I've been wondering this for a long time: Considering the popularity of the Elder Scrolls at this point in time, just how deep is the world?

The Elder Scrolls has only gotten really popular since the release of Morrowind and since then it has built its popularity from there. Now considering all of that, could the Elder Scrolls at some point and time be put up there with creations and works like, LoTR, and other really well known fantasy creations? I believe it can. How about you guys?


Leave your thoughts and comments below.

I don't really pay attention to how deep the lore in LOTR or Star Wars or things like that run, but I imagine if I did, my answer would be no. The thing is, those were books and movies. This is a video game series. Sadly, that means that lore is placed much lower on the list of priorities than it is for a book or a movie series. It's still important, but not as important, so a lot of lore gets changed and altered and superseded. The Elder Scrolls series--(quite appropriately) like Lorkhan--is an unstable mutant.

That said, TES has a truly impressive amount of lore backing up everything that happens, more so than the average gamer would ever realize (as is made evident in the Skyrim General Discussion )

I couldn't agree more. Maybe at some point the Elder Scrolls could get that popular, but it all depends. A lot of times when I look at the Elder Scrolls, its more than just a game, its something completely different. It has a lot of potential as long as Bethesda keeps to the tradition of the series.

Well, there's a bit of a stigma against video games in general, so even if someone actually did create something on par with The Lord of the Rings (which is a bit of an unfair comparison, considering that the backstory and worldbuilding was the whole point for Tolkien, and the possibility of telling stories there came afterward) it wouldn't be considered as good by the vast majority of people simply due to their own biases.

The games' stories themselves... well, that varies. Arena is very much generic "pick up pieces of plot device, use it to kill villain" and Oblivion is a little more original but not very much; Daggerfall and Morrowind at least have reasonably complex plots with interesting characters, but in the end they also suffer quite a bit from the requirements of the genre - they both have a lot of "fetch quests" in exchange for information as part of the main storyline, after all, which would be jarring and odd to have so often in a literary context, and neither of them can have the other characters doing much of anything (Daggerfall's NPCs are almost completely static) so the player character ends up doing way too much to work for a proper storyline.*

Some of the in-game literature - http://www.imperial-library.info/content/daggerfall-king-edward or http://www.imperial-library.info/content/daggerfall-real-barenziah or http://www.imperial-library.info/content/morrowind-thirty-six-lessons-vivec - are all fairly good just on their own, or at least I enjoy just sitting down and reading them sometimes, though a physical book form would help since reading off a computer screen can be very annoying for me. <_< Their length makes it so the first two can't develop their characters or plot as much as would be good, however, and the last one is less a novella and more a fictional holy book, which is fun enough to read for me but certainly wouldn't catch the interest of a lot of other people. The games' backstory and history are quite well thought-out, though of course it's still relatively rudimentary and a lot of it still falls into the generic fantasy mould that would make it hard for it to stand out in the end. I haven't read the published books (or, well, right now, book) but while by all accounts they're fairly decent I doubt they'll ever be considered classics of fantasy literature either.


*With the exception of Daggerfall, actually, where you can have it so that one of a certain set of NPCs can perform a vital task in the story themselves. It's one of my favourite moments, particularly due to the details of the event which of course I won't spoil here.

Tolkien's lore was detailed because he spent 60 years developing it. Which makes me wonder: once Bethesda has put 60 years into developing Elder Scrolls lore perhaps it will be as deep and detailed as Middle Earth lore. I don't know. I would like to think so.

The Elder Scrolls lore is already deep and sometimes overly complex as it stands, more so than alot of other piece of work I've seen. I already consider the lore to be up there among the greats.