Honestly, Bethesda has to start doing a better job handling their lore. They've been going down hill ever since Oblivion.

But they havent made anything else to do with TES after Oblivion except for Shivering Isles...which was awesome.

They drastically changed a lot of stuff when Morrowind came out.

Drastically? Not really. Most of the stuff they added. And considering nothing was there in the first place, there were little to no conflicts. I can count the contradictions on one hand, and few, if any, are significant.

As can I regarding Oblivion and lore. And they aren't very significant either. Or at least not by comparison.

So changing from a Tropical Jungle to a Temerate Rainforest isnt significant?

No more significant than shrinking the size of the world down and introducing a new race and then saying that they're the ones who started and now run the Empire.

Shrinking the world down? Just because they didn't randomly generate miles upon miles of boring random landscape doesnt mean they shrunk the world. I'm pretty sure noone honestly thinks Vvardenfell is really the size its portrayed in the game. And besides, the Imperials just make sense cause Nords would find it difficult to run an Empire. Hell, they can barely run a province without infighting.

By comparison with what? Morrowind? Not really. The worst Morrowind did was a couple misplaced cities and a reinvention of the Blades. That's it as far as outright contradictions go. It added a whole heap of other stuff, but this didn't actually "supplant" anything, because they were either undefined or ill-defined in the first place.

Oblivion was largely contradiction by omission. The Battlemage aristocracy of the Niben has disappeared; the Colovian aristocracy are not naval or army officers; gone are the diverse cults of the Imperial City; there is no form of distinction between the Nibenese and Colovians; the scholarly moth-priest order have been reduced to kung-fu monks, and not a sign of the ancestor silk they produce; daedric realms in no way resemble previous descriptions, leading to equivocation over them being "staging areas"; no magical topiaries in the arboretum; the debacle over Mysterious Akavir; and lastly, the disappearance of the jungle.

If none of that's significant, I don't know what would be.

Of course, since its a change in Morrowind, no-one cares, they just accept it as 'new lore'

Just another case of "If they changed any Lore in Morrowind it's fine, but if they changed anything in Oblivion, god have mercy on Bethesda" :rolleyes:

But before Morrowind, Cyrodiil had no native race and only one city. And there are no more language barriers, the world is a fraction of the size it once was, and populations are a fraction of what they were in Daggerfall.


Nice to know that I'm not alone here.

On population and province sizes, they're the same. Beth just decided they weren't going to resort to gratuitous filler to pad out a game to make it life-size.

On the Cyrodiils being introduced... Firstly; Morrowind did not introduce it; Redguard did. Secondly, Daggerfall's focus was largely limited to High Rock and actual descriptions of what things were like in the Imperial Province prior to Redguard are hard to come by. That massive addition of a new race really only conflicted with a single phrase buried somewhere in a history that says Bretons largely ruled the empire. Which is kind of insignificant in my opinion.

It isn't just Morrowind, it's Redguard and Daggerfall as well. All of them introduced and changed certain things. Just like Oblivion.

The feeling's mutual

Too many people have the perception that "Morrowind was perfection and anything that has changes from Morrowind is evil".

No, as Albides said, Redguard added Imperials. And how does a smaller game world change lore? If anything, DF skewed Province proportion, as Arena, MW and OB all had smaller-than-life province sizes

I've never denied this. We have Tedders on record saying that Daggerfall probably made the biggest changes to the lore. Nor have I said all changes are for the bad. That list of omissions I gave earlier that you kind of waved away are interesting things that could have been further explored. Were they or were they not significant? Did they or did they not contribute in making the Imperial Province a distinct place?

On the other hand, I'm wracking my brains for interesting things that Oblivion contributed to our understanding of Cyrodiil. That they use "mithril" armour. Oh. Right.


Are you going to do anything other than cheer from the sidelines?

Oh...getting pissy are we.



-It isnt jungle as the oh-so-precious Morrowind said, its is comprised of geographical regions that differ across the province and their location. Eg, Swamp near Black Marsh, rocky highlands near Hammerfell. (Bethesda didnt want the whole place Jungle, so they changed it, live with it)

-Architecture is influenced by the varying demographic and cultural patterns across the province. Eg, Bruma is heavily influenced by its large Nord population, which Cheydinhal has a tudor-sort of style similar to the Imperial towns in Vvardenfell, which isnt surprising considering the Dunmer in Cheydinhal could be considered Impeiral-style Dunmer)

-Magic in Cyrodiil is a far more restricted business than Morrowind, with the Mages Guild holding the monopoly on Spellcrafting/Enchanting in the province

-The Imperial Guard in Cyrodiil is recruited entirely Imperial, as the Ordinators are entirely Dunmer.

-History of the Nedic Uprising against the Alyeid, and the roles of individuals such as Alessia and Pelinal Whitestrake.

-Ayleid culture/architecture and its influence on the Empire.

-Info on the Amulet of Kings and the role of White-Gold

What exactly are you listing? Supposedly interesting bits of lore OB added?

Saying live with it doesnt excuse conflicting lore

Architectureal differences =/= political differences

Gameplay mechanics with no real lore backup

That isnt interesting lore, its logic

Granted, info considering Ayleid culture was sparse before OB, just as information concerning Morrowind Great Houses was sparse before MW

The info on the Amulet was self conflicting, as there hasnt been a pure bloodline with the amulet since the Ayleid uprising, so theoretically Dagon should have invaded long ago

No. Just wondering if you had more than caricatures of people's views.


Er. I have. I've always said in the past I don't care about the jungle if Cyrodiil only had a little more culture. You seem a little tense about it, though.


You mean influenced by its "nearest neighbour". The distinction between the Nibenese and the Colovians being largely effaced, there's no real sign of anything distinctly Cyrodilic, except the capital and a swamp city that could have been built by anyone.


The Imperial Guard is Imperial. This is indeed a very interesting piece of lore!


I won't deny it gave us a little more on these subjects, but what we got was actually rather scant, and occasionally large parts of history were completely missed. We didn't see anything about Pelinal until the expansion came along and Beth sought to make amends. Just what the Amulet of Kings and White-Gold Tower does was better explored in external texts like the Nu-Mantia Intercept. What did you find out about the Interrugnum, the rule of Reman, or even Marukh and the Alessian Order? Nothing. They didn't even leave a mark on the landscape. This, as well as the aforementioned list of omissions, is why many consider Oblivion a lost opportunity.

It was, once again, Redguard who said Cyrodiil was a jungle, with it's PGE.
And of course they could have changed the geography, they did this to Morrowind as well (before it was all Ashlands). That still doesn't explain why they left no djungle at all, especially since all of the Nibenean culture kind of depended on it.


'Tis still strange that there is no common architecture for the region. There is no "base culture" that can be influenced by the neighbouring provinces, all are just different from each other.



Skingrad? They share a common stroke with Kvatch. At least as far as one can tell from those burned piles of wood and rubble.

No, I was more thinking of Leyawiin or Bravil, but both are pretty uninteresting, purely practical sorts of things. Skingraad or Chorrol might work as Colovian styles, though both look like they might have been built by the Britons Bretons. Pretty unsatisfying examples.

It should probably be pointed out that placing the setting in a jungle would probably result in having to chop through the foilage to get anywhere. And with 16 square miles or so to explore, this would be even worse than hacking through cliff racers.

blame it on the dragon break

Finally! Someone with enough sense to see that Oblivion wasn't the exception to the rule as far as its Tolkein-esque elements. Morrowind was the game that was "different". I know the whole jungle/vs/temperate thing for Cyrodil, and I agree there. We've talked about that before. I'm talking about how younger players who were teething when Daggerfall and Arena were on the shelves at the local store. They hear that Oblivion broke lore, and begin screaming about the LOTR influence on Oblivion. You really can't base that opinion on the two latest TES games, considering one of those two games was deliberately alien, even by TES standards. MW is a weird place. Anyway... Good point, as always, Albides.

Now, about the current argument...

Oblivion was a little devoid of lore. I was disappointed in that. However, this, in no way, makes it a bad game. It was still more fun, IMHO, than any RPG that was out at the time. (and let's not start the age-old OB's not an RPG it's an action game thing... it's a part of an RPG series, which has always had action elements, it just had more, which is part of what made it genuinely fun to play). What I'm saying is, the lore flubs don't ruin the game, so, in a way, they are superflous.

The jungle was only important as a cradle for Nibenean culture. But that got axed, so the jungle is no longer important.

You are justifying it well, but you are justifying bad decisions and mediocre execution.


See above. Boring.


Which would be an interesting dynamic, if they actually acknowledged and justified the disparity, instead of pretending that these guys are the real thing, and not a ceremonial home guard drawn from an equestrian class. There, I improved Oblivion's lore in a single sentence.


Written entirely by an ex-dev they outsourced the creativity to, in fact the one who masterminded the Vvardenfell that unnerves Fable fans so much.


You mean a dungeon tileset and an Indiana Jones quest?


Once again, outsourced creativity by a contract writer and UTTERLY ignored by the main quest and the game as a whole, relying on unofficial lore to make sense of it all.