Five Fun Facts: Elder Scrolls Edition!
It's been another huge week for the RPG world - especially if you're a Bethesda fan! We finally got a pretty deep-dive look into their upcoming brand new IP, Starfield, just a week after the release of their new Elder Scrolls Online expansion, High Isle!
And in honor of our friends at Bethesda (and our Pinfinity+ Gaming subscription drop this month!), we've decided to kick off another edition of Five Fun Facts - this time we're taking a romp through everyone's favorite fantasy RPG universe: Elder Scrolls!
Let's jump into five things you may not know (or maybe you do, show off!) about the iconic Elder Scrolls franchise!
Bethesda, and it's iconic Elder Scrolls franchise, are no slouches when it comes to the impressive voice actors they get to join their games. Elder Scrolls Oblivion had none other than Sir. Patrick Stewart voicing one of its main characters, and other entries in Bethesda's catalogue include actors like Liam Neeson, Ron Perlman, and more. But if you recognized the voice of Paarthrunax in Skyrim, well it may be because it's one of the most notable and iconic video game voices in history: it's Charles Martinet, the voice of Mario!
So Tamriel is a HUGE continent (more on that later), but some Elder Scrolls fans may not know that Tamriel is only one continent on the planet of Nirn, which is home to several large continents! We've heard tales of these far off lands, but we've yet to explore them in any meaningful way - all this is to say that for the foreseeable future there is lore and locations for Bethesda to pull from for any of their new Elder Scrolls titles, and I'm here for it!
So we've covered that Tamriel is really big, and that Nirn itself is a massive planet that has yet to be fully fleshed out and explored. But despite games like Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, and even ESO exploring areas of Tamriel's massive landmass, it was the very first entry in the series that boasts the largest in-game map. That's right, Elder Scrolls ARENA! Released in 1994 on DOS, it has the largest explorable map, thanks for some impressive procedural generation. However, it's unconfirmed just how big the map is - some say it's as big as SIX MILLION SQUARE MILES but the game begins to bug out and crash as you explore farther and farther away from towns. We'll never know just how big this map actually is, but we do know it's bigger than Morrowin, Oblivion, and Skyrim combined!
This might be one of my favorite video game factoids OF ALL TIME, but did you know that Bethesda announced a challenge before Skyrim came out, that if anyone named their newborn child Dovakhiin they would get access to free Bethesda games FOR LIFE. I think most thought this to be a funny joke/prank, and that Bethesda wouldn't actually do it, or that no parents would every name their child after the Dragonborn, but lo and behold... In November of 2011 a child was born into this world that was named Dovakhiin! And Bethesda made good on their promise: Dovakhiin, and his parents, have Bethesda (and Zenimax!) games free for life!
Well you've maybe learned more about the planet Nirn today than you knew before, but here's some more info: Did you know that Nirn has two moons? And those two moons have a big impact on Nirn (not unlike how our one moon impacts things like tides, etc). Nirn's moons I'm sure have some impact on the local Lycanthopes, but it definitely has an impact on the Khajiit - in fact, depending on the alignment and positioning of Nirn's moons, a newborn Khajiit will take on completely different forms, breeds, physical characteristics, etc. A newborn Khajiit very often will have almost no traits that match up with their parents. How crazy is that?!
