I am curious how others think the Elder Scrolls Online game will alter lore. Now that I've read about some of the locations that will be in the ESO game, Skyrim to be more specific, I am a little confused. I know it takes place 1000 years before Skyrim events but lore only mentions 8 named Dragon Priests in Skyrim and 9 total masks but this ESO game has a Nordic barrow that is not in the game and a Dragon Priest never heard of. Plus a whole island that was not really used or had ruins on it. I am not against adding lore don't get me wrong but what I'd like to get an opinion on is how much will this game confuse and alter the lore?

I realize the last thing they wanted to do was rehash some of the same quests in Skyrim for ESO but I am just curious. I love the lore of Elder Scrolls so the deeper it gets is only a good thing. So what is everyones thoughts?

My thoughts are the next Elder Scrolls game will reflect the changes made in this lore and of course UESP will update but better yet the MOD community will have a field day adding content to Skyrim that is added by ESO. (I've already added some ESO lore to my own MOD I've made for my game) So as long as they don't do anything totally left field it should be okay.

Easy. We don't see him in TES 5 Skyrim and never heard of him, because he was killed 1,000 years earlier in ESO!

Also, there were a total of 13 named Priests. There's probably more that we never encountered yet.

There's almost certainly more Dragon priests that we haven't encountered. I believe the 9 were just the priests on mainland Skyrim at the time of the construction of the shrine.

How will it alter lore? Much the same way any new entry to the series might change lore really.

By beating it over the head with a club until lore submits to it.

No, it does what what Bal is king of.

Pretty much this.

They'll do their best not to contradict anything, but they'll make mistakes. They'll add plenty of new concepts, some of which we will like and some of which we won't.

Well I know that Solstheim had some too but I was just pointing out that Skyrim (the land) had 9 but anyway.. good points. It all depends on the location of the barrow (believe it's called Skyshroud Barrow). Since only Eastmarch and The Rift are available at launch (I think) you could say it was in the Eastmarch marshes and was swallowed by the volcanic land. The "new" dragon priest could also be one of the lower dragon priest, who was not high enough in the political structure to get a mask.

Dinas, I think it will change lore in a different way because this takes place in the past and not the future so I think it could be more of a challenge for the developers to include architecture and all these things that were in the Morrowind game, Oblivion game and the Skyrim game.

Also isn't Skuldafn apparently in the game? and it's only reachable by flying but I am sure they'll add like a forgotten cave that leads to it or something.

That's fair but I wouldn't overstate the differences either. In any IP, new information constantly reshapes and alters the world regardless of the "when" of the piece in which the information is found. The IP merely adjust to it. Whether or not individual fans do is another matter and a question that seems a bit more relevant for this fan base than others I've encountered.

If anything, TESO being a prequel should mean that future installments won't be as directly affected by it. That was one of the most important reasons that Zenimax chose to make a prequel in the first place: They didn't want to step on Beth's toes when it came to future games. They chose to set their game in a time period that is nothing but chaos and rumor specifically because the Third and Fourth Eras know very little about that era, so if nothing that happens in TESO is remembered in later games, they don't have to dig for explanations about it.

As for including architecture that was present in previous games: As far as I know, that was Lawrence Schick's original job description (well, more accurately, he was supposed to make sure the new game would look and feel like the old games). I would link you to the article on the official website that introduces him, but sadly I didn't feel like giving them my age when they demanded it (which must be something relatively new), and the fake one I threw together without really thinking it through was too young, so now my IP address is denied access to the website. Maybe I'll get to try again tomorrow...