The Elder Scrolls – Battlespire and Redguard Retrospective

A couple of Bethesda veterans, Chris Weaver and Julian Le Fay, recently had a chat with PCGamesN about two of the lesser-known entries in The Elder Scrolls series – Battlespire and Redguard. If you’d like to know more about how these projects came to be and why they haven’t been able to rival the popularity of the mainline series, you should definitely check the article out.

Here’s an excerpt to get you started:

Something that Weaver does remember, however, is registration cards, and that they played a big part in Bethesda deciding what to make next. If you grew up after the days when games came in great hulking cardboard boxes filled with tome-like manuals and other toilet-reading materials, registration cards were little questionnaire forms that often came with boxed games to get player feedback on what they wanted next.

“We were basically inventing a recipe as we went along, and we tried to be very responsive to the registration cards that would come in,” Weaver recalls. “And one of the criticisms that we had gotten was that Daggerfall was so large – certain things that we thought were going to initially give people the sense of expanse started having the opposite effect where they were getting tired of seeing the same repeated landscapes all the time.”

From Le Fay’s perspective, Battlespire was very much a side project – something to squeeze in between the ‘bigger’ titles. The game was essentially a hack-and-slash dungeon crawler, albeit before the mechanics really existed to make this feel great in a first-person format. “After the success of Arena, top management pretty much left it to us to decide what to do next,” Le Fay says. “So Todd [Howard] had the opportunity to do Redguard, and I had some time on my hands to start doing Battlespire.”