I also heard that reason the Elves, Nords, Orcs, Argonians, and Khajiit, shared voices is because the original audio files were lost in a server meltdown and they were in a rush to rerecord.

But just imagine a Beth-scope game with the strenuous QA of a company like Valve. It would take 50 years to produce, but after that, you really wouldn't need to make anything else.


At this point we need to make an important distinction: Cyrodiilic is not necessarily the same thing as Imperial. What we saw in MW was cultural hodge-podge made-for-easy-expert Imperial culture, not authentic Cyrodiilic culture.

It would be called Amaranth, because that's what would happen when you booted the damn thing up.

Edit: Damnit, now i'm feeling all wistful and hopeful. We can dream, I guess.

The Imperial Cult being the most obvious example; the essentialized vector of the (at least) nine distinct cults we should have seen in Oblivion.

But, Hawtty, what is the point of all this? We know that Oblivion wasn't a good representation of Cyrodiil. We've known it for a long time.

I had a taste of TES II: Daggerfall, but didn't really play much of it; my real introduction to the series was TES III: Morrowind. And there, I got the impression that Cyrodiil was modelled on Imperial Rome, to an excessive degree. I didn't even remember any mention of Cyrodiil being a jungle until I started seeing complaints about how that was retconned. I'd always assumed it more-or-less resemble the parts of Europe on the Mediterranean coast.

My biggest single disappointment with TES IV: Oblivion was with the style and scale of the Imperial City. It was ridiculously small, and primitive compared to other cities we saw in Cyrodiil -- and was nothing next to the apparent grandeur of Mournhold.

I've seen a lot of complaints that TES IV left out a lot of the color of differing cultures within Cyrodiil. I'm not sure where they were so richly portrayed -- the 1st PGE? In TES III, I remember Colovian hats, which again reminded me of the pastoral culture of medieval Italy, but that was about it.

If the game got rushed at the end, that would explain a lot. I've been seeing a lot of debate about how to deal with the ending of Massive Disappointment 3, which looks like it got rushed at the end. The game industry seems to be suffering from its new status as the last great cash cow of mass media.

He's doing a mod. (Now I've cornered him.)

Pleasedeargodyes.

Ya caught me.

http://chzscience.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/funny-science-news-experiments-memes-dog-science-fuzzy-logic.jpg

I love this one lol.

If you ever decide to, this squirrel is with you all the way.

Ah yes. Mea culpa.
But... What if this book was also rewrited by that "royalty breathe" stuff? It's Talos' Maaagicka.

As is this ermine, limited though his stubby paws may be in their capacity for picture-making.

Dammit. I was so excited to see that link.

I would have loved a larger division between Colovia and Nibenay and see both cultures developed more as a result.

Despite having put 100x's more hours into the vanilla version (which i have a strong love-hate relationship with), I will always remember oblivion as it was after having the [censored] modded out of it. Most notably: unique landscapes and better cities. This has become the 'canon' version in my eyes.

So in retrospect, Cyrodill was an amazing place.

*twitch*

Aesthetics aside, calling Oblivion's "culture" "realistic" is absolutely unforgivable.

The faux-medieval faux-Europe that is found in TES IV and every other fantasy product of recent memory is infinitely more sterile, empty, lifeless, boring and UN-realistic than the most uninspired History Channel depiction of medieval Europe as its most dull.

Oblivion's Cyrodiil doesn't even have an economy. In all aspects of society and setting it is nothing more than a sword-and-sorcery rendition of Eastern Maryland with the hills turned into mountains. Pretty, though. The Twilight of Tamriel.

Clearly, Oblivion should have been set in western Maryland. Then you could get politics, murderers, corurption, and all sorts of fun stuff.

Remember how scenic Oblivion was? Should have been a slide show of frames out of Big Sur. With a itty mans in armor, pwning evil.

No, it absolutely was more realistic. If you actually talk to npcs in the game, the colovians (especially in Chorrol) are more pious and serious, while the nibenese (with the obvious exception of Alessia Otus and her ingrate husband) tend to be materialistic and petty. But, much like real people, that isn't a blanket classification that absolutely defines everyone who falls into it. There is nuance and variance from person to person, and although they have regional differences, much like a person from Oregon and a person from South Carolina will differ culturally, your complaint is the equivalent of complaining that not everyone from Oregon wears a plaid shirt and horn-rimmed glasses and rides to work at their vegan co-op on a fixed-gear bike, and not everyone from South Carolina is a fat hick in a beer-stained tank top and trucker hat yelling obscenities at passing ethnic minorities from his Chevy truck. Sure, those are the stereotypes, but they're exaggerations that in no way apply to the majority of people living there.

No, it is more comparable to why a Roman or Greek (specifically, an Athenian) wouldn't act the same and if Rome didn't have a garrish sense of style.

And Rome if mimicked Germanic (Nordic) culture as opposed to Greek.

Edit: This is actually a bad example, for obvious reasons.

But what we should have saw is more cults in the Imperial city, with merchants having more power than the Counts in the rest of the Niben. In Colovia, the Counts should be a powerful and intimidating figure. Give the Nibense more plantations of rice fields, which is there due to geography rather than culture.

It's not just the commoners. It's the nobility and who runs the cities that should be different.

The glimmer-gold of Talos District struck me as particularly beautiful on my last visit, with the eight-times-eight statues of our Most Majestic Majesty, the Emperor Tiber Septim, lining the red tinted faith-stones of the innumerable pathways in all His Aspects, both terrible and inspirational.

A hundred or more Dragon Banners hung from the Walls That Reach Heaven, each listing the genealogy of a particular House-Clan. And Everywhere the symbol of Empire Actual, reminding all citizens of the importance of the Center-That-Must-Hold.

Maybe if we all tap our heels together and chant the Inaudible Chant we’ll go Home?

What on earth are you talking about?

Cyrodiil is nether Washington nor South Carolina. That's the entire problem.

...Do you, like, actually talk to npcs?

Yeah, there are exactly two 'Rumors' with the words Nibenay or Colovia in it. Don't try to pretend that two sentences constitute culture.

But what was actually baffling me is that you seem to be comparing a few shmucks in Chorrol to the Ald Cyrod NPCs that never existed. What the hell is unrealistic there?

And your post doesn't make sense. Alessia Ottus is the most notoriously pious NPC in the game, lofty and puritanical. She is the opposite of materialistic and petty. But that's because a two-bit writer spent three seconds throwing in a bunch of Fable-quality flavor text and you're mistaking it for lore. There is no Nibenay in Oblivion. There's the Imperial City, and then Colovia-lite. Bravil and Leyawiin are actually the most rough-and-ready towns in the province, and everything in-between is a vast depopulated wilderness.

It's not that Oblivion's Cyrodiil is worse, it's that it's empty of any meaningful content. It's just forests. And I do like the forests.

I concur.

Ald Cyrod could not withstand Talos. This is something we need to come to terms with. The jungles, the excess, White-Gold city a gleaming sprawl of banners and canols. That Cyrodiil belongs to Reman.

What we have to grasp is as the years rolled on, nostalgia and whimsy reshaped the mythic. Nu Cyrod, in light of its God-Emperor, in light of the thinning of the Dragon Blood, in light of the sheer mythological strain of holding together Empire Actual, could only collapse into child-dream of that hardy northerner, Hjalti. Two brusque observations: if Tiber was a Cyrodiil, he was Colovian through and through, and We Are All in Talos' Head and Talos is Dreaming Us. Less crudely, the Empire Actual could only maintain its Nibenian (cosmopolitan) aspect through the reflection of it self back from its own colonies - as the years took the Empire further from mortal Tiber Septim, and closer to the praxis of the Oblivion Crisis, there was only one image of Cyrod that could survive the The Prince of Destruction and his claims. Understand Tamriel is always shifting, reshaping, in the fever dreams of the missing God and his substitutes. The only form that could survive the trauma of the very jaws of Oblivion opening, the horizon of the universe tearing, was that fanciful dream in the head of brutish Hjalti. Only one Empire stood a chance against the armies of Oblivion. Not Reman's, Perif's or even the Cyrodiil that Talos inherited. Where previous modes did the job for the last few traumas Empire Mythic withstood, this one required a different Cyrod. It was, simply put, the Cyrodiil we were given in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

And then:

TALOS STORMCROWN =