Ranking the best Bethesda games is kind of a tough ask, as the studio earned its reputation as makers of some of the best RPGs around. After a checkered decade of making and publishing poorly received games such as Home Alone and Terminator 2029, Bethesda settled into a groove with its Fallout and Elder Scrolls franchises. Staying in a groove usually means creative decay for most studios, but Bethesda found a way to innovate and even push the RPG genre forward in some cases – despite stripping it back in others. Most modern Bethesda games hold up surprisingly well, and even the ones that launched in a terrible state are better now.
IHRA Professional Drag Racing
After shipping Morrowind, Bethesda went back to its 1990s roots of making and publishing sports games of questionable quality for almost three years. The first of these was IHRA Professional Drag Racing, which was, well, a drag. It launched to poor critical acclaim, but Bethesda and the International Hot Rod Association made one more in 2006 before, thankfully, moving on.
The Elder Scrolls: Blades
Blades is excellent if you want a streamlined Elder Scrolls experience. The award-winning mobile game sends you through dungeons and haunted forests on a quest to rebuild your hometown. Like Shelter, there’s a lot of series lore in here, and it’s perfectly suited for handheld play. There’s just not a whole lot here.
Fallout Shelter
Shelter suffered from Fallout 76’s fate of launching with hardly any content, but Bethesda gradually fixed that issue in the following months and years. Shelter is a solid little mobile experience for what it is, a fun base builder with some surprisingly strong ties to Fallout lore. The downside is that, like any live-service game, it gets a bit stale between major updates.
The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall
Now, there’s not really anything wrong with Daggerfall, certainly not like Bethesda’s IHRA games. It’s just tough returning to it now. There’s no fancy Xbox enhancements for Daggerfall and no modern version, so it looks rough and plays kinda rough too. There’s still a lot of charm and innovation here, though. Daggerfall is absolutely massive, and while it’s missing the signature bizarre sidequests that make modern Elder Scrolls games so interesting, the main quest is pretty darn good.
Fallout 76
Fallout 76 did a better job leaning into the exploration-based gameplay that Bethesda apparently wanted from Fallout 4, with a silent hero and a much more interesting world – once it stopped being terrible, that is. 76 launched in such a barren, broken state that it was almost not worth picking up for a good six or 12 months afterward. New content, better missions, and regular events made it a solid MMO in the end, though.
The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion
Oblivion might not be quite as immersive as Morrowind, but it dials up the narrative weirdness and dives into a substantial amount of Elder Scrolls lore. The main quest sees you trying to close portals to another dimension, a task full of Daedric lore and horror.
In between that, you’re solving murders, buying a haunted mansion, getting trapped in paintings – and that’s just a small handful of Oblivion’s off-the-wall quests. It’s a bizarre juxtaposition of quirkiness with the main story’s seriousness, and it makes Oblivion even more memorable as a result.
Fallout 4
Fallout 4 is about as far away from Fallout 3 as you can get without completely reinventing the series, and whether that’s a good thing depends on what you want in your Fallout. If you’re keen on exploration, building, and a better main story with streamlined choices, then Fallout 4 is great. If, like me, you prefer your Fallout with more RPG elements, skill checks, and complex dialogue trees, it feels a bit like a downgrade.
The DLC expansions are much stronger, though.
The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind
They say the first game you play in a series is the one that ends up your favorite, but there’s a really good reason why people’s love for Morrowind is more than just nostalgia: immersion. Morrowind lacked some quality-of-life upgrades like prevalent quest markers and easy fast travel, so if you wanted to find something or someone, you had to pay close attention to the land, the people in it, and the clues they gave you.
Sure, it’s clunky and time consuming, but you learn so much about Morrowind in the process and feel like you’re acting in that world that it’s almost worth the inconvenience.
Starfield
Starfield is Bethesda’s first new franchise in over a decade, and while it’s tempting to pass it off as Fallout in space, that’s only half the story. It is Fallout 4 in space in the sense that Starfield pares back the RPG elements and places a heavy emphasis on exploration. However, Bethesda also tries tackling more ambitious themes, and the faction quests are some of the best the studio’s ever written – if you have the patience to get to them.
Clunky fast travel and time consuming menus make getting around the galaxy a chore, though Starfield mods will undoubtedly fix some of these issues in the months following launch.
Still, the sense of freedom, the improvements over Fallout 4‘s exploration, your companions, and, most surprising of all for a Bethesda game, the main story make it one of the studio’s better achievements
Fallout 3
Bethesda took a sizeable risk with Fallout 3 by turning an isometric, top-down RPG into a first-person shooter. That risk paid off. Some of the most memorable moments in games come from Fallout 3, including your first step outside the vault, and Bethesda added a grim undertone to its quirky quests. Your first big choice comes just minutes after leaving the vault – will you blow up an entire town for the sake of business or risk murder and mayhem to save innocent lives? It’s an extreme example, though hardly the only one of its kind in the game.
Fallout 3 also keeps some of the first two games’ deeper roleplaying elements with personal traits and stats, so your quest, successes, and failures feel more personal and unique as a result.
It sure is brown, though.
The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim
There’s a good reason Bethesda ported it to nearly every conceivable platform. It’s got the freedom of Starfield, the bonkers quests of earlier Elder Scrolls, and the exploration of Fallout 4, but with more rewarding secrets to uncover. Wanna be an assassin? Go for it. You can save a village, buy a home, solve some dastardly murders, or help some snobby wizards cloistered in their exclusive guild before trotting down the way and join the legion in their effort to keep Skyrim from seceding.
There’s a metric ton to do even in the base game. Then the Anniversary Edition added fishing, making it a proper RPG at last, and the DLC expansions even weave in strands of lore from earlier Elder Scrolls games.
It’s unpredictable, but never overwhelming, and you always feel like there’s something new and exciting to discover – usually because there is. The Skyrim mod scene exploded like few others as people improved the game and put their own spin on it, and Skyrim inspired some of the biggest games in the 2010s, including Breath of the Wild.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
It’s an exceptional game and Bethesda at its best.
