I like Morrowind, the story was interesting, had mortal gods vs old gods vs modern religion as a major theme and everything looked alien. Add conflict between the 3 major houses while also having the empire trying to bring guilds and expand their influence while the locals are very xenophobic - you also root for the xenophobes. I think it could make a great series with a lot of intrigue and nuance.

Morrowind.

I want to see people's reaction to the Dunmer's habit of slavery and keeping plantations despite it being blatantly illegal.

None of them are great, IMO, for the same reason that the Fallout TV show they're doing is almost certainly going to be trash (even if they kept all the woke nonsense out of it, which we know Amazon is pathologically incapable of doing) - at their core, the games are about individual player choice and experiences. Translating that to a TV screen just doesn't work because then it's Generic McGenericSon doing the main questline in the most generic way possible, losing 90% of the charm of the games (with one exception).

Going worst to best (and assuming the main 5 games):

Daggerfall is far and away the worst. Bethesda had to invent a space/time implosion to get a canon ending out of it, so trying to do it as a TV show would just end up souring people.

Skyrim is second worst - if it is just the Alduin arc it could maybe work, but if you pull the backdrop of the civil war and the Dominion out it the setting becomes a lot more of just generic fantasy. If the civil war and the Dominion are included, though, whichever way the story has the protagonist react to them is going to upset a lot of people (even though Ysgramor definitely had the only correct opinion on dealing with those pointy-ears). And parts of the main quest get weakened heavily without that backdrop (there's no need for the Graybeard peace conference, and Delphine and Esbern's caution becomes pointless. You might be able to make the embassy quest work but even that becomes rather silly without the political backdrop for providing a reason to not just slaughter the Thalmor to get the info)

Oblivion and Morrowind are roughly equal for me, as maybe doable but with big issues. For both, the main quest pulls out a lot easier than Skryim's does, but there's other problems.

For Oblivion, the biggest issue - and Bethesda did this some in Oblivion and ESO did it even more (at least in their trailers) - is that Hollywood will go hog-wild with Dagon = Satan which is not how it should be. Second is the issue that a lot of people have with the game - Oblivion Gates get real repetitive, real fast. If you limit it to just the Kvatch gate and the Great Gate it would solve that problem, but then your story about a daemonic invasion of the world will feature perilously few daemonic invaders. If you do include a bunch of gates (say, adding in the Allies for Bruma optional side mission where you close a gate for each major city), though, then the protagonist gets to do basically the same thing 8 times and by that point audiences will be yawning. Honestly, to adapt something from Oblivion, I think Knights of the Nine would work best (but, as with Skyrim, it risks becoming rather generic at that point)

For Morrowind, the main quest would work the best as stand-alone IMO but I just do not trust them to get the environment and the inherent ... alien-ness (is that a real word?) ... of it right. Plus, a lot of the charm (at least for me) is in books and drawn-out conversations and I don't think multiple episodes of "protagonist discusses metaphysics with Vivec" would go over well.

Which leads us to the last game, and the only one I think could work well - Arena. There's not much in the main quest that couldn't be adapted fairly easily, there's not much in the way of choice or branching paths, and pretty much all the side quests are randomly generated and pretty generic anyway so they could get added in pretty much anywhere if needed. And, on top of that, the main quest makes brief stops in each of the provinces but never spends much time or goes into too much depth in each of them. As a result, you could have 1-2 episode set-pieces in each province, show some cool stuff, and then leave to somewhere else and the next cool set piece, which seems to be the way Hollywood likes doing things.

Oblivion with the constant back and forth between planes would be fun. It would also give a long runtime for seasons as a wanderer in Cyrodiil.

Come Nerevar, be your friend or traitor, and consider the resurgence of Dagoth Ur, the god, and also the on screen displays against filthy Khajit and Argonians that could be. What a sublime and intoxicating innocence.

The premise is flawed. Why would you want there to be an adaptation in the first place?

I’m sorry, but why would you want that? What is this obsession with having video games be turned into movies or TV shows?

General spoilers for Morrowind ahead.

As much as I love Morrowind the fact that the plot is close to Wheel of Time, in terms of the Nerevarine being the Elder Scrolls version of The Dragon Reborn, means Nerevar would get the Rand al'Thor treatment but with actual gender swapping and not just some stupid convoluted idea that Nynaeve, or any random woman, could in fact be Lews Therin Telamon.

Throw in the prophecy about Nerevar returning to save Morrowind from shit going bad and the encroaching Imperials means you also have a very likely Daenerys 2.0 white saviour plot going that modern day writers would wank themselves silly over since the native residents are the Dunmer, also called Dark Elves because their skin is the colour of ash for plot reasons.

Wouldn't surprise me if under such a production that the leaders of some, if not all, of the Great Houses ended up a particular shade of gray that was more convenient for Woke purposes while the protagonist friendly Dunmer were otherwise shaded.

Even in the best case scenario, I don't think it would work out. High fantasy is excessively difficult to produce in film; no one can ever make the sets, costumes, or props right, and you can forget about the creatures and magic spells looking good for years to come. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is the only one I can think of that pulled it off, but not only was that a massively ambitious passion project for the director, but the magic in Middle-Earth is very subtle and nebulous and only a select few individuals can actually use it, which helped keep the setting grounded. You can't really pull that off in The Elder Scrolls, where magic is so common that even a pauper can buy a small spell or spell scroll from the local shop, where humans frequently intermingle with lizard people, cat people, orcs, and three kinds of elves (yes, I know orcs are a type of elf in TES, sue me), where multiple god-like figures constantly meddle in the mortal realm for shits and giggles, and where people can actually visit these extraplanar worlds often belonging to those gods. To say nothing of all the trippy metaphysical stuff going on with the creation of Mundus, the nature of the gods (both Aedra and Daedra alike), the general fragility of time that has caused contradictory and paradoxical effects to occur (called Dragon Breaks), and whatever the fuck was going on in the 36 Lessons of Vivec. There's a lot of outrageous stuff in this franchise, and while it's fun to partake in them in a video game, making a movie that looks good and feels comprehensive with them is a whole other matter entirely.

I think the best thing to adapt from an Elder Scrolls game would not be to adapt the main story of any particular game, but on one of the smaller-scale stories found in the guilds or expansions, where the stakes aren't so high (and where they don't need the associated game's epic hero whom you play as to get involved). Of note, I think some highlights would be:

• The Thieves Guild from Oblivion, where the heist of a sacred magical artifact is plotted to undo the ancient curse placed on the Grey Fox.
• The Bloodmoon quest from Morrowind, where a free agent goes to the isle of Solstheim to find work assisting with the mining operations there, only to be swept up in a werewolf hunt staged by Hircine.
• The Dawnguard story from Skyrim, where a guild of vampire hunters form to combat a rising vampire threat.

Another option might be to adapt the many books and short stories you can read in the games. I quite like the idea of a fantasy anthology TV series where every episode tells its own standalone tale.

The problem is adapting games can't work on a 1:1 as film is inferior to games as they lack the interaction of games that can pull a player into the world when a movie of the same story can not.

If you were to do it, you're best off doing a Dead Space downfall or a Halo Forward unto Dawn where you explore a side character more and flesh them out that attempting to adapt verbatim. For that you could do the time between Oblivion and Skyrim and explore how the Empire ended up in the state it was in Skyrim.

I'd rather have a series set somewhat outside the well establish lore of the existing games. That way, if they screw it up, no big loss. It can be discarded and handwaved away as a casualty of a dragon break. If it's done well though, some of its story can bleed back into future iterations of Elder Scrolls games.

In any case, I want to see some speculative gnostic bullshit. Roll back to the early days of the Empire, during the Reman dynasty. The plot would follow the exploits of the Imperial Mananauts in their explorations of Aetherius and Oblivion. The early seasons would be more episodic in nature with the Mananaut corps interacting with the inhabitants of various realms, learning about the nature of their existense and how the various planes of reality relate to one antoher. Occasionally, they'd fly a little too close to the sun and run afoul of a Daedric Lord or a member of the Magna Ge.

Throughout their travels, they'd be at odds with the Aldmeri travelers riding on the wings of their Sun Birds. The foundational schism between the belief systems of the Mer and Men would constantly see them exploring similar places and concepts, but with different goals in mind. The Aldmeri would be preoccupied with collapsing existense back into a previous state of unified divinity, similar to what the Aldmeri Dominion wants to do, while the Imperial Mananauts are on a more expansive endeavor. A Psijic Endeavor, if you will.

In the later seasons, one of the prominent characters would achieve CHIM, and after exploring his new understanding of existence as a dream while maintaining his sense of I, he'd achieve apotheosis via Amaranth. This intrepid Imperial Mananaut turned God would become the new Godhead of his own dream, and the new reality of this dream would be the basis of a whole new spin off series.

Depends what you mean by "best adaptation".

None because they would make the hero a one legged gay downs syndrome eskimo midget or something and the bad guys would be the empire of White people.

honestly, none. Elder scrolls quests are written very game-like, were the protagonist is all-powerful and solves everything immediately. It's not due to bad writing, but simply because game quests require that so that the player can fill in the blanks of the struggle and hardship through gameplay. Skyrim is the biggest offender, with every quest boiling down to the player being some kind of chosen one.

That said, an original story set in the Elder scrolls world and lore would be pretty cool.

Arena or redguard by virtue of structure.

Oblivion would make for an easy, straight forward plot for a movie. Maybe not the "best" candidate, but it's certainly the most approachable and expedient.