The Elder Scrolls series does do a good job of avoiding being too derivative of Tolkien. Ever since the lore rewrite around Redguard, anyway (between Elder Scrolls 2 and 3, right about 20 years ago coincidentally).
What do you mean? Skyrim has 307 books in it which serve no purpose other than establishing the world/lore. It brought to life various elements previously only known about through such books and which have been established in the lore all the way back around the lore rewrite. ESO is an MMO which is probably best enjoyed as a single player wandering around, questing, and reading lore. It is masterfully crafted and brings so much more of the world to life than any main-line entry to the series. There are also two novels which take place in the setting.
What does it mean to "do something" with the lore?
ESO shows a lot of the background lore stuff that the mainline games ignore, and generally does a better job showing off the setting than they do. Sadly nothing really captures how weird and fucked up the Elder Scrolls setting is, like the world as described in the in-universe books is more like the setting The Witcher series portrays than what the TES games themselves do in terms of idiosyncratic creatures and magic and what absolute pieces of shit everyone in the setting is.
It's really not. The games after Morrowind would function identically if the background lore was just the standard Tolkeinesque fantasy.
The daedric princes are the one aspect of the lore that feels integrated into the games to me, so that is the one exception I would make. Besides that, the lore has very little bearing. Summoning a Fire Atronach would function just as well if you were summoning a fire demon in a different lore setup. According to the lore, the dragons are basically angels with a complex magic language that changes how they interact with the world, but then in practice they just fly around like dragons in any setting and breath fire or frost at you like dragons in any setting.
According to the lore, the dragons are basically angels with a complex magic language that changes how they interact with the world, but then in practice they just fly around like dragons in any setting and breath fire or frost at you like dragons in any setting.
Humans are pretty complicated too, but despite all the complicated thoughts, feelings, desires, goals, and experiences they have, all they do is run at you with an axe and shout "Skyrim belongs to the Nords!"
It's a video game, and in this case the dragons are attacking you because they are on the opposite side of an ancient war from you. The game features no fewer than three dragons who are not at war with you, and those dragons behave how you would expect a primordial entity who doesn't desire to kill you to behave. While, yes, Shouts should have been cooler in general, the Shouts they do are the same shouts you do. It's not like they're just breathing fire, they're manipulating the fabric of the universe to bring fire into being, exercising their dominance over the world itself and asserting that, despite the fact that there's no reason there should be, there must now be fire before them.
"Shouts should have been cooler" is a valid criticism, but not an example of failing to implement the lore into the game mechanics.
It’s not like they’re just breathing fire, they’re manipulating the fabric of the universe to bring fire into being, exercising their dominance over the world itself and asserting that, despite the fact that there’s no reason there should be, there must now be fire before them.
Cool. It is functionally and visually the same as if they were just breathing fire.
I mean if all you have to say is something you have already said and that I have already addressed I'm not sure why you even felt the need to reply :shrug-outta-hecks:
Idk, it felt like you weren't listening? I say that it feels like the lore explanations for things don't feel connected to what we actually see, and you respond "but the lore actually does establish this as a pretty different thing" and it's just, yeah, I know, but that's fluff.
You can create explanations for how these fantastical things in the lore could be expressed in a really mundane way we're all used to without it breaking with the lore. Technically, you can then say that the really wild out-there lore is being expressed. But it's being expressed in the most mundane, unimaginative way possible and this lore could allow for us to actually see much more interesting stuff than we do.
You say that "“Shouts should have been cooler” is a valid criticism, but not an example of failing to implement the lore into the game mechanics." but the point is, the fact that they chose to portray shouts in this way tells you a lot about the writers' priorities and imagination. The lore suggested that shouts would be more interesting than the basic spells which we got in game- it's not wrong to make them boring, but it's not living up to the potential that they wrote.
Idk, it felt like you weren’t listening? I say that it feels like the lore explanations for things don’t feel connected to what we actually see
But I literally responded to that by saying, yes, the shouts should be cooler than they are. But that's the core of the criticism. A criticism which I acknowledged and agreed with, and then you reiterated.
they chose to portray shouts in this way tells you a lot about the writers’ priorities and imagination.
No, it tells you a lot about the restrictions they were working with, both in making a fun video game and the actual software limitations of the engine they're using. I mean if shouts were portrayed exactly as in lore, then dragons should by flying around making the earth quake in order to collapse buildings on top of you, conjuring storms of glass to shred entire cities to pieces, bending reality to teleport around and attack you from impossible angles. Also if you're trying to fight any dragon too "high level" for you then it should just command you to explode and you should obey.
But even the modders, in their wildest dreams, wouldn't try to tackle any of that. For a wide variety of reasons.
The lore suggested that shouts would be more interesting than the basic spells which we got in game
Yeah, the shouts should be cooler, you say for the fifth time. Is this your only complaint? If so I suppose they did a damn good job.
No, it's not my only complaint, it's a complaint that is emblematic of a larger point. We could expand this to any number of things. And before I do that, I need to say this again, because you missed the actual core of my argument. It's not that the shouts aren't cool. It's that they're uncool in a specific way, in that, in the dragons, they manifest in them behaving like dragons from any other property. If you didn't know the lore, you wouldn't have any reason to suspect that they weren't just generic fantasy dragons. They looked at the lore they had and found the one way to (kind of) incorporate their pre-written lore without actually keeping the feeling that this wasn't just generic fantasy. You're right that the lore as-written makes for some powers that are difficult to portray. If they wanted to stay true to it, they could either just decide they don't have the capability to portray that and shelve the dragons for now, or they could find a managable version of those powers. There are steps between "fuck this is so hard to implement and balance" and "throw out the lore and make them as generic as possible", and making that decision is obviously going to draw complaints that they threw out the lore. Saying it would have been hard is not really a defence.
Wood Elves worship plantlife to the point of being pure carnivores? Sounds cool, but we never see it or explore it- the bosmer that we see basically could have walked straight out of Lothlorien (except for being shorter in some games, I guess). All the cool details about Argonians and the Hist and Hist Sap? Sounds cool in the lore, never presented or explored in the games in any fashion, beyond the one time in Oblivion that Hist Sap makes you hallucinate people as goblins for some reason, even if you're Argonian. All these cool ideas are there, but they're not explored, and you would never know they were there if you didn't go out of your way to find them.
I'll reiterate my main point here to make it a little harder for you to just cut my comment up to avoid it again: it's one thing to have lore, it's another thing to implement it and explore it. There is some batshit stuff in the background of Elder Scrolls that 99% of the players have no idea about because it's just not in the games beyond the books that most players just don't read.
Wood Elves worship plantlife to the point of being pure carnivores? Sounds cool, but we never see it or explore it
Because we never (in the mainline games) go to Valenwood where that's relevant. Outside Valenwood they eat plants.
I’ll reiterate my main point here to make it a little harder for you to just cut my comment up to avoid it again: it’s one thing to have lore, it’s another thing to implement it and explore it
This is true, and Skyrim implemented for you to explore a lot of wild shit from the lore. The fact that a lot of players don't understand that's what they're seeing is not a failure to implement the stuff from the lore.
Well, we read an Elder Scroll and visit Sovngarde, for two. It's not really a failure of the worldbuilding if the average player doesn't realize how cool those two things are.
It is a failure of worldbuilding and of storytelling (by which I partially mean how the worldbuilding is conveyed to the player) if they don't make it cool enough on its own merits for players to realize it without having doing unassigned homework first.
For example (and this is from Oblivion, so I'm undercutting my own point somewhat), stealing the Elder Scroll in Oblivion was cool whether or not you knew what it was because they made it cool. You spent basically half of the questline building up preparations, all of which then pay off one-by-one. People who know the lore know how important the Elder Scroll is from the lore, but "regular" players also have at least a sense of how momentous this is.
And then the player is confronted with what felt like 10 minutes of unskippable dialog from the Grey Fox, the actual protagonist of the questline. So I'm not saying that was perfect or anything.
You're not going to hear me say that Skyrim's storytelling is better than Oblivion's, especially not regarding Oblivion's sidequests. They did really good work with those. But the Elder Scroll in Skyrim is also built up, not in exactly the same way.
Lol don't get me started on the writing in Skyrim's Thieves Guild questline or we'll be here all night (actually, Shamus Young already did a 5-part deep dive into why it was so bad, so I don't have to). Out of Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, Oblivion is the one I have the hardest time revisiting, but it definitely had some good stuff going on in its quest writing. I was going to say "especially compared to Skyrim", but honestly, that wasn't Morrowind's strength either, not in the way Oblivion did it.
Yeah, the Thieves' Guild and College of Winterhold questlines are my favorite examples of writing disasters in video games quests. Just absolutely atrocious in every way. Thieves' Guild is worse than the College though.
I also like The Companions questline because it somehow doesn't even feel like a questline? Say what you want about the Thieves Guild, as bad as it is (and I do think it's the worst written of the major questlines) at least it feels like a narrative. I always forget the Companions exist.
The lore is never used outdidr the books, just look at the entire environment of oblivion, it's supposed to be a jungle.
Or just the nine divines. In the north they have different names(and meanings), but in game the nords for some reason have
exactly the same faith as the imperials. Another example: the northern name of Akatosh is supposed to be Alduin. Alduin is not just some evil dragon in the lore but an aspect of the highest of the nine divines. Not ever talked about in game.
Nords are supposed to run around with necklaces if tongues and not use sirge engines because they bring doen the walls with their shouts. In the lore shouting is just the magic of the nords, not some dragon thing.
just look at the entire environment of oblivion, it’s supposed to be a jungle.
There are a million explanations for why Cyrodiil is no longer (or perhaps never was) a jungle. That, in itself, has become an interesting bit of lore.
Or just the nine divines. In the north they have different names(and meanings), but in game the nords for some reason have exactly the same faith as the imperials.
Because two hundred years ago, a god invaded the world and was then beaten in physical combat by a physical manifestation of Akatosh, one of the nine divines. When your god physically manifests and saves the world, that will drive a lot of interest in your religion.
the northern name of Akatosh is supposed to be Alduin. Alduin is not just some evil dragon in the lore but an aspect of the highest of the nine divines. Not ever talked about in game.
The thing about what we hear in the lore is that it can be wrong. Many of the gods have several known aspects. Akatosh to the Empire, Alkosh to the Khajiit, Alduin to the Nords? But either the person who wrote that last part misunderstood the Nords' religion or the Nords themselves in their tradition misunderstood the nature of Akatosh/Alduin. Or, to take another route, it could easily be argued that Alduin is simply an aspect of Akatosh, regardless of how it is framed. I mean, really, you could say all dragons are aspects of Akatosh, or perhaps pieces of Akatosh or avatars of Akatosh, depending on how you want to look at it. Akatosh is time deified. Alduin is the end of time.
Nords are supposed to run around with necklaces if tongues and not use sirge engines because they bring doen the walls with their shouts.
They were said to have done those things a very long time ago, yes, but things change. Skyrim's culture was irreparably changed by the Battle at Red Mountain. Jurgen Windcaller led a movement to completely pacify the concept of shouting, to leave its uses for war behind and to use it only to worship Kyne. That's where the Greybeards come from, and where the warrior-Tongues went. All of this is part of the main quest of the game, you can't miss it.
Daggerfall's story and worldbuilding were pretty "revolutionary" as far as fantasy RPGs go (at the time), and did a lot to distance itself from the now-weird DnD-ish setting the first game was. It's just a shame how overlooked it is. But yeah, ES didn't become as recognizable to us now until Michael Kirkbride entered the scene for Redguard and Morrowind.
The Elder Scrolls series does do a good job of avoiding being too derivative of Tolkien. Ever since the lore rewrite around Redguard, anyway (between Elder Scrolls 2 and 3, right about 20 years ago coincidentally).
They just don't do anything with the lore.
What do you mean? Skyrim has 307 books in it which serve no purpose other than establishing the world/lore. It brought to life various elements previously only known about through such books and which have been established in the lore all the way back around the lore rewrite. ESO is an MMO which is probably best enjoyed as a single player wandering around, questing, and reading lore. It is masterfully crafted and brings so much more of the world to life than any main-line entry to the series. There are also two novels which take place in the setting.
What does it mean to "do something" with the lore?
Actually have it come up in the games outside of books?
ESO shows a lot of the background lore stuff that the mainline games ignore, and generally does a better job showing off the setting than they do. Sadly nothing really captures how weird and fucked up the Elder Scrolls setting is, like the world as described in the in-universe books is more like the setting The Witcher series portrays than what the TES games themselves do in terms of idiosyncratic creatures and magic and what absolute pieces of shit everyone in the setting is.
What do you even mean by that? The lore is the world upon which the games are built. It is baked into the setting, quests, NPCs, etc.
It's really not. The games after Morrowind would function identically if the background lore was just the standard Tolkeinesque fantasy.
The daedric princes are the one aspect of the lore that feels integrated into the games to me, so that is the one exception I would make. Besides that, the lore has very little bearing. Summoning a Fire Atronach would function just as well if you were summoning a fire demon in a different lore setup. According to the lore, the dragons are basically angels with a complex magic language that changes how they interact with the world, but then in practice they just fly around like dragons in any setting and breath fire or frost at you like dragons in any setting.
Humans are pretty complicated too, but despite all the complicated thoughts, feelings, desires, goals, and experiences they have, all they do is run at you with an axe and shout "Skyrim belongs to the Nords!"
It's a video game, and in this case the dragons are attacking you because they are on the opposite side of an ancient war from you. The game features no fewer than three dragons who are not at war with you, and those dragons behave how you would expect a primordial entity who doesn't desire to kill you to behave. While, yes, Shouts should have been cooler in general, the Shouts they do are the same shouts you do. It's not like they're just breathing fire, they're manipulating the fabric of the universe to bring fire into being, exercising their dominance over the world itself and asserting that, despite the fact that there's no reason there should be, there must now be fire before them.
"Shouts should have been cooler" is a valid criticism, but not an example of failing to implement the lore into the game mechanics.
Cool. It is functionally and visually the same as if they were just breathing fire.
I mean if all you have to say is something you have already said and that I have already addressed I'm not sure why you even felt the need to reply :shrug-outta-hecks:
Idk, it felt like you weren't listening? I say that it feels like the lore explanations for things don't feel connected to what we actually see, and you respond "but the lore actually does establish this as a pretty different thing" and it's just, yeah, I know, but that's fluff.
You can create explanations for how these fantastical things in the lore could be expressed in a really mundane way we're all used to without it breaking with the lore. Technically, you can then say that the really wild out-there lore is being expressed. But it's being expressed in the most mundane, unimaginative way possible and this lore could allow for us to actually see much more interesting stuff than we do.
You say that "“Shouts should have been cooler” is a valid criticism, but not an example of failing to implement the lore into the game mechanics." but the point is, the fact that they chose to portray shouts in this way tells you a lot about the writers' priorities and imagination. The lore suggested that shouts would be more interesting than the basic spells which we got in game- it's not wrong to make them boring, but it's not living up to the potential that they wrote.
But I literally responded to that by saying, yes, the shouts should be cooler than they are. But that's the core of the criticism. A criticism which I acknowledged and agreed with, and then you reiterated.
No, it tells you a lot about the restrictions they were working with, both in making a fun video game and the actual software limitations of the engine they're using. I mean if shouts were portrayed exactly as in lore, then dragons should by flying around making the earth quake in order to collapse buildings on top of you, conjuring storms of glass to shred entire cities to pieces, bending reality to teleport around and attack you from impossible angles. Also if you're trying to fight any dragon too "high level" for you then it should just command you to explode and you should obey.
But even the modders, in their wildest dreams, wouldn't try to tackle any of that. For a wide variety of reasons.
Yeah, the shouts should be cooler, you say for the fifth time. Is this your only complaint? If so I suppose they did a damn good job.
No, it's not my only complaint, it's a complaint that is emblematic of a larger point. We could expand this to any number of things. And before I do that, I need to say this again, because you missed the actual core of my argument. It's not that the shouts aren't cool. It's that they're uncool in a specific way, in that, in the dragons, they manifest in them behaving like dragons from any other property. If you didn't know the lore, you wouldn't have any reason to suspect that they weren't just generic fantasy dragons. They looked at the lore they had and found the one way to (kind of) incorporate their pre-written lore without actually keeping the feeling that this wasn't just generic fantasy. You're right that the lore as-written makes for some powers that are difficult to portray. If they wanted to stay true to it, they could either just decide they don't have the capability to portray that and shelve the dragons for now, or they could find a managable version of those powers. There are steps between "fuck this is so hard to implement and balance" and "throw out the lore and make them as generic as possible", and making that decision is obviously going to draw complaints that they threw out the lore. Saying it would have been hard is not really a defence.
Wood Elves worship plantlife to the point of being pure carnivores? Sounds cool, but we never see it or explore it- the bosmer that we see basically could have walked straight out of Lothlorien (except for being shorter in some games, I guess). All the cool details about Argonians and the Hist and Hist Sap? Sounds cool in the lore, never presented or explored in the games in any fashion, beyond the one time in Oblivion that Hist Sap makes you hallucinate people as goblins for some reason, even if you're Argonian. All these cool ideas are there, but they're not explored, and you would never know they were there if you didn't go out of your way to find them.
I'll reiterate my main point here to make it a little harder for you to just cut my comment up to avoid it again: it's one thing to have lore, it's another thing to implement it and explore it. There is some batshit stuff in the background of Elder Scrolls that 99% of the players have no idea about because it's just not in the games beyond the books that most players just don't read.
Because we never (in the mainline games) go to Valenwood where that's relevant. Outside Valenwood they eat plants.
This is true, and Skyrim implemented for you to explore a lot of wild shit from the lore. The fact that a lot of players don't understand that's what they're seeing is not a failure to implement the stuff from the lore.
Give me examples.
Well, we read an Elder Scroll and visit Sovngarde, for two. It's not really a failure of the worldbuilding if the average player doesn't realize how cool those two things are.
It is a failure of worldbuilding and of storytelling (by which I partially mean how the worldbuilding is conveyed to the player) if they don't make it cool enough on its own merits for players to realize it without having doing unassigned homework first.
For example (and this is from Oblivion, so I'm undercutting my own point somewhat), stealing the Elder Scroll in Oblivion was cool whether or not you knew what it was because they made it cool. You spent basically half of the questline building up preparations, all of which then pay off one-by-one. People who know the lore know how important the Elder Scroll is from the lore, but "regular" players also have at least a sense of how momentous this is.
And then the player is confronted with what felt like 10 minutes of unskippable dialog from the Grey Fox, the actual protagonist of the questline. So I'm not saying that was perfect or anything.
You're not going to hear me say that Skyrim's storytelling is better than Oblivion's, especially not regarding Oblivion's sidequests. They did really good work with those. But the Elder Scroll in Skyrim is also built up, not in exactly the same way.
Lol don't get me started on the writing in Skyrim's Thieves Guild questline or we'll be here all night (actually, Shamus Young already did a 5-part deep dive into why it was so bad, so I don't have to). Out of Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, Oblivion is the one I have the hardest time revisiting, but it definitely had some good stuff going on in its quest writing. I was going to say "especially compared to Skyrim", but honestly, that wasn't Morrowind's strength either, not in the way Oblivion did it.
Yeah, the Thieves' Guild and College of Winterhold questlines are my favorite examples of writing disasters in video games quests. Just absolutely atrocious in every way. Thieves' Guild is worse than the College though.
I also like The Companions questline because it somehow doesn't even feel like a questline? Say what you want about the Thieves Guild, as bad as it is (and I do think it's the worst written of the major questlines) at least it feels like a narrative. I always forget the Companions exist.
The lore is never used outdidr the books, just look at the entire environment of oblivion, it's supposed to be a jungle.
Or just the nine divines. In the north they have different names(and meanings), but in game the nords for some reason have
exactly the same faith as the imperials. Another example: the northern name of Akatosh is supposed to be Alduin. Alduin is not just some evil dragon in the lore but an aspect of the highest of the nine divines. Not ever talked about in game.
Nords are supposed to run around with necklaces if tongues and not use sirge engines because they bring doen the walls with their shouts. In the lore shouting is just the magic of the nords, not some dragon thing.
There are a million explanations for why Cyrodiil is no longer (or perhaps never was) a jungle. That, in itself, has become an interesting bit of lore.
Because two hundred years ago, a god invaded the world and was then beaten in physical combat by a physical manifestation of Akatosh, one of the nine divines. When your god physically manifests and saves the world, that will drive a lot of interest in your religion.
The thing about what we hear in the lore is that it can be wrong. Many of the gods have several known aspects. Akatosh to the Empire, Alkosh to the Khajiit, Alduin to the Nords? But either the person who wrote that last part misunderstood the Nords' religion or the Nords themselves in their tradition misunderstood the nature of Akatosh/Alduin. Or, to take another route, it could easily be argued that Alduin is simply an aspect of Akatosh, regardless of how it is framed. I mean, really, you could say all dragons are aspects of Akatosh, or perhaps pieces of Akatosh or avatars of Akatosh, depending on how you want to look at it. Akatosh is time deified. Alduin is the end of time.
They were said to have done those things a very long time ago, yes, but things change. Skyrim's culture was irreparably changed by the Battle at Red Mountain. Jurgen Windcaller led a movement to completely pacify the concept of shouting, to leave its uses for war behind and to use it only to worship Kyne. That's where the Greybeards come from, and where the warrior-Tongues went. All of this is part of the main quest of the game, you can't miss it.
Daggerfall's story and worldbuilding were pretty "revolutionary" as far as fantasy RPGs go (at the time), and did a lot to distance itself from the now-weird DnD-ish setting the first game was. It's just a shame how overlooked it is. But yeah, ES didn't become as recognizable to us now until Michael Kirkbride entered the scene for Redguard and Morrowind.