How to Play the Elder Scrolls Games in Chronological Order

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With a lineage spanning back to 1994, it’s difficult to talk about RPGs without mentioning Bethesda Studios’ flagship franchise, the Elder Scrolls. Whether your first adventure across Tamriel came while battling the vicious dragon Alduin in 2011’s Skyrim or you’ve been following the franchise ever since saving Emperor Uriel Septim’s life in Arena almost three decades ago, chances are you’ve dabbled in one of these seminal fantasy epics.

With so many Elder Scrolls games now available to play, any newcomers looking to get into the series are probably wondering where to start. Luckily, we’ve got you covered. Below, we’ve assembled a chronological timeline of every Elder Scrolls game and major expansion, showing you how to play the series in order.

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There are a total of 27 games and expansions in the Elder Scrolls timeline - 4 exclusively on PC, 18 on home console and 5 on mobile devices. All of these games are canon to the timeline, telling stories set in the fictional world of Tamriel. Although some span multiple provinces, each entry in the series tends to focus on a specific continent or region of Tamriel, whether that’s the murky swamps of Morrowind, the snowy mountains of Skyrim or the sunny meadows of Cyrodiil.

There are only two games that won’t feature on this timeline, and that’s because they don’t specify the year or era in which they take place. These are The Elder Scrolls Travels: Dawnstar and The Elder Scrolls Travels: Stormhold. Both mobile dungeon-crawler spin-offs are isolated from the events of any other Elder Scrolls game, making it very difficult to place them on the timeline. With that in mind, let’s run through the chronological order of every other game in the series.

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