Every race has their heroes and their villains, their good eggs and their bad apples.

I ran Old Orsinium for the first time the other day (late to the party as usual). The problem doens't seem to be with the orcs as such as with their Daedric Prince. That dude only cares about bloodshed and chaos.

To expand on my previous comment, I play Arena and Daggerfall a lot, and it had occurred to me that Orcs were portrayed as villains in those two games, since Orcs weren't one of the playable races back then.

I began my Elder Scrolls experience with Oblivion, followed by Morrowind and Skyrim, all three of which let a player choose to play as an Orc character if desired, and which also had a lot of friendly Orc NPCs to interact with. But in Arena and Daggerfall the Orc NPCs were always enemies-- although I suppose in Daggerfall it was possible to have non-hostile interactions with Orcs if your character's skill level in the Orcish language is high enough (which I've yet to attain).

But then I realized that in Arena and Daggerfall I was actually having to fight more non-Orc enemies than Orcs. Due to the way Arena and Daggerfall were limited in their portrayal of enemies-- by which I mean the graphical depictions-- enemies are often more identifiable by their classes than by their races, such that an enemy Mage or an enemy Nightblade always looks like an NPC of a given race, which is sometimes more apparent when fighting female enemies. For instance, I think female Warriors in Arena look like Nord women-- because of their blonde hair-- whereas I assume that Mages look more like elderly Bretons.

But the point is that in Arena and Daggerfall you're having to fight a lot of enemies who belong to "friendly races" in addition to enemies who are obviously Orcs or other non-human and non-elf races. And of course you must fight a lot of enemies from all the races in the later Elder Scrolls games. So that helped me feel less conflicted about being forced to kill Orcs in Arena and Daggerfall.

It's interesting to observe how the portrayal of Orcs has changed throughout the Elder Scrolls series, with Arena being closest to the old RPG tropes about Orcs being monsters, then Daggerfall adds the possibility of having non-hostile interactions with Orcs, then Morrowind actually lets you play as an Orc character if desired. And the intellectual capacity of Orcs has also gone through an evolution, with Morrowind (the first TES main-series game that lets you play as an Orc) and Oblivion portraying all or most Orc NPCs as being either rather dim-witted or inherently savage.

I think ESO has done a good job of fleshing out the whole backstory or lore of Orcs. This is most obvious in the Orsinium DLC and some of its quests and lore books, which is to be expected since that DLC was pretty much all about fleshing out the Orcs and their place in the Elder Scrolls universe. But even in the base-game zones there are NPC conversations that hint at the complex and often problematic ways in which Orcs are viewed by the other races.

I got into the Elder Scrolls series when I was looking for a game for which I could make my own mods. I was going to start with Morrowind, but Oblivion had just been released, and was easier to find in the shops. I looked at the starting stats of each of the races, and picked a female Orc as having the lowest starting number for anything in the table. 25 for Personality, giving me the most scope for improvement.

I've played Orcs in every one of the games, except Arena. For Daggerfall, I had to mod the game to do that. Arena never had the tools, so I couldn't complete the set.

When you're making mods for the games, you're not restricted by any bias the developers may have built in for a race, so mine could become Arch-mage, Champion of Cyrodiil, or whatever I wanted. One of them has her own Stronghold in Skyrim.

In ESO, I have several Orc characters, and many of the others have also done the Orsinium quest line, and the region's side-quests. So for me, Orcs are a properly complex race, where not everyone matches the stereotype. In fact, the better quests acknowledge the stereotypes, and subvert or invert them.

You're definitely missing a lot of lore OP.

Orcs aren't barbarians for the sake of being barbarians, they (and I'm being very broad here because there's also plenty that don't fit in with this) are outcasts because they've literally been cursed to be pariahs. Everyone looks down on them and exaggerates their barbarity; that's the entire point. Play through Orsinium and you'll see this isn't the case at all. Orsimer, like most TES races, intentionally try to push the boundaries of the stereotypical version of their race from fantasy (e.g., Wood Elves being strict carnivores/cannibals rather than peaceful vegetarian tree people).

Orcs don't wander around in tribes with a "might is right" mindset because they want to. They do so because they literally cannot form a lasting empire - Orsinium is always doomed to fall.

In times when they are able to band together, they build incredibly sophisticated societies with rich culture, order, and social hierarchies.

Not to mention in TES canon, they're some of the finest crafters around. You also have plenty of notable examples of intellectual Orcs throughout the game, like the Gourmet or Urag gro-Shub.