, then his wife, a prisoner of the village, will be force-fed to him. There aren’t many quests quite that disturbingly dark in the game, but the player does also have to help the Argonians avoid being wiped out by the Aldmeri Dominion in what is clearly attempted genocide. Including this darkness, there are a lot of things that ESO does better than most MMOs.
3 Oblivion
The fourth main entry in the Elder Scrolls franchise is a heavily loved game, and fans continue to debate today whether it is better than the follow-up, Skyrim. Whatever players believe, Oblivion certainly isn’t as dark as Skyrim would later be, but it does have many disturbing themes and missions which catch players off-guard in a relatively happy, even unintentionally funny world.
The comedy, colorfulness, and fun of Oblivion is overshadowed at times by missions like “Baiting The Trap” where the player causes horrific pain, either physical or psychological depending on the choices players make, on some adventurers. Perhaps the worst part is that none of these choices matter, the adventurers all die as a result of whatever pain is inflicted upon them. There are other missions, such as one in Hackdirt where a cult is attempting to sacrifice a child, and the Sanguine quest which forces an entire party of people to strip. Both of these can be viewed with amusement on the surface but are in reality very dark quests that leave players stunned by the horrors.
2 ESO: Greymoor
The Elder Scrolls Online has had several expansions to date, allowing players to explore areas of Tamriel that haven’t been seen since the days of Elder Scrolls: Arena. But Greymoor, which allows players to return to Skyrim in what was a greatly worrying follow-up to the hugely successful game, was perhaps the darkest expansion to date.
Some of the darkest quests are set in and around Morthal, a place familiar to Skyrim fans, where paranormal sightings send the player on a journey to uncover frozen bodies, feral animals, and a death mage at the heart of it all. Two large quests need to be completed to uncover what is really occurring in Morthal, but it is one of the darker investigations players will engage in anywhere in Tamriel. Of course, the main quest in Greymoor focuses on a vampire lord devouring as many souls as possible, so the whole thing is fairly dark.
1 Skyrim
Skyrim itself is, without a doubt, the deepest dive into the darkness that any of the Elder Scrolls games have taken. Many of the missions lead players to dark deeds, particularly the sixteen Daedric missions which force players to engage in cannibalism, priest torture, companion murder, and worse. The game is bursting with violent opportunities for murder with countless great weapon choices.
But besides all of that, Skyrim itself is a dark and foreboding place living in dark times, with dragons returning and a civil war brewing. There is a huge volume of world-building to Skyrim. The game is much less bright or comedic than Oblivion, and storylines like the Dark Brotherhood which begin with the player murdering an old woman and being forced to murder a tied-up captive are incredibly dark. Players can choose lighter paths through many of the quests in Skyrim, and can role-play as a true hero, but it is entirely possible they’ll end up as a vampire or werewolf destroying countless innocent lives.