Don't get me wrong.. I loved Oblivion. I still play it to this day. But Morrowind, with its central volcano hiding a cursed god, the pyramidal structure of Vivec, yurts, adobe structures, tents, mushroom-like wizard towers, and giant-tick-like silt striders, felt like a truly alien, fantastic world. It was like living in the world of The Dark Cyrstal or something. I don't know. Maybe it's the 80s kid in me. But it was also the way I couldn't really immediately relate to the world or its people until I "studied" its culture and lore through the in-game books and what not. I felt like there was an assimilation process to a degree. That feeling really heightened the immersion for me, personally.

I don't think I could count on two hands the (in my opinion at least) improvements Oblivion made over Morrowind in terms of gameplay, graphics, interface, pace, and a litany of other factors. But it just felt... well... familiar. It was a world I felt I had seen and played in before to a larger extent than Morrowind. Knights, castles, horses, green forests, western european architecture, seemingly LOTR-inspired ruins, and - in my opinion - less cultural, visual, and dialogue variation between the game's races. It just felt, as I said, familiar. There was still lore to "study," but it was presented in such a relatable, westernized, accesible way, that I never felt like I was in an alien culture. It felt more like a familiar, if ancient, normal human culture. I suppose that makes sense given that it was the capital province of the Imperial-dominated empire. But still...

My hope is that TES V will retain the improvements Oblivion brought to the table (with many of its own, I have no doubt,) but take me to another fantastic, alien world the way Morrowind did. One that makes me feel like I'm truly in a land I know nothing about, can't necessarily relate to without immersing myself in its lore, and am truly a stranger in. Accessibility is great, but sometimes roleplaying and immersion, for me at least, really require a sense of feeling like a fish out of water that has to learn about the world he's in in order to survive in it. Sadly, I suspect those days may be behind us in today's mass-market appeal driven videogame industry. I think a true stroke of videogame design brilliance, however, would be to couple accessibility and ease of use with the FEELING of knowing nothing about the world we are entering from the outset. If anyone is up to that task, it's Bethesda imo.

well from what it looks like is that its going to be in Skyrim, so dont expect an alien enviroment, think of like canada, it going to be alot of tundra like terrain and and temperate forests, so in the warm places it will be like around bruma from oblivion, and in the cold places up north like solsthiem from morrowind.

Well said.

While I like the environment of Morrowind much more, that is just how it is made. All of the areas have already been created, Cyrodil was made correct lore-wise, like it or not.

Well, it isn't so much the setting,, as it is the customs, culture, personalities, and life forms within the world in my opinion. I can think of several ways they could make Skyrim seem like an "alien" land if they wanted to. The Skaal in Bloodmoon were fairly alien, although not unlike the Nordic peoples of our own world. The sense of antiquity in Morrowind really set it apart from Oblivion for me too. Morrowind felt like a Stone Age culture. Oblivion felt like a Broze Age or later culture.



I would certainly never argue that it wasn't correct.

No it wasn't. Cyrodiil was supposed to mainly be a jungle, according to lore. Then Oblivion came along and well...It's more like Middle Earth. So if they will continue to contradict lore, for all we know Skyrim could end up being a tropical place.

Oh really? I just thought it was suppsoed to be lush and forest like.

Thats good to know, as I hated the landscape

Yup. Before Oblivion came along Cyrodiil almost sounded more exotic than Morrowind.

I think it could be argued (rightly or wrongly depending on one's view) that forests are similar enough to jungles that at least the general spirit of the setting was retained. I don't know if I agree with that, but my issue isn't how lore-correct Cyrodiil was or wasn't. My issue is how Oblivion felt compared to Morrowind. Morrowind felt like a strange, exotic land with its own culture and customs. Oblivion felt like western europe, or as another poster said, Middle Earth. (Although I would argue that it was actually less alien a world than Middle Earth.)

That would be me. :hehe:

well it is jungle, for instance the closer to Black Marsh you get the more jungle like and tropical, same as you get closer to south eastern Elsweyr, you wouldnt find jungles near the borders of Skyrim, i think they were very geographically correct in oblivion.

I'm looking forward to it. Right now my head is going through images of the ashlands(because its barren and rocky), Solothsiem, and Bruma wilderness all combined into a giant scene.


Pics or it didn't happen! :frog:

That's more swamp-like than jungle-like.



Just look up a few posts, lazy-bones.

I have to agree with what the poster of this topic is saying about the world of Elder Scrolls games. In terms of world design, I found Oblivion to be a very large step back from Morrowind. I may have said before in other topics that fantasy, as a genre, should offer creators the greatist room for using their imagination of any genre of fiction, since fantasy offers writers freedom to create their own world, and decide for themselves what sort of races inhabit this world, what kind of cultures they have, what countries they are, what the continents look like or what their terrain is like, what creatures inhabit them, what the technology in the world is like, how common magic is and what it can do, and so on. There's a lot of room for creativity in this genre, and yet it is so often confined to certain cliches, and it's not just bad writers that do this either, even very good stories often still end up relying on the same concepts that everyone else uses, they just use it to tell a story that's still good. What should have been a genre about immersing audiences in a world that's unique and different from their own instead all too often becomes a genre about rehasing the same generic ideas. And rehashing ideas is alright to some extent, because even the most creative of writers will still need to rely on concepts others have done before, but the way things are in fatansy, it's gotten to a point where most of the settings would pretty much be interchangable if you changed some names around a bit. I honestly see a lot more creativity in science fiction than I usually see in fantasy, even though science fiction most often takes place in the future of our own world, and thus you'd expect it to have more grounding in reality, thus leaving writers with less room to come up with their own ideas, and yet still, science-fiction often does a better job at making its settings seem unique than fantasy. This is not to say, of course, that science-fiction doesn't have its own sets of cliches, for it does, but good writers of science fiction seem to be much more willing to break away from the usual mold than those of fantasy. It might also have to do with the fact that many science fiction cliches are somewhat less constraining than fantasy cliches. In science fiction, we have things like aliens, robots and starships, whereas fantasy has elves, dragons and knights. The concept of aliens leaves quite a bit of room for people to get creative despite it being so common in science fiction because aliens is a very broad category, where do they come from? What do they look like? How intelligent are they? What kind of technology do they have? Do they have any abilities a normal human would not? Depending on how much detail you go into, there's a lot of ways such a concept could be used differently in different settings. By comparison, most fantasy fans probably have a distinct image of what an elf is in their mind, and while there is a bit of room to try different things, if the elves differ TOO much from the norm, people might say they should not be elves at all. But ranting aside, when I read fantasy, in fantasy, what I want to see is a world that is unique and very different from our own, populated by strange cultures and creatures, with exotic locations and interesting characters, usually what I get is the same generic garbage. While this might not be true in terms of gameplay, as far as setting is concerned, Morrowind was my favorite Elder Scrolls game because it was the closest to what I want from fantasy. It felt like a really unique world, with its own distinct cultures, history and environment. It was a world which took some learning to understand, yes, but it was also one that you WANTED to understand. By comparison, Oblivion's world felt boring and unoriginal, Shivering Isles was an improvement in this regard, but since it was only an expansion, it could not fix the problem, only offering a place I could go to for relief from the genericness rather than making the world itself unique. Now, Arena and Daggerfall were also pretty generic, some might say, but to that I would say, so what? Aren't sequels supposed to try to improve upon their predecessors? And if they can't, they should at least aim to capture what was good in the previous work, they should DEFINATELY not take a step backwards if the work before them was already an improvement over what came before it, the third one is exactly what Oblivion did. Morrowind was a unique game in a series that had previously been generic fantasy, and I loved it for it. If Bethesda's decision of how to design Oblivion was meant as a throwback to Arena and Daggerfall, than it was a very misguided decision, hopefully Bethesda will make the next game a throwback to Morrowind.



And how is Canada alien?

For that matter, how is Solstheim or Bruma alien? I mean, sure, Solstheim had some things you won't see in real life, but so did Oblivion, that's not the point, the overall feel of the place still didn't feel as much like exploring a place that's truely unfamiliar. And a lot of the fictional elements added by both Bloodmoon and the ones in Oblivion were based on very common mythological and fatasy archetypes, werewolves, for example, are absolutely nothing new. While maybe Skyrim COULD be fairly creative, I fully expect it to be every bit as cliche as Oblivion's world, after all, it's not like people haven't done ice and snow in fantasy before.



Indeed, there's a difference between swamp and tropical jungle, not everything that has lots of trees but doesn't look like your stereotypical European forest is a jungle.

tl; dnr. That was the biggest wall of text I have ever seen on this forum. Try breaking it up into a couple of different paragraphs...

So did arena have rainforest?

No, but pretty much everything from Arena has been ret-conned in some way.

Well that means three(if you count arena but arena is different because they were still making lore)elder scrolls games break their own lore oblivion,morrowind and arena all break the lore(but arena didn't have too much made back then)Morrowind was supposed to be a volcanic wasteland and oblivion and arena are supposed to have rainforests(in cyrodiil).

Morrowind might have broken lore, but at least they changed Vvardenfell into something interesting.

When isn't Arena recon. Its a typical Medieval RPG with a typical king and a typical main quest. Its short and fun, but its just a start of something HUGE.

Whatever they decide, I hope they keep the same PC ability that Oblivion had. It was refreshing to see that any creature or NPC that was killed can be picked up, moved, and either thrown off a hill into the water, put on a roaring fire, or just posed in solemn rememberance. Couldn't interact with NPCs in Morrowind on that scale, just kill them and dispose of them. That's not to say sometimes you don't get lucky with a good shot, like killing an Ash Zombie to see it fall direcly on the fire. Or the killing of two Dreamers and seeing them fall to the ground almost embraced.

Of course, if they keep their games with the ability to be modded (PC at least), it really won't matter how alien or not the game will look. These talented folks will make it any way their imaginations decide.

Well after the infernal city Vvardenfell wasn't so intresting.

I treat the Infernal City the same way some treat the issue of Greedo shooting Han Solo first. ; p

Selbeth always writes pretty lengthy posts compared to most everyone else, and they're usually always good; you should learn to read them.

Edit: That said, I agree with both Selbeth and the OP. There's not much to add though. They pretty much said anything I could want to say.

Oh come on, do you seriously believe that? Did you not see Morrowind in pre-Morrowind? It was a large volcanic wasteland where nearly nothing can survive. You have no imagination. The concept artists at Bethesda have imagination, it's what they're payed to do. ANY province can be made culturally unique and awesome.

Or they'll be lazy again and make Skyrim all snow.