What do you think about the elder scrolls setting?

lazy and uninspired

you're swinging at them, not hitting them. you're weighing your weapon skill and agility against their armor skill and maneuverability.
kinda like a ttg
yes, it sucks at low levels. you grow stronger.
much like a ttg

The Kirkbride lore is fucking retarded and cunts delude themselves into thinking it's good.
Otherwise it's just OK

That's mostly mitigated by using a weapon you actually have skills for and bringing stamina potions. Lower stamina = lower chance to be successful at anything.

Kirkbride is the second most influential writer in the franchise. You're just parroting memes you've read online

Love it, if for no other reason than I'm partial to settings that let elves be filthy peasants like everyone else.

Mediocre with a few interesting bits. There's a lot of things that sound cool, but end up being pretty lame once you see them. Other times you'll have things that end up wasted on an otherwise generic plot or a story that doesn't really matter.

Not him, but in a ttg you don't see your character's sword connect to the rat and do nothing to it. In a ttg, if you miss the rat, "your swing goes wide and hits the rock next to it". Anyone with a brain must recognize that video games, as a VISUAL medium, must reconcile what happens in the code with what our eyes see.

Good by video game standards, but nothing compares to LOTR.

The map look dumb.

It's an approximation. Just like Vvardenfell is larger than a small island, or a town has more than a dozen residents. It's not a faithful depiction of the world or combat. It's an approximation.

t. Guy who just discovered MK hate-posting from 2012

Reminder that according to canon, Akavir is the future of Tamriel, and Tamriel is the future of Yokuda, which is why travel between the continents is difficult.

Source pls

it's okay for a video game

The game should not at any point suck. I paid money for a game that doesn't suck.

LOTR is tired as hell. I'm tired of hearing about it. I'm tired of people telling me about it. Go away with your morders and your sammyrolls and let us enjoy fiction.

Amazon just committed to a multi-season LOTR series. You'll never stop hearing about it.

Greeeeaaaat.

>he says while championing a game highly derivative of LotR

If you were a Howard or sci-fi fan you might have had an excuse.

...

Does MK just write weird stuff for the sake of it being weird?

What the fuck does that even mean.

No just the spergs on /r/teslore piss me off

You mean regionalized?
Like europe?

Does that mean that every region os stuck withon their own time line or something

Yes

God this is retarded. I could get behind a northern continent being frozen in time but having EVERYTHING outside of ONE continent being in a different time? Just fucking say they don't exist nigger

>intentionally max agility during first play through (this isn't difficult or obscure to find out, within your first five level ups you should realize you can easily train agility)
>level up agility to a good amount
>game is now more fun than skyrim
haven't played oblivion yet
actually pretty interesting, good balance of the new and the familiar, probably wouldn't want to play something other than the main 3 games set in it though, it's nice that lore is mostly optional, encourages you to dig deep yourself rather than having most of it shoved down your throat

It had potential, to be a good and unique setting, but was butchered when Bethesda butchered it to make more money (i.e. causalized it). Some people here attack the weird ideas of Kirkbride, some attack the bad gameplay of morrowind. I would say both of them are right even though I have no problem with kirkbrides ramblings nor morrowinds gameplay.

What made TES good was that it managed to find a golden zone in its atmosphere, in its setting. Right between the familiar and the obscene the weird and the common. Morrowind was the best example of it. You had imperial legions, castles, mage guild, all familiar tropes, but you also had a religious guild of assasins that were legally sanctioned, nomadic elves with their tribalistic culture, weird fauna and flora. The gods and cosmology was also quite interesting, the division between Aedra and Daerda. Moreover the setting shifted some tropes while in other tropes it enriched it orcs were cursed elves sure but how they were cursed was explained very well. The drow and dwarf/gnome aka mechanical genuius race, tropes were subverted beautifully in dunmer and dwemer (if you call them dwarvish at all)

You might say this is due to Morrowinds unique location and unique dunmer culture and here I beg to differ. Take a look at the old pocket guide to empire booklets. Take a look at how cyrodil was described, with lush jungles, massive rice farms, an amalgamation of roman (common) and chinese (weird, at least for most of the audience) traditions, not even talking about the goverment the akaviri influences etc. Cyrodil pre 2006 was quite unique, as much as Vvardanfell was. But what did we got in Oblivion? A generic medieval setting. Some might say it is the new writers (kirkbride and others were gone by then) that caused this change but I do beleive they butchered the lore purpusefulyl to appeal to a broader masses,
cont.

mind you that the lore I'm talking about is not the weird CHIM lore spouted out of Kirkbrided spouted but the lore about the imperial system, the cyrodil, akavir, etc the things that put TES right between that golden zone I'm talking about.

Morrowind came about in early 2000s, in the peak of the popularity of generic fantasy tropes (due to pc rpgs, 3rd edition, lotr etc) it subverted a lot of the tropes and I think TES really had a potential to be really unique, one which escaped the generic fantasy setting. But sadly oblivion reverted that trend.
They tried to make skyrim a bit unique, I'll give them that, but that was also marketed for the masses and the nord trope was overused while more complex cultural stuff was downgraded, I feel that TES world had potential, but it ruined it to sell more. It is better to play safe after all.

Thats why the only truly unique settings we will have will come from written media, be it tabletop rpgs or fantasy novels.

Bland on the surface, somewhat novel just below that, retarded below that.

>babbys first ES thread
okay, so long story short:
The entire setting is a lucid dream of a dying creator who self-inserted him and accidentally his rival and his rival tried killing him, so the self inserts self-inserted again. Everything is a metaphysical representation of that initial conflict and works its way down to the point of being unrecognizable.
The problem with the dream world is that it is linked in a literal sense to the timeline with the best way to think about it being similar to the physical representation of the big bang as seen from outside.
At atmora to the north, all points converge similar to falling into a black hole. things can leave it, but it takes a long fucking time. meanwhile aldmeris is kinda like the frayed edges of spacetime where the border of the universe is/isnt where all points diverge. you can go there, but it takes just as long to get back, cause you kinda had to stop existing.
Meanwhile, yokuda, tamriel and akavir are all different "kalpas" or time zones. you can get to the remnants of the last one, and the beginnings of the next one, but cant really go past that. its like a wheel always in rotation, but you have to remove yourself at least two spaces away from a point before it resets. Each kalpa is a representation of "now" and youkada was destroyed by something involving the redguards and they ended up sending themselves into the current kalpa by traveling through literal space and time.
but we run into a problem with Skyrim, because, theoretically, Alduin or some form of incarnation of him has to be present to destroy this land so the next can come into being. we may or may not have killed him, so, at best, we delayed the next kalpa or we may have broken the cycle at last.

>1/2

One more unintentional admission that redguard are subhuman spearchuckers and were always thought of as such

I suppose the keyword there would be derivative
that's just the way the canon works, LOTR is a derivative work too, to some extent
the problem is that the more derivatives of an original you consume, the more bland that original becomes, and the few times when the original is subverted rather than copied are often the most enjoyable because of the spark of novelty they engender

This is what happends when you OD on chim.

Lott is derivative of a higher source.

Now, back to an earlier point. The self inserts. So there is a representation of Anu, the creator, and Padomy, the rival. Their self insert is anuiel and sithis. they are the representation of creation and the void. their self inserts are Akatosh and Lorkhan. Lorkhan "tricked" the other gods into creating nirn and as a punishment, had his heart ripped out and shot to nirn, ironically embodying it with his life force and creating one of the towers at the same time, red mountain. but the hatred between akatosh and lorkhan was so great, that they have representations traveling through time and occassionally bumping into eachother, the dragonborns are the lineage of akatosh and the shezzarines or doom driven (another term for the protags in each game) are the spawn of lorkhan. In skyrim, however, we see the culmination of the cycle. we see two dragonborn shezzarines fighting eachother. One was attempting to become a god through the tower theory (basically by using a physical representation of a tower to step outside themselves, realize themself as being a fragment of a dream and using that knoweldge to become almost infinitely powerful by being able to directly change the dream, such as vivec and talos did, though they used another method. the dwemer did use the tower method, but we figure they couldnt handle being not real so they hit a sum-zero computing error and just got deleted ). but, the reason we know we are shezzarines is that we killed akatosh's son, aludin, who is also a representation of akatosh. but so are we.

feel free to clear up any points i may have muddled a bit through trying to be concise.

The imperials look very oriental.

tl/dr, lore was unique, but was butchered later on

It's because they went with the copy & paste approach of game design and never really bothered to go as in depth for background information like in Morrowind.
Lore and story peaked at Morrowind while the gameplay improved in later games. I've yet to play any other game where I spent over an hour reading the books in stores because of how amazed I was with their detail about the world and the in-game theories being provided to me

it's actually pretty average without kirkbride

spirit science tier

>to some extent
>some

Old kirkbride is good but his newer stuff like c0da and his attempts to go FULL science fantasy (instead of just vague allusions) are really awful and I wish he would just go back to writing religious texts while high on mushrooms.

Can anyone explain the Nord pantheon further ? I would love to know what they left out in Skyrim.

Janky and patchwork, the scale is also wildly inconsistent. There was a lot about it I liked best back in Daggerfall, although Morrowind is the best game obviously. The cosmology is basically just shit.

I ran a decent length game set in the Iliac Bay. We had fun, they accidentally sent a small island into Oblivion, woke up an ancient evil tree, and planned a surprise party for Mehrunes Dagon with Sheogorath's help.

I prefer it to any other fantasy setting really.

It could mean special metaphysical stuff about time. Or it could be a cheeky reference to time zones. The second of which Id personally find incredibly funny.

>nothing compares to a wide empty expanse of fucking nothing where nobody lives, attached to an even more vast expanse of literally no development that doesn't even have a map
Middle-Earth a shit, user. The Hobbit's a good book, but Tolkien's worldbuilding is terribad.

Kirkbride's lore was always the most interesting in its sociological implications. His bullshit about the dreaming godhead is trite, but if you present it as something the people in the setting believe in and use it to shape their actions, now we're getting somewhere.

>Khajiit has bullshit if you have coin
This guy needs to lay off the catsauce, I swear.

A nonsensical mess that got memed into being good, while being as bad as vanilla, mid-80s D&D. Ironically it was memed into being good by vidya that cut out everything that makes it in anyway interesting, leaving just an empty husk that people still wank about anyway.

Too contradictionary, too choppy, too grimderp, too convoluted and each bit of it could work as a setting on its own, rather than creating a bullshit "full" world.

I suggest to learn what "regionalized" means. Or how Europe looks like, being almost uniformly two climates with two distinctive biomes each, same language family, almost identical ethnicities and with pretty uniform land formation. Because something in your post makes me think you assume there is some weird shit going and after crossing each national border you teleport to another fucking planet.

Have you ever been around Europe?

How was Alduin trying to get more power through the tower?

I'm Czech. Not counting Kosovo, Bulgaria, Moldavia, Ukraine and Belarus, I've been in every other country on the continent. Excluding Serbia, Montenegro and Albania, for at least two weeks in each. The joys of open borders.
And funny thing, I've did half of that as a Geo student through research grants.
Want to add anything, or you are done?

Well, that just means that you're wrong. I can count four completely different 'partitions,' just from my own country.

It's mainstream so it's shit.

So it's like the impression I got of the wheel of time from the first 3 books, but with physical representations of different time-loops.
Sounds pretty interesting actually. Wish the games involved this more, timeloops are always great, and visiting these different lands, and having time travel mechanics operate between them could make a game by itself with the narrative fuckery that could do.
But instead the games are about yelling at chickens.
It's like Dragon Age. It sets up so much weird and interesing stuff with the gods and everything at the start, and then it's just a standard DnD campaign with a dracolich final boss. Maybe that's why I like dark souls so much, because the interesting unique parts of the setting are integral to the game, and they don't give undue attention to anything that isn't important, there aren't thousands of in-game books about unimportant shite everywhere.

>I'm Czech.

Thate makes you celto-germano-avaro-slavic rape baby. Of course identityless mutt would think everyone is the same.

>central-eastern european can't be an identity and therefore user is retarded
back to /pol/ user
The majority of europe does consist of a few select biomes. We don't have jungles, or deserts, the majority of the continent is woodland, bogland, or farms. Sure there are a few volcanoes here or there, and the mountains get pretty cold, but comparing it to elder scrolls or WoW level terrain division is retarded. Few places have the level of terrain diversity you seem to think europe has, and IRL terrain doesn't have borders, it all blends smoothly for the most part, with few exceptions like rain shadows.
The majority of your contry looks something like that, some places might be a tad boggier, some may be more forested, some may be better for growing crops, but you don't have deserts or jungles in (Finland? Norway?)
And I know because my country is nearly entirely bog, with some boggy woods and some crappy farmlands.

>eastern european

Eastern european identity is poverty and fetal alcohol syndrome.

>The majority of your contry looks something like that
But that's fucking stupid and wrong.

I guess I'll spoonfeed you
>The gods are cyclical, just like the world is. There are the Dead Gods, who fought and died to bring about the new cycle; the Hearth Gods, who watch over the present cycle; the Testing Gods, who threaten the Hearth and thus are watched; and the Twilight Gods, who usher in the next cycle. The end of a cycle is said to be preceded by the Dragonborn God, a god that did not exist in the previous cycle but whose presence means that the current one is almost over.
The Dead Gods
>Dead Gods don’t need temples. They have the biggest one of all, Svongarde. Nord heroes and clever men visit the Underworld all the time. They bear a symbol to show that they have, which garners much respect.
>The Hearth Gods have temples appropriate to their nature: Kyne’s are built on peaks, Mara’s are the halls of important Witches, Dibella’s are the halls of important Wives– the temples aren’t like those of the Imperials; as Hearth Gods, they are always homes to someone, and the highest-ranking female of that home is their de facto high priestess.
>The Testing Gods don’t really have temples – they are propitiated at battlegrounds or other sites where they caused some notable trouble. Nords understand that the Daedric Temples are something else entirely and think them as much of a waste of time as the formalized religion of the Nine Divines of Cyrodiil.
>The Twilight Gods need no temples– when they show up, there won’t be any reason to build them, much less use them – another waste of time. That said, Nords do venerate them, as they always venerate the cycles of things, and especially the Last War where they will show their final, best worth.

>Alduin is venerated on the winter solstice by ceremonies at ancient Dragon Cult temples, where offerings are made to keep him asleep for one more year. Alduin is also the source of many common superstitious practices before any event of significance.
>Talos’ totem is the newest, but is everywhere – he is the Dragonborn Conquering Son, the first new god of this cycle, whose power is consequently unknown, so the Nords bless nearly everything with his totem, since he might very well be the god of it now, too. Yes, as first of the Twilight Gods, this practice might seem contradictory, but that’s only because, of all the gods, he will be the one that survives in whole into the next cycle.

Nord view of Imperial Religion
>The Eight Divines are viewed by the Nords as a “Southern” import. They retain some of the taint of the Alessian Order, and are basically viewed as a religion for foreigners. Their gods are fine for them, but Nords need Nord gods.
>Some of the gods are the same (or similar) – significantly these are the three female gods, which are far more important to the Nords than they are in the Imperial Cult. (Kyne is in fact the de facto head of the Nord pantheon.) The Nords are perplexed and disturbed by the Imperial Cult’s focus on the Dragon God – they regard this as a fundamental misunderstanding of the universe, and one likely to cause disaster in the end. (Which fits perfectly with the pessimistic Nord view of the world in general – things are likely to turn out badly, and it will probably be caused by some foreigner.) Lucky for the world that the Nords are so diligent about keeping Alduin asleep, while the southerners are busy trying to get his attention! Any mention of Akatosh in a Nord’s presence is likely to bring a muttered invocation to Alduin to stay asleep in response.
>The Nords believe that, During the Oblivion Crisis, it was Talos (Dragonborn, Martin’s forefather) lending his aid, not Alduin.

Original Czech guy and Jesus Christ, apparently you can't leave a thread for two hours without idiots jumping at each other.
Also, while commuting I've realised I've only been in Monaco and Andorra for two days each. But since you can pass each of them within a hour of walking...

Also, to the Swedish user - since when Skania is Swedish clay anyway? Gib back to Danes

Yeah just as bad as excepted. Strange to think that you can kinda see some of this behind the whole "really swole guy kills dragons and spooky viking mummies" story

I'm GMing UESRPG game and it's a pretty good setting, because vidya made it popular. New players know what to do and what to expect, they instantly look for appropriate guild if they aren't in one already, know what to expect in various dungeons. Plus both setting and rulebook allow you to fuck with the universe on macro scale, like Dagon's Razor (or whatever it's called), that allows you to reshape whatever you want however you want, or the new fighting style they added, that allows PC to sacrifice themselves to cut out of the world any concept they can come up with (races, territories, physics, etc.).

>Literally can't walk for 30 feet without coming across some pissant little stream that has a name, a backstory, and a song to tell you about both.

You are the first person ever to say that Tolkiens problem is too little world building and not too much. Either you're a unique genius or a unique retard.

>Amazon just committed to a multi-season LOTR series
Ah, great, get to watch another story go down the hell-hole of full-on franchisedom.
At least when it was shitty vidya plots from shitty vidya, I could ignore them.

So, Elder Scrolls is bad because it's too generic and too weird.
Yep, I certainly never wonder why I bother asking Veeky Forums about anything.

Bit offtopic, but can anyone recommend any mods for oblivion that mitigate the level scaling. I've used ooo, but i'm looking for something that doesn't add so much.

Not enough Snow Elves, too many betrayed.

>the gameplay improved in later games
I want this meme to end.

I'll admit that some aspects of gameplay improved. Others suffered immensely (see: scaling enemies/items, fuck that shit).

>elder Scrolls
>Grimdark

>I'll admit that some aspects of gameplay improved.
Name one.
inb4 combat - if anything they made it even worse.

Have you people never actually read or learned about any Elder Scrolls content?

Each region of the map has unique regions and, in the older games, mildly different cultures of the dominant race of that region. Morrowind alone has swamps, frozen north, red mountain, ashlands, and fertile farmlands all in the same 'partitioned' region.

I disagree with the use of "improved". Some aspects changed and a few became slightly less awful.

the gameplay did improve, as in combat and general mechanics, although it was always still mediocre for its time - carrying on the ES tradition. However the content in later games took a nosedive