The Elder Scrolls: It's the IX Divines, you milk-drinkers

[NineThePuma]

Thread Title suggested by Osiris_Shadowblade

Previous threads:

• Who's excited for Skyrim?
• Skyrim II: A Dragon A Day Keeps The Draugr At Bay.
• Skyrim III: Get rich selling protective knee gear!
• Skyrim IV: Oblivion
• Skyrim V: Skyrim
• Skyrim Thread VI: Dov Riders, AWAY!
• The Elder Scrolls VII: Do you believe in mod?
• The Elder Scrolls: By the VIII Divines

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[Triaxx]

I"m partial to the much older UESP Wiki. Not least because I like the look better.

[DomaDoma]

More informative (at least from my story-oriented perspective), less obnoxious ads, one-stop compilations of the multi-volume books... yeah, UESP is clearly superior.

[Cobalt]

The fifth thread is missing from the list.

[DigoDragon]

less obnoxious ads

This.
I don't mind some banner ads, but when a site starts auto-playing video ads regularly, I take my business elsewhere.

I do like the way UESP threads the quest pages together. It's easy for me to follow a questline all the way down without need to back track much at all.

[NineThePuma]

Jeeze, it's not like I've used the same opening post for the last three threads and am only now getting complained at :P

[Nilehus]

The internet is a fickle mistress.

Love the title.

[Gracht Grabmaw]

So here's what I have concluded from the discussion in the last thread:
The Stormcloaks in general and Ulfric in particular are ****ing retarded.

There's a foreign force that all the combined forces of the empire just barely fought to to an uneasy armistice... so your crappy little backwards province with barely even one city to speak of is gonna secede from the empire so you can keep fighting that same enemy. Sure, you go ahead with that.

[Gaelbert]

So here's what I have concluded from the discussion in the last thread:
The Stormcloaks in general and Ulfric in particular are ****ing retarded.

There's a foreign force that all the combined forces of the empire just barely fought to to an uneasy armistice... so your crappy little backwards province with barely even one city to speak of is gonna secede from the empire so you can keep fighting that same enemy. Sure, you go ahead with that.

It's not quite that simple. It's not that the Stormcloaks are revolting because they immediately want to invade Valenwood or go on the offensive, they want to remove the Thalmor from Skyrim and they feel that the Empire is in Skyrim protecting the Thalmor. Which they are, more or less.

[NEO|Phyte]

It's not quite that simple. It's not that the Stormcloaks are revolting because they immediately want to invade Valenwood or go on the offensive, they want to remove the Thalmor from Skyrim and they feel that the Empire is in Skyrim protecting the Thalmor. Which they are, more or less.

It should be pointed out that the Thalmor are only in Skyrim the way they are because Ulfric decided to be all LOOK AT ME WORSHIPING TALOS OVER HERE.

[DomaDoma]

It should be pointed out that the Thalmor are only in Skyrim the way they are because Ulfric decided to be all LOOK AT ME WORSHIPING TALOS OVER HERE.

Yup. Balgruuf seems to do pretty well just signing the Concordat and then turning a blind eye to actual violations thereof.

Speaking of which, as far as I'm concerned, the point where Ulfric officially goes too far is his invasion of Whiterun. He's got plenty of worthy causes, but at that point, he pretty much declares that they're not as important as his idea of being the High King.

But as I say, the whole question is kind of akin to "which victor do you favor in the Quarter Quell?" Pick a horse and get this over with as quick and cleanly as you can.

[Calemyr]

Actually, someone mentioned ESO in the last page of the last thread. I was curious if anyone was still playing and if the game has improved. I desperately wanted to like the game, but there are so many faults built into it that I just couldn't keep interested.

The problems I had with the game:

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* Inventory is horrible - hundreds of little pieces are needed to craft anything (a different reagent for every style of crafting for starters), but the inventory system is limited by item type, and the bank is shared between all characters.
* Gear depreciates too quickly - It takes a huge amount of work to craft something worthwhile, and it inevitably gets invalidated in two levels.
* Upgrade crafting is luck based - It would be one thing if failing an upgrade wasted the resources, but it destroyed the entire freaking item, and all the effort you'd already put into it. Which would be fine if it lasted for more than two levels, but it doesn't. And since it was really hard to get any decent quantities of the higher tiers of tempering items...
* NPC allies do nothing - literally nothing. I'm assaulting a crypt with the biggest, most badass team of heroes the era knew, and they do no damage, hold no threat, and do no healing. They are worse than useless, because they clutter up the fight, while the mandatory fights force you into close quarters horde combat whether or not you're set up for it.

Finally, the bots. I hate the bots. They are what ruined the game and drove me away. I mean, first there's the gold spammers. Every MMO game has them, there's no escape from it, I know. If it were just them I'd have been able to soldier through it, taking some small pleasure in reporting each and every one of them. But they are nothing compared to the menagerie I found in this game:
* The Circular Firing Squad: Bots all bunched up around the spawn point of a dungeon boss. If anything hostile appeared there, it was dead long before you could even target it. Patches succeeded in making it less profitable, but I never saw it stop being a major issue.
* The Joggers: There is nothing quite so funny or quite so stupid as seeing twenty to thirty NPCs running a circuit around a dungeon, mindlessly running only stopping to kill anything that spawns along the way.
* The Circuit Miner: Runs from spawn point to spawn point in a constant circuit, gathering resources.
* The Teleporting Miner: Doesn't even bother with the space between resource nodes, just jumps from one to the next and gathers faster than should be possible in the game, teleporting away before anything can react.

That crap I can understand in a single-player game, but here? It simply wasn't cool and stole the fun out of the game.

[DomaDoma]

ESO struck me as a bad idea to begin with. The whole appeal of TES, I think, is it's like an MMO - open world, skill-based leveling, loads of interaction and exploration - only you get to change the world and you don't have to put up with the idiots who play MMOs. That it apparently fails even by MMO standards is just icing.

[Divayth Fyr]

More informative (at least from my story-oriented perspective)

If you want any background/lore information you do not ever go to the ES wikia - some of the pages there are basically pure fanfiction.

Yup. Balgruuf seems to do pretty well just signing the Concordat and then turning a blind eye to actual violations thereof.

Balgruuf? Torygg himself was a Talos worshipper (as shown by the quest where we are to bring his horn to a Talos shrine) who actually considered Ulfric a hero.

ESO struck me as a bad idea to begin with.

Yeah - while a lot of people wanted multiplayer in their ES games, most of them wanted something that would allow them to have the full singleplayer experience with a friend or two, not having to deal with a bunch of idiots running around (which was expected years before ESO got announced ;) )

[DomaDoma]

Thorough non-sequitur, but is there an established story behind the statue at the Chorrol front gates, the one with a woman offering extreme unction to a man who apparently went into battle half-dressed? Because if not, there ought to be.

[Divayth Fyr]

Thorough non-sequitur, but is there an established story behind the statue at the Chorrol front gates, the one with a woman offering extreme unction to a man who apparently went into battle half-dressed? Because if not, there ought to be.

The Guide to Chorrol mentions that near the gate you'll find the

statue of the Saint of Sancre Tor, in memory of all who died in that great battle

[Kareeah_Indaga]

@Calemyr: I cancelled about a month ago, but when I left the bot situation was (thankfully) much improved from launch. Inventory still required a zillion slots though. For getting tempers I recommend the Hireling perks and refining a lot of materials—that was enough to keep my gear in blue most of the time. Also, a crafting guild helps—I was a member of a small one and it was a good way to store things like style materials that were necessary but common and findable everywhere.

[Anxe]

Yeah - while a lot of people wanted multiplayer in their ES games, most of them wanted something that would allow them to have the full singleplayer experience with a friend or two, not having to deal with a bunch of idiots running around (which was expected years before ESO got announced ;) )

When they were first designing it they talked about some crazy server system that would allow this. It apparently never got implemented though. I agree with exactly what you guys said. Elder Scrolls has always been about MMO depth games for single players. The zoo of other people in the game just killed it. I felt more immersed in WoW when I was trying that out than ESO because there were fewer players.

[veti]

When they were first designing it they talked about some crazy server system that would allow this. It apparently never got implemented though. I agree with exactly what you guys said. Elder Scrolls has always been about MMO depth games for single players. The zoo of other people in the game just killed it. I felt more immersed in WoW when I was trying that out than ESO because there were fewer players.

The "crazy server system" isn't hard to implement - Neverwinter Nights has been doing exactly that, any time these ten years. Why they didn't implement something like that? - I don't know. Maybe they couldn't work out how to turn that into a steady revenue stream, or maybe they just got fixated on the idea of being a WoW-killer.

[RabidKoala]

Yeah I played ESO and I thought it was fun as a mmo but lacked the Elder Scrolls feel to it. I thought the class system would be cool like in Oblivion but it turned out (IMHO) feeling very forced on what you did.

[Triaxx]

I've never really been a fan of MMO's for various reasons, originally connection issues, but mostly because I play games to get away from people, not the other way around.

That said, if I had an Elder Scrolls that allowed Fable style drop-in/drop-out multiplayer, I'd be very happy.

[Calemyr]

I've never really been a fan of MMO's for various reasons, originally connection issues, but mostly because I play games to get away from people, not the other way around.

That said, if I had an Elder Scrolls that allowed Fable style drop-in/drop-out multiplayer, I'd be very happy.

That "Fable-style" multiplayer is, I think, exactly what people have always wanted. The Elder Scroll games have had an odd loneliness to them. Despite being the hero, you're always the outsider, always everything alone, and nobody has anything to say to you besides what they want from you (or to answer questions you might have). Post-apocalyptic wasteland settings make you feel like part of civilization better than TES games (Fallout, for example), for crying out loud.

Skyrim at least added companions, which gives you your own little circle of friends, and possibly even a spouse, and Hearthfires allowed you to get two adopted kids to boot, and let you live on a homestead you built from scratch. Even with all that, however, it would still be nice to go dragon hunting with a friend of mine rather sometimes instead of Serana or Erik the Slayer.

Pity there's no money to be made that way, so they went the way of the dollar bill. And they had a lot of good ideas, too, that they poisoned with a WoW obsession and a stunning inability to respond to things that weren't set up well.

[Squark]

The "crazy server system" isn't hard to implement - Neverwinter Nights has been doing exactly that, any time these ten years. Why they didn't implement something like that? - I don't know. Maybe they couldn't work out how to turn that into a steady revenue stream, or maybe they just got fixated on the idea of being a WoW-killer.

It's the revenue thing. NWN ran through Gamespy Arcade, which means no constant revenue stream.

Regarding a Fable or Borderlands style Multiplayer for Elder Scrolls; I guess the issue is you don't actually make much more money for what would likely be a big investment. ME3 managed to do fairly well with it's multiplayer (At launch War Preparedness issue exempted), but that drew revenue from microtransactions for weapon unlocks (and online passes for used copies of the game), which wouldn't make much sense in an Elder Scrolls game.

[Gracht Grabmaw]

Can elves get dementia?
A subtle thing I noticed when replaying Oblivion was how many altmer and bosmer with one mental illness or another there are. So I started thinking about the mental state of elves in general and I noticed something: Elves don't really age physically, or at least it's very hard to tell how old one really is, they could be under a hundred, or a couple of hundred or close to a thousand years old and you wouldn't know the difference except in the way they act. So if an elf who is otherwise in perfect physically form starts acting their age so to speak, they would definately appear mentally ill to other people.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Can elves get dementia?
A subtle thing I noticed when replaying Oblivion was how many altmer and bosmer with one mental illness or another there are. So I started thinking about the mental state of elves in general and I noticed something: Elves don't really age physically, or at least it's very hard to tell how old one really is, they could be under a hundred, or a couple of hundred or close to a thousand years old and you wouldn't know the difference except in the way they act. So if an elf who is otherwise in perfect physically form starts acting their age so to speak, they would definately appear mentally ill to other people.

While we're on the subject of ESO, there's a side quest in Auridon that touches on Altmer insanity.

[veti]

I've never really been a fan of MMO's for various reasons, originally connection issues, but mostly because I play games to get away from people, not the other way around.

Connection issues are a killer for me. (Literally.) The laws of physics mean that even under ideal circumstances, my ping times to a server in the continental US are never going to be less than 200ms. Anything that requires split-second timing becomes physically impossible.

Can elves get dementia?

The way the Dunmer talk about each other in Morrowind, I think it's pretty clear that age-related dementia is very much a recognised thing with them. Canonical example: Telvanni Councillor Therana, whose "eccentricity" is openly attributed to her age.

Presumably the same applies to other elves, but we haven't had nearly so much exposure to them.

There's also the "Old Orc" random encounter in Skyrim, which suggests that old age is considered borderline shameful in Orcish society. But then, orcs are different from other elven races in many ways - aging may be one of them.

On the other hand, there are also canonically-old elves who are still mentally very sharp. So obviously, as with humans, it's a selective thing, not inevitable for everyone.

[Grinner]

That said, if I had an Elder Scrolls that allowed Fable style drop-in/drop-out multiplayer, I'd be very happy.

That "Fable-style" multiplayer is, I think, exactly what people have always wanted.

Regarding a Fable or Borderlands style Multiplayer for Elder Scrolls; I guess the issue is you don't actually make much more money for what would likely be a big investment.

Call me crazy, but I'm positive there was an Oblivion mod for something like this. It was an OBSE plugin that somehow synced multiple games together via Internet. Never did understand why it never took off.

[Squark]

Call me crazy, but I'm positive there was an Oblivion mod for something like this. It was an OBSE plugin that somehow synced multiple games together via Internet. Never did understand why it never took off.

If this is the one you're talking about, it hasn't taken off because it's still in alpha.

[Grinner]

If this is the one you're talking about, it hasn't taken off because it's still in alpha.

I think I saw it on the Construction Set wiki, but that sounds about right.

I fear it shall never leave alpha state. Still I distinctly remember a group of people saying they got it working.

Edit: That conversation appears to have been deleted, and due to the Construction Set wiki's policies, it was never archived at the Wayback Machine.

[Gracht Grabmaw]

The title to this thread just reminded me of another thing that annoys me about nords (apart from just being a really generic one-trick-pony race in a setting that's otherwise very imaginative)
Milk-drinker sounds like a goofy made-up term but it actually is a real-world insult, only nords don't use it correctly. Milk-drinker doesn't mean sissy or coward or anything like that, it means liar. The Romans took their 'in vino veritas' very seriously, if a man didn't drink wine obviously he had something to hide.