The whosewhatsist[wtfbbq?]? :confused:

EDIT: if this is a global change, then why aren't the climates of the other provinces affected?

I'll pre-empt the oblivious rebuttal to this.

Yes, a dense jungle would have been unfeasible with Oblivion's engine and foliage software. But the concept pre-dates the programming. They could have tailored the game's coding to make jungle work, centering visual design around that concept. Bethesda could have done anything.

I concede.

That's completely not true, as long as the game tells no stories in the world, it contributes to the lore, some fans just prefer to think otherwise, because they are arrogant enough to think that what they want the lore to be is substitute for Bethesda's canon.

Anyway, the real explanation for what happened to the jungle is the whim of Todd Howard, who thinks that players want familiarity, not originality, he felt that Cyrodiil as a jungle wouldn't be familiar to players, so he decided it should look like a more boring version of Middle Earth instead. We just got "Talos did it" as a half-hearted handwave to explain such a design choice. I don't like it, but to just boycott new lore because you don't like it is foolish and doesn't change anything.



To be fair, when I read a fantasy book and read those words, something along the lines of Cyrodiil is usually the image my mind forms, but that is in part because I already know that it's set in your usual Pseudo-Medieval European Fantasy Land, in reality, it's far from indication that Cyrodiil looks like that.

Less time to take in designing the setting with such graphical detail. In addition, it also meant that they didn't have to design entirely new jungle-oriented monsters.

Meaning laziness and lack of creativity. And you're talking about it like it's totally a good thing.

No, simply time-saving measures. It's their call to make, whatever they do to it they're entirely in their right.

Legally speaking? because Legalism is often dry and confused, so it sort of fits with Oblivion's Cyrodiil. I'll gladly make up bethesda's mind for them if they need me to :hehe:

but yeah it wasn't all "time saving" it was mostly a design schism They knew they'd have a loyalist base which didn't care no matter what they did.

Toh-may-toh, toh-mah-toh.

They're entitled to their rights to property.


It still a measure to save time and money at the same time. Those who didn't play Morrowind wouldn't notice, and most of those that did care would end up buying it anyway.

So you're saying that you not only don't care if gamesas alienates their fanbase, but the fact that you're arguing to defend it says that you support them alienating their fans. Let's watch TESV be like Dark Messiah or rather whatever-the-hell-you-don't-want-from-a-TES-game-or-even-any-game-in-general (because they CAN do that, it's their right and their property, and it would be a great time-saving measure to make a linear game rather than a sandbox one or whatever, so it's all good, yes?) and we'll see if you still stick by your argument then.

Why would I dispute property rights? We may not agree with everything they do with TES, but we must respect the laws that give them control of what belongs to them.

So things like internal consistency and creating interesting new environments to explore should be ignored for the sake of shortening development times?

And it's not like no one ever conceived monsters that wouldn't look out of place in a jungle.

Of course, Bethesda CAN do whatever they want with their own property, they want to turn their jungle into Generic Fantasy Land? That's they're right. They want to throw laser guns into the game, add in generic fantasy dwarves, and replace horses with purple polka dotted ponies? Their right too. Sure, the fans wouldn't like, it, but it's still their right.

Uh, this is not all just about the property rights, it's the property itself. Seems to me you either a) fail to distinguish between the two, or b ) are knowingly not distinguishing between the two even though you are actually aware there's a difference, and hoping nobody notices, in order to fuel your argument.

Okay this is getting hectic. The writers and the designers want the game to be good and in-depth. It's the producers, and corporate people that want the game to go mainstream, play it safe, dumb down, simplify, and basically destroy itself. What Crimson Paladin is saying is that they have the legal rights to do that. Whether or not it actually happens depends on how the cost/time/production/quality factors of the game turn out. The designers want cost and time to be open-ended variables while the money-counters want them to be low by any means neccessary. Both the designers and the producers want production to be high as that's the moneymaker, and the fanbase as well as the designers, want the quality to be amazing while the producers could care less as long as sales are up and cost is down. [/rant]

But the thing is, even with Cyrodiil as a temperate forest, the dev's didn't even do a good job making it a forest. I live in a forest. Cyrodiil doesn't have forests, it has a sprinkling of new-growth (young) trees. There's no dense canopy, there's no leaf-litter, the spacing of the trees is all wrong. The girth of the trees is so narrow, the branches aren't very convincing (compare to the gnarled arms jutting and twisting out of the trunks of the trees in Morrowind's Bitter Coast region). There's even grass in the supposedly dense forest. You don't get grass in dense forest, there's too much shade and leaf-litter!

While billboard foliage certainly reduced render time, it was rather immersion-breaking to see the same billboard face me in all directions like the furnishing in Wolfenstein 3D did.

So, all in all, be it a jungle or a forest - you are still going to have a lot of trees and vegetation to consider. As for monsters: there was a lot creativity for Morrowind's monsters. If they couldn't hire somebody to design new monsters, then the devs could always take inspiration from the mythical beasts from the mythologies of cultures living in such climates, as well as drawing inspiration from the sundry bizarre and exciting animal species inhabiting the jungles of our very own Planet Earth.

Alright, now that you're arguing about this directly, I gotta weigh in.

The contents of the mind are not property. Ideas are not property. Expression is not property. The State grants a temporary (though increasingly less so) monopoly over reproduction of and derivation from artistic works, in an effort to subsidize the production of artistic works. The state grants a temporary monopoly on the production of new inventions to subsidize invention. But the products of the mind are not "property" in the same sense physical objects are.

Sure, gamesas can take a dump in a box and put a "The Elder Scrolls" label on it. There's no law against it. And by your logic, that would be perfectly fine, since gamesas "owns" three words in a phrase. That doesn't mean we have to like it. It also doesn't mean we can't attempt to warn potential buyers against the actual contents of the box. Our expression is as free as theirs, and I find your continual protests to the contrary offensive.

I'm going to reuse a quote I posted at another forum. It applies to TES over the years (and Bethesda's game-making decisions). I have been around since the beginning of TES, as several of us may have been. I remember buying and playing Arena with my college friends like it was yesterday. I understand the disappointment that many of you feel:

"Now I, and my opinion, matter very little to Bethesda. It's hard to argue when Morrowind was GOTY, Oblivion was GOTY, and Fallout 3 also was GOTY. From the outside looking in, I would seem like the crazy one."

I think most of us here are in the minority when it comes to our overall opinions of the game. It pains me to say that I believe a vast majority of game-players enjoyed Oblivion just the way it is (was).

Wait, so let me get this straight. An ice-breathing Dragon, who was at the time the Emperor of Cyrodill, reshaped the land to please it's inhabitants because they fought for him?

New growth trees that are three feet wide and a hundred feet tall. Everything is upsized like in WoW to better use screen real estate. Whenever I mod anything, I shrink the trees by half and it looks better by miles.

I don't mind people disliking it, they're entitled to their opinion. Myself, I don't care, I don't feel it's worth getting upset about. However, as I've said before, we must recognize that they're entirely in the right to do whatever they want with it, and nobody can tell them otherwise. Naturally, their choices are influenced by the goal of those choices, and some choices can ultimately be finanancially damaging to the company. But we cannot impose our judgements on them, we can only either express our opinions or simply not buy their products.

Oh, and in my opinion, the TES forums would be much better if the discussion and arguments stays on their respective threads on their respective forum.

Your arguing against all this suggests that you think that we shouldn't express our opinion.

I myself am pretty sure this discussion is relevant to lore. Or was, until somebody made it about property rights.

No, I'm saying that we shouldn't treat our opinions as facts.


The property rights thing was just to give backing to why Bethesda can rightfully do whatever they want with TES, and our judgements of Bethesda are opinions.

Nobody gives a damn about property rights or what Bethesda can legally do, its irrelevant to any conversation not dealing with copyright infringement, which this isn't. And yes, they're opinions, that's sortof a "no freakin' duh" statement. Us not agreeing with what Bethesda does has nothing to do with not respecting laws that give them the power to do what they want and its ignorant to propose this has anything to do with legalities.

We've got every right to criticize Bethesda on their product or any other company whether it be games, film, music etc. If I say that the camerawork in a movie was shoddy, that the writing was bad, or that it had plot holes, you could harass me about how its their movie and they can make it however they like but it would still stand that their movie was flawed and that they were trying to save time/money etc wouldn't change that. Games are no different.

I'm sure Bethesda would have loved to make Cyrodiil a jungle, how ever the game engine is very limited in rendering it properly, without melting most computers. I doubt even high end ones could do it properly.