The Elder Scrolls XIV: Good? Bad? I'm the one with the Thu'um!

[The_Jackal]

That is why I love it. There is nothing set in stone, it is just interpretations of different in-world scholars. As much as I would love a book from Mike Kirkbride about the mythos, it would deduct from the mystery.

It is just as confusing as the different real world creation mythos(es?).

Yes, it's this staunch refusal to offer an absolute, canonical explanation of Tamriel's cosmology which makes the world seem so vibrant and interesting. Compare this to, say, the Warcraft setting, where you've got direct interaction with Titans who all tell a single, non-conflicting narrative about the world and what takes place in it. There's no doubt in that universe. No controversy, and little life. The good guys are good, the bad guys are bad, and all of the conflict in the world is driven by the story characters infantile reactions to a series of provocations.

This can make neverending fancruft disputes, like the Stormcloak vs. Empire arguments, as each side can recruit whatever information out of the conflicting morass of data and hearsay that comprises the world's lore to suit their own argument, but I'd rather have that than the flavorless zwieback which comes from a simple, single, uncontested narrative. There's lots of things that Bethesda could learn from an outfit like Blizzard, like how to better balance, bug fix, and iterate on their product, but I actually think the Elder Scrolls' lore game is top-notch.

[Resileaf]

Yes, it's this staunch refusal to offer an absolute, canonical explanation of Tamriel's cosmology which makes the world seem so vibrant and interesting. Compare this to, say, the Warcraft setting, where you've got direct interaction with Titans who all tell a single, non-conflicting narrative about the world and what takes place in it. There's no doubt in that universe. No controversy, and little life. The good guys are good, the bad guys are bad, and all of the conflict in the world is driven by the story characters infantile reactions to a series of provocations.

This can make neverending fancruft disputes, like the Stormcloak vs. Empire arguments, as each side can recruit whatever information out of the conflicting morass of data and hearsay that comprises the world's lore to suit their own argument, but I'd rather have that than the flavorless zwieback which comes from a simple, single, uncontested narrative. There's lots of things that Bethesda could learn from an outfit like Blizzard, like how to better balance, bug fix, and iterate on their product, but I actually think the Elder Scrolls' lore game is top-notch.

I agree heartily with this post. You don't need to have everything explained 100% for something to be enjoyable. In fact, it's always good to keep a bit of mistery to things. To go back to the Warcraft example, the only thing that remains even a little bit misterious because we don't have any information on it is Elune, the deity of the Night elves, but the way Blizz has been going, they're planning on revealing everything about her, probably in the next expansion. A setting's lore does not win to be fully explained. It loses its magic and becomes dull.

[The_Jackal]

I agree heartily with this post. You don't need to have everything explained 100% for something to be enjoyable. In fact, it's always good to keep a bit of mistery to things. To go back to the Warcraft example, the only thing that remains even a little bit misterious because we don't have any information on it is Elune, the deity of the Night elves, but the way Blizz has been going, they're planning on revealing everything about her, probably in the next expansion. A setting's lore does not win to be fully explained. It loses its magic and becomes dull.

Yeah, completely. At risk of geeking out about classics, this is what Tolkien understood and carried off so artfully in the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. When he describes mundane things like the terrain, or food, or buildings, he can be very descriptive, to the point of being nearly obsessive in the level of detail. He describes the kingsfoil plant with such detail and precision, you could ask a dozen different readers to draw it, and they'd wind up showing incredibly similar plants. But when he starts to describe the more mythical and momentous entities in the setting, he can get very strategically vague. This lets you colour these characters with your own imagination, dredging up such visions as appeal to your own sense of what is ominous, inspiring, beautiful or terrifying.

This is obviously impractical to do in a video game or a film, where you actually have to show something concrete to dazzle the viewer, but I still think that mystery, uncertainty, and vagueness are extremely important when building a world. In a related note, that's why prequels often fall flat: They seek to draw away the curtain from the very mystery that lends a story its sense of wonder, and the reader's ability to populate that mystery with their own imagination.

[Celestia]

Yeah, completely. At risk of geeking out about classics, this is what Tolkien understood and carried off so artfully in the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. When he describes mundane things like the terrain, or food, or buildings, he can be very descriptive, to the point of being nearly obsessive in the level of detail. He describes the kingsfoil plant with such detail and precision, you could ask a dozen different readers to draw it, and they'd wind up showing incredibly similar plants. But when he starts to describe the more mythical and momentous entities in the setting, he can get very strategically vague. This lets you colour these characters with your own imagination, dredging up such visions as appeal to your own sense of what is ominous, inspiring, beautiful or terrifying.

This is obviously impractical to do in a video game or a film, where you actually have to show something concrete to dazzle the viewer, but I still think that mystery, uncertainty, and vagueness are extremely important when building a world. In a related note, that's why prequels often fall flat: They seek to draw away the curtain from the very mystery that lends a story its sense of wonder, and the reader's ability to populate that mystery with their own imagination.

I do agree with you but with the caveat that Tolkien was sometimes a little too vague. You need to give something, a foundation upon which the audience can build. Some of Tolkien's mysteries, however, were so barren that there is simply no speculation possible without crafting whole cloth. And that's really just fan-fiction.

[Spore]

Yes, it's this staunch refusal to offer an absolute, canonical explanation of Tamriel's cosmology which makes the world seem so vibrant and interesting. Compare this to, say, the Warcraft setting, where you've got direct interaction with Titans who all tell a single, non-conflicting narrative about the world and what takes place in it. There's no doubt in that universe. No controversy, and little life. The good guys are good, the bad guys are bad, and all of the conflict in the world is driven by the story characters infantile reactions to a series of provocations.

The main narrative in my opinion for Warcraft comes from mortals taking charge, and most divine beings being **** heads, with the addendum that mortals would be perfectly capable to stop that if they weren't killing each other over and over again. (And a side side narrative of mortals being so able to fight for their existence BECAUSE they kill each other for fun.)

This can make neverending fancruft disputes, like the Stormcloak vs. Empire arguments, as each side can recruit whatever information out of the conflicting morass of data and hearsay that comprises the world's lore to suit their own argument, but I'd rather have that than the flavorless zwieback which comes from a simple, single, uncontested narrative. There's lots of things that Bethesda could learn from an outfit like Blizzard, like how to better balance, bug fix, and iterate on their product, but I actually think the Elder Scrolls' lore game is top-notch.

Remember TES started off as a weird "off-brand" fantasy setting with a few darker undertones. It really feel like a D&D setting from the 80s with a twist. A setting that got deep with Morrowind because it showed living demi gods, and hero gods that stop impossible dwarven machine gods, along with a very unusual feel for a fantasy world. And while Oblivion was bog standard fantasy tropes on the surface, its Oblivion gates gave the realms of Oblivion form, with the Shivering Isles showing not every Oblivion plane is a lava hellscape. Skyrim showed us Sovngarde and yet another two realms of Oblivion, the Soul Cairn and Apocrypha (I mean actually it is more because of Sanguine's drinking place, Pelagius' Mind which is no doubt just in the Shivering Isles [apparently the place is called Madhouse]), plus a few spots in Skyrim where the borders to Oblivion _feel_ very thin, such as Nocturnal's tomb, the Haunted House in Markarth and the cave where the Hircine quest takes place.

I agree heartily with this post. You don't need to have everything explained 100% for something to be enjoyable. In fact, it's always good to keep a bit of mistery to things. To go back to the Warcraft example, the only thing that remains even a little bit misterious because we don't have any information on it is Elune, the deity of the Night elves, but the way Blizz has been going, they're planning on revealing everything about her, probably in the next expansion. A setting's lore does not win to be fully explained. It loses its magic and becomes dull.

There comes a point where you have to explain old mysteries in order to make people consume the work of art. But you then need to introduce new questions, mysteries and secrets. Blizzard does almost nothing to build up new mythos, they just tear down old lore without replacement.

If they disenchant that much lore, I hope they get enough arcane dust to craft a new one.

Yeah, completely. At risk of geeking out about classics, this is what Tolkien understood and carried off so artfully in the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. When he describes mundane things like the terrain, or food, or buildings, he can be very descriptive, to the point of being nearly obsessive in the level of detail. He describes the kingsfoil plant with such detail and precision, you could ask a dozen different readers to draw it, and they'd wind up showing incredibly similar plants. But when he starts to describe the more mythical and momentous entities in the setting, he can get very strategically vague. This lets you colour these characters with your own imagination, dredging up such visions as appeal to your own sense of what is ominous, inspiring, beautiful or terrifying.

This is obviously impractical to do in a video game or a film, where you actually have to show something concrete to dazzle the viewer, but I still think that mystery, uncertainty, and vagueness are extremely important when building a world. In a related note, that's why prequels often fall flat: They seek to draw away the curtain from the very mystery that lends a story its sense of wonder, and the reader's ability to populate that mystery with their own imagination.

It is a wonderful backdrop to a novel which Tolkien did masterfully. He released a more complete world setting on demand I think, but for what it is worth, his writing style is perfect for the stuff he created. Similar to Martin, who ignores the world of GoT outside of the kingdom it plays in. It doesn't need much explanation, allowing new ideas to be added without a fuss.

I do agree with you but with the caveat that Tolkien was sometimes a little too vague. You need to give something, a foundation upon which the audience can build. Some of Tolkien's mysteries, however, were so barren that there is simply no speculation possible without crafting whole cloth. And that's really just fan-fiction.

As I said above, he explained as much as he needed for a novel. He built a believable world but the primary concern always was the story about the ring. Maybe a substory about immortal super beings relying on the small people (literally as in the Hobbits, and figuratively as in the humans).

[Celestia]

As I said above, he explained as much as he needed for a novel. He built a believable world but the primary concern always was the story about the ring. Maybe a substory about immortal super beings relying on the small people (literally as in the Hobbits, and figuratively as in the humans).

True. Middle-Earth was created for the express purpose of telling the Lord of the Rings, so the world is a little empty outside of that. It's why I never understand people's desire to make LotR RPGs. It just doesn't work.

[The Jack]

Remember TES started off as a weird "off-brand" fantasy setting with a few darker undertones. It really feel like a D&D setting from the 80s with a twist. A setting that got deep with Morrowind because it showed living demi gods, and hero gods that stop impossible dwarven machine gods, along with a very unusual feel for a fantasy world. And while Oblivion was bog standard fantasy tropes on the surface, its Oblivion gates gave the realms of Oblivion form, with the Shivering Isles showing not every Oblivion plane is a lava hellscape. Skyrim showed us Sovngarde and yet another two realms of Oblivion, the Soul Cairn and Apocrypha (I mean actually it is more because of Sanguine's drinking place, Pelagius' Mind which is no doubt just in the Shivering Isles [apparently the place is called Madhouse]), plus a few spots in Skyrim where the borders to Oblivion _feel_ very thin, such as Nocturnal's tomb, the Haunted House in Markarth and the cave where the Hircine quest takes place.

Did it? I, like basically everybody, never played arena, but I'm pretty sure you're wrong on multiple accounts here.

A giant dwemer machine weapon was the centre of the plot of daggerfall, the second game in the series.

Books describing different oblivions and daedra appear in daggerfall. Also, Daedra each had holidays, which I think is very cool. In morrowind, Daedra design was radically different, and Golden saints, winged twilights and Ogrims showed variety in what could be from oblivion.

Oblivion gave us that cool painted place too.

Daggerfall and Morrowind reversed the tolkien dichotomy of 'Dwarves have craftsmanship, Orcs mass produce ugly'. TES is a world where the Dwemer are soulless tinkerers and the orsimer are tradition bound master craftsman (at least until skyrim, where the orcs are savages and the dwemer live in ornate stone halls again). In daggerfall, Orcish gear was second only to daedric.

Also reversed; people from the west came to the continent of tamriel and took a sizable chunk of land from the native population. They wear colonial clothes and use black powder weapons. Thing is that racially they're black/red people. This was their pre-morrowind lore, and it remains so (though nobody's seen a cannon outside TES Adventures; Redguard) )

Hircine was a big deal in a tes III expansion. Bloodmoons were the whole idea.

TES was deepest around 2/3.

Actually, Skyrim's kinda ruined a lot. Volkihar vampires used to live under frozen lakes and would drag people down under the surface. Falmer remnants used to be something more than blind goblins and -that one albino altmer-. Werebears used to be skyrim's thing, and lycanthropy wasn't a simple blessing. I could go on and on, but skyrim made things more generic than oblivion ever did.

[Resileaf]

There comes a point where you have to explain old mysteries in order to make people consume the work of art. But you then need to introduce new questions, mysteries and secrets. Blizzard does almost nothing to build up new mythos, they just tear down old lore without replacement.

There are ways to reveal things about old mysteries without breaking the magic. Blizzard did not succeed in doing that.
The Titans, the beings that virtually created all life in the setting, spend a grand half an hour on-screen (10 minutes for the Eonar fight, 10 minutes for Aggramar, 10 minutes with them sitting on their hands in the Argus fight) doing virtually nothing. Or how about the Old Gods? Unfathomable entities from another dimension whose mere whispers can drive a man mad, but actually they're just parasites and are the minions of stronger beings who are actually the biggest threat to the entire universe and they explain exactly what they are. Even worse, they explained all of this in supplementary materials long before we would even know in-game that Void Lords existed, which is kind of like removing the mystery before you even knew it existed. It's like being spoiled about the twist to an Agatha Christie novel before you know who the author is. What do you care about learning of the story anymore?

[factotum]

True. Middle-Earth was created for the express purpose of telling the Lord of the Rings, so the world is a little empty outside of that.

It really wasn't? You only have to read the Silmarillion to realise that--there's barely a mention of Rings in it. LOTR was the story Tolkien told when people told him that the Silmarillion would never get published, so it's an afterthought in the mythos if anything. This is why there isn't really a creation myth for hobbits, because they were never originally part of Middle-earth and just got sort of shoe-horned in when they proved popular.

[The_Jackal]

It really wasn't? You only have to read the Silmarillion to realise that--there's barely a mention of Rings in it. LOTR was the story Tolkien told when people told him that the Silmarillion would never get published, so it's an afterthought in the mythos if anything. This is why there isn't really a creation myth for hobbits, because they were never originally part of Middle-earth and just got sort of shoe-horned in when they proved popular.

Yeah, no, actually Tolkien has tons of untapped backstory, going back to the very creation of the universe, most of which is barely brushed by. Take, for example, the song of Beren and Luthien which Aragon sings/tells of during Fellowship of the Ring. He outlined the entire story, and fleshed out big pieces of it in full prose. Check out Unfinished Tales, which is the only posthumous work of Tolkien's which has complete prose written by the man himself, as opposed to the Silmarillion and later works which were heavily edited, amended, and written wholesale by his son, Christopher. Or the wanderings of Hurin, who I don't think even gets a mention in LotR or the Hobbit. He wrote lots of material on him, and his tragic tales of coping with being accursed by Morgoth (the original big bad of the Tolkien backstory, and for whom Sauron was just an understudy.

Getting back on topic, I think it's quite a compliment to the lore writers in Elder Scrolls that we're even having a conversation about how Tamriel might measure up to Middle Earth. This is not a discussion you'd have about Azeroth, or Norrath, or any number of other computer RPG settings, I feel. I also really like that chunks of the backstory are presented in the form of short stories you can interact with, as opposed to some voice-over exposition dump or cut-scene. Not that those aren't good too, but the tale told without context or direct bearing on the player's own situation gives the world a sense of depth.

[Resileaf]

Getting back on topic, I think it's quite a compliment to the lore writers in Elder Scrolls that we're even having a conversation about how Tamriel might measure up to Middle Earth. This is not a discussion you'd have about Azeroth, or Norrath, or any number of other computer RPG settings, I feel. I also really like that chunks of the backstory are presented in the form of short stories you can interact with, as opposed to some voice-over exposition dump or cut-scene. Not that those aren't good too, but the tale told without context or direct bearing on the player's own situation gives the world a sense of depth.

I hope they don't fall into an over-explaining trap for ES VI. Recent Bethesda blunders give me pause and make me wonder if they're not getting a bit too out of touch with what they're supposed to do to make a game good.

[The_Jackal]

I hope they don't fall into an over-explaining trap for ES VI. Recent Bethesda blunders give me pause and make me wonder if they're not getting a bit too out of touch with what they're supposed to do to make a game good.

I generally attribute to stupidity in lieu of malice, and I think the whole 76 fiasco has been one of 'Let's squeeze some value out of a project we should have spiked', rather than an objective disinvestment in their development team. It's hard to push against a project once it's in the pipeline, and there's a release date set. I'm sure there were developers at Bethesda who knew that 76 wasn't ready, or wasn't ever going to be a viable offering, but were unable to get their opinions heard. Corporate culture is weird.

I think ES6 is so far over the horizon, it's not even worth worrying about. Starfield is in the pipeline next, and I think the pre-release hype for that game will be a good indicator of whether Bethsoft's stumble with 76 portends a general decline in quality, or just a momentary lapse of sanity.

[Celestia]

It really wasn't? You only have to read the Silmarillion to realise that--there's barely a mention of Rings in it. LOTR was the story Tolkien told when people told him that the Silmarillion would never get published, so it's an afterthought in the mythos if anything. This is why there isn't really a creation myth for hobbits, because they were never originally part of Middle-earth and just got sort of shoe-horned in when they proved popular.

The Silmarillion? You mean the one that was written by his son based on a few scattered notes? Is that the book you're talking about?

Tolkien did make extra stuff (primarily after writing LotR), but most of it was unfinished and barely more than cliff notes. The expanded Middle-Earth lore was almost entirely crafted by Christopher.

But even including that, there are still so many mysteries that are left with a serious lack of information. What does exist about the world is great and imaginative, but the border between the known and unknown is a sharp contrast.

[The_Jackal]

The Silmarillion? You mean the one that was written by his son based on a few scattered notes? Is that the book you're talking about?

Tolkien did make extra stuff (primarily after writing LotR), but most of it was unfinished and barely more than cliff notes. The expanded Middle-Earth lore was almost entirely crafted by Christopher.

But even including that, there are still so many mysteries that are left with a serious lack of information. What does exist about the world is great and imaginative, but the border between the known and unknown is a sharp contrast.

Not really, no. He had worked on it throughout his life, the earliest drafts of which dated back to 1925, 12 years before the publication of the Hobbit, and he said that he first started working on it in 1917, when he was hospitalized during World War I. He actually tried to publish the Silmarillion after The Hobbit, but the publisher rejected it for being 'too Celtic'. While there's definitely much patchwork done to turn what was a disorganized bunch of writings and world-building into a kind of Middle-Earth biblical arc, there's no question that he had put an enormous amount of work on it during the course of his life.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

I hope they don't fall into an over-explaining trap for ES VI. Recent Bethesda blunders give me pause and make me wonder if they're not getting a bit too out of touch with what they're supposed to do to make a game good.

If they fall into that trap it's more likely to be in ESO IMO - though I'm assuming a similar scope for ESVI as the previous single player games (read: one province or thereabout).

[The Jack]

I hope they don't fall into an over-explaining trap for ES VI. Recent Bethesda blunders give me pause and make me wonder if they're not getting a bit too out of touch with what they're supposed to do to make a game good.

bethesda looks at it's own lore like it's a dragon to be avoided or to be slain. Over explanation is the last of my worries.

[Celestia]

I've been thinking, and it occurs to me that TES, as it's been since Oblivion, is basically just Fable with a bigger budget. It's an ambitious project with great ideas and greater promises that fails utterly in its execution and creates an enjoyable yet disappointing experience.

[The Jack]

See, I think the issue is that it tries too hard where it doesn't matter or is bad, and doesn't try at all in areas where it does matter.

For example, every single major questline in Skyrim was somewhere between paint-by-numbers and agonizingly stupid.

They could have spent twenty minutes coming up with better stories.
Or they could have saved days of time by not doing them at all, because they were blatantly just needing them to fill a quota. Had they divested those hours into other areas of the game, it would've been stronger as a whole. Maybe then they could have bettered the radiant quest system (which again, is something you need to go all-in on or not touch), improved the quality of dungeons or cities, got some properly fleshed out Nords or just improved how characters interact/ai.

Perk trees were a lot of effort but somehow half-assed.

They're spending far too much on big name voice actors. It's marketing I guess.

Also, where's my morrowind dunmer voice? It's incredibly easy to do. There I was one day thinking I could not only do it perfectly, but I could also switch it up to have different but consistent dunmer voices, and thus I should be hired, but then I found out my mates could do a pretty good job of it, so It's by no means special.

[factotum]

See, I think the issue is that it tries too hard where it doesn't matter or is bad, and doesn't try at all in areas where it does matter.

I always think you can tell how much Bethesda care about the lore by what happened with the Daggerfall ending. "Oh, we really can't decide which of these six possible endings to make canonical, we'll just say they all happened at once and call it the Warp in the West".

[Resileaf]

I always think you can tell how much Bethesda care about the lore by what happened with the Daggerfall ending. "Oh, we really can't decide which of these six possible endings to make canonical, we'll just say they all happened at once and call it the Warp in the West".

In a way, it's clever in its own dumb way.

[LibraryOgre]

I always think you can tell how much Bethesda care about the lore by what happened with the Daggerfall ending. "Oh, we really can't decide which of these six possible endings to make canonical, we'll just say they all happened at once and call it the Warp in the West".

In a way, it's clever in its own dumb way.

Really, the concept of CHIM and Dragon Breaks is kind of brilliant, since it allows every game to be valid, and provides a degree of in-game justification for "I cannot fail save by choosing not to complete the game." Events are heading towards an inevitable conclusion, but which conclusion is inevitable? Almost all of them! Morrowind, by comparison, had a relatively straightforward end-game storyline... while there was the workaround if you killed an essential person, there was really only one conclusion it could come to (other aspects were more open-ended, but it was going to end with you destroying the Sixth House).

Compare this to, say, Mass Effect, who wound up writing a lot of your choices out. Did you make Anderson the counsellor? We've written that out; it doesn't matter, because we need Udina to be the bad guy. Did you die and restart this particular fight 30 times? It's just a game. Making CHIM an explicit part of the lore makes everything you do... including dying repeatedly, or even looking up a map on UESP and being perfectly prepared for things... part of the game.

[Resileaf]

Really, the concept of CHIM and Dragon Breaks is kind of brilliant, since it allows every game to be valid, and provides a degree of in-game justification for "I cannot fail save by choosing not to complete the game." Events are heading towards an inevitable conclusion, but which conclusion is inevitable? Almost all of them! Morrowind, by comparison, had a relatively straightforward end-game storyline... while there was the workaround if you killed an essential person, there was really only one conclusion it could come to (other aspects were more open-ended, but it was going to end with you destroying the Sixth House).

Compare this to, say, Mass Effect, who wound up writing a lot of your choices out. Did you make Anderson the counsellor? We've written that out; it doesn't matter, because we need Udina to be the bad guy. Did you die and restart this particular fight 30 times? It's just a game. Making CHIM an explicit part of the lore makes everything you do... including dying repeatedly, or even looking up a map on UESP and being perfectly prepared for things... part of the game.

It's a brilliant cop-out, yeah. It's a very clever way of making game mechanics and events that couldn't possibly happen at the same time do so, without feeling entirely out of place because of how wacky the Elder Scrolls lore and the mythos surrounding it is. Reality is shockingly fragile in that setting, and yet it's very adaptable and does a good job patching itself up after someone has decided to go ape with the laws of time and physics.

[Celestia]

See, I think the issue is that it tries too hard where it doesn't matter or is bad, and doesn't try at all in areas where it does matter.

This. This times a thousand. Skyrim is full of halfassed detail, and it's distracting. And so much of it is just a waste. Like, did you know the game has a unique animation for farmers feeding their chickens? Of course, whoever did that clearly just did so when they were bored one day as nothing else in the game supports it. There is no bag of chicken feed item or bits of chicken feed that sit on the ground, so the NPCs, apparently, feed their chickens invisible flower blossoms. It does not make the game more immersive because the incomplete nature of it is absurdity and draws your attention to this being a game.

And this halfassed tendency permeates the entire game. There are hundreds (thousands?) of quests, but most of them are dull and redundant, and a shocking number are so easy you can literally complete them five minutes after getting them. "Hey, I have a problem with another person" "Okay, I'll just go talk to that person who is standing twenty feet away." "Thank you for solving my problem." The central questlines are all abysmally short, even after being artificially inflated by required "jobs." In the Dark Brotherhood, you only perform three real contracts the entire quest. And that's counting Grelod. They should have spent way more time on the quests.

The thing that gets me the most, though, is the dungeon design. In Oblivion, people complained that the dungeons were too samey and blamed it on them being procedurally generated. So, in Skyrim, they spent thousands of hours hand crafting the dungeons. And still made them all feel samey. Because the problem isn't whether or not the dungeons were made by a person; it's how many different pieces are available. The problem with both games is that the dungeons are built using the same set pieces just in different orders, and there are so few of them that you see the same ones multiple times. If they had simply made more such pieces, they could have kept with the procedural generation and saves a boatload of time to be better spent on other things. Like maybe also making more buildings. The four small cities and the settlements all use the exact. same. buildings. The only difference between Dawnstar and Falkreath is that one has snow. It also really distracted me when I realized that the abandoned shack on Solstheim is nearly identical to Alvor's house in Riverwood, all the way down to the same furniture layout. That is supremely lazy.

I feel like Bethesda has just become completely out of touch, like none of them actually understand what makes a good game. I don't care that there's, like, two dozen different dishes I can cook. But I would like different weapon types to actually play differently. A mace is just a slower sword, and that's not right.

Final note: Hearthfire. That expansion is everything I've said turned up to eleven. They give you the ability to custom design your house in a sort of Sims-lite, but then they give you all of three choices for your wings and zero choices for the rest. The house has so little player input that there's basically no reason for you to be able to build it yourself, and building a custom house is literally the entire point of the expansion! In fact, it has virtually no content outside of the house building. Add that to the fact that Hearthfire is the absolute buggiest thing in Skyrim (despite being the second expansion), and I feel like this thing was shat out in a week to meet some sort of deadline.

[The Jack]

The dungeons thing; They really just could've gotten better at randomizing the dungeons.

-Add a colour filter/lighting change/Fog. It works wonders.
-Add a modifier to the monsters inside. Be it 'draugr have red eyes, no weapons and drain life on a hit. They are faster and more agressive" or "all the bandits look like imperial deserters and are under the effects of skooma" or "all the Ice warriors are blind, ugly and use charus chitin" because that last one might've been a great idea had it been a one off.
-randomize the music in some way. Each dungeon should have it's own sound.

Or randomized the dungeons but then went through an additional handcrafting pass so that they've got memorable stuff in for little effort.



Also, Am I the only one to think that the Aylied ruins were visually the best dungeon, beating anything from skyrim? Following that, The standard Oblivion-dungeon, Morrowind's daedric ruins (I was usually too scared to go in them), Morrowind's dwemer ruins, Oblivion's daedric towers, Morrowind's cave (it has a charm to it I can't describe, and crystal sections were nice), oblivion's cave, Skyrim's riften sewers and then Castle Volkihair (even if it's a terrible castle and a terrible rendition of skyrim's vampires)

What's everyone's favourite dungeon tileset?

[Celestia]

I, too, loved the Aylied ruins. They were so visually interesting and had a certain feel to them that really worked. They were definitely my favorite TES dungeons.

[LibraryOgre]

My problem with the Skyrim dungeons is that EVERY SINGLE ONE was a donut. Where ever you ended up, it was going to be a short walk to a previously inaccessible door near the entrance OR an inaccessible, unmarked, exit to the outside. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. They were never something you could discover on your own... they were just arbitrarily blocked off and inaccessible.

I understand WHY, but it led to a very same-feeling to the dungeon.

[Celestia]

My problem with the Skyrim dungeons is that EVERY SINGLE ONE was a donut. Where ever you ended up, it was going to be a short walk to a previously inaccessible door near the entrance OR an inaccessible, unmarked, exit to the outside. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. They were never something you could discover on your own... they were just arbitrarily blocked off and inaccessible.

I understand WHY, but it led to a very same-feeling to the dungeon.

Not all of them. There are some that don't loop, but those tend to be either the small ones that don't need a loop or dungeons with a back door that goes directly outside. However, the vast majority do have the loop the shatters suspension of disbelief.

[Keltest]

Not all of them. There are some that don't loop, but those tend to be either the small ones that don't need a loop or dungeons with a back door that goes directly outside. However, the vast majority do have the loop the shatters suspension of disbelief.

Actually, it makes sense. These things are supposed to be temples and other similar functions. That means you want easy access to the depths, if you know how to trigger the secret door to open. It also would serve as an emergency bolt hole if anything living in it actually cared to get out.

[The_Jackal]

Actually, it makes sense. These things are supposed to be temples and other similar functions. That means you want easy access to the depths, if you know how to trigger the secret door to open. It also would serve as an emergency bolt hole if anything living in it actually cared to get out.

Eh, that smacks a bit of rationalization to me, but it makes no difference. I would have been just has happy, if not happier, to have a more randomized procedural dungeon system, with various entrances and exits, which dumped you out somewhere else far from the entrance to the crypt, Rogue-like or Diablo style. Continuity is overrated.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

I don't know about tilesets, but I miss the variety of traps Oblivion had. Part of that is that so many of the dungeons are Draugr infested tombs but if they were going to have so many of those they could have dreamed up a few more traps for them. Ditto for the monsters - did 90% of the monsters have to be Draugr? Couldn't they have mixed it up a little?