Thank god. :laugh:

Brilliantly worded! made me think of every viking metal song ive ever heard
"Ride away with your mighty horse
ride away through the land of storms...
Unknown are the ways of your journey ahead
but with strenght and courage you can avoid your death! "
Epic description bro. maybe you can write the blurb for the game when it comes out

I really hope they don't do Skyrim, I've seen the northern part of Cyrodil and Solstheim.

This has been covered so many times across the forum... Skyrim is not just snow and mountains! Northern Cyrodiil was snow-covered because of the elevation in the Jerall Mountains. Most of Skyrim is going to be boreal and tundra, scattered with grassy plains and conifer forests, and will undoubtedly contain http://www.gotonorway.info/wp-content/uploads/geirangerfjord.jpg to feast your eyes upon. There will be dangerous mountain blizzards, and snow covered northern expanses, but most will just be a beautiful northern climate, without snow.

And, to further emphasize that anywhere can be great - Morrowind was an inhospitable lava filled ashy wasteland where hardly anything could live before that game. (Jeez, how many times have I said that today? How many on this thread alone? :bonk: )

Uh, isn't ability to live in rocks and snow exactly the kind of thing that would define a plant as alien or exotic in the first place?

I'm just hoping the sense of scale will increase. I want to have the same sense of awe in-game as I got from just looking at that picture Darkstorne posted. Oblivion sorely lacked that feeling of being in a large world - and not just because you could see from one end of the map to the other. When I looked at the mountains in Oblivion, I went meh. In Skyrim, I want to stare at a mountain and say "I have to scale that? Holy moley..."

Are we playing the same game? Elder scrolls iv looks, feels and is huge. I'm playin om ps3 so maybe that's why?

Most probably the same game, but you're talking to a person who's driven on a lonely road in the middle of Virginia during bad weather. I was driving straight in the direction of a distant mountain's dark silhouette for well over twenty-something minutes at 60-80 miles per hour, and the fact that it didn't seem any closer after all that time of driving a mile a minute just blew my mind. It made me feel so small and insignificant, and the mountain ranges in Oblviion were foothills in comparison. hell, that mountain alone was probably bigger than the entire playable area of Cyrodiil.

It's clearly visible in this thread that most people have a limited vision of skyrim. It's because skyrim is in a position like a standard northern country, and that is limited by stereotypes that are much harder to break for us. I guess most people here live in a temperate area, and for us all that is so normal. We have normal trees, normal animals, normal culture... Further north we have pine forests instead, also wolves and bears, don't forget some fjords. Meanwhile in the south, that's where all the exotic stuff is. We have palm trees, weird flowers, weird animals. Colourful environment and an exotic athmosphere.
Morrowind is exotic because it is on an active volcanic island, the last frontier of the empire with a truly different culture. Morrowind is exotic because it was created like a volcanic island in a different world. We don't have any stereotype to box in what vvardenfell is supposed to be like. And more importantly, it has an athmosphere that could make any place interesting. Overlook cyrodiil, what do we have in skyrim? In skyrim we do have vikings, fjords and mountains... Norway??? We get the frozen stereotype version of norway...
And here's the point: People start pointing out that norway has a beautiful, varied and interesting nature. Turns out that we won't get a boring cliche world after all, since northern nature is pretty cool. But all the way we are fooled by our own stereotype; that a place like skyrim can't be exotic. What would the northern part of tamriel look like?

I agree with this poster. I for an instance, live in Norway and Finland (Study in Finland, live on holidays in Norway) and Skandinavia is not just mountains and snow, there are some beautiful lakes and forests too. Like this http://www.solosholidays.co.uk/_uploads/uploaded/Geiranger.jpg. I personally hope it is not going to be the stereotype of scandinavia. f.e eskimos,polar bears and endless winter.

-Emp :tops:

I'm norwegian too, but that wasn't my point. I meant that we depend on stereotypes of what a northern country looks like when thinking what skyrim should be. Skyrim doesn't have to have pine forests or bears if they don't fit in the setting. Nords don't need to be vikings. What I meant is that we have the illusion that countries with a warmer climate are more exotic, while cold countries are all the same. They don't have to, we can't have tropical rainforests in skyrim, but that doesn't mean we can't have exotic plants.

I think regardless of what Skyrim looks like, it needs to have extremely distinct regions. That is the number one reason Morrowind looked bigger than Oblivion, aside from the draw distance.

I like that that picture is of mountains! I dont live in scandanavia but thats pretty much what i imagined it would look like. As far as im aware most people live in the south of those countries, but the nordland is rather desolate and cold with some mineral mines serving as employment (I think i looked this up on wiki sometime ;d) Anyway I know well skyrim doesnt have to be all snow, nor does it have to be moddelled on norway, but i do hope it has some

IMO morrowind looked a lot more interesting than cyrodiil did. I couldnt describe it before but the alien world just does describe vvardenfell! so many different landscapes in it. cyrodiil to me is jst well bland, but thats from playing oblivion. heres hoping Skyrim looks unique in its own way

Definitely.

There should be tundra, mountains, desert, forest, jungle, meadows, plains, lakes, rivers, hills, valleys, etc. The landscape should be diverse, distinct, and spread out. I agree with the people saying that our stereotypes of Norway/Finland do not need to be the influence for Skyrim. This is Nirn we're talking about, not Earth. Flora, fauna, and general geography on Nirn are NOT limited to their earthly counterparts.

I especially hope that they make the sky as vibrant as possible. Sky + weather. At night, the sky should be so vivid and beautiful that I will want to just stop and stare at it as the score swells around me. Oblivion's skies were pretty nice, especially in Shivering Isles, so I have high hopes that they build on that. I hope they improve on the weather though; after playing RDR I know that many of my hopes/ideas for TESV's weather system are indeed possible. Things like puddles that accumulate during rain, massive towering cumulonimbus clouds that you can actually watch roll in before a storm, powerful thunder and lightning that seem to shake the land and show a major light contrast, respectively. Sunrises and sunsets that cause beams of light to reduce vision if you're looking in the sun's direction... Beams of sunlight breaking through distant clouds... Fog, hail, snow that actually accumulates on the ground rather than permanently sitting there.

Ah, the eternal debate: should TESV be Morrowind, or Oblivion?

How about they just make it take place in Skyrim? Alien or not, that'll do.

lol, hopefully neither.

Alien World? meh.

Alien Wildlife? Definitely.

The whole bottom half of Canada is warm for half the year with no snow. I live in Vancouver BC and we got NO SNOW AT ALL this year. Im in Ontario right now and its 30 degrees. Im sure that in the northwest territories is cold and snowy but thats less than a quarter of Canada.

Anyways, the map of skyrim is quite misleading. It is represented as all snowy but I bet that if the game takes place there then it will be at least half green.

That's something like what I had in mind, too. Just for an idea; The southern quarter could be more green, somewhat forested like the stone pines you see in Russia. Could be called the Skyrim Lowlands, which is where most of it's government is. The further out you go, the more vague the empire itself seems to be.

*Headache* Yes, Nirn is pretty limited to Earth's geography, because that's how it's always been. Unless they wanted to retcon that too. Spherical planets orbiting a sun, leading to seasons and bound to geographical climates. Flora such as Chorrol's Great Oak, the Silver Birch north of Chorrol towards Bruma, the Scots Pine and Redwood on the path to Skingrad. Blue skies indicating the presence of oxygen and nitrogen atoms scattering the sun's rays.


I played an online game called Aion for a while. It had deserts right next to snow covered plains and mountains. I quit pretty soon after that.


The magic of TES games is the immersion it provides. It has earth-like rules because that's what we're used to, as do all fantasy stories more or less. Making up a whole new set of rules, and whole new species to play as or read about would be difficult to follow and therefore difficult to become immersed in. So you find a happy medium, where the basic rules we understand are catered for, and a healthy dose of epic fantasy laid on top of those groundworks. If Skyrim had all those habitats that you just listed... that breaks the rules and breaks the immersion. Unless an explanation is provided as to why a desert is found next to snow plains in Skyrim (work of a god, place of magic, being common examples) then it can't work and still be acceptable.


"We included more landscape variety because people complained about Oblivion's monoculture" is just taking the problem to the other extreme end of the scale. I'm sure Bethesda will find the perfect balance. They're a great development studio.

Morrowind is alien and exotic because it was made to fit those who live there, the dunmer. Even before Morrowind, the dunmer were badass, not nice people at all. Look at the descriptions of Morrowind, and of the Dunmer given in past lores. Look at them in redgaur comic. The land made the Dunmer, the Dunmer completed the feel of the land. Complimentary. Black skinned sorcerors who lived in a land of fire and ash. Brilliant, bizarre, mystical. A country dominated by a splendorous, bat[censored] crazy theocracy, worshipping living gods. Sanctioned slavery, murder, with deep ancestral traditions by a people soaked in esoteric mysteries. A tough challenge.

The Imperials were just as brilliant. Cyrodiil was (before Oblivion) a "city of a million cults," where moth priests walked the imperial plazas in robes made of living moths, innumerable legions, in splendid armor from the most prosperous nation on the planet, came and passed through the nexus of the continent. But... what happened? Mass market happened. Peculiarity, strangeness and uniqueness were pushed aside for popular ideas of fantasy. Dumbing-down at it's finest I think. Popular ideas are still fun, which is why they are popular.

We've heard quite alot about the Nords. And the Nords have had just as much impact on the histories as the "Imperials" have. The nords may be bat[censored] crazy at times, but they aint black skinned, dont have red eyes, dont talk like chain smokers or ride on giant fleas. They're just like us real-life folk, and it's real-life that we're trying to get away from when role-playing. If it's Skyrim for TES5, then it's gotta to be REALLY special.

If TESV is in Skyrim, I won't mind as long as it has two things: Mead Halls and Werewolves.

And anyway, I've had enough of men and mer, I want Elsweyr.

We're not going to see exotic green leafy plants in a cold environment, which most of Skyrim is. We are going to see hardy plants that can survive the cold, plants with a thick bark or with pine needles. Not saying that the flora should follow real life but logic says that green, leafy plants, will not survive in a rocky and cold climate.