Would be killer to help Cyrus' RESTLESS ghost defeat the Thalmor. Here's the catch, his spirit came back as....

A sword!!!

I'm not so sure that'd be a catch - wouldn't it be a really [censored] awesome sword?

If I had to design a MQ, it would start with the PC being taken prisoner and left to die in the middle of the Alik'r desert only to stumble upon a rusty old saber sticking out of the sand. Try as you might, you cannot bring yourself to dump the sword, and by intuition your find your way to an oasis and then to a city, guided by a voice in your head. You think you're crazy, but an old man tells you that you're not. In fact he says that you and your old sword are the key to freedom from Thalmor oppression. The Sons of Hammerfell are strong enough to defeat the Thalmor, but they lack a leader. This old man cannot teach you to become that leader or even promise that you are the leader required because nothing is set in stone, and men must make their own fate. He can however guide you on your path. He is after all, an Ansu, a Sword Singer. Once celebrated masters of the sword, they are now hunted down by the Thalmor as political dissidents simply because they represent a form of national pride that the Thalmor so desperately need to erase if they wish to conquer this land and its people.

I like it very much. If Bethesda doesn't steal the idea from you and run with it (here's hoping that they do), you should think about modding once the construction set comes out.

As long as it doesn't devalue Bound Weapons, it sounds good.

So, it's not sword-singing but sword-singing?

This is not the same mechanic. With the word-wall you're learning a new word, and absorbing it's power.

This isn't how a memory-stone works at all, nor are they only meant for conveying sword-moves. A memory stone is a stone on which you can record your memories - it's like a Walkman, except when you touch this stone it aborbs everything going through your mind while you do-so. We see Leki using it to give an account of a battle as she lays dying, she touches the stone and starts talking (or thinking), and it records her.

If you touch a memory stone you're going to absorb the information put into it, those memories or monologues or whathaveyou.

Cryus had a stone put under his pillow in which the user had put their knowledge of a sword move. It's really more comparable to Neo learning stuff from the Matrix than it is the dragon word-walls.

But what if a Memory Stone could serve as the Shehai's equivalent of Dragon Souls, needed for understanding sword singing techniques?

They could be used for understanding techniques, but it's still not in the same mechanic. You can pigeon-hole them into lining up if you like but it's selling short the capacity of memory stones by a great deal; they could serve in that manner, but it's not their design or primary use by any means (though 'needed' is too strong a word, stones aren't needed, they just have potential to serve as a partial substitute for training).

I always pictures the sword singers are just jedi wzards, and stone memories as holodisks that the old jedi wizard masteres used to remember their best abilities to pass onto thier students.

I think Mer magic, Dogah's Thu'um and Yokunda sword-swingers are all just unique ways of using the same universal force of magic.

Perhaps the the Yokunda learned a bit of dragon magic and over the centuries has studied it and made it thier own, developting into its own unique form based on the Dovah's type of magic.
The Nords stay truest to the Dovah magic since they had such a long 'history' with them.
And the Mer had their own unique way of manipulating magical forces that became the common form for man and mer, perhaps the only difference is in how its called forth.

Mer and Man use focus and concentration to manipulate the energy, while Dovah use more of a force of will such as imagining fire in their minds to give it form and shouting it out to shape it.

It doesn't seem unreasonable that sword-singing could be heavily based on the Thu'um magic with some unqiue twists such as memory stones containing whole memories.
The very existance of Dragonrend shows that the Thu'um can be taken by men and used in ways the Dovah can't comprehend. So maybe Dovah magic is inherently more powerful because it
involves absolute commitment to the use. IE you want to burn someone you imagine an inferno and the desire to burn them to make them hurt and die in order to form the magic, in essence
making it apart of you, were mer focus on the magical principles of fire to shape it in their hands but they are still only picturing the magical formulas, one is refined and scientific and the other is
savage, primal and powerful. Well thats my take on it anyway.

Word walls aren't just for learning words of power. Like memory stones, they serve as records of important events, left by dragon worshippers.

Haha, modding... I have no idea how to do any of that. If I knew how, I'd probably have made my own game based on my own shiz with the Morrowind construction set by now. Speaking of which, if anyone's interested in making a morrowind mod with firearms, repeating crossbows, and pole axes that takes place in a completely different world, drop me a line. I have my own world-refusals to sing at the current generation of industry developers.


Luagar you s'wit. Always raining on my parade
So the memory stones and the word walls are different, but the idea of absorbing information without reading and instant comprehension is the same. And the mechanic is the same. The purpose and information are different, but the mechanic, especially that of learning the language is the same.

I've had this idea forming in my mind for a while now for a sort of lore-mod which would take Skyrim back to some point in the TES timeline when more cool stuff existed but the whole world wasn't in imminent peril (a world to exist in, rather than to save, you might say), while also implementing a lot more of the mythic elements in a more literal way. Post-Dwemer, pre-Nerevarine, I guess, but I'd need a lot of help with the lore-bending.
*And remove the voiced dialogue so I could write a bunch more.

OT: I assumed the connection was a thematic one and not a literal/direct one. A parallel could just as easily be drawn between methods of learning thu'um, sword-singing, and magic (ie, absorbing the knowledge of scrolls/tomes), though the latter I suppose is only really established as a game mechanic; we know the source in lore but not the specifics of how it's tapped.

Or we do and it's just that I'm ignorant, but I had to type something on-topic!

Fun thread. I always thought how [DBZishly] powerful or odd the redguards' Sword-Saints were, and how weird it would be to incorporate it into a future title. Then, all o'sudden, Skyrim features the Voice and crazy powerful shouts. Now, slicing-the-atom doesn't seem so impossible or improbable or whack after all.

Fun fun

bracketed for lack of eloquence

That's the big thing. Most games don't just let you live in them. There's always something gigantic happening at that one time. The same could be said about Morrowind I guess, but the 6'th House wasn't besieging cities or anything. A lot of the stuff in Morrowind was just business as usual until near the end.

'exist in, rather than save' has always been my reasoning for saying TES is better than DA. (among other things, of course). At the end of the day, Tamriel is beautiful and life is fascinating, Thedas is brown and life is depressing.

I've said before that if not for the awesome world, the ingame books, the unconventional story, and the lore, Morrowind would have gone by completely under the radar because of the bad gameplay.

If not for the suspense and political intrigue in DA, that game would've tanked because if anything the combat was an annoying chore at best. Morrowind's combat was just lack luster and simplistic. DA's combat was godawful. The political element of that game saved it. Personally the whole darkspawn thing was contrived and generic. If that game was just political warfare, it would've been something memorable.

Huh, I thought DA's politicking was lack-luster, but found the combat to be very fun. Engaging, somewhat complex... it was refreshing (the only part of DA that lived up to the "old-school RPG heritage" it claimed to offer), and DA's greatest redeeming feature.

I couldn't agree more with the idea that Morrowind embodies a world to live in rather than play in.

The early politics were boring, but I loved the idea the Loghain was a hero to the people and ended up a serious villain. The bit about Alistair being forced into being King or else being imprisoned or executed was cool too.

My problem with the combat was that it didn't allow for much strategy if you were a melee warrior or a melee rogue. If you were out-statted you'd get wtfpwned in the first few seconds of combat, and the magic system, at least on the xbox, was too convoluted. I like using lots of spells, especially spells that set up other spells such as weaknesses or slows, but the menu system didn't work for me. Also setting up NPC action chains got tedious really quick.

I did like the fact that the major fights were truly major. The optional dragon fights took a damn long time. I even restarted the game once because I knew my party was ill-formed and would never be able to down one.

Do you know of any other games where you aren't the chosen-one or have to save the world? It seems like from the first RPG to the latest, they all feature some form of stopping a major villain.

If I can ever find a modder or get in good writing for a game company, I'm planning out an RPG that takes place within a single, huge city that features 12 factions that can't all be joined because like Morrowind, many factions stand as direct enemies of others. The PC is an immigrant to the city, hoping to escape from the war-torn countryside only to find that the war is about to tear the city apart. You can't stop the war or the city and Kingdom from dying. It's gonna happen whether you like it or not. You just decide if you want to fight for the people who accept or are working towards the downfall or the people who more or less accept the end yet are confident they can keep their factions safe throughout the big changes to come. There will be crossbows and spears.

Loghain was an excellent character. I've been in like twenty-page-long discussions about his motivations, morality, compotence, etc. Very well done. Alistair's situation showed promise, but as a person I thought he was a bit of a [censored], and fit too much into Bioware's usually party-dynamic archetypes.
The politics themselves I liked, especially as part of the overall setting, but I wasn't impressed with how the character interacted with it. It was good I guess, it just didn't strike me as anything special.

The best things about the combat were definitely mages and boss-fights. The most epic boss-fights I've seen in ages (how many other games these days have hidden bosses that can be accessed early-on and are insanely impossible to defeat, which offer massive rewards as incentive for overcoming them? Not freaking many, that's for sure. but even the regular bosses were great).
The menu took a bit getting used to and the magic system was convoluted, but that's in holding with long-standing RPG tradition

I love your idea for a game. One realistically-sized and fleshed-out big fantasy city to play around in, with complex plot and devoid of "The CHOSEN ONE must save the LAND from an ANCIENT EVIL THAT HAS AWAKENED" cliches is everyone's wet dream, and that last line sells it 110%.

I was gonna play DA 2, but a friend (holy [censored] Chaplain has friends?!?) told me it wasn't like DA 1 at all, and they screwed the game up.

Honestly the thing I thought was coolest about DA was the creative names. Aside from the fact that they used real world terms like Chevalier, and they had all the nations represent real ones (Scotland, France, Germany), I loved the more creative ones, like having Teyrns, Banns, and Arls instead of just going with Counts, Dukes, and Barons. I respect that sort of stuff. Same thing with The Chantry instead of just doing The Church.

As for the optional bosses, didn't you think the two optional dragons were like crazy hella uber harder than the final boss? That's one thing that's never gonna change with the gaming industry. Final Bosses used to be [censored] hard. I remember beating FF6 with a gamefaqs printout beside me, pausing after ever hit to subtract Kefka's HP on a calculator so I'd be able to pace my damage and healing. I miss those battles that were true fights instead of hyperbole plot points.

You ever play any of the old Thief games? Now that city was one hell of a world. Minimalist storytelling at its damn best.

Someone (not a friend, I lack those) told me the exact same thing about DA2. Apparently it was a huge disappointment as a sequel.

Those two dragons were HARD. One of them, I think Flemeth (was that her name? I forget. The skimpy witch's mom [except not really because of whatever weird soul-swapping was going on with her]) took me AGES to beat, and I actually had to work out a precise party/equipment set-up and attack pattern with liberal quantities of luck and prayer to beat her. Like what you described with Kefka. It was awesome.
There was a hidden boss in a random house in the main town (wow my memory svcks) that you had to complete a quest to access who kicked my ass so badly that I eventually just gave up on fighting him. Still haven't beaten him. More games should take a page out of DA's book, and go back to the days before players were treated like brain-dead babies whose hands need to be held through every possible objective so that they can get their achievements and gamer points. Stuff like that is FUN! It gives you an incomparable sense of reward and accomplishment to beat something when it's actually a challenge.

Oh, Thief! I loved Thief! It's one of my 5 or 6 favorite games ever, and since three of the others are TES games that's saying a lot. It was SO ahead of its time. Hell, the way it approached stealth gameplay, storytelling, and NPC behavior is still ahead of the current time in many ways. It's just pure pleasure to play.
Man, I think I'm going to go through the ordeal of getting it to run on a modern machine and install it again.

How???? Nedes worshiped Shezzar, but he wasn't even in the Nordic Pantheon. Farther, when we meet Pelinal, he is an Imperial.

From everything we know, A memory stone is just the quickest way to teach it. To me at least sword-singing seams to be its own SCHOOL of magic but still not entirely seperate from 'merish' magic: the shaping of the magical forces inherent to the soul appears in the other schools as well.

You can learn a spell. It becomes part of your memory. Because of this, if you have the power to transfer memories, you have the power to teach other people spells.

I bought Thief from some company called Sold Out games or something. It worked on my Vista machine. A lot of people use the "ahead of its time" to describe good early things, but with games I don't think it applies. If anything games like Thief were of their time, not ahead of it. We'll never see games like Thief or Morrowind again because the industry is all about making games for casual audiences, not challenging games. Every new RPG will be more derivative than the next. Thief was hard as balls, and developers would look at that game and say,

"This game has awful graphics, and I don't get to be a ninja."

So not ahead of its time and good for it. Let's thank the little kid gamers, family gamers, and online shooter enthusiasts for setting a theme in games that will never go away. It's just like movies. The golden age of American cinema was in the late 20's to the probably the 40's and featured some of the greatest classic films, and the American Film Renaissance went from '67 to '75, producing some of the the greatest films since the 20's-40's and arguable some of the most unique. In 1972, Jaws was released, and the age of the blockbuster began. This era will never end.

Like blockbusters, the age of quick time events, games that are 75% cinematics, 2 hour campaigns, auto-aiming, no reading or listening, and graphics over content will never end. Instead of Thief we'll have Assassin's Creed. Instead of Morrowind we'll have Oblivion. Instead of Half Life we'll have Call of Duty.

The theme of all this is that films were at their peak when:

1. The art form was new, the studios weren't bogged down in the politics they are today, and they basically owned everything from the shooting floor to the theaters. (20's-40's)
2. When the industry was in the pits, and studios didn't know what people wanted to see, so they were willing to let directors have tons of leeway and produce their visions. (67-72)

After blockbusters became a real trend, the industry had a true niche; an unbreakable way to make as much money as possible, and that method was so perfect it will never change.

Now games are mainstream enough that games are less about doing new, innovative things and more like trying to emulate Call of Duty to make money off of style-recognition.

The worst thing that can happen to a good artist is to become famous. See unknown Kevin Smith in Clerks and famous Kevin smith in the abortion that was Clerks: 2. All of that creative cinematography went straight out the window to allow for derivative six jokes and "shock" humor.