Nirn seems to be stuck on super slow mo mode as far as progress is concerned. they havent really changed much and in fact arguably they have lost lots of knowledge. no one seems interested in picking up where the dwemer left off.

in the span of only a few hundred years we went from about where nirn is to cruise missiles, tanks and aircraft and the ultimate AoE fire spell the nuclear bomb. mehrunes dagon and alduin would have been shot down within minutes of trying to invade our planet.

edit: apparently i need to clarify, we did not actually have magic two hundred years ago. i mean in regards to combat technology and architecture. :mellow:

on nirn in the same amount of time they actually got dumber. forgot how to levitate, no more spears or crossbows, cant do spellmaking anymore. does the fact the magic makes daily life so easy for nirnians actually hurt them in the long run? they dont have to worry about disease so they are never going to improve their medicine and this bit them in the ass with the red mountain corprus that was incurable with normal spells. if it werent for some guy that was older than dirt and my parents everyone would have been screwed. have fireballs and staff so no need to develop guns or cannons which would have taken care of that dragon problem nicely. no need for toilets cause they teleport their crap to some mystery location. they used to be able to levitate hence no flight etc. a group of sloshed deer hunters could solve skyrims problems in a day.

i used to think that it would be cool to live in a world like that were you could shoot fireballs and float in the air.........but then i imagine a world without the internet and toilets and i think that we are better off without.

Well, you can see how the Dwemer turned out so maybe that scared people off


But Skyrim is a period after the fall of a massive empire, we lost much knowledge when the Roman Empire fell in real life, so Skyrim will be Nirns transition from the Classical age into the Dark Ages.

OMG 200 YEARS AGO WE HAD MAGIC!!!! why couldnt of i have been born then :sadvaultboy:

You forget we have only advanced fast in the last say 500 years since the renassiane. Before that we made very little progress for centuries.

The first three games are set in a 40 year period.....so you cant expect much to change.....to time period to skyim is 200 years now...but seeing as the entire empire has fallen and war going on....with the empire falling they are properly having a bit of a Dark Ages period.

eh.. plane tickets cost a lot of money. I would rather teleport. I woulda been at PAX if I could teleport.

judging by the aleyids ruins and weapons who existed for hundreds if not thousands of years they didnt seem to progress much at all. the only race that embraced technology were the dwemer......although someone mentioned maybe their fate made other races wary of technology. bunch of luddites if you ask me.

yer well, they didnt spawn from unicellular organism. so we have existed for what like a billion more years than they have .

Time does not magically translate into technological prowess. Why don't people get this?

It's more realistic this way.

Ancient Romans had complex bath systems, paved roads, complex military strategies, aqueducts and dams among other things, all of which was lost when their empire fell.

Much of what the Imperials built will have been lost now as well, as well as the secrets of spell casting I would assume.


And this, the Nirnians had no reason to develop technology, they were doing just fine without it.
Just like medieval kings never considered that electricity would be a good idea, they never lived with it so they didn't need it, want it or know how to begin developing it.

Actually, that's a rumor the folks during the Renaissance spread to try and appear particularly enlightened, It is, however, false. The Middle Ages saw massiveprogress, from the civil sector (note the rise of the cities to a point where the Hanseatic League waged wars against entire nations and the corresponding gradual decrease of clout of nobility) to metallurgy (the latter not the least driven out of necessity for arms and armour development, but not alone)

how do you forget about spears though? even if they did somehow manage to forget how to make a pointy stick, at some point in time some random person must have started poking something with a stick, perhaps a rat to keep it away from his food. a light bulb should go off in his head and he should be thinking "my God, if this were longer and thicker i could poke bigger things with it.........like giants" its even in their literature. what happens when some kid finds their dads copy of the lusty argonian maid. when mod and dad are explaining what all the metaphors are for what do they do when they get to spear polishing?

while i agree that time doesnt necessarily translate into progress ie africa and south america. war is perhaps one of the greatest drivers of technology and advancement. and nirn has been fighting with eachother or some outside force since day one.

Seeing as we are talking about scientific development (techniacally metallurgy is chemistry, but smiths weren't using any form of scientific method so it doesn't really count) civics is completely irrelevant.


Well, I can't explain that away.

They don't really NEED to technologically advance much, they don't need guns or explosives because they have magic fireballs... I take it they don't really need to get to other planets or moons anytime soon... So it's like what more do they need (in their eyes).

Not true, Vegetius "De Re Militari" was one of the most popular books with medieval military leaders, and the Carolingian Abbot Rhabanus Maurus published an annotated edition of it that brought it up to date. Dams against flooding were built during the Middle Ages, though depending upon density of settlement, sometimes only around one's own farm. In any case, already the "Sachsenspiegel" had severe penalties for people endangering the integrity of dams or not helping in saving the dam during a flood.

I don't think we should assume something doesn't exist just because it's not in the game. There's things that are deliberately left out and others that are just not there because games are a limited model of a place. They still have spears; we just can't see them.

They did lose levitation though.

Universities are irrelevant for scientific development?

Now that's some news you have there...

During the High Middle Ages, yes. The Early Middle ages, however, was a horrible place to live (in most of Europe). Few cities, petty kingdoms, bad sanitation, nations were very, very poor, ect.




They still have spears. They just aren't in the game. Levitation is illegal, IIRC.

Metallurgical and society developments =/= scientific development no matter where you study them

And universities were irrelevant for scientific development in the majority of the Middle Ages, you know how universities also offer degrees in law, medicine and journalism?
Furthermore universities were more for philosophy than science, even in the roman era


You have me there, but there were still a lot of tactical texts lost

And the dams were largely insuperior.

I don't think every nirnian has magic prowness, and thinking about them not having necessities because of magic is an absurd.
They should at least invent new forms of using magic, to me, it's just the lore that is not profoundly rich or creative.

Edit: Or nirnians are too dumb, which is a good excuse for the writers.

Since it is rarely mentioned: The Minoan had concrete asphalt, something we only rediscovered more than three millennia later.

Necessities?

If you have never experienced or even imagined something you would not think of it as a neccesity.



And that's my new learnt fact for the day :foodndrink:

so they are all collecting dust in some shed and an enemy that has tough armor and long arms shows up and no one thinks to grab the pointy sticks. as for levitation being illegal the empire is no more so why would anyone care about laws 200 years earlier. if people still new how to levitate dont you think anyone and everyone would be flying around since they couldnt do it for generations.

Actually that would be the reason no-one is doing it, if no-one has been levitating for 200 years is anyone going to remember how?

No, you just can't use them. They still use them in-universe.

Conquest, messaging between provinces, lack of space, lack of food, attack of daedra... All of these are problems asking for inventions, they should at least use magicka in new ways (inventions) to overcome all this, because it clearly isn't doing it.