And next, all of the talent anybody cares about leaves the company?

[A Black Falcon]

Um aren't they more like Eye of the Beholder and basically one of those "click here to move exactly one block and here's another automatically generated room with no wall to your left and a chest in front of you" thing? I mean that's still more or less 2D graphics isn't it?

No. Full 3d movement in all of the PC games. You spend a lot of time in the cities or overworld running around, and the first two games have action-style "move the mouse in a swing motion while holding down the button to attack" combat (well, and menus for magic). How would that work with tile-based movement? It wouldn't... Arena absolutely had full 3d movement and 3d graphics. Okay, so it couldn't do diagonal surfaces, so buildings all had flat rooves you couldn't see, and there were no half-levels in building heights so they were either one floor or two, and all building interiors continentwide were all based off of the same models so only the town exteriors were different between regions (these graphical issues were all fixed in Daggerfall), but it was definitely 3d. :)

Also, ratings. Arena was T-rated, Daggerfall M-rated (thanks to the nudity, presumably -- no other game in the series has it...), and Morrowind and Oblivion T-rated. Morrowind went backwards on mature content.

As for the scale part, as Wikipedia says...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elder_S...Daggerfall

Daggerfall is the largest Elder Scrolls game to date, featuring a game world estimated as being 161,600 square Kilometres (63,125 square miles) with over 15,000 towns, cities, villages, and dungeons for the player's character to explore. According to Todd Howard, Elder Scrolls programmer, the game's sequel, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is 0.01% the size of Daggerfall, but it should be noted most of Daggerfall's terrain was randomly generated. Vvardenfell, the explorable part of the province of Morrowind in the third game has 6 square miles. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has approximately 16 square miles to explore. In Daggerfall, there are 750,000+ non-player characters (NPCs) for the player to interact with, compared to the count of around 1000 NPCs found in Morrowind and Oblivion. It should be pointed out that the geography and the characters in these later games are much more detailed.

An automap was implemented to help players navigate through the lengthy tombs and ancient underground fortresses. Players have to visit approximately 6-8 areas in order to finish the game, although a total of 47 areas are present. A limited array of building blocks were used to construct the towns and dungeons, causing some reviewers to complain about the game's monotony. In 2002, Morrowind, the third game in the series, responded to this issue with a smaller, more detailed world with unique-looking cities and NPCs with greater individuality.