& game of thrones

Elder Scrolls is pretty much the most generic fantasy ever. The farthest they ever got from generic was with Morrowind with their focus on the Tribunal Temple and the mystery of the dwemer (which IMO is one of the most interesting bits of backstory in videogame history). Skyrim is just Lord of the Rings with some norse stuff thrown in (which I dig, but it's still generic) plus lots and lots of dragons.

There's Orcs, there's elves, there's humans, there's giant spiders, trolls, giants, and wizards. There's even have Ainur and Maiar, renamed as Aedra and Daedra. Elder Scrolls is as Tolkien as you can get without getting sued by his estate. The only big difference is that ES is a higher magic setting.


EDIT: It occurs to me how nerdy it is that I know what both Ainur and Aedra are. Fuck.

Quote from: MiracleFruitClock;1884664& game of thrones

Fuck yeah!!!!!
You all should watch the series then read all the books because fucking do it

Ok well that sounds pretty promising. It's probably worth mentioning that I thought the gameplay in all the other Elder Scrolls games was absolutely awful. What I've seen of Skyrim looks better but I don't trust videos.

I wish there was a demo so I could be sure. Maybe I'll legally acquire it and try it out.

The combat in Skyrim is vastly superior to other elder scrolls games. The only thing thats worse is that there's no magic customization, but only nerds used that anyway.



You could always "acquire" a free copy of the game and try out the game first before buying it. By, you know.... borrowing it from a friend

Quote from: Thor;1884697The combat in Skyrim is vastly superior to other elder scrolls games. The only thing thats worse is that there's no magic customization, but only nerds used that anyway.



You could always "acquire" a free copy of the game and try out the game first before buying it. By, you know.... borrowing it from a friend

I don't have any friends who play stuff like Skyrim. Well I have a few but they don't live nearby.

idk thor man it is pretty generic but its also kind of not

ive read a lot of lore & history on uesp.net in the weeks anticipating oblivion/skyrim and there is a fucking ridiculous amount of backstory that dates back thousands of years before the first game and serves no purpose other than to be the history of tamriel. well i shouldnt say tamriel because it covers Nirn (the planet) and the entire elder scrolls physical universe and planes of oblivion and whatnot. it makes tolkien look lazy

its really easy to say "oh look magic elves and orcs how typical" rather than understand them for what they are in this particular game. im not going to get into it but all orcs and elves are from the same bloodline yadda yadda natural selection and daedric curses and magicka stuff

also theres that unique racial and political tension in the elder scrolls games which i really ahvent seen in any other fantasy setting

Quote from: MiracleFruitClock;1884703idk thor man it is pretty generic but its also kind of not

ive read a lot of lore & history on uesp.net in the weeks anticipating oblivion/skyrim and there is a fucking ridiculous amount of backstory that dates back thousands of years before the first game and serves no purpose other than to be the history of tamriel. well i shouldnt say tamriel because it covers Nirn (the planet) and the entire elder scrolls physical universe and planes of oblivion and whatnot. it makes tolkien look lazy

its really easy to say "oh look magic elves and orcs how typical" rather than understand them for what they are in this particular game. im not going to get into it but all orcs and elves are from the same bloodline yadda yadda natural selection and daedric curses and magicka stuff

also theres that unique racial and political tension in the elder scrolls games which i really ahvent seen in any other fantasy setting

My problem with it is that none of it means anything. In sci-fi, world building always starts from the same point - reality. It's always going to have some kind of meaning to it because it's speculating about the world we all live in. With fantasy, pretty much everything starts from the world Tolkein invented decades ago and every bit of backstory they layer on top of it just takes it further away from reality. It pisses me off to see people spending so much time jizzing out lore when it doesn't have any purpose other than to sound kind of cool.

Yes there is a lot of backstory, but most of it is just copy pasted from Tolkien. For example, the origin of the Orcs in Elder Scrolls is that they are corrupted elves because their god got eaten by another god. Sounds like a unique spin on things right? Only it's not, because in LotR the origin of the first Orcs is that they're corrupted elves. Also like LotR the elves are timeless and magical and predate humans by a large amount of time. The only thing ES changed was splitting elves down the middle to make "magical elves" and "woodsy elves". They then did the unprecedented and copied Dungeons and Dragons instead of LotR and added Dark Elves, Catmen and Lizardmen.

Onto the next point: the geography of ES. You claim that there is a huge world compared to Middle Earth but really it's not. There is effectively only one continent in Nirn; the ones that aren't actually shown ingame have virtually no details given and exist only in name, similar to how the Undying Lands worked in LotR. Like Lord of the Rings everything is focused on one very small continent with very little information about everywhere else. Detail is so sketchy that nobody IRL even knows what lives on Akavir because the lore is inconsistent and alternates between claiming there's snake monsters that ate every man, vampires, or a race of men. Virtually nothing is known about Atmora and the other continent doesn't even exist any more. So effectively all of Nirn is one continent, so the "history of Nirn" is really just "the history of tamriel".

But what of the creation myth of Nirn? How the evil god Lorkhan tricked the Aedra into creating earth, and then being "killed" by them? Sounds an awful lot like when the evil god Melkor inspired the creation of Middle Earth by the Ainur and later became the enemy of all the gods. The multiple plains of existence which are home to gods idea is not from Tolkien, I'll give you that; instead it's from Dungeons and Dragons. However the idea of gods representing one aspect of reality and that being the source of their power IS from Tolkien.

In conclusion, the Elder Scrolls backstory is entirely unoriginal and mostly stolen from Tolkien and D&D

its a vidya game son. they werent going for revolutionary

obviously its going to be inspired by the classic fantasy mumbo jumbo

okay so first you're saying it's pretty original and then when I ram your shit in with my nerd powers you're all like "it's okay that it's not original!"

nice backpedalin there magicfruit

i was just casually discussing elder scrolls when you jumped on me and did your best angry screaming video game nerd impression like you usually do

At least we can both agree I'm right.

Quote from: Thor;1884732okay so first you're saying it's pretty original and then when I ram your shit in with my nerd powers you're all like "it's okay that it's not original!"

Quote from: MiracleFruitClock;1884703idk thor man it is pretty generic but its also kind of not

"its also kind of not"

You also went into specifics as to how it's original and I then specifically refuted them.

you blew up my poor lil post and viciously attacked me. plus you just ignored a good part of my post uhg stop trying to troll me idiot

and now you are saying that i said elves and orcs and magic is original when i said the exact opposite. i dont know wat youre talking about

Your poor little post was dumb and deserved to be put down. It's called euthanasia.

you are just the worst troll in the clock crew maybe besides babsinthe

Quote from: Thor;1884726Yes there is a lot of backstory, but most of it is just copy pasted from Tolkien. For example, the origin of the Orcs in Elder Scrolls is that they are corrupted elves because their god got eaten by another god. Sounds like a unique spin on things right? Only it's not, because in LotR the origin of the first Orcs is that they're corrupted elves. Also like LotR the elves are timeless and magical and predate humans by a large amount of time. The only thing ES changed was splitting elves down the middle to make "magical elves" and "woodsy elves". They then did the unprecedented and copied Dungeons and Dragons instead of LotR and added Dark Elves, Catmen and Lizardmen.

Onto the next point: the geography of ES. You claim that there is a huge world compared to Middle Earth but really it's not. There is effectively only one continent in Nirn; the ones that aren't actually shown ingame have virtually no details given and exist only in name, similar to how the Undying Lands worked in LotR. Like Lord of the Rings everything is focused on one very small continent with very little information about everywhere else. Detail is so sketchy that nobody IRL even knows what lives on Akavir because the lore is inconsistent and alternates between claiming there's snake monsters that ate every man, vampires, or a race of men. Virtually nothing is known about Atmora and the other continent doesn't even exist any more. So effectively all of Nirn is one continent, so the "history of Nirn" is really just "the history of tamriel".

But what of the creation myth of Nirn? How the evil god Lorkhan tricked the Aedra into creating earth, and then being "killed" by them? Sounds an awful lot like when the evil god Melkor inspired the creation of Middle Earth by the Ainur and later became the enemy of all the gods. The multiple plains of existence which are home to gods idea is not from Tolkien, I'll give you that; instead it's from Dungeons and Dragons. However the idea of gods representing one aspect of reality and that being the source of their power IS from Tolkien.

In conclusion, the Elder Scrolls backstory is entirely unoriginal and mostly stolen from Tolkien and D&D

Pretty much every fantasy thing is lifted from Tolkien because he defined the genre. It's like saying every shooter is ripping off Doom.

Quote from: WrenchClock;1884755Pretty much every fantasy thing is lifted from Tolkien because he defined the genre. It's like saying every shooter is ripping off Doom.

That's beside the point. I'm saying that The Elder Scrolls backstory is incredibly generic and thus probably wouldn't be liked by Munglai. Whether or not it's a bad thing that it's generic wasn't what I was talking about. Although in the specific case of Munglai it obviously is.

Quote from: WrenchClock;1884755Pretty much every fantasy thing is lifted from Tolkien because he defined the genre. It's like saying every shooter is ripping off Doom.

That's different. New games build upon what Doom had and made it better. Games that rip off the Middle Earth setting invariably make it worse.