UESP Forums

I'm asking this more with an eye as to how faithful the past games have been to existing lore, so as to project what to expect in this game.

For instance, the idea of Dragon Shouts is an adaptation of the existing lore, which basically gave that power to all nords.

And I'm assuming that these Volkihar vampires will be in the game, but I find it highly unlikely that they will be pulling you down through the ice.

I remember reading a discussion somewhere that the monsters in Cyrodiil didn't really match up with the previously existing lore, and I'm wondering how faithful morrowind was, or if there wasn't that much lore about it developed prior to that game.

Is there even that much to go by about skyrim? I've just read People of the Sky and maybe a couple other books that briefly touched on it. Maybe they have a pretty free hand.

As for the temptation to move this to the general discussion, I'm not really asking about the lore per se, but rather what to expect in this game based on their past performance of either following the lore closely, or using it as a rough guide, or completely disregarding it in some cases.

I think the lore in skyrim is pretty solid. The current story, from what we know of skyrim, does not seem to ruin previous lore of the place and even the hardest pieces of lore to implement can always be referred to by other NPC's.

For example, as you mentioned the Volkihar vampires I will use them. It may be hard to implement a part of skyrim where the actually drag the PC through ice like lore would suggest they get there victims but this can always occur through conversation. Such as an NPC might say;

"'Dorris' was telling me that her husband 'Tom' was visiting the lake last week and never seen from again. The guards found only a hole in the frozen lake... some fear the vampires are back..."

Yeah a rubbish example but you get the point. They could do something like this upon going near a frozen body of water or part of a lake where you're suddenly dragged under! Could be like a random encounter kind of thing.

In the end, any piece of lore like this can be implemented. Considering the amount of actors and speech expected in this, I think there will be a lot of reference to lore and it should be kept truly intact with a lot of the current lore being 'fleshed out'. I pray it keeps to lore. I don't want a lot of contradiction. We can only hope.

Is it possible that the part about the Volikhar dragging you into the water was a piece of imagery?

Metaphors ftw!

I hope they continue creating lore as well as building off the existing

Afterall, were all hoping for an ESVI yes?

Yeah it could just be considered superstition, some of the things already in the lore. If they make any changes they'll probably go with something like that. Like was mentioned in another thread about the vamps, if they start sparkling we'll have an uproar on our hands. Although I'd probably find it better killing off some werewolves. "Take that you shirtless $%^&!"

I think the fact that the Falmer are included shows that they will be sticking pretty close to what has been written in the past.

I would like to see some sort of reference to the Wolf Queen as well. Maybe like a ruin connected to her or something

I don't think anyone is stupid enough to use that seriously anymore.

Chances are there'll be some sort of dig at Twilight somewhere.

*Finds random diary of a random vampire* "Today Toplessian revealed an unusual side effect of his vampirism. It appears his skin twinkles in the sunlight. Myself and the rest of the clan found this entirely humourous. We proceeded to kill him just on the merit of how lame it was."

Beth's lore tends to be shallow so they do not have to worry about the details in the future. Then in each game they wash away all the key points from the last game so they do not have to worry about those details either, that leaves them completely free to make up new stuff as they see fit.

For example, destroying Morrowind means they do not have to worry about Morrowind lore any more.

"Waaahhh, Waaahhhh Greg Keyes Waahhhh, Argonians Waahhhh"

Grow up, Morrowind is still fine, the f*ck should you care about it anymore, the empire is in shambles too, no one is crying over that simply because Oblivion was in Cyrodil, the heart of the Empire. You will never re-visit Morrowind in the next decade, so stop crying because the Man %$#@-blocked your hard-on for a game 10 years old and your fan-boy nostalgia.

I swear to God, you and your kind are the most frustrating and childish minority on this site.

Please, no flaming.

right, because dragging in a novel's summary of the Lore, rather than the actual game is relevant and on-Topic

Yeah, that explains the tons and tons of pages about the lore here.

The dev's have been quite good so far. Besides, they made the lore....

I think its quite the opposite, the is a lot of depth to the lore. The fact is most of the lore comes from books and journals etc. and are deliberately given bias depending on who has written them. This means you sometimes get contradicting accounts of events, but this shouldn't be misconstrued as a lack of depth, this makes it much more like real historical study.

I am being deadly serious here, its not an attempt to wind people up, TES really is quite a shallow lore game and it would not be hard for beth to add the the missing depth, all that have to do is write a series of short stories about in game characters to fill in the gaps but they do not do that. Other lore games DO and it makes a massive difference to the game lore players experience.

I spent years researching lore topics for TES and looking for the details for my mods and finding many details I needed where completely missing.

For example, give me a complete history of Kvatch from the 1st Era to the 4th Era.
You can not, because it does not exist. Your left with vague pointers at best.

You only get the parts that count for the story in that game and very little else.
I researched Kvatch heavily for nearly 5 years because of the BS being spread about kvatch lore by forum lore fans that felt research was an unnecessary act.

Tell me what spells would have been in the school of necromancy, you cannot because vanus never made a school of necromancy and because he never created one, you never heard about those spells. Nor would he have used them anyway, you would have look to Manimarco for those spells and nobody knows what spells he created because that is a great big hole in the lore right there.

In fact tell me what spells vanus did make that would have fitted in to the school of necromancy if only in part ?

The entire Necromancer lore is as holy as the pope. You have perhaps 2 true examples of necromantic spells from Oblivion. Can anybody here tell me what they are ? I'll give you the first one, a resurrection spell, what is the second example of Necromantic magic we see in the game ?

Those are the only 2 real example of necromancy spell lore because the games never needed that lore yet.
You could even call one of them divine magic since one of these spells qualifies as divine, which opens up a great deal of other divine questions that are simply not asked or answered. Leaving giant holes in the game lore for a major oblivion story line because it was not nessessary for the game.

Before answering think about the difference between Mannimarcos views and Vanuses views, Mannimarcos principles where very different from Vanus and he pre-dated the schools of magic Vanus created anyway and had no interest in teaching magic to the unwashed masses unlike Vanus.

Question, was mannimarco a man or a god or both according to OBLIVION (< notice the game I name here) lore, and once you know the answer and why its true, ask your self, where is the rest of the lore for it. It should be there, it should be deep, it should be common knowledge, Mannimarco did not exactly hide his power even if beth hid the answer to that question in Oblivion.

What about Emperor zero, what do you actually know about the first emperor other than he had Tiber Septim as a general and came from colovia.

There are thousands of such examples of missing lore details that proof TES is not a deep lore game. They are missing because they where not needed for a game so Beth did not bother creating that lore. Nor did they include stories on their blog or website to fill in those gaps outside of the game as other game developers have done for Warhammer and Battletech and many others.

I compare all lore from games to the Warhammer 40k universe lore because it is the best example of a lore game I have found.

It does a good job on game lore and it is rich, deep, they even go as far as to include background stories with their games to get you in the mood and set the scene. Lots and lots of mini stories that tells me what an Ork thinks when he sees fugas or hears a MadBoy singing in the middle of a battle field. I can tell you exactly what a mad boy would do if he was out smarted by the enemy. Usually these stories are short stories mentioned in the manual, reading them puts you in touch with the side your playing.

Did you know Orks cannot be beaten in 40k, they can lose but you cannot beat them, I know why because the lore told me why.
You get in to the heads of the characters no matter how unimportant they may be.

I had a spacemarine, elder and ork army for years, I knew exactly what each race felt and considered important, I knew about those special units such as harlequins and how they appeared to others and what they considered dance or battle, or that there was little difference to them between either. I know the details of the shows they put on and the names of the shows that cannot be performed without 1 very special character who does not travel with their troop because I read it in a short story.

I can tell you how ork credit works too and why dentists and bankers in Ork Society are one and same thing.

In TES, you barely know the stars of the show or their history, its all vague and sketchy, Morrowind was perhaps a good example of a game with deep lore, but most of you have already said, Oblivion just does not deliver that same level of detail and major pieces of the lore it does provide comes from morrowind anyway.

If I search this forum, I could probably quote most of your comments on that point, I would bet most of you have commented on that at some point on this site.

Beth could easily make the game lore rich and detailed by producing short stories about characters in their games, filling in the blanks that way, just as Games Workshop did. But they do not, its not that important to them to fill in those gaps and if they did, it would restrict what they could do in the next game.

If you look at TES lore in isolation then its the best lore you know because its the only lore you know and you have nothing to compare it too, but when you broaden your horizons and seek what other games do with lore, you will be left with the sad conclusion that TES lore is actually very shallow.

The sad fact is, the more TES lore you know, the more holes you see and the holes left behind are pretty big ones that other lore games would have filled with rich detailed stories.

Hopefully now Beth have a Blog they will use it to fill those gaps, but right now, I am not holding my breath.

PS If you do like TES Lore and hate the gaps as much as I do, how about we do something about it and try and get Beth to write those short stories and fill in those gaps because as a lore mod maker, i have always hated those gaps.

Incomplete does not mean shallow. You can spend a lot of time reading about the gods for instance.

Yes true, but try doing something with that lore and suddenly you find out its true worth when vital questions go unanswered.

For example I had to use a system of magic designed to support Vanus to create necromancer spells from scratch in my mods because there was no lore covering it at all. But the game did have necromancers in it, quite a lot of them in fact. Questions like what sort of spells they would use, what sort of objectives they had when attacked and even the basic what was their principles where all questions left totally unanswered.

So I had to answer those questions my self in my mods.

Remember the black arts retrial document, that IS THE ONLY source of lore about how the mages guild implemented its ban on necromancy. Everything flows from that one document and it barely scratches the surface. It is a tiniest of hints as to the ruthlessness of the mages guild under traven, the fact that he managed to [&@%!] off a lot of necromancers so they turned on the mages guild is perhaps the only other clue that it was not a simple friendly "your banned get out" affair.

So many stories of so many individuals that once hung out in the guild halls and nobody even remembers any of their names except for Falcar who is a plot character.

Well, remember that it's a game. The developers focus more on gameplay than the lore.

Exactly my point.

Morrowind I believe has been washed away in recent books because future game lore is going to be more akin to oblivion rather than Morrowind. From now on I expect Oblivion style lore to be the norm, but I am secretly hoping for at least shivering Isles depth in the lore since that was light years better that Oblivions in every way and still let Beth do as they please in future games.

After all the isle changed a lot over time and the lore for it accepted that, not a problem for future games.

I am actually glad to see them wave good by to the fighters guild, that was based on a single book and was too shallow.
I am hoping the Companions will have a lot more lore surrounding them than the Fighters Guild did. Being in Skyrim, it should be a good topic for Beth.

I think this is actually very true, I totally understand what your saying about there being gaps where you want there to be fuller info, but explicitly being told everything and every detail actually makes the lore less interesting and engaging. You have to read in what you think, and read between the lines just like when you take a lot of real world history back to its source.

I like the Lore, its cool to find stories and reasons for the story in each game, I like getting to know the universe Movies/Novels/Games expand on.

What you posted however is troubling, please go outside for once, that was too much information for a game that no one needs to know, it was if you studied it, regardless if you want to bash the Lore on the series why did you bother to make an account?

Just to show your fanboy hard-on for Warhammer, please just go play Space Marine or something instead of trolling on this site.

No one was trolling...
Relax, it's just an opinion.

that wasn't my point, Mars even you dont know that much about TES than he clearly does on Warhammer, that much knowledge is unnecessarily vast.