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Col. Roy Campbell posted:Hold on, hold on: Akavir is the future? So the future invaded the past? And then I guess the past invaded the future? DRAGON BREAK. That's what's going on. TES lore is a delightful pot of insanity where everything that could potentially happen is sometimes true. This is the least bizarre thing about the setting as well. Archonex fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Feb 3, 2015 |
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Feb 2, 2015 23:22
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Zoe posted:As much as I'd love to see a game set in one of those provinces, at the same time I really, really don't want this because I'm afraid they'd get the Oblivion treatment and we'd just get generic nature-loving elves living in a forest, or generic cat warriors. For all the poo poo TESO gets it really isn't that bad lore wise. There's a ton of little lore nods scattered everywhere. And even the most batshit stuff seems to get some sort of explanation. Plus, you can go to one of the Bosmer provinces. And seeing the Bosmer in action on their homeland is amazing if you bother to actually chat people up. At one point I decided to talk to a Bosmer chef who was busy cooking at a party. She opened her dialogue with "It's not a party until someone gets eaten! Try my food?" in the most enthusiastic voice ever. 
Archonex fucked around with this message at 11:06 on Feb 3, 2015 |
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Feb 3, 2015 08:08
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Sekenr posted:Ah OK than I'm reminded of a joke about how some writers like to merge two words together in sci stories to make the setting seem more futuristic. Like a laser cannon becomes a lascannon and whatnot. This guy is going above and beyond that. He's taking terms from a fantasy series and transporting them into a sci-fi medium so he can merge them together or use them like it's no big deal. And just for a further mindfuck, those same sci-fi terms sometimes get oblique mentions in the fantasy version of the setting when someones travel back in time to gently caress things up and causes the resident god of time to have an epileptic fit. At least this poo poo only barely gets referenced in the actual canon. Reading his stuff makes me think the dude actually invented skooma in real life. Which is probably why only ubernerds sperg about it. Archonex fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Feb 3, 2015 |
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Feb 3, 2015 16:30
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Thanks Kirkbride, I kinda assumed that impossipoint detonations stippled across the Ix-Egg and its clutch-satellites ironically.
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SunAndSpring posted:So if you think about it, the plot of Skyrim is the following: Games Workshop ought to hire on Kirkbride to write lore for Tzeentch.
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Feb 4, 2015 01:07
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Reading up on Daggerfall I want all the poo poo that never got into that game. National wars with full blown sieges, vampire covens actually doing poo poo in the game world, the world actually changing instead of the events being background info (National leaders were actually assassinated at one point instead of it just being bullshit fluff you can hear about.), other NPC's working on the main quest while you are, the works. The game had a stunning amount of content dropped that probably would have put it on par on par for Dwarf Fortress in terms of being a living world. It's basically the Dwarf Fortress and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. of it's era in what it was apparently trying to achieve. poo poo, with the resurgence of retro games you don't even have to deal with people complaining about the lovely graphics. Archonex fucked around with this message at 12:39 on Jun 10, 2016 |
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Jun 10, 2016 12:23
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Chief Savage Man posted:The best part about Dawnguard is that the whole point of the good choices is to prevent a guy from blotting out the sun because it would be the most disastrous thing to ever happen then when it's done you can ask the lady for arrows that will blot out the sun and she's more than happy to make them for you. Then you blot out the sun, and it's spooky and people comment that it seems bad, then it goes back to normal and everything is fine. It's a bit old, but to be fair, you are one of the nastier types of vampires out there. Dawnguard is great like that. Your first impression of these guys is them literally messily dining on the still-living bodies (Look at them carefully when you first show up!  ) of some captives. By default, choosing to join them is basically saying you're at least a notch under "blot out the sun and cackle maniacally as the mortal herd withers and dies under your iron grip". It's just that it's an Elder Scroll game, so it doesn't comment on you being a bastard.Edit: I mean what's trespassing into a hellscape dimension and hacking off eldritch abominations, committing what's essentially patricide on both your parts, murdering the next to last member of an ancient species, possibly soul trapping the crap out of people after you learn what happens to them, and all the other crap you can possibly get up too compared to throwing up some shade for an hour or two? Archonex fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Jun 21, 2016 |
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Jun 21, 2016 16:29
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RBA Starblade posted:I still want to know which of the two dozen space satans I sold my soul to gets first crack at it. Even if one of them manages to beat the others and goes to grab it you've kinda got a gently caress ton of souls to spare by the end of the game. There's nothing saying that the Dragonborn can't just irritably wave them off and say "Here, take a dragon soul and leave me the hell alone." before getting back to slitting throats with Mehrune's Razor. Edit: Also there's some lore that implies that the Dragonborn is about as powerful as one of the weaker daedric gods at the time of the game. Clavicus only had access to half his power too. One can only imagine what an entire lifetime of eating dragon souls without any other dragonborn to compete with is going to make them be like. At that point it's less a matter of whether they can get his soul and more an issue of whether they even have the strength to take it. Archonex fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Jun 22, 2016 |
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Jun 22, 2016 00:30
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A.o.D. posted:having a poo poo ton of dragon souls didn't even slow down Hermaeus Mora. You beat the gently caress out of Miraak first, that's why. He was literally huffing nearby dragon souls to keep fighting you by the end. It was pretty obvious that he was on his last legs by the time Mora showed up. He basically had you do the work of killing the guy only to show up and gank the kill at the last second so he could try to bluff you on how powerful he is. There's all sorts of implications all over the game that the Daedric gods aren't really as powerful compared to the Dragonborn as they claim to be. Mora needs you to do the grunt work on a few jobs and it becomes apparent that he isn't always the all knowing seer-god he claims to be. Meridia needs you to kick a "mere mortal" out of her own temple, despite her imperious and condescending nature. Hircine may basically be a god of predatory hunters but he can't keep some of the souls he took for himself. Clavicus might be the god of bad wishes and two-faced schemes but he gets screwed over by his own hand. Etc, etc, etc. Meanwhile the last Dragonborn's theme songs kind of sum up his overall theme. One of the lines points out that he has power to "rival the sun". A point which is backed up by how he starts out his career by taking down what in the Nord's belief system is an undying god of destruction. Archonex fucked around with this message at 01:04 on Jun 22, 2016 |
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Jun 22, 2016 00:55
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quote:Dragonborn is Talos. After being mostly killed off because of reduced faith thanks to the elves he jumped into a mortal avatar to renew his power and renew faith in him. I always thought it was obvious that the Dragonborn is a straight up god (That was possibly reborn. That's a bit more iffy.). Albeit one that's just finding their feet. I always thought the subtle implication that you were more than just a man or woman was there. The songs and a lot of the harder to find lore all but confirms this. I mean look at what you're playing as. You're playing the last of the dragon blooded, the first of a new rightful line of Tamrielic emperor's, a being capable of devouring and forever destroying the souls of beings that treat mortal concepts like death like an aggravation and nuisance, an entity that treats with and slays beings that are considered by the inhabitants of the setting to be of literally god like power, all before demanding the loyalty of some of their former subjects. I mean, what the gently caress else do you call that within the confines of the setting? If you walk the walk, talk the talk, but just haven't hit your stride yet that doesn't mean you aren't a thing. There are things that are worshiped as gods in the Elder Scrolls series that are far less powerful and awe inspiring than that. The Elder Scrolls series even has a term for the concept that's touched on in Morrowind and outright shown in Oblivion's expansion. It's called "Mantling". A really nerdy wiki posted:Mantling is a process in the Elder Scrolls universe by which one entity becomes another entity by impersonating it. In most known or speculated instances of this process, the entity being mantled is a deity, while the person mantling is a mortal. There's a reason some of the more knowledgeable characters are in awe of you and trying to get you on their side. Just as their's a reason why the last of the Blades swear themselves to you. You're basically the freaking messiah to a good chunk of the world, just like you (possibly --- again, just like in Morrowind it's left with a few interpretations) were in Morrowind. It's just that outside of Skyrim it's not being advertised that heavily yet. Jeff Goldblum posted:e. Honestly, I sometimes suspect Hermaeus Mora of having a hand/tentacle in all things of that matter, where world conquering powers become destroyed or disappear altogether. Hermaeus is definitely not that smart. He makes a lot of lofty claims about knowing things, but despite all the justifications and weaseling around it the fact is that more than a few times he has to sacrifice his servants or personally get his hands dirty to get his hands on more secrets and get the job done. And other times he turns out to be flat out wrong. None of the Daedric gods are flat out omnipotent entities, even within their sphere. Hell, what Hermaeus does is arguably another example of Mantling. If he convinces everyone he meets that he's this all knowing, all seeing, omni-potent Machiavellian being, does that not qualify him as being treated as such? Of course, the problem comes around when someone with the power to stand up to him starts calling him out on his bullshit. Edit: To expand on the Mantling thing, Morrowind has some insight into the whole "the Skyrim PC is a god" fan theory. If you tell Dagoth Ur that you don't care about the prophecy but are going to become one by fulfilling it/kick his rear end he actually is impressed with you. The concept of becoming a god by fulfilling a set of beliefs or requirements is touched on in as being a thing in the setting in that game. It's called Mantling and it's about as crazy as some of the other older lore. TL;DR: To quote Morrowind on the issue of Elder Scrolls godhood: "...walk like them until they must walk like you"". It doesn't really matter if you are or aren't if you can act like it. Archonex fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Jun 22, 2016 |
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Jun 22, 2016 02:12
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Whizbang posted:Talos isn't a he, it's 3 people mixed together. As far as the remaining old guard like the Blades that are left are concerned it probably does. And given that you can literally murder the Emperor in the game and send the Imperials packing at the head of an army it's kind of questionable whether the player character does have a claim or not. There's no "dragonborn" bloodline that inherently rules since the lore mentions that it's just a common misconception. But that doesn't mean that some people in the setting don't perceive the rightful emperor's as being dragonborn. It's literally one of the plot points used to help explain why poo poo starts to fall apart after Oblivion. quote:That's not at all how mantling works. You don't make anything new when you mantle, you specifically act like something else that isn't around anymore until it becomes you. It's filling a metaphysical hole. I didn't mean that he was actively using it to try to Mantle something. Just exploiting some of the concepts behind the idea of Mantling itself. Mantling is basically the idea that you can trick the world into thinking you're a thing so well that you effectively become that thing in the eyes of the world. It's basically being such a good liar that the lie becomes the truth. And if you pay attention to the differences between what Hermaeus Mora is saying and what he and others are doing it starts to become apparent that he's a very good liar. Edit: But all that doesn't mean he's the omniscient being he claims to be. Hell, by the rules of the setting he literally can't be. Other, far more intrinsic elements of the setting (Like the Elder Scrolls.) directly contradict a lot of his claims. Though it's not immediately evident if you're not the type to sperg out on the lore and chew through the in-game books and conversations across many of the games. Much as I hate to quote the place TVtropes had a good explanation of one of the reasons why Mora is full of poo poo. And since it doesn't require me to type up another essay: quote:While it is not certain, there is strong evidence to believe that Hermaeus Mora is not omniscient, or that fate is definite in TES. For one, a dragon and a powerful vampire state that the Elder Scrolls (pretty much the closest thing to absolute truthful records) only predict what may be, not what will be. Furthermore, the scrolls themselves may change until the events predicted at a given time come to pass, at which point the words are absolutely fixed forevermore. Archonex fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Jun 22, 2016 |
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Jun 22, 2016 02:42
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Goa Tse-tung posted:dark souls combat would push TES so far to the next level it would be insane It's already sorta doable with Skyrim via a bunch of mods, funnily enough. It's just a royal pain in the rear end to get it working. Way back I posted about a mod pack I set up that turned the game into a mix of Dark Souls and DnD while making it more of a living world. Everything that should have been lethal was lethal in a few hits without really heavy armor or blocking and the enemies had greatly increased numbers (Falmer would just boil out of their tiny caves when spawning. It was horrifying.) to go along with their vulnerability. Having a healer was absolutely vital. Which meant that you'd want to bring along a healer with the specialized "heal other PC's and friendly NPC's" AI package that some companion mods gave you, along with casting support and maybe someone to do some stealth work for/with you. It was loving bonkers, and fun as hell once I spent like two months tuning it and making my own mod supplements. Best part was I added in special NPC's that would randomly raid different dungeons, and created a setup so that certain groups like bandits would actually hit isolated settlements (I had a ton of nameless "filler" NPC's in to go with the expanded towns.). So you could take a bounty quest to hit a tomb or bandit camp and see a troop of soldiers already in the process of clearing it out. Or a bunch of bounty hunters racing you to the kill. They really need to get the SKSE in for Skyrim SE so you can start making stuff like that again. Scyantific posted:Todd is probably going to announce a new TES MOBA Nah, it'll be a Hearthstone ripoff to capitalize on the fad of card games being the new "in thing" now that MOBA's are starting to get a bit stale --- https://legends.bethesda.net/?locale=en Oh, wait. They already did that. And they turned some of the more interesting periods of the setting into a card game. Which means they probably won't ever get featured in a proper Skyrim-esque game. Archonex fucked around with this message at 13:16 on Jun 2, 2017 |
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Jun 2, 2017 12:56
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Mister Adequate posted:What's wrong with us orcs being in it? It really was. Though it took months to get it all together. I've got something vaguely similar set up with the special edition but it lacks most of the bells and whistles of my original setup.
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Jun 2, 2017 22:17
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Scyantific posted:Actually it was their version of a nuke created by one of their elite sword-singers To be precise, it's implied their swordsmen were so loving awesome and good at cutting things apart that they could literally split the atom in a single swing of a sword. And not just split the atom, but presumably split enough atoms during a war that the explosion was so massive that it literally shattered their homeland. The Redguard that are seen in the games are the descendants of the ones that were presumably far enough away or lucky enough to survive Hiroshima 2.0: This Time It's An Entire Continent. Nasgate posted:the most basic, idiot mages in TES games are too dumb to do things like not drown in a well or not fall to their deaths. Mages can do a lot of stuff that is pretty impressive. We've seen immortal mages, a dude who literally invented the concept of Lichdom, a race of presumably mage-like technologists that were so good at loving with reality they made a gigantic mecha-god, another mage that actually pulled off what the technologists wanted to do through nothing but magic and ascended to a higher plane while being able to still interact with the world, and generally all sorts of other stuff. No one mentions them because they either keep quiet about it, their creations turned on them and wiped them out, or in the games so far they're chilling on a literal doom mountain or something equally terrifying that makes everyone just go "Maybe if we ignore him he'll leave us alone?". It's just that when mages get dumb, they tend to get dumb. Case in point, the guy who made the Boots of Blinding Speed was an incredibly stupid enchanter. Ditto for the guy that made that wings of icarus spell. He figured out how to go up, but then didn't consider how to handle going down when the spell wore off. Archonex fucked around with this message at 10:08 on Mar 21, 2018 |
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Mar 21, 2018 09:54
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It also helps that most of the games don't show what a late stage _____ is like. You're always the newbie hero-adventurer, starting out and finding your place in the world. And yet at the end of many of the games you're often literally capable of ripping apart entire cities single-handedly. For instance: One of the last base game shouts the Dragonborn gets can literally obliterate the population of entire towns by calling down a destructive storm and rain of lightning bolts to murder everything in sight. Also, every daedric god wants him on their side and will outright just hand over their artifacts for the opportunity for him to help their cause. This is despite the fact that he's got a built in clause to get out of handing over his soul. He's also canonically somewhere in the range of being like half as strong as a daedric god at the end of the game, and will only get stronger as time goes on. The Nerevar is literally immortal and can't be afflicted with disease on top of killing a guy who was basically a parasitic god. And assuming that that one fired writer's apocalyptic nazi wankfest isn't canon (And all indications suggest it isn't.) he has a good chance to actually outlive the game's version of reality. The MC of Oblivion is literally a Daedric god. Literally. He's got an army (two, potentially) of daedric creatures at his command, along with an entire world of followers and the appropriate powers there-in. The thing is, the games never let us get to play around with what happens after we get established as (Insert overpowered type of character here.). Though the stuff we have to read suggests what they can do later on in their lives is even more overpowered than what we can do at the end of the games. Archonex fucked around with this message at 10:22 on Mar 21, 2018 |
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Mar 21, 2018 10:13
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Dwesa posted:What nazi wankfest? Ugh, I forget his name. It's one of the guys that helped create Morrowind's background lore and later quit/was fired and kept writing his own fan fiction for the setting on his own website despite no one asking him too. Some of the more stuff he's come up with is a bit of a conversational topic in the Elder Scrolls lore nerd community. From what, I remember, highlights included him having supposedly locked himself in a room for days on end until he came up with a good chunk of Vivec's teachings in a crazed haze, literally depicting Elder Scrolls IN SPACE in his later writings with the nazi elves (IE: Altmer) actually turning out to be morally correct in wanting to purge all the other species, the Dunmer living on the moon, Pelinal Whitestrake being a terminator-esque elf hating cyborg from the future, and all sorts of other nutty poo poo like one of ESO's queen's leading one of the player factions secretly being a machine intelligence being sent back in time (Which ESO does not give any credit to being real. Like, at all.) to rule the races. TL;DR: He comes off as a bit crazy, and from everything i've read about him he had an unhealthy obsession with the setting. Edit: I just remembered his last name! It was Kirkbride! Fun fact: His post-firing/quitting work is so crazy that it was featured on the "What do you mean it wasn't made by someone on drugs?" page on TVTropes. Archonex fucked around with this message at 10:55 on Mar 21, 2018 |
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Mar 21, 2018 10:27
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Entropy238 posted:When someone's there to rein him in a bit Kirkbride's official stuff is pretty drat good. From what I understand the guy was basically an alcoholic when he wrote a lot of the lore for Morrowind. So, it requires really getting deep down the rabbit hole of all the stuff he's written and it's going to be a rough description of all of it since it's been a long time since I read anything of his. But some of the later stuff he wrote starts to go into how the Altmer turned out to actually really be right that the existence of the human and other non-mer races were holding them back from ascending (or something like that). Hence why the Altmer of his later works were sorta-kinda justified in going on a genocidal purge since the other races were holding them back from reaching their true potential. Like a bunch of modern day neo-nazi works it's danced around just enough that you can't really say it's a definite thing. But anyone familiar with those sorts of works that reads it often can't help but squirm uncomfortably in their chair as they put two and two together when they get through all the crazy sci-fi bullshit and reach the big twist in his take on the setting. He might not personally be sympathetic to nazi's, but intentionally or not the Altmer being justified in wanting to murder all the other races over racial differences/perceived inferiority hit a lot of uncomfortable notes with people familiar with more realistic literature done by literal nazi's of the past. I wish I had the old thread from another forum that went through his stuff line by line and explained why it was so distressing, but it's been literally years and I have no idea where to even start digging it up. Archonex fucked around with this message at 10:45 on Mar 21, 2018 |
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Mar 21, 2018 10:40
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Entropy238 posted:I understand that racists like to talk in dogwhistles, but seen in the context of the lore of the game as a whole – which to be clear apes from various different cultures and religions – I don't see how having a relatively small (I think?) proportion of a race of people that hold nazi like beliefs featured in the games should be considered an issue? It is when the meta-physics of the setting support those bigot's beliefs. "Bigots exist in the setting" isn't a contentious issue. Plenty of settings have things like that as a feature. They aren't right though. "The things the bigots believe are the truth due to how the setting secretly functions." is a contentious issue when applied to some former writer basically writing out his own lore and rules on how the setting works. That essentially results in a rewrite of the setting to support some pretty hosed up views. Which to some basically equates to Elder Scrolls neo-nazi fanfiction, intentional or not. Archonex fucked around with this message at 11:20 on Mar 21, 2018 |
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Mar 21, 2018 11:13
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radintorov posted:I remember that Kirkbride said in an interview or an AMA that the basis the Thalmor are operating from are dead wrong and if their plans go through everyone is going to have a bad time, including them. He didn't specify how things will turn out bad, but when you are dealing with idiots trying to unravel reality it can't be good. Sounds like he went back on some of what he wrote then. Good on him, if so.
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Mar 21, 2018 11:20
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Berke Negri posted:i think you're just misremembering everything tbh Maybe. Like I said, it's been years. Plus I totally got distracted by that Summerset announcement and forgot to try and dredge up a quote. frajaq posted:were they Thalmor-level nazi in the ESO timeline though? Yeah. They even start going after other mer. If you play in the Aldmeri Dominion faction you can even get a quest that takes you to an academy they're in charge of. They basically treat the other races, elves included, like sub-human slave labor. And yes, you get to wreck the place up and set things right rather than get told to gently caress off by the game when you find out what they're up too. It's glorious. Actually, on that note i'd recommend ESO for anyone that hasn't tried it yet. In some ways it's got just as many (if not more) hardcore lore references hidden in it than Oblivion and Skyrim. You just have to go dipping around in random conversations and such. Archonex fucked around with this message at 04:34 on Mar 22, 2018 |
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Mar 22, 2018 03:46
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Fuligin posted:Eso is bizarrely good for an mmo, maybe cause you can just go wherever and do whatever It didn't used to be that way, but yeah. It's pretty good nowadays. The original devs had issues with allowing players to have fun. Even dungeons were an exercise in masochism (Banished Cells.  ) depending on your level. The past three or four years though have seen them go full on Skyrim with the world design, instead focusing on letting players go anywhere and do anything on top of focusing on more neat skill lines and areas instead of just doing the WoW-esque "Here's a bunch of dungeons and one time leveling content to do every year or so." thing. My only regret is that vampires don't work like they used too. Used to be around release that a vampire bite could be fatal to npc's. That's why nowadays if you watch your health bar carefully your HP goes up when feeding. You were literally transferring their life bar to yours. You also needed to feed every thirty minutes to an hour of play time too, which meant that you had cause to go munching on characters. Feeding was also hilariously disturbing to actually bear witness too. You basically telekinetically sucked the blood out of people Billith style and ended up with like half of it splattered over your character's face and chest in a unique temporary skin. Being able to turn your average low level dungeon into a horror movie by terrifying any newbies to the game that had the misfortune of witnessing some dude getting exsanguinated never got old. I used to hit up the starter delves and world dungeons for just that purpose. Archonex fucked around with this message at 06:31 on Mar 22, 2018 |
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Mar 22, 2018 04:41
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SunAndSpring posted:So if you think about it, the plot of Skyrim is the following: Tzeentch works in mysterious, and often utterly batshit and self-contradictory ways.
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Mar 22, 2018 16:05
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