So, what is so enticing about the Elder Scrolls lore?

[Ruprekt]

Actually one of the things that sets it apart from other fantasy games is that the apparently repetitive ideas are usually given some pretty cool twists. There's no idealism in the elves like there was in tolkien.

Well, the 'idealism' in Tolkein re: the elves is kind of the point. The elves are a perfect first creation and so on. It's retarded when you try and work that into a swordnsorcery or DnD-verse but then ... DnD is retarded anyway.

But yeah, Morrowind does have a genuinely interesting spin on things: High Elves are eugenicists. Wood Elve are cannibals. Dark Elves are more fleshed out with politics of empire vs tribe vs a trinity of living gods.

---

It's still childish however compared to the witcher, and real art is childlike not childish.

An author like Tolkein invents a new language to name his characters: Facile and childish. Sapkowski on the other handnamed ciri after a child porn website he used to frequent.

 

[Mastermind]

Well, the 'idealism' in Tolkein re: the elves is kind of the point. The elves are a perfect first creation and so on. It's retarded when you try and work that into a swordnsorcery or DnD-verse but then ... DnD is retarded anyway.

I don't think it would be retarded if they actually tried to implement that in the actual gameplay. I remember one LOTR scene where the fellowship is trudging through heavy snow while Legolas is walking on top if it as if it was the ground itself. Instead of stuff like that we get humans with pointy ears and +2 to dexterity.

 

[1eyedking]

ITT people don't know how to judge literature.

ES lore is pure tripe and fan-fiction. Very, very low quality. For starters, it's mostly written in a very monotonic amateurish style. For seconds, the material itself is shit. If you want good writing in a FPS perspective game, try Thief.

You can find more literature in that Hammerite chant's metaphor than in all of TES 'books'.

Case closed.

 

[RK47]

So...

How many Dragon Breaks do you have in your saved games folder?

http://fallingawkwardly.wordpress.com/2 ... nd-part-2/

Highly recommended. I was ignoring the first part but reading onward to part 2 was worth it.

 

[octavius]

Lore in ES is shit. As is in almost every western RPG/CRPG game, good or bad by codexian standards. It's all generic Tolkienesque anglo fag shit, with your standard mainstream fantasy western shit like elves, good-vs-eeebil!, dragons, and what not. With Skyrim they are moving deeper into that territory for obvious sales purposes. If one thing western RPG players can be accused of, even old-school hardcore ones like some here on Codex, is that they are extremely xenophobic when it comes to lore material inspired by non-Tolkienesque non-western sources. They do NOT like to leave their comfort zones which are populated by standard high-fantasy shit found in every RPG in the west from the dawn of time. Hence, the lack of interest in far-east, or even Slavic MMO's by anglo RPG players. Give them their Harry Potter fag shit, even though it's the same shit they've seen in the movies/games over and over again, and they'll be happy little shits.

...
..
.

But at least the characters look like real people, unlike the cartoon figures with spiky hair, wary faces and ridicilously oversized swords, surrounded by ridicilously cute fluffy creatures. If I have to choose between extremely formulaic JapCrap and western RPGs set in generic fantasy world, the choice is easy for me as a westerner.

 

[octavius]

I have a follow up question.

In what ways has Elder Scrolls: Oblvion improved on the lore, or changed it?

I played Oblivion for at least 20 hours and don't recall anything about lore.

Basically, the lore is not important in Oblivion since it's mainly targeted at 13 year old consoletards.

But OTOH Oblivion does improve on one thing that I personally think is more important than lore: NPC AI. The Radiant AI (even though it is nowhere near as advanced as it was hyped) and the Factions system makes Oblivion a better game than Morrowind, IMO.
Morrowind has a more interesting game world, but it's highly static, with everything revolving around the player character, and with absolutely no interaction in between NPCs. Oblivion's world, while not the jungle province promised in the Morrowind lore, is much more dynamic and unpredictable, and apart from the MQ the world does not revolve around the player character.
(Yes, the level scaling was very bad indeed, but fortunately that is easy to fix if you're playing on a PC.)

 

[dextermorgan]

But OTOH Oblivion does improve on one thing that I personally think is more important than lore: NPC AI. The Radiant AI (even though it is nowhere near as advanced as it was hyped) and the Factions system makes Oblivion a better game than Morrowind, IMO.
Morrowind has a more interesting game world, but it's highly static, with everything revolving around the player character, and with absolutely no interaction in between NPCs. Oblivion's world, while not the jungle province promised in the Morrowind lore, is much more dynamic and unpredictable, and apart from the MQ the world does not revolve around the player character.

 

[Teepo]

I was joking by asking if Oblivion improved the lore.

I guess the question I was wondering was "Does Oblivion even pay attention to the lore?" It doesn't violate it in anyway, does it? So it doesn't really do anything to the lore besides have much less of it?

 

[octavius]

But OTOH Oblivion does improve on one thing that I personally think is more important than lore: NPC AI. The Radiant AI (even though it is nowhere near as advanced as it was hyped) and the Factions system makes Oblivion a better game than Morrowind, IMO.
Morrowind has a more interesting game world, but it's highly static, with everything revolving around the player character, and with absolutely no interaction in between NPCs. Oblivion's world, while not the jungle province promised in the Morrowind lore, is much more dynamic and unpredictable, and apart from the MQ the world does not revolve around the player character.

 

[Commissar Draco]

Morrowind has Romans, Jap niggers, Frenchies, Vikings, jewish butthurted Elves who hate all, canibal elves who're most sympathetic of all elves despite being all rogues and whores, Nazi elves bent on becoming the ubermensh throu eutanasia and eugenics, punk orks who're pariah elves whose lifes were made literaly shit by demon and and steampunk dvarfes who were elves too and disapered all mixed up with gnostic cosmology, political plots, house feuds, racial and religius conflicts, furries and scalies sex. What not to love.
BTW Oblibion faction were shit only four to join and but you coud advance in all at once.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Eh...I think you could say it presents Dagon as the Devil, when he just represents destruction and that's not considered to be always a bad thing in the lore (destruction also means change, maybe for the better).

 

[dextermorgan]

Exactly.

 

[octavius]

Exactly.

 

[made]

Dwarves (that weren't in fact dwarves) were pretty intriguing in MW. Apart from that I dunno, forgot most of it.

 

[Commissar Draco]

Dwarves (that weren't in fact dwarves) were pretty intriguing in MW. Apart from that I dunno, forgot most of it.

The Dwemer were Tolkien gnomes - their names mean deep elves in Cyrodilic. I whish I would forget Obliobion.

 

[JarlFrank]

I was joking by asking if Oblivion improved the lore.

I guess the question I was wondering was "Does Oblivion even pay attention to the lore?" It doesn't violate it in anyway, does it? So it doesn't really do anything to the lore besides have much less of it?

It does violate it. Violate it with giant metal dildos penetrating each of its holes, while Pete cums all over its face and Todd flogs its back with a multi-headed whip.

Cyrodiil was supposed to be a jungle. They retconned it in order to make it into generic fantasy land. Imperials were similar to Romans in Morrowind, but Oblivion made them into generic boring pseudo-medieval fantasy knights. The political scene of Cyrodiil was completely fucked, too, with the different provincial lords doing nothing at all and there being no political activity from the chancellor and the council, either. Also, the population density is completely fucked since there's only very few cities in the fucking capital province of a huge empire, and the villages are only about half as big as Seyda Neen and there's only a handful of them around. And the imperial city itself is a fucking joke, too - what was supposed to be a huge Venice-like city occupying the whole central island, it was a rather small city without any canals.

LORE RAPE EXTRAORDINAIRE

 

[Eyeball]

TES series has good lore. The reason for this is because it is actually fairly well integrated in the game instead of being merely thrown into a generic orcs and elves setting as an afterthought and alluded to occasionally.

For an example, take this scenario. Your party is ambushed by orcs, your ranger cries out "It's the orcish followers of the god Fahghotaz!" In most RPG games, you might then want to ask "Who the hell is this Fahghotaz?" to which the game would respond "Shut up and kill some orcs, they give XP."

In Morrowind, however, the game would respond more on the lines of "So, you don't know who Fahghotaz is? Did you miss the 600 allusions to him in previous dialogues, the dozens of books strewn all over the place mentioning him, the numerous temples dedicated to him or the fact that you can ask literally every single character in the game about him and get varying degrees of information from each one?"

The background lore and deities in the TES series are thus a much more integral part of the game than in most other RPGs - you even get the option of conversing with and doing quests for several gods and the fact that reading books give you skill upgrades also encourages at least skimming of a lot of text giving you background info.

Fuck, I wish the new game would be more like Morrowind.

 

[CappenVarra]

I'm far from a TES expert (perish the though), but it's my impression that TES lore at its best is lucid insanity produced by a madman of Clevian magnitude. On the other hand, TES lore at its worst is non-lucid insanity produced by a madman of Clevian magnitude. Or possibly a dictionary randomizer script (http://sourceforge.net/projects/prosper/files/0.37/). Just read "The 36 lessons of Vivec" online and you'll get the idea.

 

[SCO]

Actually about the 36 lessons ... ahfuckit

 

[Mastermind]

BTW Oblibion faction were shit only four to join and but you coud advance in all at once.

You could do the same in their morrowind equivalents.

 

[Mastermind]

I was joking by asking if Oblivion improved the lore.

I guess the question I was wondering was "Does Oblivion even pay attention to the lore?" It doesn't violate it in anyway, does it? So it doesn't really do anything to the lore besides have much less of it?

It does violate it. Violate it with giant metal dildos penetrating each of its holes, while Pete cums all over its face and Todd flogs its back with a multi-headed whip.

Cyrodiil was supposed to be a jungle. They retconned it in order to make it into generic fantasy land. Imperials were similar to Romans in Morrowind, but Oblivion made them into generic boring pseudo-medieval fantasy knights. The political scene of Cyrodiil was completely fucked, too, with the different provincial lords doing nothing at all and there being no political activity from the chancellor and the council, either. Also, the population density is completely fucked since there's only very few cities in the fucking capital province of a huge empire, and the villages are only about half as big as Seyda Neen and there's only a handful of them around. And the imperial city itself is a fucking joke, too - what was supposed to be a huge Venice-like city occupying the whole central island, it was a rather small city without any canals.

LORE RAPE EXTRAORDINAIRE

Most of the shit you mentioned isn't lore rape in any sense of the word, just shitty design and restrictions thanks to it having to run on a console.

 

[ElectricOtter]

BTW Oblibion faction were shit only four to join and but you coud advance in all at once.

You could do the same in their morrowind equivalents.

... Except that to advance in guilds in Morrowind, you actually had to improve your skills in the guild's specialty to advance

 

[JarlFrank]

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.

 

[octavius]

BTW Oblibion faction were shit only four to join and but you coud advance in all at once.

Four guilds, you mean?
Factions is another thing.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Don't bother playing daggerfall, it's not worth the trouble. Just read the books.

Don't listen to this faggot. Daggerfall is the best game in the series.