Do Bethesda have any noteworthy policies on their lore and when expanding the TES universe? I've heard some whispers about everything that have happened on Nirn have a real life counterpart... Or something along those lines...

And how much does the lore influence the games? Does it matter much to everyone that works on the games, even the data programmers?

I understand that only employees could fully answer my questions. But feel free to share your thoughts on it nonetheless!
And please forgive my awkward sense of writing. I speak in tounges and write even worse... >.<

Presumably. Sometimes it's hard to tell.


No. To put it simply - no. Not if they're doing it right, anyway.


Only so much. It probably outlines/is molded by the 'Main Quest', but otherwise your average dev probably isn't up on his lore. Take, for instance, the questers of Oblivion. Or, if they were up on their lore, they don't really concern themselves with 'canon' etc. There's probably some guy whose job it is to give things a quick once over (at the quest design stage, likely) to check for glaring lore errors, but otherwise, they probably don't worry about it.

Granted, I also think that Oblivions way of "freeforming" was a big "*n'wah* you" to the already established lore.
But what about Morrowind? I guess that I never wanted to leave that province at all... and Cyrodiil and it's Tolkien-esque blandness was simply a huge let-down for me...
So, Crustacean... What's your opinion on how they handled lore in MW?

Ken Rolston had some bewildering rules, such as "No NPC must ever betray the player," and "Everything must be based on something." Luckily, the other devs ignored him long enough to make Morrowind.

Indeed. Think I remember reading an interview of his somewhere.

According to ol' Goodall, lore to Bethesda employees is a plate of spaghetti. They come in, look at the plate of lore from the previous game, chew on it a while, swallow some, spit out some. They add stuff, too. I'd much rather the superglued-legos approach (where what's there is reasonably immutable), but apparently that's just not edible enough :shrug:. How much of that comes from the design team versus the writers (or if there's a difference between the two), well, who knows.

I guess I'll be saying the same as everyone else, but the way I keep it in mind is that lore is fundamental. These games wouldn't be as extra special as they are without their lore.

But reality in programming and gaming play has to play a major part in development as well. (IMO, a perfect example of this is Cyrodiil having sparse forest in stead of jungle.)

It can be bad at times, but more often is good that you also get new blood into the design teams and (even from veteran members) new ideas and new interpretations or compromises of lore come into the game.

Maybe I'm wrong. *shrug*

It appears to me that they take a similar approach as I do with my mods - use it, but don't be bound by it. If it's getting in the way of something that you want to do, then it can be stretched or moulded to fit.

What you have to get right is the weaseling. That was my main criticism for Oblivion. Yes, I get why they wanted to make Oblivion a LOTR-style generic fantasy setting, and that was at odds with the description of "endless jungle" in the Guide. If I couldn't have a wonderfully tropical setting for the game (boo!) then what I would have wanted is a better explanation than the emporer changed it. The easiest thing they could have said is that rainforests can be temperate, and that some of the forest has been cleared for agriculture (much like England, which was once mostly forest and is now mostly fields) - and that we had misunderstood the description of "rainforest" to mean "like Costa Rica" when it's really more like the rainforests of Scotland and Ireland.

They generally take the same approach to lore as Peter Jackson took adapting Lord of the Rings: if it works, keep it; if it doesn't, discard it.

The programmers don't really have any reason to worry about lore, though obviously they would be fairly familiar with it through playing the games. The designers do know their stuff, though, and according to an interview DoctorSpooky gave to ORE a while back, they often have fierce arguments about lore. Lore, like history, is always going to be controversial because it can be interpreted in many ways.

I agree with Princess. It would've been far more believeable and satisfied me much more had they simply said the whole jungle thing was a misinterpretation on our parts. It probably would've pissed off a few people, but it's not like the Talos retcon didn't. Now we have people constantly whining about it. However, if it was simply put as "Oh, that's what you thought? HA! That's your bad, dude," people would be angry, but far too embarassed to say anything about it. LOL.

Yeah.

The only problem with Beth's handling of the lore is that they don't retcon. (often)

With Oblivion, most of the glaring problems simply weren't acknowledged (e.g. books in Oblivion carried over from Morrowind still talk about Cyrodiil's jungles etc.), and it lead the cynics among us to the (perfectly reasonable, given the lack of evidence to the contrary) conclusion that the devs either know very little, or care very little, for the lore they've developed. It'd be fine if they showed they had at least some awareness of clumsy or awkward manouevers on their part, without leaving it to fans and ex-devs to retcon for themselves.

And the explicit passage in The Real Barenziah was still censored by the Tribunal Temple!

That said, they have updated a few books. Chirim's Heart of Anequina, which extols the virtue of Medium Armor, now raves about Traditional Armor...

To be honest, it annoys me to no end when book refer to skills and methods ripped right from the game. I choose to ignore any line that mentions an 'adventurer' or a 'healing potion.'