Valen Dreth?
I hope he's not there.

I hope that instead of classes, we can chose why we are in jail and that will determine our major and minor skills

Well you could be framed for something or mislead into a situation or was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Daggerfall's beginning was actually kind of brutal. If your character did not have good stats and fighting skills (or you missed out on the ebony dagger) you could have an extremely difficult time surviving in Privateer's hold. I recall a Let's Play where the guy died at least a dozen times before making it out of there.

My hope for Skyrim is that the tutorial is good enough and non-repetitive enough to not warrant a mod to skip it (or perhaps includes an option to skip).

Edit: Oh, and I LOVE Valen Dreth. He was by far my favourite character in Oblivion.

I don't accept "framing" crap to cover up such a stupid intro, namely because I know how my toon can escape these kind of stuff without getting caught in teh first place (my thief go into hiding and get contact to cover it up, my battle-type toon live off in the wilderness til it die down, my magic user just disappear, and anyone that is rich just brided their way out).

Again, you are forced to make an ass pull that you are somehow a felon from the get go.

Could we stop stuffing the "it's a tradition" thing down the throats of those apposed to prison beginning? I consider it a tradition and like the prison setting, but really I don't need the rest of the world to agree with me.

Why the hell are so many people assuming the start is the same as Oblivions? <_< Am I missing something? :confused:

The only thing they say is 'prisoner' and make no references to jail (as far as I can tell...) People are already throwing a fit over it... yet they know the equivalent of nothing about the begining of Skyrim.

But it's a tradition on the forums to be opposed to things that are non-traditional!

Better to be in prison then somewhere boring.

Yeah, I have nothing against starting as a prisoner again

I like the prison intro. I think its a fun way to start the game off.

Ahem
In Arena, because Jagar Tharn knew you would be screwing up his plans, so he imprisoned you in a goblin infested hell hole, in hopes that you die, which is highly plausible, since JT was very powerful to begin with.

Then comes Daggerfall. Here, you were on a ship (not a prisoner ship nor were you in jail before) and it got wrecked. In fact, that intro was pretty much you were sent to Illiac Bay, your boat got owned, and you managed to swim to a cave, which is extremely open of one's past, and a very plausible situation. In Redguard, Cyrus is on a boat, is attacked by pirates, kicks their asses, and gets to port. Battlespire had your PC walking into the Battlespire, only to see that it was razed by daedra. All three of those games came before Morrowind. So, following everyone's logic, being in prison was not a tradition, and since it requires two games to make it tradition, being on a boat and getting off somehow is the real tradition.

Morrowind, while you technically were one, had the grace of making it extremely overlooked, allowing one to easily just say they went to Vvardenfell or were an agent of the Blades. It was Oblivion that made it extremely explicit and constantly reinforced that you are a prisoner, and therefore you did something illegal no matter what.

The problem tend to hold that people keep thinking that the prison intro is a "tradition" to the TES series but in all argument, it only appear in Oblivion. I just like to remind them that it is not a tradition at all.


Naw, if one can think right any where can start "epic" without the need of a prison cell. Morrowind's off the boat was not boring as we walk out the ship due to teh atmosphere it presented. The Dungeon in Daggerfall made it an "interesting" start.

Hellmouth just owned this thread.

I'm fine with it :thanks: :starwars:

Having played all the Elder Scrolls from Arena onwards i really like that this has become a tradition. I hope they don't get bored and change it, although i suspect they will. You have to start somewhere and to be honest most of our characters (if not all) will be violent people so it's not that much of a stretch to assume they got caught doing something naughty. If you want to roleplay that they aren't into crime then make your backstory a false imprisonment story. SImple

As mentioned already by qawsed asap and I, pulling the whole "framed" bit out of our asses every time gets annoying, and are still left with a sour taste in our mouths. Plus, if you REALLY want to go into the discussion about 'tradition', I WANT you to refute my points I made above.

It sounds pretty cool. I don't really care if it's tradition or not. It will still be different from Oblivions, so that's all that matters. They're not going to copy/paste the intro, just because it's based off the same theme. I'm sure it will be fresh.

It is no denial that thing will get bloody, but it does not have to start out in a "prison" cell just because one will start killing things. Hell, they could have done this with Oblivion like the mod http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=23757, where one can start anywhere but the Main Quest start when they go to Kvatch and have to "save" it, thus getting known as a hero and one get recommended worthy to help "finding" the heir to the throne. No Prison intro require.

And again, "framing" is just a stupid excuse to have a "prison" intro, which I find such intro horribad.

I don't understand why so many people are against the prison intro? Yes, it seems to be a tradition now, but I think the idea works very well for a TES game. Basically, you start with nothing, and as your character grows and becomes more powerful, he becomes the hero of the world. If you started out a superhero, it wouldn't mean as much when you got to the end. But by starting this way, you are basically a nobody, a street rat (and have a hard time taking one down too, to start). Who is this lowly prisoner no one has ever heard of? Where did he come from? This is great for role players. Only you can answer that question. And only you can define who you will become. That's what TES is all about. It just works!.

All I can say is, there is so much I have written that accomplishes the same thing, but without being a felon from the get go, and I'm getting tired of having to repeat myself every other week, and multiple times in a thread. Qawsed Asap has also made even more arguments of why a prisoner intro just is not satisfactory.

Go search the forums this instant.

You'll probably be in a jail in this one captured during the civil war by the enemy, the side that's not loyal to the Empire.

Meh. It's better than having my character somehow wind up at the bottom of a very deep, very monster-infested dungeon for some random reason. How'd I get there... Underground river?

LOL Sometimes I find this forum hilarious... I mean, usually its "they changed it so it svcks!" but now its "they didn't change it so it svcks!" Make up your mind people, geez! Its like Bethesda can do nothing right with some of these so-called "fans".