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.
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.