z o o l said:
When I first played Morrowind a few years ago, I had never heard of the Elder Scrolls and didn't know squat about the lore. Though the lack of gameplay turned me off after some time, I really enjoyed discovering Vvardenfell and the lore - and that's why I come back every 2-3 years to the game for another playthrough (which, needless to say, I never finish). And yet, when you think about it, the ES lore is fucking cheap. It's both a rip-off - with the Imperials being pure copies of the Romans
Except they are Romans descending from Norse, dwelling in tropics and with visible elvish and Wapanese (Akaviri) influences, so the resemblance mostly boils down to nomenclature, legions and vast cosmopolitan empire.
and full of boringbanalshit ideas with the usual elves
Which ones are the usual?
Exclusively carnivorous, canibalistic wood elves?
Vaguely Mesopotamian, steampunk dwarf elves?
High elves with their extremely rigid and codified society and eugenics induced 90% infanticide rate?
Dunmer?
reptile-people from the swamps
Reptile people from frozen wastes make little sense.
Almost as cliched as pink people.
polymorphic furries with forms tied to when they were born during lunar cycle
Fix'd.
Smart trolling is welcomed too.
DraQ, please forgive me
But the trolling in the OP is weak.
NEVAR!1
Lunac said:
Lore in ES is shit.
It's all generic Tolkienesque anglo fag shit
good-vs-eeebil!
Mastermind said:
Oh, I should add that I love the vibe I get off necromancy in the game. They did a great job (especially in morrowind and oblivion) of making them feel like they are despicable, disturbed individuals working with corpses
Umm... There is no single blanket stereotype for necromancers in TES.
Sure, most necromancers are pretty nasty types, as you'd expect of people obtaining corpses using criminal or morally disagreeable ways (like forceful disruption of vital functions in living subjects), but just being necromancer doesn't automatically make you a nasty fuck in TES. It isn't even illegal in most provinces provided you don't disturb the peace and obtain your corpses from legitimate sources (you can apply for deceased/executed criminals or have someone donate their body).
.Sigurd said:
Teepo said:
I played Oblivion for at least 20 hours and don't recall anything about lore.
Monstly because almost all books are (censored) copies from Morrowind and Daggerfall. The little that has been added is full of contradictions and conflicts with the older lore.
And with themselves.
JarlFrank said:
Really? I think it's more like inability of the post-Morrowind Bethesda or laziness.
It has to run on an XBox 360, yes. So? If the area is a forest or a jungle makes no big difference. Since it uses a cell-loading system, it doesn't matter how many cities or towns are in the world, so they might as well have increased the population density. All the small details like farms and small villages that Morrowind had are missing in Oblivion. The city could've been much larger and more Venice-like, as the previous lorebooks said - heck, Assassin's Creed 2 runs on an XBox 360, too, and it has the actual city of Venice with all its canals and pretty impressive size in the game. Also, the fact that there are no politics and faction interactions whatsoever is just laziness of the writers, nothing else.
I think MM meant that his mind is shittily designed and restricted due to having to be able to run on a console. It suddenly makes sense now.
octavius said:
dextermorgan said:
octavius said:
I felt like I was talking to my 4 year old niece - the same well thought out arguments.
I'm sorry, did I actually make an argument? I thought I was just lolling at your post, which I at first presumed was written as a tongue-in-cheek joke. You see, it's not often someone picks out RAI of Oblivion - possibly the single greatest contributing factor to the game's overall over-9000 level of derp - as being advantageous over static NPC behaviors of Morrowind.
Ah, so you
can make arguments?
So how is MW static NPC behaviour advantageous? That they are easier to find? That they don't have accidents and die on you?
That passive passivity is less conspicuous and thus less immersion-breaking than retarded activity or some other act of active retardation.
You don't really notice that the characters are merely just standing or walking about all the time unless you stop and take a look, on the other hand it takes but a momentary contact to experience the full force of derp if you meet imperial foresters killing each other over a handful of venison or overhear conversation about benefits of everyone knowing how to pick locks.
The latter may also cause severe physical brain damage so I advise against launching oblivious just to see what DraQ is talking about.
The faction system is similar in both Morrowind and oblivious from technical PoV, and oblivious doesn't use it to any appreciable effect anyway despite technically using it to handle stuff previously handled by more case-by-case scripting.
Other than that the only improvements are that NPCs sleep and move around more and that they don't get stuck on protruding elements of vegetation as often as in Morrowind. They are still >10 years behind schedule when it comes to combat AI, but are also encumbered with brand new kind of profound mental retardation in non-combat situations.
To the point, though (regarding pre-derp lore, so discounting anything from oblivious onwards):
TES lore is in character - no word of god, but heaps of conflicting, fallible sources pushed by groups with their own agendas.
TES world is not kitchensink - unlike typical D&D settings you don't have shit squeezed in just because retards want ninjas or Aztecs.
TES world has few non-PC sapient races - there are no countless species of savages too dumb to avoid jumping on players' sword, but somehow persisting among much more civilized and organized groups that should either annihilate or assimilate them. In particular, on Vvardenfell the number of non-PC sapient species native to the material plane equals zero.
TES world is non-generic - even seemingly familiar stuff gets strange twists and there is plenty of non-familiar stuff as well.
TES worldbuilding is multilayered - you can dig pretty deep and find new stuff.
TES world has no moral absolutes - shades of grey are the very least you can count on.
There is a lot of intrigue and politics in TES universe.
TES world has good amount of internal logic.
Due to setting's history (it started out as cheap D&D knockoff, then gradually mutated into something actually interesting and unique), combined with exclusively in-character sources, it developed particular organic kind of consistency that characterizes things like scientific knowledge, real-life history and such stuff - it's very robust and can accommodate small changes without taking visible damage which is often the case of engineered settings that fall apart all too easily. It took oblivious to blow a hole in TES lore.
Metaphysics is kind of cool.
Teepo said:
I have a follow up question.
In what ways has Elder Scrolls: Oblvion improved on the lore, or changed it?
Oblivion has improved on the previously existing lore in following ways: