Skyrim is worse than Oblivion in every way

Why not a Star Wars movie about the Venetian Republic in the Renaissance?

Actually, that would be more likely than an Elder Scrolls game with--well, okay. I take that back before I said it, because Daggerfall is basically exactly what you said, just not set in the Imperial City. But post-Daggerfall Bethesda will never produce anything like that ever again.

 

And what's the point of making game in Cyrodiil if you can't get into *THE* Imperial City?


Besides, this would eliminate key advantage of such approach - not squeezing major portion of a continent into an area the size of someone's backyard.

Also this.

The plot could mainly revolve around player sniffing around Mythic dawn. Say, someone picked off some of Uriel's heirs and player is suspect.

The oblivious invashuun could effectively be squeezed into grand finale.

Actually about half of the Morrowind MQ was just footwork and information gathering, and a lot of faction quests dealt with just petty inter and intra faction backstabbing.

 

Hopefully they do Elsewyr or Black Marsh for 6. They need to get back to the 'alien' and away from the cookie cutter western/european fantasy stuff.

 

I'm with Draq about Skyrim, even if he never really says it, I'll say it for the both of us: Skyrim with Requiem and your favourite sex mod IS ONE OF THE BEST GAME EVER. FUCK JAESUN, HE DIDN'T EVEN PLAYED IT.

Au revoir, et à chacun sa merde.

 

I don't think the choice of an interesting province would necessarily translate into an interesting game. Pre-Morrowind (the game), Morrowind (the province) sounded like a pretty dull place. The nice bit is that they actually improved and expanded the lore and made it more interesting than what had been hinted at so far (grey wasteland). They were successful in doing so because they had people who could actually write and who knew their literature on board, and because they weren't afraid of scaring away the casuals with weird/outlandish stuff. Cyrodiil, on the other hand, was worsened/made less interesting to suit the tastes and expectations of casuals looking for a generic "fantasy" experience.

Since Bethesda is after the casual console crowd, and Toddler is well aware that exotic/outlandish = less sales, we can expect them to ruin pretty much any province they use in the next game to suit that agenda.

Take Elsweyr, for instance. A confederacy of tribal cat people whose economy is mostly based on dealing illegal drugs, ruled by a unique khajit with a giant mane and whose inhabitants can vary wildly in shape, size and appearance based on how the moons are aligned when they're born? Yeah, not likely. They'll probably just make a generic province, slap a few turbans on it, add a load of sand and make the game some generic "Ahab the Arab" bullshit with cosmetically altered radiant quests (Go to X Oasis and kill the evil Sheik of the Burning Sands).

A province is only as good as the writers behind it.

 

If they do Elsweyr they're going to butcher the lore on kitty species. Not that they haven't already by ignoring it all anyway, I guess.

I really doubt they will ever do Valenwood, Black Marsh or Elsweyr though. Too alien and too hard to do. TES Online is going to butcher them anyway though I guess, so might as well roll with it and make Valenwood look like Northern California or whatever other bullshit they do.

I would bet on Summerset Isle with a story about the Thalmor or post-Thalmor society, or a return to High Rock and Hammerfell for the realistic look.

 

I don't see how they could portray the "some of the best khajiit wizards look like common housecats" thing from Mixed Tactics without making it look like some anime.

Same reason you make a game set in Morrowind but don't send the player into the mainland, where the capital is? Nothing prevents a future game from being set into Cyrodii as welll, either.

 

Nah, that would be Hammerfell.

But wait...

 

The difference is that Imperial City is by far the only place of interest in the province as established by the Lore, and that it's pretty much the only chunk of Cyrodiil that could be isolated as self-contained gameworld based on geographical barriers - the same way as Vvardenfell was.

There is no way you could make a game set in Cyrodiil not including the IC, without it being glaringly arbitrary and contrived especially seeing that there is not much to do in Cyrodiil if you exclude the IC.

It would also sidestep the problem of downscaling.

 

Coincidence? I think not!

 

Eh... I mean if they were realistically proportioned Chorrol could be a massive city and still be dwarfed by the IC. You could keep the IC an amazingly huge and bustling place of the imagination and still have the game set in and around Chorrol, a huge city itself, and the villages in it's immediate surroundings. Natural borders is more the core issue I think, yes, but even in Oblivion there is a lot of border area that is only blocked by invisible walls. As long as the map shows where the world ends I think players accept it.

None of this matters of course since they made the whole thing the game world already, sadly.

 

The thing is that, frankly, no one fucking cared about Chorrol because no one fucking heard about Chorrol prior to Oblivious.
It could be on Pyandonea for all that matters.

OTOH some of Vvardenfell's settlements and locations have been in game back in Arena - I'm speaking of Ald'Ruhn (Old Run - phonetic mangling), Balmora (Stoneforest - literal translation) or Maar Gan (Markgran Forest), then the lore on the province was expanded and built upon in Redguard. At Redguard's release Vvardenfell was reinforced as important landmark (remember that you were raiding DU for a piece of macguffin in Arena), most important one, at least judging by the volume of dedicated text in PGE1. It was also naturally *THE* place where a plot centered around DU, HoL and a bit of ancient treachery had to be set.

The only established places potentially holding similar relevance to the plot of Oblivion or any its modification would be Planes of Oblivion and the Imperial City itself. No one fucking cares about Chorrol that was, along with Cheydinhall, Bravil and pretty much all but some of the Colovian settlements, only established for the need of this plot and yet only play tangential or otherwise replaceable role in it. It shouldn't have been in game because it's not a game about it, while Morrowind was a game about the Isle of Vvardenfell.

Wouldn't it have been better if it could do without those?

It easily could have.

For reference:
http://www.imperial-library.info/content/pocket-guide-empire-and-its-environs-first-edition <- read

Seek in-game references to lore established by PGE1 in Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim.
Check for contradictions as well.

Find the one game that doesn't belong.

Skyrim's worst problem, by far, are those damn dragons.

 

Well who cared about the little villages in The Witcher and Witcher 2 before CDP made them interesting questing locations? I would actually say the lore would have been better if the IC remained a well described and amazing place just off camera that Chorrol felt a lot of effect from.

In the end we don't really disagree. I would have loved it if Oblivion took place solely on the center island and used realistic proportions with a massive bustling city and a lot of the surrounding area. I agree with you 100%. What I am more saying is that if they couldn't do the IC any more justice in that scenario, and indeed the technology and their engine wasn't there to do it right, I would have rather seen a large but still relatively realistically small Chorrol with it's surrounding area and the feel of the IC being close-by. The boundaries could have been done decently with mountains to the North and West, water to the East and the South being the only issue... perhaps use clever fencing or rivers there. It would have honored lore more to say the rain-forests and such were on the East side predominantly.

In the end this is all a discussion in hindsight of how Oblivious could have done the world better. Given the tech they had I think their mistake was doing too much, in addition to wanting to make a standard looking fantasy world. Both those things could have worked out better if they focused on a smaller city and villages/farms around it, and focused on one part of Cyrodiil that could have allowed lore to remain untainted in other areas.

 

The thing is neither Chorrol, nor any of the cities save for maybe Kvatch play any significant role in OB's plot, and even Kvatch was problematic in that it broke game's pacing (lvl 1-2 weak-ass valiantly stopping daedric mass rape of a burning ruin). You could easily contain the entire action to the IC and suddenly you'd have a whole different and far more interesting game to design.
OTOH you couldn't just isolate the plot from the IC, not when it involves assassination of the emperor, succession and daedric rape of the province culminating with massive showdown.

Witchers needed all those villages and other locations because the trail needed to lead through somewhere and they were instrumental for fleshing out game's themes.

 

Damn, now I want that. TES6: Alinor expansion, maybe, in line with Bloodmoon, SI, and Dragonborn (though it is a bit big for that).

Though the Maormer would probably end up like in MarkyDaySaid's comic and less like the abominations they're described as being. For much the same reasons. (Is NSFW.)

 

Oh, Vivec isn't the capital? Color me surprised. Morrowind's themes are so well done that I didn't even realize that Vvardenfel isn't the cradle of the dunmer nation. Everything is well focused and the source of all struggles in the game come from Red Mountain. Both in History and actual gameplay.

We can't have that in an Oblivion where the focus of the daedra invasion, the Imperial City, is cordoned off, can we?

 

I'd keep the city cordoned off for most of the game (Ocato: GET OUT OF HERE STALKER) and maybe allow access to the Dragonfire temple part of the city at the ending (since the climax of the plot is when Dagon finally manages to open portals inside it). That way you could keep the Imperial city in the game without having to turn the entire gameworld into the city and its immediate surroundings (which sounds interesting in theory but I'd rather not have a million sewer systems as substitutes for caves and dungeons).

Yeah, yeah, DECLINE ARTIFICAL BARRIERS IN MAI ELDER SCROLLS, suck it down.

 

I dont know, i like sewer levels

 

The capital of Morrowind is (or was?) Almalexia, of which Mournhold (Tribunal's setting) was a sort of city-within-a-city.

It would only be as bad as the people designing it. Which, admittedly, doesn't sound very promising considering that these people gave us Oblivion in the first place. But I must reject the whole premise on the grounds of it being boring, and therefore the wrong thing to do. Just nixing the city doesn't make things better. Just... not worse.

You could even use sewers well, if you were so inclined. Throw in a few squatters, thieves, and the like. As the Daedra invasion (Main Quest) progresses, more and more people end up in there, or in the waterfront or something like that.

Also a Dark Brotherhood base, a lich's tomb, some overpowered goblins... wait, wrong game.

 

Well obviously the plot would have to be tweaked... the Emperor escapes the mayhem in the IC to Chorrol perhaps, the showdown could take place in a massive shrine to Akatosh or something. I'm talking a fundamental restructure of the game that would fit the tech better but still allow them to have a pretty traditional fantasy setting, which they obviously wanted.

 

Valenwood? Ignore 75% of previous lore, reference Oblivion and copy-paste tons of forest, then shamelessly loot designs and stylings from the thousands of Tolkien-esque elves you find in pretty much every other fantasy game. They're already going that route from what I've seen in TES Online.

They'll use a slightly more cosmopolitan version for Sumerset, and High Rock will be Cyrodiil with mountains.


Fuck, have the next game located in Orsinium. Life pretty much perpetually sucks for the Orc nation (they got hit *again* near the beginning of the 4th era), and in place of some big bad threat the main quest could be the player acting as a privateer and adventurer looking out for their interests. Exploring, looting and cataloging ruins along the borders of Skyrim and Hammerfell and bringing back the choose bits to your handler. Every once in awhile you have to deal with political fallout from crossing into the other nations and stealing their shit, whether or not to go through proper Imperial channels in your business, etc.

 

Would be a nice change of pace if the protagonist/player weren't 't3h chosen one' this time.

 

If Bethesda want something epic, every once in awhile the player could stumble upon a macguffin in one of the ruins, setting off a small series of quests dealing with the fallout. By the third or fourth time this happens (end game, it's not going to be Deus Ex Machina-Mart), the situation has changed a bit. You'll be encountering rival expeditions or groups from the nations whose ruins you keep pilfering, or even Agents if you chose the 'piss off the Empire' route. They know you have some strange magnetic pull with items of power so where you go they follow. And the people you work for start considering if all the scrutiny you're attracting is worth it. Artifacts won't do much good if they bring down another invasion on everyone's heads.

 

The "unlucky everyman that gets involved with sinister plot by accident but fortunately he has the right set of skills to save everyone" protagonist is just as banal as guys who get to be the hero because THE PROPHECY SAYS SO, to me.

Morrowind protagonist's "Chosen One" status is highly debatable, Oblivion's "Chosen One" was Martin Septim ( ), Skyrim's protagonist "Chosen One'-ness comes from possessing a rare ability.

 

I just want to play what i want to play, not what they want me to play... if that makes any sense.
I dont want to HAVE to be the dragonborn, i dont want to HAVE to be a friend of martin septim. Because it gets old, rather they focus on factions and their motivations instead of trying to accommodate the whole world and events to revolve around the player.
I dont want to be the one that has to stop some cunt from taking over the world, maybe i want to help the dude that wants to do it, then kill it at the most critical moment and take all the glory to myself? maybe i want to serve the dude that wants to take over the world, for years, before deciding i want to sit on his chair. Point is, some cunt wants to take over the world, feel like doing something about it?

They shouldnt even care about cannon, they should just make an official one and let you screw with the events in the game as you see fit and are able to.
Ahhhh, a man can dream i guess, Hope obsidian gets around to craft a world like they did on NV in future releases.