Why does everyone assume Skyrim would just be alaskya/norway style? this IS Elder Scrolls universe and as such it can be as alien as the developers make it. I want it to be way more atmospheric and alien than Morrowind and that can be achieved because its set in a completely different universe to ours

Skyrim is based on norway.

Skyrim is based on norway.

The concept artists at Bethesda have imagination, it's what they're payed to do. ANY province can be made culturally unique and awesome.

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 after the infernal city Vvardenfell wasn't so intresting.

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.

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.

I don't think its about what just the people of the Bethesda forums want, I think its more about the other people who never register onto these forums. They definitely out number our say.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

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.

That better not happen. I hope Bethesda is more sensible than that. Hope so.

Don't have to make a place alien to give it variety. Skyrim doesn't have to have just tundra and temperate forest. It's a pretty old place. Could be a whole underworld of buried cities and such. Would also be nice to have some real mountains with sheer mountain cliffs. Be like "holy crap" when looking down a ledge you're traveling on. Maybe that ledge is actually part of a road to the next town. In the most northern part of Skyrim, you could have worse than tundra.. maybe a whole, literal frozen forest making you wonder if things used to be different thousands of years ago.

I thought Cyrodil was just beautiful. Way prettier than Morrowind. Who cares if it broke the lore. I never liked Morrowind's landscape nearly as much as Oblivion.



I guarantee that the day TES: V comes out, you guys will all [censored] about how it's not like Morrowind. Get over it.

Apparently this topic is now about lore consistency and graphical presentation. *sigh*

I guarantee that the day TES: V comes out, you guys will all [censored] about how it's not like Morrowind. Get over it.

The minute somebody brings up the point of Cyrodiil originally being described as a jungle this usually happens.

...

That's what I'm talking about. A spirit; a feeling. Not what it looks like or how much visual variety is or isn't present.

Of course, as denoted by others herein, what I want is probably 100% irrelevant. I'm just expressing my hopes.