Bethesda's Biggest Game Ever Is Free And Remastered

Before , before , before and , before your parents even knew how to make you, there was . It was, and remains, Bethesda’s biggest ever game, and now a fan made rebuilding of the entire vast world in Unity . Oh, and it’s entirely free, and won’t be destroyed by lawyers! This new is an almighty achievement, and exactly the excuse you needed to return to Tamriel.

originally released in the magical gaming year of 1996. It was an astonishing moment in gaming history, a year when video games demonstrated they were capable of achievements vastly greater than anyone had dared imagine. It was the year of seismic releases like , , and and . Gaming’s potential exploded exponentially, and few games exemplified this better than Bethesda’s second entry in legacy.

2023’s has roughly 1,000 planets you can visit. 1996’s features locations to explore. Spread across High Rock and Hammerfell, it features everything you’d expect from a game, with free exploration, guilds to join, religions to associate with, a reputation system, and of course the ability to get turned into a vampire or werewolf.

This was all set in a game world the size of the United Kingdom, said to be 80,823 square miles big. It’s hard to better show the impossible vastness of this than in , which superimposed the map of (2011) over that of (1996): All of this is now playable in updated, prettified graphics, along with full mod support, thanks to .

10 years in development, the team behind it on the last day of 2023. And best of all, it’s entirely free, thanks to Bethesda’s in 2009, to celebrate its 15th anniversary. In 2022, it . To play , you need to , then , and unzip the latter and . You’ll then, likely, want to install approximately 480 billion mods, .

But importantly, having just tested it myself, you don’t to—the game works perfectly at launch, in enormous resolutions, with a clean, crisp UI. Bethesda intended to be a game people could just keep playing forever, with its enormous size and hundreds of hours of quests. The developer probably didn’t think that would be literal, but 27 years later it’s proving extremely valid..