morrowind actualy had a villain with lore behind it. he wanted to get rid of the foreigners and free his land from the empire (a view shared by many of the native dumner).


in oblivion it was "oh, this guy likes to destroy things, he wants to destroy your things,he's using a cult that somehow agree with him, deal with it"

in fallout 3 it was "i am a bad guy and i would like to take control of this water purifier so we can purify water for you"

i hope skyrim isn't "im a dragon god dude, here me ROAR!!! "

You going to stick around this time?

I agree btw.

Over simplify much? I agree for the most part though. As for Oblivion, people like to be on the winning side, the gambled on the wrong person.

Completely agree with you. No more mustache twirling cartoon villains!

I thought that Mehrunes Dagon wanted to take revenge for the events in Battlespire. Which I think would make sense.

With the right substance behind it, I think that "im a dragon god dude, here me ROAR!!!" could work. Isn't that what Alduin is supposed to be doing anyway? Destroying the world?

Oblivion: A chip on his shoulder, bastard son of Robert Evan-, er, Camoran the Usurper, channels some Morian Zenas and creates a cult-paradise in a Daedric Realm. Summons up Mehrunes because Jauffre says and I quote " I couldn't help it, it just popped in there... No,no, it can't be...".

Its basically Waco meets Ghostbusters.

Mehrunes Dagon is the Daedric Prince of Destruction and Ambition - it's natural that he would want to usurp Nirn, which is very ambitious and involves lots of destruction, lol.




The Dragons DO have a deep motivation for wanting to destroy Nirn - it's late so I shan't go into detail, but it involves destroying creation to free the Dragons from being tethered to the mortal coil.

What really struck me the first time I met Dagoth Ur was... that for the first time since I've been playing rpgs, I was tempted to side with the villain.
I didn't, but when I finally struck him down, I felt sad for him. Now, that's not something easy to pull out; whoever wrote the storyline and characters should be proud of what they did.

I'd love to get that feeling again: meeting your nemesis and actually think "ehi, s/he's the villain but s/he actually has a point..."

Dagoth Ur didn't had much more motivation other than "first Morrowind, then the entire World!" style world domination.

I fully agree and I'll take it one stop further and hope that all the dragons aren't just one dimensional "rawr dragons we will smite thee" monsters. The fact they went to lengths to develop a dragon alphabet is promising on this topic though.

Any story can be made to seem one-dimensional and simplistic, if summarised in a certain way. Bonus points for naming these literary works (but beware of spoilers):

1) A small person with no heroic qualities is persuaded by a wizard to steal treasure from an evil dragon.

2) A hero responds to a king's request to slay a monster. After killing it, he also kills its mother and becomes king. Later, he dies fighting an evil dragon that's attacked his kingdom.

3) A teenage princess with the only three dragons in the world begins a voyage to her homeland to kill the bad men responsible for usurping her father's throne. Meanwhile, evil ice demons invade.

4) A hero, after surviving a long war, travels back home and fights monsters on the way. Upon his arrival he kills the people who moved into his house and mistreated his servants.

5) Several small people lacking heroic qualities travel with a party of heroes and wizards to a volcano to destroy an evil god's all-powerful magic ring.

They all sound pretty bad!


Assuming Alduin and the dragons aren't the sole enemies, I suspect the more mortal "bad guys" in Skyrim might have some interesting reasons indeed. I bet some of 'em are Altmer... with the whole lost divinity grudge. Besides that, there's a civil war to consider, which promises to be a much less black-and-white, much more human sort of conflict; even if it is only a backdrop to the more mythic elements.

Alduin has a reason to destroy Nirn. He's the Nordic God Of Desctruction. It's what he does. And that's without going into all the Lore and stuff. :wink_smile:

1) The hobbit
2) Beowulf
3) The Ral Barenziah? (I only skimmed a bit of itonce looking for something, so I may be totally wrong)
4) The Oddysey
5) Lord of the Rings

Durrr, Alduin smash.

Hah, now that I think about it Alduin and his dragons seem a lot like the reapers in Mass Effect - since Alduin also likes to come in every
X years and wipe everything out...

Well, Mehrunes Dagon not having much of an apparent motivation for wanting to destroy anything sort of makes sense, being the Prince of Destruction and all that, it's pretty much in his nature. The problem is that we didn't really get a good look at the mortal villain's motivation, I can understand a god of destruction wanting to destroy the world, but a mortal who would be destroyed with the world needs some sort of motivation, and Mankar Camoran really just came off as insane, or at the very least, extreme in his views, which explains why he would support Mehrunes Dagon, I guess, but it doesn't adress why people would be loyal to him.

But really, I don't expect Alduin to have much in the way of a motivation beyond "It's what I do." either. He doesn't strike me as the kind of antagonist that is likely to have a very complex motivation, though I could be mistaken. But that doesn't necessarily mean that he can't make for a good story, just that you have to either introduce other antagonists with more nuanced motives, or you have to build the appeal of the story on something other than having a complex villain. While certainly, the villain of a story is an important aspect of it since, at least in the sort of stories that rely on villains, because the villain drives the central conflict of the story, having a complex villain isn't the only way to make a good story, it's just that having a good villain is a very effective way to enhance a story, and a bad one can often ruin it (Though when I say a bad villain, I don't necessarily mean a simple one. Some villains are fairly one dimmensional when you get down to it, but they still work because they fulfill their purpose in the story very well.)



That's also a pretty good point. People like to praise Morrowind's main quest here, yet I could very easily sum it up thusly: The evil god Dagoth Ur threatens to enslave the land of Morrowind, and only the reincarnation of the a Dunmer hero, whose coming was foretold by an ancient prophecy, can stop him. Do you have what it takes to fulfill your destiny and become the Nerevarine?

Sounds pretty simple, doesn't it? Yet whether you like the story of Morrowind or not (I think it has some pretty good ideas and a good background but could have been told better, myself.) I think you'll agree than there's more to it than what I just said would indicate.



Hmm... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=li5aDU9280c&feature=BF&list=PLED411B83F57B0A3C&index=3

Sorry, I couldn't resist doing that when I saw that statement.

Some people are just arseholes, which makes them even more evil and more fun to beat.
Why do murderers murder? Maybe Alduin had a troubled family life. Maybe he was bullied by Akatosh as a kid. Who knows.
Either way, as long as my hero is needed to save the world from something actually worthwhile, then I'm happy.

Maybe Alduin will be offering his followers (assuming he has them) a place in the new world he creates. Obviously he would never actually live up to his promise but there are a lot of svckers out there .

Pretty generic stuff, really.

I think the main reason that the story in Oblivion was a bit abbreviated was that the creators were still partially living in Morrowind's 3 option interaction world. I thought that the ultimate solution to Oblivion's main quest was a bit of a dead stop, when you might expect a bit of strategic interplay between the hero and the arch villain. In the end, it just seemed like the usual "Point-A to Point-B" sort of exercise that had gotten really old by the end of the Morrowind quests. [edit] You could actually see some of that realization that "this is not a cardboard game" really shine through in the SI expansion.

1) Fight
2) Stand there and make repetitive or scripted sound effects
3) Tons of text dialogue options

Hopefully once the quest makers get the feel for a more dynamic world, they will start making much more interesting plot-lines, and the complex interplay will really help players to understand the full motivations and abilities of their foe, and hopefully that time is Skyrim. You can basically create any situation that you could in a high fantasy novel as if you are directing real actors, or even better, as if they are not acting at all. In the same way that an actor has to gain experience to be able to seem convincing, the people behind the TES series is hopefully becoming more capable at bringing to life what the lore-masters envision.

FO3 was a lil more deep than that. The Enclave hate mutants, and they consider "mutants" to be anything that has been exposed to any sort of radiation, therefore they hate everything that wasn't born in an Enclave bunker, living in Enclave armour. That's why they wanna capture the purifier and put a virus in there that kills anything that's been exposed to radiation so they can cleanse the wasteland.

Also, Dagon KIND OF had reasons behind the things he does. It's just obscure in the lore and not exactly logical or straight-forward. But hey, since when are Daedric Princes just regular dudes?

Um it was Mankar Cameron who was the bad guy in Oblivion and he had his reasons....

:goodjob:

3) was actually

... But I'd never considered that Barenziah's story is quite similar in some ways. Hmm.

All I remembered was that Barenziah was a Dunmer royal who I think was a teen, who had to travel through Skyrim and into Morrowind for some reason, and I also remembered that there are Ice demons from Akavir.

Well, to be fair, we've already been given snippets of info in terms of the lore they have created around the rise of the dragons. The language they have created around them, merely as a means of magic communication, and ancient dialect in something we can get our teeth into. But you're right. Oblivions storyline was the last thing I did in the game, purely because I found it to be the least interesting thing. I usually go for main quests first, only because I get enveloped in the story so much that I just continue naturally. Oblivion didn't allow me to do that. One thing that annoyed me, and it made no sense, was when the Emperor was killed, why didn't Jauffre just go and get Martin himself, instead of waiting for some dude to deliver the amulet, and then send that dude, who he doesn't even know, to get the Emperor's hidden heir. It's not like they didn't know where he was. He instantly tells you. Actually, that's another thing, off topic again sorry, but I hope people are harder to get information and topics from in Skyrim. Because every NPC was far too friendly for my liking. Everyone just talked. WTF XD