:facepalm: Dagon's realm is the deadlands.... Oblivion is the black void around mundus wich you can see from nirn.. both Deadlands and the Isles are within Oblivion...

The Dwemer were intricately linked to the present and past of Morrowind, society and culture. Not only were they important in understanding the plotline to Morrowind, but also the precursor to the Tribunal, the Numidium, Dagoth Ur, the Heart, the cosmology... Everything. You cannot have Morrowind without the Dwemer from a lore pov. Morrowind is saturated on every level in meaning derived from the Dwemer, a race that is practially longer existent.

The Ayleids are the complete opposite, and even in the midst of an invasion, nobody seems to understand who or what they are, nor seem particularly interested either - the exception to this being scripted events. You can play the Oblivion MQ purely and only need to come into brief contact with any Ayleid ruins. In this regard Oblivion really did NEED an "Ayleid Puzzle Box" I think. But that is how Oblivion is with everything else. "The Ayleids," who, without the KotN are just another poorly done hamfisted seque into the past, are reduced to nigh complete irrelevancy in Cyrodiil, KotN was just a desperate attempt at trying to atone for the lack of Dwemeri mystery in Cyrodiilic history.

And good excuse for a expansion pack.

We know what happened, sort of, but we don't know why. We know exactly what happened to the Ayleids, and why.



There was nothing else to learn besides the dates, names, and exact places of specific events. We have an excellent general description of what happened from many different sources.



It is a realm of Oblivion. Anything you saw in Shivering Isles was entirely new lore that we didn't have in Morrowind, and I'd say that both the Shivering Isles and the realm of Mehrunes Dagon were massive contributions, even if one was largely visual.



Considering the Mythic Dawn are one of the most secret Daedric cults and that even scholars at the Arcane University do not know whether or not Mankar Camoran is the leader, I'm amazed we actually had that. Remember that even someone who wants to join them, that Bosmer you speak to as part of the main quest, don't know that much about them, and he'd probably been doing a lot of research. But if you want more, there's a small amount of speech, from the guy who helps you in Paradise, and from Mankar's children.



Sometimes the stories aren't even told, and there's nothing said in-game besides a few bits of dialogue from random characters. But there's a visual contribution, which can be put together with what else we hear in the game. Take the Renrijra Krin as an example: does the settlement of Border Watch look as if it was taken peacefully, and from what Alessia Caro and the citizens of Leyawiin say does it sound as if the Imperials are winning? Two bits of information there. Add it to the presence of skooma in Leyawiin and Bravil, consider who sells skooma and what quests the player goes on to deal with skooma dealers, etc. If you put it together you can build a good picture of what the Renrijra Krin does and how it works.

People really need to stop downplaying Oblvion as much as they do. You guys are starting to come off as if you have some sort of agenda or something. If you've played Oblivion and KotN enough you should be able to find out more about the Ayleids, at least as much as Dwemer, and I'd say actually going to a bunch of Oblivion realms puts a lot of insight into that particular aspect of lore. And from Eldamil, Paradise, Commentaries, that Mythic-Dawn wannabe, Jearl, etc, I'd say it's easy to get a clear image of what the Mythic Dawn were like. They even have an obvious hierarchy that you can see in Mankar's Paradise.

While I agree that the original was lacking in lore (at least, the main quest was, some of the side quests were great for lore), KotN and SI both had fantastic lore imo.

I do have an agenda. The cessation of degradation of the Elder Scrolls series and the prevention of continued dumbing down and simplification. Substance over style.

Hah, goodness. No. I am quite sure the devs have a thick enough skin to endure our criticism.

So they don't fulfil the same role as the Dwemer did in Morrowind. I fail to see anything wrong with that.


I agree. Disliking the game for certain things is fine, but its flaws are always getting blown out of proportion.

The Shivering Isles is a realm of Oblivion. The gates you entered in Oblivion's MQ are actually gates to the Deadlands not all Oblivion. Bethesda did a really poor job with that and though we learned a lot about the Shivering Isles we learned next to nothing about the Deadlands.

Anything you saw in there, anything the Dremora said, anything about the architecture, landscape, and defences - we learned the whole thing.

We know exactly what happened to the Dwemer and why. I will look for more Ayleid lore next time.



I noticed nothing new about the Imperials specifically except how biased and racist they are. I will look for more Imperial specific info next time I play.



We learned tons about the Shivering Isles but we learned nothing new about Dagon's realm except how it looks and that Dremora seem to inhabit it.



Don't defend Bethesda on this, they could have given us much more information if they wanted too. It seems like they didn't even try to explain more about the Mythic Dawn though.



The Renrijra Krin did nothing in Oblivion and we learned nothing about them. Border's Watch seems pretty much like a nice, peaceful Khajiit town, and we all know that Countess Alessia is a racist and really, we have plenty of non-Khajiits smuggling skooma too.

There are several competing theories. Bethesda has made a point of keeping quiet about the real one. We know more about the fall of the Ayleids than we do about the fall of the Dwemer, when we ignore any speculation.



That is a vast understatement. Everything we have learned about the society of Dremora, what the inhabitants of the realm think of each other, and how they are organised. We now have a lot of information about the uses of buildings, the architecture, the landscape, and everything else we see. It's essentially just how it looks, but we learned nothing more than that about the landscape and geography of Morrowind.



Don't dance around the point. We know everything about the Mythic Dawn that we need to, and a vast amount of things that we don't need to. They could have given us a lot more information, and they could also have given us more information about the Sixth House. They have, however, given us the information we need to work out the rest for ourselves.



Another understatement, which has little to do with what I actually said. I'll link you to a post I made a while ago: http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=1014609&hl=renrijra+krin+oblivion

And that's the beauty of it. The MQ didn't shove the entire game's lore down your throat. The lore was still there, but you had to find it. In particular for the Ayleids, by doing Umbacano's quests. Some things were mentioned in the Mage's Guild quest line, and some were done without quests (take a run through Sideways Cave). There's apparently some stuff if you go through the Thieves Guild quests, too (though I haven't personally done that, yet).

Additionally, the guild quests even add their own bits of lore with their stories.. ever seen a Hist tree before? Not only do you get to see something from the elusive Black Marsh, but you learn something new about them (that they can produce sap which puts people, including Argonians, into a psychotic rage). You also learn what happened to the Count of Anvil, and why the Thieves Guild had no presence on Cyrodiil (and fix it; ironic that the player themself ret-cons that ). How much was known about Pale Pass before? What about http://uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Tears_of_the_Savior?

Oblivion does have its lore. It's just not all shoved into the main quest.


No we don't. Or if we do, it wasn't Morrowind that told us. Just look around on the boards, and you see that there is no accepted explanation (IIRC, there was some out-of-game discussions MK had where he explained it, but again, Morrowind didn't tell you).

Yes it is.

And since word of god posts are absolutely meaningless, we don't know exactly how and why the Dwemer dissapeared or exactly what pelinal is.

But on topic, yes. There was the potential for a lot of good things, but any lore we got was from Battlespire or other older games.

The potential was:

Ayleid culture.
Imperial "melting pot" culture.
Imperial beurocracy
Imperial Aristocracy (and their dirty doings)
Imperial Military
Regency
The border cultures
Imperial ecosystems
Cyrodiilic animals and monsters

And that's just off the top of my head. Those are all things that we should have gotten. Morrowind had those things when you replace "Imperial" with "Dunmer/Morrowind."

Wow was I wrong. Hehe, sorry about that people. I was just misinformed.

That's simply the list that you wanted to see in the game. Some of them are in the game. Other things that Bethesda considered more important it has expanded upon significantly. We even learned about the feuds of Oblivion, and there is a legitimate reason that those of Cyrodiil were not included any more than they were.

Yes, we did learn that. In Battlespire. In Oblivion they were restated in the context of bland "good empire vs. evil Demons." I didn't see ANY new lore in vanilla Oblivion. They were too busy making sure thaere wasn't anything original in the story to scare off casual gamers.

That's what the majority of new players see the conflict in Oblivion as. That's also what the majority of new players see the conflict in Morrowind as.

In Oblivion, we learned what the Daedra think of each other, learn more about Dremora society and ranks, and the intelligence of each Daedra in relation to creatures on Nirn.

No we didn't. To learn something you have to not already know it. And everything said about it in Oblivion was either paraphrased or directly ripped from older games.

No, there was new information about it in Oblivion.

I see no beauty in being forced to travel through the lifeless husk of a story.

Where are you getting this? All I got was that the big bad demons have different unpronounceable names. But they just stood around in non-utilitarian towers waiting to be attacked. There was no society, there was no obvious hierarchy (just leveled spawns).

Shivering Isles at least provided the Lesser Daedra (Mazken and Auriel) with "jobs" and explored the female-dominant societies of both - and how both are rival's to be Sheo's favorite. There was a rudimentary criminal system, and interaction between non-hostile Lesser Daedra and mortal NPCs and the CoC. But this was in SI - NOT TESIV: Oblivion.

Even the Lesser Daedra allegiances seemed to be ripped to shreds - Dagon's realm included Spider Daedra, all three Atronachs and the Daedroth. Formerly, the Daedroth serves Molag Bal, and the Spider Daedra served Mehpala; the atronachs have no traditional allegiances, but from Battlespire we know they don't like working together. There's no explanation as to why these lesser daedra (who now cannot speak and only wander around with no purpose until they spot an enemy NPC/PC) shifted their allegiances to Dagon. You'd think they'd be all "Oh, that Dagon, he's got another scrib-brained idea to conquer Tamriel. Want to take wagers on the next Nirnian's champion's gender?"

Not unlike in Morrowind.


Simple; not all Daedra of a certain type serve a certain lord. While Spider Daedra and Daedroths are both typically associated with other Daedra princes, the ones in Oblivion showed very "Dagon-ish" characteristics. The Daedroths had pigmentation similar to that of the Clannfears and Scamps, and relied on fire and brute strength, unlike the more Molag Bal-like variety in Morrowind. Likewise, the Spider Daedra had markings on them similar to those on the armor worn by the Dremora. The same likely goes for the Seducers in Battlespire.

It is a proven fact that Daedra can change alliances. The Dremora did not always serve Dagon, for example. And no-one forced you to play the main quest, and as stated there is little lore in it compared to side quests and what you can find out for yourself, so using that as an argument is useless.



Ever heard any of the Dremora speak? Ever looked at their ranks? Ever looked around Oblivion and found scamps that had already been kiled? The hierarchy is obvious, but it isn't put into practice as much as you seem to want because someone just ran in screaming with a claymore trying to beat seven shades of (censored) out of the commanding officer.

I'm with Gallowglass and KCat on this. I'd say Oblivion had not merely as much location based evidence as Morrowind; it had more. There were more times, with exploring around Cyrodil or The Shivering Isles, when I stumbled across something, examined or watched what was going on, and said to myself, "Whoah! I see what's going on here. That's really cool!" The first example of this is the various conflicts already going on when I arrived at a location, such as Bandits and Marauders fighting over that one fort just west of the Imperial City, or the Bitterfish(?) Goblins invading certain Ayleid ruins. It was just nice to see there was some attempt at depicting a dynamic environment. Morrowind had this, as well, but it was much less dynamic; places like Ordiniran and that one place north of Mar Gaan had a conflict in place, but there wasn't any actual fighting going on when you got there, just some NPCs were hostile, some weren't.

The second was the first time I discovered Sideways Cave. An Ayleid settlement had somehow earned the wrath of Meridia and ended up being destroyed by roots. Neat.

The Pale Pass quest was cool. The daedric quests were not only fun, they also gave a much more hands on experience of what each of them was all about (with Sanguine's and Vaernima's quests being my favorites). I was once heading east along the Gold Road at night, and saw a strange light shining down from the heavens... and was like, WTF is THAT?! (It wasn't until later I went through the Mages' Guild quests and found out what it was.) It was a big "Wow" moment when I traveled deep into the root tunnels in Shivering Isles, stumbled across a border skirmish between the Elytra and... those other guys (can't recall the name) and realized the tunnels connect Mania to Dementia... and then re-read the book that attempts to explain this (and gets the author declared insane). And some of you have seen my extensive theories drawn from demographic evidence most of you dismiss as "game mechanics".

I think the main problem some folks have with this is that there is no "Grand Tour of Cyrodil" to go on. In Morrowind, each of the guilds would take you on a tour of a particular aspect of Morrowind. The Fighters' Guild would get you in touch with the politics of the underworld, and let you choose a side. The Mages' Guild had different foci at different guildhalls; Mages Guild politics at Balmora, Dwemer at Ald'Ruhn, vampires and necromancy at Saldrith Mora. I didn't do as much with the Thieves' Guild as with the others, but I do recall it getting me into houses I otherwise would not have bothered entering. The Morag Tong taught you about how Dunmer often handle their disputes. Each of the Great Houses sent you on a grand tour of their area and taught a bit about inter-house politics. The Temple got you all over the place via pilgrimages and such. I can't speak for the Imperial Cult, since that's another one I didn't do so much with.

In Oblivion, all the stuff is there, you just have to go looking for it. Personally, I could go for a few more factions, and for factions more fully integrated into the world they inhabit. But the information IS there, if you go looking for it.

(Also, "authorization mismatch" is getting annoying...)