Things you want to like in TES... but can't

Post » Sun Mar 20, 2016 1:13 pm

A simple topic: What are the things that you want to, or thought you would, like in TES, but can't/doesn't?



For me, the Imperials. Between the http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Pocket_Guide_to_the_Empire,_1st_Edition/Cyrodiil and the book http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Shezarr_and_the_Divines(can't recall other works describing what would be semi-contemporary, meaning Tibers time and later, culture in Cyrodiil atm, but feel free to link if you have any), the Imperials seemed to have a lot of potential as a people. And what we got instead was really, really bland.

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Michelle davies
 
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Post » Sun Mar 20, 2016 5:59 am

I have never liked Imperials either, but I can't count that because I never wanted to like them. Here are two things I actually do wish I could like but can't:



I wish I could like Oblivion's guilds. It is "conventional wisdom" around here that the one thing Oblivion got right (some people say the only thing) is guilds. But they leave me cold. There are individual quests in guilds that I like (killing people with horse heads never gets old) but as far as the overall Oblivion guild experience goes, no. I prefer guilds in Morrowind and (for all its problems) Skyrim. I don't think the NPCs in most of Oblivion's guilds are as interesting as the guild NPCs in Morrowind or Skyrim either.



I wish I could like Arena and Daggerfall more than I do. Especially Daggerfall. The sticking point for me here is that I absolutely hate and despise that move-your-mouse-to-swing-a-sword combat mechanic. I also don't play first person games. So between the two I am missing out on a great game. But I can't help it.

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Sarah Unwin
 
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Post » Sun Mar 20, 2016 5:26 am

I'll agree with Pseron on the Daggerfall mouse swing deal. I really liked certain aspects of the game, at least as far as I saw of it, but I can't get the combat thing to work well, no matter what I try. You can't hit an opponent if you can't even make your weapon move 90% of the time. Losing a fight to a rat because you couldn't even attempt a swing, much less hit it, gets old after about the 30th time.



Likewise, the Guilds in Oblivion simply didn't feel like "guilds", they struck me as nothing more than places to get quests. Morrowind's guilds had "work", and tended to promote the business they were in, rather than jumping into "save the world" epic nonsense almost immediately just because you're the "special snowflake". I do give Oblivion some credit for a number of excellent individual quests, even if the overall faction experience felt nonsensical.

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Chris Ellis
 
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Post » Sat Mar 19, 2016 10:47 pm

Equipment degradation. :P



Lore-wise, Wood Elves. Their lore is honestly too bizarre for me, and they're the hardest race to "connect" with - Imperials might be boring, but I can just never imagine myself rolling any kind of Bosmer. It doesn't help that Morrowind and Oblivion really didn't have any likeable Bosmer characters - and tons of really punchable ones.

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Ilona Neumann
 
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Post » Sun Mar 20, 2016 12:51 am

This is one of mine, too. I really want to play and like these 2 games, but the combat is the worst, for me.



Speaking of combat, TES combat in general is not very good, or fun for me. I wish my character was more involved.



I also would like to "like" companions, but they are mostly just annoyances for me. The best thing they do is get in the way. Few have little to no reason for being.

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james tait
 
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Post » Sun Mar 20, 2016 4:24 am

How can't you make your weapon move? It's a simple click-and-drag. I understand if you simply don't like it, but I can't see how click and drag is any more difficult than, say, move and click.



Actually, that's my main criticism of Oblivion's guilds, that they weren't places to just get quests. They were only a place to tell a story through quests. Daggerfall's guilds were nothing more than places to get quests, and I liked that because it makes me feel like a proper adventurer living their own life by their own means. I mean, I like having a story as part of the guild experience (and Oblivion's were better than Morrowind's and Skyrim's in general, IMO), but given the finite, non-random nature of them after Daggerfall, where it's the same basic story and quests every time which you're forced through every time you do the guild. Skyrim took a step in the right direction with radiant quests, but there were far too few variations and the various templates were all too similar.




For my part, it's the whole Nerevar/Nerevarine and Dwemer stuff. I get why people like it, and there's been a good bit of thought put into them to build a good mystery and add to the setting... but I just can't get interested in them. The Nerevar/Nerevarine stuff I'm not interested in because I don't particularly care for the Dunmer, Tribunal, etc. For the Dwemer, I'm not terribly interested in the steampunk aesthetic, especially when its forced into a medieval-style fantasy setting just to have some kind of "advanced" machinery and technology. If I wanted modern/advanced technology, I'd go for some kind of urban or recent-history fantasy setting rather than medieval. And aside from their technology, the Dwemer are essentially just an extinct race of elves.

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Beulah Bell
 
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Post » Sun Mar 20, 2016 11:53 am

Contrary to what BOX MAAAN posted, I actually liked the equipment degradation in Morrowind. Repair tools only lasted 15-15 uses, which was awkwardly low, but it worked passably well in spite of that. In Oblivion, the wear effect was far too rapid, and at low to medium skill the repair tools broke almost immediately, so you had to carry dozens. That was just annoying.



Playing a Bosmer seemed like a good idea in Morrowind, until he took a couple of hits. The horrible and annoying squeeking and moaning noises coming from the character quickly convinced me that it was a very bad idea, and I've never played a Bosmer since.



For whatever reason, my PC doesn't seem to handle DOSBOX well, so I've never been able to properly play Daggerfall on my system. I had dabbled with it on a friends PC years before, and it seemed to function well enough then, but neither the configurable nor the pre-configured versions will consistently activate the weapon on my own system. The controls seem to be really awkward for movement, too. Worse, my character just stands there and takes hit after hit while I click and drag the mouse back and forth or side to side repeatedly, trying to attack. Every 10-20 mouse swipes, it will work and the character will actually take a swing, then stand there again. The game is essentially unplayable for me.



As for Oblivion guilds, yes, you get quests, but they don't feel like "guild work", they feel like a "storyline". In Morrowind, I went to guilds in order to get work. In Oblivion, I wanted "work" and got a "questline" instead. I understand that its even more that way in Skyrim, except for the radiant quests, which SHOULD be at the start for generic "work", instead of after you've already finished the questline and become head of the organization.

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Laura Elizabeth
 
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Post » Sun Mar 20, 2016 4:09 am

Re Daggerfall and mouse swings, I could not get the weapon to move without increasing the mouse speed to an absurd level that made menu navigation difficult. But with Xpadder I was able to have two different " sets", one that was active during combat (when you hold down one of the triggers while swinging your weapon) and one that was active the rest of the time, and I eventually got it working well with a controller.


I really wish I could like Daggerfall more but lack of a "world" to explore makes the game less interesting to me than its successors. Daggerfall has a huge world but it all looks the same. Just an enormous flat area filled with the same Sprite graphics and some random encounters. Can't really get into that.
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Toby Green
 
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Post » Sun Mar 20, 2016 12:12 pm

I started out liking the whole "CHIM means you know you're in a game" thing, but now I just kind of find it boring and limiting.


+1 wanting to like Daggerfall but can't, for the same reason Turija mentioned.





I don't suppose you've played ESO, have you? I didn't really like the Bosmer until I played it. You spend a lot of time in Valenwood, and there are a lot of really cool Bosmer characters there, and a lot of really cool things about them. Like the Spinners, who are all about stories, and can recreate the past and even change people through it by putting new people into the story.

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Zoe Ratcliffe
 
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Post » Sun Mar 20, 2016 7:01 am


Haven't played ESO, I think I just have a really hard time enjoying MMOs in general. tbh nothing I've read about Bosmer or Valenwood really appeals to me. I'm sure Bosmer will grow on me if I can experience Valenwood in a game, though - a setting's actual portrayal in-game is always more grounded than described in lore, mostly since the games are so huge that they don't really have to worry about tokenism.

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Sarah Edmunds
 
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Post » Sun Mar 20, 2016 10:55 am

Just as a FYI, ESO has a lot of content for a single player experience. Even more with Orsinium and Thieves Guild DLCs. Indeed, the game has more single player content than multiplayer content.

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natalie mccormick
 
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Post » Sun Mar 20, 2016 1:37 pm


This so much. The lore has now gotten so convoluted, contradicting and downright ridiculous. I mean, have you tried to read the mental writings of the Loveletter and Landfall? The guy who writes them isn't even with Bethesda anymore, and these sources cannot be found in any official TES source, so why in the hell are they considered canon rather than fan-fic?

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Ells
 
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Post » Sun Mar 20, 2016 9:39 am

Thalmor. Empire having a formidable challenger was welcome change, but they came off as just Fantasy Nazis, which was pretty boring after fighting against Fallout 3's Wasteland Nazis. I'm confident that they'll be fleshed out more later though and Skyrim's representation of them was just establishing them in the lore.



I wanted to like Oblivion. I was on these forums* and all hyped about it, but I didn't have a good enough computer to run the game when it was released. Couple of years later I bought the Game of the Year -edition, but I didn't enjoy it, mostly because of the UI and the dialogue-system (zooming to someone's face who's staring at you was just torture to me). Exploring and combat was good though.



*Ooh, the autocensor still changes "s t f u" to "Please continue, my good sir."

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saxon
 
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Post » Sun Mar 20, 2016 12:57 pm

Altmer. They are tall, elegant, beautiful... and complete [censored] heads, lol.
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N Only WhiTe girl
 
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Post » Sun Mar 20, 2016 7:59 am

I also have a hard time getting behind the Bosmer. The Green Pact is a bit too unbelievable for me. Only meat for literally everything? How is that a healthy diet? And why does the nature god love mindless plants but not animals? surely raising and killing large amounts of livestock is poor for the ecosystem.
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Natalie J Webster
 
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Post » Sun Mar 20, 2016 2:02 pm


Because the material has shown up in other sources? Elements of Loveletter and Nu-Mantia Intercept have shown up in ESO and Skyrim, Hiemskier's speech is pretty much entirely taken from the Comentaries of the Mythic Dawn (written by Kirkbride). His fingerprints are on just about everything, as much so as Howard's and Kuhlmann's. Of course, the whole "CHIM is you in a video game" is a gross oversimplification of the philosophy.



For me, it's Nords. They're a super important part of the world, the last legacy of the progenitors of the Mannish societies, and have been a driving element of every period of Tamriel's history. But they've always come off as buffoonish, gulliable, or outright idiotic. And they don't even own their quirkyness and stupidity, like the Bosmer do.

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Laura Samson
 
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Post » Sun Mar 20, 2016 2:12 am

A lot of people on the lore forum consider all kinds of fan fic to be canon. That doesn't actually make it canon though. But as Lach points out, if it shows up in another Bethesda game, then it would be canon.

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Ridhwan Hemsome
 
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Post » Sun Mar 20, 2016 1:05 pm


What elements are in Skyrim and ESO?

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Caroline flitcroft
 
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Post » Sun Mar 20, 2016 4:50 am

I'm not well versed, but I know that the Towers were first brought up in the Obscure Texts (Kirkbride and others' out of game writings, usually on this forum) before being referenced in Skyrim. Specifically, in the Last Dragonborn Prophecy as featured in The Book of the Dragonborn. I think the Towers also feature into the Thalmor's endgame.



I want to like the dungeons. People have raved about the massive dungeons in Oblivion and Skyrim, but I just can't accept being underground for that long when the overworld is so pretty. That each dungeon only includes two or three enemies repeated over and over and over is a problem, too. Different dungeons have different enemies, but during a single dungeon I tend to feel like I just keep killing the same guy.

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Kelli Wolfe
 
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Post » Sun Mar 20, 2016 6:39 am


It's not really a nature god. More like just a tree. A really big tree that's really an entire forest.

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Wane Peters
 
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Post » Sun Mar 20, 2016 9:54 am


Well, actually, one of my favorite things about Elder Scrolls is the lackadaisical approach they take to canon in the first place. They'll draw on out-of-game sources like Kirkbride's writings and incorporate those ideas into the settings without turning it into a surrealist stream-of-consciousness sort of thing. But even better, they don't even worry about canon while writing their stories. One of my biggest pet peeves with a lot of communities is how sacredly they value canon, saying nothing matters but canon. My stance is, having something declared canon or non-canon doesn't suddenly make it good, or bad or whatever - Mega Man X7 is still a terrible game with an idiotic story, and the original Fallouts are still full of fourth wall breaks and pop-culture references, regardless of any of it being canon. Elder Scrolls, every interpretation of the story is plausible canon, and they deliberately write around trying to establish any sort of canon for the games. I love it. Uh, rant over.






I promise I'll try it again at some point. My first experience wasn't the best, but I'll keep my counsel until I get more than an hour into it.





Gotta agree on the Nords. I really like what Skyrim did with them, and I'm actually a big fan of Dragon Cult lore and the Songs of the Return, but they're another race I just have no interest in ever playing.

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Annika Marziniak
 
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Post » Sun Mar 20, 2016 12:54 pm


The Towers, the Kalpas, The Magne Ge (and the Celestial Avatars), the White Gold Concordant, The Companions, Painted cows and the decline of the Gians, and potentially the Thalmor agenda (if Ancano's world-destroying binge can be taken as a wider goal, and not personal ego). ESO also directly talks about the transformation of Cyrodiil, reinforcing what Kirkbride wrote in the Commentaries, and which is paraphrased by Hiemskier.



That's not to say that Kirkbride is the absolute authority on anything. His word can not be taken as law. But his influence on the word, and his interpretation of some of those concepts, can't be dismissed out of hand just because he's no longer on the payroll. He's done extensive contract work since his official departure before Morrowind's release, and references to some of his more outlandish stuff persists in the games.






Yeah, i actually liked how ESO expanded on the nature of the Green Pact. It's less about not harming nature, and more about not harming Valenwood it's self. They're free to slash and burn whatever they want outside it's borders, but WITHIN Valenwood, plant life is off limits.

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Chantelle Walker
 
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Post » Sun Mar 20, 2016 10:16 am


http://inhumanexperiment.blogspot.ca/2009/09/two-brave-men-who-ate-nothing-but-meat.html



Seems to work fine for regular human beings, so it's probably ok for these fantasy people.



To the topic!



I think Cyrodiil should be populated by Bretons in the east and Nords in the west, all with Roman and Italian names. I like Cyrodiilic culture, but whenever I play a character that buys into it, I almost invariably choose either an Imperialised Nord or an Imperialised Breton.

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Kayla Oatney
 
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Post » Sat Mar 19, 2016 10:59 pm

I assume you mean the PGE version of Cyrodilic culture :P



But I find myself agreeing on Nords and Bretons being the large groups of people in Cyrodiil. At least as it stands. Adding another race, then only to portray it without any real identity of its own makes me go "well, then what was the point of introducing them?"

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Chrissie Pillinger
 
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Post » Sun Mar 20, 2016 1:24 am

In general I think main quests and guild main quests being poor in Oblivion and Skyrim. Especially in Skyrim where I am forced to be the choosen one all the time and there is absolutely no logic to how short the quest lines are. I finished the Companions in like an ingame month, not even rushing.



Also while I do want to like the world of Skyrim and Oblivion but I can't buy it, its too small and the people are simply too shallow. This was a problem in Morrowidn too but at least here I had more dialogue options and more npcs overall.

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CHARLODDE
 
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