The Elder Scrolls is one of the most illustrious sagas in video game history, which is perhaps why Skyrim has been ported to everything short of a calculator over the last eight years. However, although Skyrim and its predecessor Oblivion are vast oceans containing a wealth of wonderfully intricate curios, their oft-overlooked older sibling Morrowind is a bottomless lake, its boundless depths plummeting into the territories of magic, secrecy, and the unknown.

Since Morrowind launched in 2002, players have been exploring its every nook and cranny, desperately seeking to unravel its most intimately hidden secrets. Perhaps the most accomplished of these Morrowind mystery hunters is Redditor OccupyTamriel, who has discovered countless hidden treasures buried in Morrowind's deepest recesses.

"I started playing Elder Scrolls when a very dear friend of mine told me about the series," OccupyTamriel tells me. "I needed a lot of time to get used to Morrowind - the sheer complexity of the world and the mechanics, the invisible per-attack dice roll, and just being lost and making no progress were extremely off-putting."

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To mark the end of the 2010s, we're celebrating 30 games that defined the last 10 years. You can find all the articles as they're published in the Games of the Decade archive, and read about the thinking behind it in an editor's blog.

There's something mournful about roaming the wilds of the Mojave, but maybe that's to be expected from a game that starts with you getting shot in the head. Like an irritated poltergeist, you're unleashed onto the wasteland to claim vengeance on those who wronged you. Or not, if you're like me - and make it your sole mission to find and save your would-be murderer Benny.

This is what Obsidian got so right about Fallout New Vegas. Somehow, the game's able to anticipate exactly the sort of decisions a player wants to make, often before they even know it themselves. I was constantly surprised at the options presented to me, which frequently veered into the ludicrous and naughty. Do I want to take Fisto for a spin before delivery? Yes, of course I do.

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To mark the end of the 2010s, we're celebrating 30 games that defined the last 10 years. You can find all the articles as they're published in the Games of the Decade archive, and read about our thinking about it in an editor's blog.

It's hard to think of a game that's been subject to just as much revisionism as Skyrim. Maybe that's to be expected, given its dizzying success. The game is everywhere and its cultural reach is almost insurmountable - so much so that the jokes about climbing mountains, taking arrows and porting to toasters have all been unfashionably irksome for much longer than they were ever funny in the first place. And with all that success comes the inevitable and insufferable "not that good actually" crowd.

But they are wrong! Skyrim is good, actually. Exactly as good as everyone says it is. And it is good for a lot of reasons but none of them as truly special, I think, as its world - or rather, more specifically, the ineffable rules that bind it. There is an intangible realism to Skyrim's world that I haven't really felt in a game of its budget and scope since. It's in the mechanics of it - the literal mechanics; the basic billiard balls of the physics - and the best example I can think of, for some reason, is pushing people off a ledge.

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I visited Obsidian Entertainment a couple of weeks ago for the reveal of the studio's first game for new owner Microsoft. If you remember, The Outer Worlds was published by Private Division, Take-Two's label for partnering with independent studios (Obsidian was independent when the deal was made). This was, then, a significant moment.

The game itself was a bit of an anti-climax - Grounded, a small-team survival game with a Honey I Shrunk the Kids hook - but I still got an opportunity to nose around the studio and see what changed post-acquisition and since I visited in August 2017.

The answer, in a nutshell, is "not a lot", which is encouraging. Obsidian still resides in the same office block in the eerily perfect city of Irvine, California, and still occupies the same amount of office space. It's still a bit tatty, which I like, and the only real sign there's now Microsoft money behind the studio is a pile of boxes with computers and monitors in them.

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Five of the Best is a weekly series celebrating the poor old parts of games we tend to overlook. Not the glitzy bits but the supporting cast. Things like crowds - whoever stops to think about a crowd? And how do you think that makes the crowd feel? But the games they're in wouldn't be the same without them, so let's big them up a bit, shall we?

Also, I want your ideas! I want to know what you remember when you read the title of this week's piece, the things that spring to mind. Don't worry about what I think, no one ever does, but do jump in the comments below. We've had some lovely discussions and you've remembered loads of great details about games.You can find all the previous Five of the Bests in a handy archive.

So, on to today's five. But how to summit up...?

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OK, so I know Eurogamer's actual birthday was two days ago, but as is our style, the Eurogamer video team is once again Late to the (birthday) Party.

Over the past three years, we've been introducing each other to our favourite (and/or least favourite) games from yesteryear as part of our Late to the Party series. During that time we've shared our love (and/or hatred) for over one hundred and fifty different games and thanks to this, we've been able to make a compilation episode of LTTP that features one game from every year that Eurogamer has been alive.

In this video, Aoife, Zoe and I are joined by some friendly video team faces from the past (who?!) as we play our way through the 20 years worth of games, including 1999's Dino Crisis, 2006's Gears of War and 2017's PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Basically, if you want a healthy dose of nostalgia (or just want to feel rather old) this is the video for you!

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The people behind Skywind have released a gameplay demo of the mod - and it's pretty impressive.

The gameplay video, below, shows off how the modders have recreated Morrowind in the Skyrim engine. We see the player pick up a bounty in town, head off out into the wild and into a dungeon to kill the target before returning for a reward.

This is classic The Elder Scrolls stuff and on the face of it not particularly groundbreaking, but there's a level of polish here we don't often see from mods. The music, voice acting and town AI is all present and correct, and we even get to see some spear combat.

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The volunteer-based group TESRenewel has released a new teaser trailer showing the incredible progress it's made on the mod to remake Oblivion in the Skyrim engine.

Skyblivion started life back in 2012 with the aim to bring The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion to a new generation of gamers, and seven years on it's clearly made some great progress, though no news of when we'll see a playable version just yet.

"We have been hard at work these past few years and recently a lot of that work has fallen into place, finally shaping up to what we can call a proper video game," writes project lead Rebelize. "It's been a long ride but we are finally at a point where the end is almost in sight.

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Five of the Best is going to be a series! Every Friday lunchtime, UK time, we're going to celebrate a different incidental detail from the world of games. The kind of thing we usually just WASD past, oblivious. But also the kind of thing which adds unforgettable flavour if done right.

Potions! We've been drinking them for years. In games I mean! I hope you haven't been knocking them back in real-life, they're bad for you. Imagine drinking something which alters your behaviour - how ridiculous! But potions we've been drinking for years. Red ones, blue ones... They're so common they've become a universal language. We don't even really see them any more. We just slosh them back when needed. Gulp!

But every so often, we do see them. Once in a while, a memorable potion pops up. Maybe it was a potion which typified a game for you - the port-key to remembering an adventure. A tonic from BioShock, perhaps. Or maybe it was one which made a character drastically more capable, or one which changed who - or what - we were. Can you think of any now? Good - hold onto that! Because I want your input below.

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After hours trekking across the wasteland, swatting away bloatflies and squashing hordes of ghouls, the end is in sight. Or at least Hoover Dam is. It's the intimidating final stage
of Fallout New Vegas, and no matter your path until this point, you'll have to pick a side and fight an explosive battle to irrevocably change the fate of the Mojave.

A fate that is reported, rather than told, through a series of end slides - before you're taken to a save from before the battle. Ah.

It's a slightly frustrating ending, particularly when post-game content is so often used in RPGs to display the impact of a player's decisions. Even in Red Dead Redemption 2 (not an RPG), you can still find special encounters in the epilogue depending on whether you helped certain people in the past. It's possible to leave a tangible mark on the world, and it shows your decisions went beyond the moment to have long-term repercussions.

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