[neilshevlin]

Morrowind: Dense, lot's of lore and immersion. More open, and less guided. I think at this time the cult of linear narrative was in it's infancy. And so you could kind of do more of what you wanted in Morrowind.

Oblivion: Brilliant for it's time in terms of world building, graphics and size. Famous for it's goofy elements, story line and characters. It still kept a lot of that attention to detail, but you could see it was starting to make tradeoffs.

IMO, As time has gone on, TES had traded size and grandeur for attention to detail, and Tolkien-esque world building. Skyrim was beautiful and a good continuation of the series. But it successfully struck a great balance between open world role playing, and commercial accessibility for audiences more accustomed to a single player linear narrative experience.

I'm too young to have played Daggerfall or Arena, so someone else would have to fill you in.

[kbenson]

Arena took place in all of Tamriel. Cities were procedurally generated from a seed if I recall correctly, so they could have buildings in same locations across games, but cities were huge and filled with random people (like over a hundred buildibgs, some probably had specific structures). You could walk for hours between cities, because the land was also procedurally generated, but mostly flat. This was doable because the game looks like minecraft with a bigger block size.

It feels like a cross between a few features of a modern TES game and a rogue-like.