The Elder Scrolls

[Fathomless Eminence]

I don't know how they went from the Oblivion Thieves Guild to the Skyrim one but holy shit it was so bad. How do you downgrade from stealing a fucking Elder Scroll and breaking into the Imperial Palace to dungeon crawling so you can return the Skeleton Key? Nevermind the "selling your soul to Nocturnal" bit. What is with the Skyrim guilds and forcing you to sell your soul to a Daedric Prince?

The only one who doesn't is the CoW and they have the most nauseating, nonsensical plot of all time. I hadn't played it in years, but just finished it tonight and forgot how bad it was. Bad doesn't even begin to describe it, it's pure shit. Half the time it isn't even driven by the college, it's the fucking psyjic monk who only you see until the very end except for one bizarre interlude with Ancano and Savos.

The monk (literally just finished, already forgot his name, that is how forgettable this dude is) just appears, says ominous shit about how you're all supermega fucked if you don't make the right decision, but you don't have the option to make a choice at all. You pick between two dialogue options which can be boiled down to "yeah ok" and "tell me more about that" throughout the entire questline.

You obey his telepathic directives like a tame dog. He shows up in person one time, entirely because the writers needed to force you to interact with Ancano in some way and make you negatively disposed to him. I guess the Eye of Magnus blocks telepathic communication but not direct teleporting because after the final battle he shows up and says "Wow dude, you really are the tits, I as an individual unaffiliated with this institution have decided that you should be the Archmage but also that you cannot be trusted with this artifact." and Tolfdir says "Whoah, this dude I've never met is right, here's a robe and an expensive suite!" and then the monk steals your still unexplained magic ball and fucks off to another dimension.

The only time you are given an option to say "why should I listen to you" he dismisses it as "Oh man, that Ancano guy has been getting to you, huh?" No nigger, I don't trust strange wizards who appear out of thin air to give instructions without explaining their motivations. The guy was a High Elf too, crossed my mind right away that it could have been a Thalmor psyop, but I guess that never occurred to the apes at the typewriter. Why does Tolfdir alone have the authority to name you archmage? Why not have a quick follow up quest where a conclave of mages decides you are indeed worthy? Why does Tolfdir trust this random elf who has made off with the artifact he was dedicated to studying up to this point? Why was Magnus even invoked? At the beginning of the quest the apprentices just call it that because they think it's badass, then the Augur refers to it as the Eye of Magnus and when you report that to Mirabelle she says "Why are you making shit up like that, that's super immature" and you say "Well actually the Augur came up with it." No, the apprentices did and they just happened to be correct as apparently it shares some connection to the pre-existing Staff of Magnus. What a coincidence.

Why was Enthir allowed to give a mind altering staff to a vampire without consequence? What school of magic was best girl studying that transforms you into various animals. Was that supposed to be funny? J'zargo and book orc have the only good sidequests and that is only by comparison. The book orc quests aren't even real quests, just "Yo lemme know if you ever find this lost tome" kind of shit. Found Shalidor's Insights in a random ass bandit camp. Why would they even have that? Why can everyone in this fantasy setting read anyway? You pull on one thread with these fucking bethesda games and the entire tapestry unravels. I still trapped Ancano in a black soul gem and left him in a drawer in Breezehome but it was entirely out of tradition at this point. My heart wasn't in it.

 

[JJLiautaud]

The eye of magnus is such a missed storyline because some explaination of the "provocations and blasphemies" that caused the night of tears wouldve been a really neat bit of story telling and lore.

 

[Strangolapreti]

So far i think Oblivion was a huge downgrade compared to Morrowind. The settlements and cities feel dead and empty,

Oblivion being a downgrade to Morowind is a common complain and I would probably agree with it, had I actually played Morowind, I know cities were shrunken due to the new (and infamous) AI and improved graphics, the lack of teleporting and addition of fast travel too ensures that many quests requires you to either walk or abuse the new feature, which lowkey sucks, its the beginning if the normiefication of elder scrolls games, so rest assured that its successor is even worse.

and i don't see much liberty in character building as many cool things are absent from this game

Making a build is actually not that bad, but the leveling system is infamously atrocious for a reason: you want to max resistance immediately otherwise you'll be fucked over due to the shit way how hp increases. This is also the game that introduced leveled items, which means some of the best weapons (like my beloved chillrend) are locked behind grinding, this includes dark brotherhood and arena items, so you already know we onw a thank emil pagliaculo the retard for their introduction.

The difficulty/level scaling is atrocious too. Crank the difficulty too high, everything is a HP sponge, crank it a little less, everything is too easy

The strenght of this game is enchanting, (either pre-made items or sigil stones) and spellcrating: if you obtain 100% chameleon, you automatically win the game, if you get 100% damage reflect and slap on top of it a mundane ring, you become untouchable to anything but archers.
Without those, you can craft spells/gear to fortify your mana, willpower and intelligence in order to charge yourself and then unleash stupid strong spells.
With stealth builds you can use a bow and poison, enchanted arrows are a pain to find but extremely worthy too.
And for melee builds, you can get up to 85% damage resistance, sigil stones that grants you shield do help with that.

I don't know how they went from the Oblivion Thieves Guild to the Skyrim one but holy shit it was so bad. How do you downgrade from stealing a fucking Elder Scroll and breaking into the Imperial Palace to dungeon crawling so you can return the Skeleton Key? Nevermind the "selling your soul to Nocturnal" bit. What is with the Skyrim guilds and forcing you to sell your soul to a Daedric Prince?

You wanna lament the thieves guild in skyrim? That wasn't even the worse one:
The mages guild is all about everyone being a retard, including you, who get elected archmage after attending a single lesson.
The companions forces you to become a werewolf or the questline ends (you missed NOTHING, the remaining quests are dungeon crawls with generic bandits armed with silver swords, an hagraven den and more draugrs).
The dark brotherhood quest is overrated, you do a bunch if shit quests for a literal sandnigger, fuck a corpse, get chosen as listener, do a pair of quests that are almost at Oblivion level and fuck a corpse a second time, its reffered as the best questline by a big margin, you can also just destroy the brotherhood, since you can kill their leader at the very start but even then its pretty dogshit.
All guilds follow the same identical beat:
- The guild has become corrupt due to its leaders, is way past its prime and lost its luster
- You, the GIGACHAD DRAGONBORN inspire the ancient leader behind THE VIRGIN EXECUTIVES with your AURA and ability to do 2 piss easy quests NOBODY COULD DO BEFORE so you now get to work for them instead like their fucking lapdog, and the SOULESS CORRUPT EXECUTIVES can do nothing but cope and seethe.
- Something happens that causes the evil executive to die, either by your hand or an accident (lol)
- You do one final quest and replace him as the true supreme leader.

 

[souschef]

The strenght of this game is enchanting, (either pre-made items or sigil stones) and spellcrating: if you obtain 100% chameleon, you automatically win the game, if you get 100% damage reflect and slap on top of it a mundane ring, you become untouchable to anything but archers.
Without those, you can craft spells/gear to fortify your mana, willpower and intelligence in order to charge yourself and then unleash stupid strong spells.
With stealth builds you can use a bow and poison, enchanted arrows are a pain to find but extremely worthy too.
And for melee builds, you can get up to 85% damage resistance, sigil stones that grants you shield do help with that.

Huh. On Morrowind you can do that and with greater variety since we have more armor slots, including pauldrons

One thing i liked in Morrowind was to stack enchanted items until i reached 100% sanctuary, making me untouchable to every melee attack with the exception of uber strong enemies like Almalexia and her guards, Dagoth Ur etc... In Oblivion right of the gate i noticed that spells won't fizzle, they always cast successfully... Which is pretty OP since i can reliably cast things like Command at level 5 or so, pretty ridiculous

But i think the greatest offender in Oblivion is how fucking clunky the interface is! Click click click, in Morrowind i got all i need in a single screen upon bringing my inventory, i could freely rearrange the panels as well

At least there's poisoning from alchemy, which was the playstyle i choose to go with

 

[TrainWreckWatcher]

I recently reinstalled Skyrim and have been playing around in it... Honestly it just makes me want to uninstall it and play Oblivion, or even Morrowind.

I tried skyrim and ran towards an enemy wanting to swing while running at them and was stunned to learn you can't do that. Something that feels like it should be so common sense, but nope you can't.

Do you consider skyrim to be an upgrade to Oblivion on Morowind on any level that isn't visual?

I know its not addressed to me, but I would say no. Lock picking maybe? But oblivion lock picking was never that bad.
The UI of oblivion had more soul than skyrim and even oblivion's UI I think lacked the versatility of morrowind, but it was visually nicer.

I don't even consider the models in skyrim better. Vanilla everyone looked like a blind wood carver made their faces. The evironments kind of all felt samey. Forest with stream / river and grey caves that are a tomb or bears / spiders. Mostly with running water in them too.

It was all some variation of snowy forest.

Story wise ehhh. Maybe the "living world" of npcs was slightly better than oblivion which was still janky.
Scaling was better thats about the one thing it had over oblivion.
But classes - especially magic were far worse. And leveling outside of the skill tree felt just retarded.

 

[souschef]

Also commerce in Oblivion pissed me off so much

I can't buy AND sell stuff at the same time, so i came across an issue: i wanted to buy a retort for 2000 coins, but i had 1900 and the vendor didn't have any more money. So what i had to do is hit another vendor to get the 100 remaining gold since i couldn't sell stuff to the first vendor

Also everyone magically knows when an item is stolen, in Morrowind a vendor would recognize something stolen from him, not something stolen from some random house on the other side of the province

 

[Sunflower Samurai]

I tried skyrim and ran towards an enemy wanting to swing while running at them and was stunned to learn you can't do that. Something that feels like it should be so common sense, but nope you can't

Beth, in their infinite wisdom, locks that behind the 50 level skill in either of the two melee trees

Anyways, modded Skyrim was an errant curiosity of mine since my first exposure to TES was PS3 Oblivion in 2008, I got Fallout 3 during that same time and enjoyed it enough to get NV and Skyrim as gifts later on from a relative that also enjoyed them. But point is, I finally bit the bullet in like 2020 to get Skyrim on PC and modding it was a journey. Ultimately pointless, but there are nuggets of gold hidden among the muck, like 2 or 4 and they're mostly retarded VICN mods and retarded animation ports that I probably enjoyed more than I should, but still. Legacy of the Dragonborn felt really overrated, I enjoyed the premise and most of what is added is pretty sweet, its a fairly comprehensive artifact compilation and the museum is nice enough, the airship is fucking pointless though. But everyone was treating it like a mainstay, life changing experience and it was just random artifacts scattered throughout. They don't look half bad, so it was not really jarring.
I got interested a lot by the animation mods, seemingly, most of them are just chinks porting random shit or making souls slop but the few who make good animations for idles or even the first person actually improve my personal nags with the game. Shame a good chunk of them are porn. Armor mods are varied enough that there is actually sizeable collections that aren't porny in the slightest, so that was nice.

Spoiler: Long, spergy rant on a SEAnig's companion mods

But the focus of my autism were these two retarded companion mods made by a random SEAnigger, Serana Dialogue Overhaul (SDA) and Ashe Crystal Heart. On the surface, SDA is honestly really fucking bad, Laura Bailey's passable VA was replaced by this woman that can barely voice act and she gets a major "waifu shift" to her banter and personality, you can taste the animu the author pirated for days at the time everytime she smugly points something out or talks about being a nerd about books. This fucking thing had fluff pieces talking about how good it was. RPGHQ (i believe, a chuddy mod site) also claims that the SEAnig author waifus and white knights that VA, hard, but I haven't seen anything like that myself.
But that was just Serana, a character I didn't actually particularly care for or find interesting vanilla beyond her having the better companion loadout and a personality deeper than a churro. The other mod tickled my tism in weird ways, surprisingly not as negative as SDA, but Ashe was mostly built out of ripping off Nier, a series I hold an autistic fondness towards, to the point where the author rips out models (probably) and OST straight from Automata. The VA throughout is passable, he actually got some C-list anime and game VAs for the two main characters. Although I wonder how in the hell did he convince this one woman who was in Cyberpunk, Anna Rust, (iirc the male VA was Sean Chiplock) I do wonder how, because while that makes Ashe an actually competently VA-ed companion, it still has the same issues of her having generic animu backstories (spoilers, she is a robot just like Nier Automato!!!!11) and aspects of the personality like liking books like a fucking nerd. She carries the entire companion on her fucking shoulders. She gave way too much effort towards the material she was given. A bog standard revenge story built upon an even more clichéd romance that outright has planned harem options for her and Serana, and let's you skip the actual retarded relationship points to just make her want to insta fuck you (which she can, because of course this mod and the Serana one have official Sexmod integrations for different fucking frameworks, pun intended)
I did a single playthrough with Serana and just to see what the whole shebang was, Ashe's VA was the only thing that stuck with me but it wasn't egregiously boring, I might look into what the SEANig keeps making for it but that's a pretty loaded "might". Skyrim is a really shit game unless you want to just use it as a dressup sim

Now that I got that out of my system, what are the standout quest mods for it? I know that this one mystery questline mod got a game (the forgotten city or some shit) but my experience is just Vigilant, are the other VICN mods good? I'm actually curious on if there is actually something else that was at best decent or if i should just replay Oblivion or Morrowind again (Tamriel Rebuilt is pretty great)

 

[Strangolapreti]

In Oblivion right of the gate i noticed that spells won't fizzle, they always cast successfully...

The efficacy of a spell is hindered by your gear, wearing heavy or medium armor vs clothing will results in worse spells. You also won't be able to cast spells if you don't have the required level of skills, plus leveling up spells is annoying (but doable by just putting a weight on your keyboard and go AFK for an hour or so, I would reccomend to look first at a leveling guide otherwise you may fuck yourself over.

Huh. On Morrowind you can do that and with greater variety since we have more armor slots, including pauldrons

You can get near complete invincibility with 6 items or less:
- Mundane ring (50% magic resistance) can be randomly found or drops from an npc during "the path of dawn quest" at high level
- Being a breton (50% magic resistance) or 2 transcendent sigil stones with mana resistance
- ring of the iron fist (33% damage reflect), random loot
- necklace of axes/amulet of swords (33% damage reflect), random loot
- escutheon of Chorrol (35% damage reflect if at high level), leveled reward for "sins of the father" quest
With this build, spells don't hurt you, melee attacks don't hurt you and you don't even need armors, the only thing that can hurt you is arrows.

Also commerce in Oblivion pissed me off so much

Yeah, its pretty ass to say the least and an absolute pain to level up.

 

[Mr. Racewar1488]

Although I wonder how in the hell did he convince this one woman who was in Cyberpunk, Anna Rust, (iirc the male VA was Sean Chiplock)

She's a Z-list actress that lives in LA while overall productions in Hollywood are down almost 40%. Every spring in Hollywood is called "Pilot Season" because studios are filming pilots for TV shows. Normally there's 150 to 200 being filmed. During the height of streaming there were over 300 being filmed. Last year there were three pilots being filmed. Pilots are how actors like her get paid and become famous if they're lucky but if there's only a couple being filmed she's fucked. With her experience she's probably charging $10/line of dialogue and with how mush dialogue there is she's making bank by recording dialogue in the closet of her LA apartment.

Now that I got that out of my system, what are the standout quest mods for it?

Midwood Isle feels like a vanilla DLC, not amazing but decent. Beyond Reach is dark and depressing but some voice actors sound like they used their XBox 360 headset to record their dialogue. If you want a decent follower mod I'd suggest Xelzaz. The mod author is a Morroboomer and does his best to make Xelzaz lore accurate.

 

[Prophetic Spirit]

I remember having Extended Cut of Saint's and Seducers was a good choice.

 

[Fathomless Eminence]

After reflecting on my half baked, late night autism I have come to the conclusion that voice acting in RPGs is a mistake. I think that having every NPC voiced severely limits what a writing team can do.

There was a kernel of a good story in the College of Winterhold. These mages isolated in a frigid hellhole at the edge of civilization, mistrusted by their own Jarl who harbors common Nord superstitions about magic and has personal grievances with how diminished in power he is after the great collapse, a mysterious event in and of itself. A mages guild that doesn't hold common taboos about magic, notably permitting Necromancy, the only solid rule being "don't fuck up other student's shit." There was a line Savos had that was something like "Please don't tell me another apprentice got incinerated, I really don't need that on my plate right now." Combined with Tolfdir's obsession with safety, it paints a vivid picture about the kinds of chaotic shit that happens there on a day to day basis, some of which you experience for yourself when you blow yourself up testing J'zargo's scrolls. You're also told how this place dates back to the first fucking era, like a thousand years before the Imperial Mage's Guild, which has disbanded by the time of Skyrim and morphed into a bootlicking faction of political wannabes. Yet the Nords, who love their legends and traditions are still kicking it old school.

Imagine if this was Morrowind with a sidebar of 40 dialogue options, each giving you a paragraph to read. As a writing team, you could collaborate and explore these ideas freely over the development cycle, throw in as many sidequests as you want and if something doesn't work, just take it the fuck out. I brought up how I fucking hated that you cannot shit test the Psyjic Monk to satisfaction. All you'd have to do is throw in a few more options to account for the different perspectives. You cannot do that when every line has to be voiced. You have to pay those three fucking guys that voice every NPC and you have to account for file bloat. 30000 words in a text document is still in the KB range. With audio, you're stacking up gigs eventually and you're gonna be feeling those deadlines if you have to keep getting niggas in the booth to fix your latest edit.

We need to retvrn to the era where all you hear is the janitor on his coffee break saying "sup nigga" before you are reading. I do not need the voice and likeness of Keanu Reeves in my fucking vidya. That shit never stacks up against the imagination of an individual. It's a waste of money and actively prevents creativity. Owlcat games knows the score. Those Pathfinder games and Rogue Trader kicked ass.

 

[LovisXVI]

After reflecting on my half baked, late night autism I have come to the conclusion that voice acting in RPGs is a mistake. I think that having every NPC voiced severely limits what a writing team can do.

True, Morrowind is the best one, in part because it can have long winded dialogues that require no VO. A side benefit is that because it isn't VO, you can read the dialogue at your own pace, so you can in fact go longer without fear of the player losing track.

 

[JJLiautaud]

I have come to the conclusion that voice acting in RPGs is a mistake. I think that having every NPC voiced severely limits what a writing team can do.

Unfathomably based and correct. I genuinely think that until we have really good ai voice overs a full text game allows more than a fully voiced one.

 

[God of Nothing]

Nevermind the "selling your soul to Nocturnal" bit. What is with the Skyrim guilds and forcing you to sell your soul to a Daedric Prince?

there are many reasons to complain about the questlines
but please don't act like selling your soul to a daedric prince isn't just another tuesday in these games

we all did that for azura's star in each game

 

[Strangolapreti]

there are many reasons to complain about the questlines
but please don't act like selling your soul to a daedric prince isn't just another tuesday in these games

Vecause it isn't, can't really remember submitting my soul to Sheoghorat after killing a Netch with a fork for him.

we all did that for azura's star in each game

No you don't, you just kill some vampires in Oblivion.
Daedric quests in that game are just that:
You make an offer, the prince asks you a favour, you fulfill it and get a reward.
Sometimes you do some questionable shit that may influence but it never explicitally tells you that you have to pledge your immortal soul to the daedric prince nor guard a shitass sanctuary for all eternity once you die.
The elf also describes doing it as ab absolute necessary thing in order to stop Mercer, and yet during the fight agaisnt him he will still be able to use a command spell to put one of the nightingales against you and turn the fight into a 2 vs 2 so its absolute fucking bullshit.

 

[God of Nothing]

Vecause it isn't, can't really remember submitting my soul to Sheoghorat after killing a Netch with a fork for him.

No you don't, you just kill some vampires in Oblivion.
Daedric quests in that game are just that:
You make an offer, the prince asks you a favour, you fulfill it and get a reward.
Sometimes you do some questionable shit that may influence but it never explicitally tells you that you have to pledge your immortal soul to the daedric prince nor guard a shitass sanctuary for all eternity once you die.
The elf also describes doing it as ab absolute necessary thing in order to stop Mercer, and yet during the fight agaisnt him he will still be able to use a command spell to put one of the nightingales against you and turn the fight into a 2 vs 2 so its absolute fucking bullshit.

do you seriously think you can just walk away after a daedric lord makes you their champion?
and you totally did submit to sheogorath through going through that insane ordeal
only a madman kills a netch with a fork
that's how crazy you are

you think serving devils doesn't mean anything
insaneoid

 

[Strangolapreti]

do you seriously think you can just walk away after a daedric lord makes you their champion?

Yes

and you totally did submit to sheogorath through going through that insane ordeal
only a madman kills a netch with a fork
that's how crazy you are

Doing that tasks doesn't means submitting, it means you were already insane to begin with.

you think serving devils doesn't mean anything
insaneoid

If I play a shitmer, I can do quests for all other princes with no problem since, as a shitmer, my soul will inevitably go to the poop realm of the turd god Malacath, unless soultrapped.

 

[StacticShock]

<autistic screeching at voice acting>

that's where the clankers come in, all of the extra dialogue shit will be cool once they refine the AI voice acting with proper TTS techniques, obviously jeetthesda isn't doing that because it would be too expensive, saar.
but they sure as shit will do like the other AAA studios and copy whoever indie dev does that.
if that means getting rid of the shitty cult of personality the western VA industry has been hopelessly trying to make it work, all the better, fuck these niggers and not in a sexual way.

 

[TrainWreckWatcher]

Imagine if this was Morrowind with a sidebar of 40 dialogue options, each giving you a paragraph to read. As a writing team, you could collaborate and explore these ideas freely over the development cycle, throw in as many sidequests as you want and if something doesn't work, just take it the fuck out. I brought up how I fucking hated that you cannot shit test the Psyjic Monk to satisfaction. All you'd have to do is throw in a few more options to account for the different perspectives. You cannot do that when every line has to be voiced.

Unironically AI solves this.
A dev I follow has talked about using LLMs with game lore context only for its knowledge base using the NPC's, castes and locations for their knowledge. So think old PC games where you typed into the game and it searched for word context clues in what you typed and if it was a key flag it would respond in certain ways. Except the AI can respond to anything you say and with the trained list respond appropriately. If you start gibbering on about iphones or celebrities or other things it'll just think you're crazy and ignore you / call the guards.

That along with AI voices - when it gets good enough to invoke emotion properly. We're a long way off though from what the guy said. You need to either pay for an online server, or do a local LLM that ups the system requirements to use.

From how they put it, we're really on the verge of some really cool shit. Although I Think the RAM and GPU price spikes are going to kind of ruin it.

 

[Sprocket]

Played some Elder Scrolls Online again and picked up a very short quest. Go to an NPC's lesbian wife. That was it. The whole quest.