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Most of the dialogue indicates that the Empire is in some kind of boom phase where it's flourishing like never before, but a quick walk around the world almost gives the impression of the Empire being in total collapse and disarray.
I don't recall too much of the dialogue from the citizens regarding a boom (I'll take your word for it, it's been a long time for me.) however, the feeling of an empire in stark decline is exactly the vibe I took from Oblivion as well. (Something like the point in history where the capital of Rome was moved to Ravenna) Roads are unsafe, ruins everywhere, scant patrols even near the capital and the consistent pessimism from nearly every legionary you come across talking about the Emperor's murder and whatnot. Then there's the sack of Kvatch too.
I always took the forts to be remnants of the human rebellion against the Aylieds, just as old as the Aylied ruins or else built in some other much earlier time from the point the game takes place. The frontier had been pushed so far since then, you'd expect them all to be abandoned since the Imperial heartland was long ago secured. The only "forts" thought necessary would be the Castles in the various cities projecting their zones of control.
There's been a very clear change in how the game's perceived over time on this site - older threads from around 2003 show people complaining that Morrowind is barebones, heavily dumbed down, and possesses an empty and unreactive world.
I largely agree with the older assessments; and ultimately I think Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim all have far more common with each other than they do with Daggerfall. I like all three of them but I really don't buy that Morrowind is some kind of high benchmark for RPG complexity while the other two are just retarded action games.
Daggerfall vs Morrowind is mostly the matter of perspective. But the same, in a way, holds true for Morrowind vs Oblivion (or Skyrim). Like you yourself have said, a lot of it comes down to design philosophy when discussing Daggerfall and Morrowind. This means comparisons between Daggerfall and Morrowind are going to be on a somewhat different level than those between Morrowind and Oblivion or Skyrim.
Additionally, the most important differences between all these come down to writing and art direction. Daggerfall and Morrowind are built differently. Oblivion and Skyrim are the same (or, like you said; "they have far more in common with each other"), but they suffer in writing quality across the board (in my opinion). And that is what distinguished Morrowind out of all games. That and how distinct the world of Morrowind is (which is a bit of tie-in with the writing).
I disagree. Skyrim at least pulls off the viking vibe, if nothing else. Oblivion, by contrast, is... nothing. It's utterly forgetable as a setting when compared to any other Bethesda game.
Yes, but mainly because of how Bethesda executed it. Oblivion still had some of that Morrowind exoticism that made it stand out. Skyrim on the other hand took what should have been the most brutal and exotic province of them all and sanded off all the edges to a point where the viking setting is less viking than the prior morrowind expansion that only had them as a side attraction.
I don't recall too much of the dialogue from the citizens regarding a boom (I'll take your word for it, it's been a long time for me.) however, the feeling of an empire in stark decline is exactly the vibe I took from Oblivion as well. (Something like the point in history where the capital of Rome was moved to Ravenna) Roads are unsafe, ruins everywhere, scant patrols even near the capital and the consistent pessimism from nearly every legionary you come across talking about the Emperor's murder and whatnot. Then there's the sack of Kvatch too.
Interesting - maybe "boom" was the wrong word but I didn't get the impression from the quests and story that the Empire was meant to have collapsed, or be on the brink of collapsing. The assassination of Patrick Stewart might cast a shadow over the Empire, but the amount of disarray the world is in would suggest it had experienced some kind of decades-long decline, which doesn't track with what we're shown in Daggerfall and Morrowind.
You get things like certain NPCs going on holiday to other towns, mentions of traders coming and going, people living peacefully and happily in the countryside (next to bandit camps), and so on - implying that travel is considered perfectly safe, and only the player character seems to have the astonishingly bad luck of being mugged twelve times a day. If the intent was to show an unsafe country, surely there'd have been lines about how the roads aren't safe, about how people are scared to leave the safety of the city walls, about how the Legion don't seem able to exert their authority, etc.
It's enhanced by the story not really seeming to be skeptical of the Empire. Daggerfall and Morrowind both portray the Empire in a fairly ambivalent, arguably mostly negative light, and Redguard outright portrays them as fascists. Oblivion meanwhile seems to just take it as a given that the Empire is a force for good, and that the player will want to assist Sean Bean in securing Imperial might (Knights of the Nine gives a similarly ultra-whitewashed view of the Empire). If the intent was to show an Empire that had collapsed, surely the plot would have more people discussing the Empire's failings, hypothesising causes for the collapse, some people celebrating its downfall, and so on.
There's also issues with the placement of various things - the Ayleid ruins and destroyed forts right next to the Imperial City, for example. I can handle a lot of abstraction in Bethesda gameworlds - the maps of Skyrim and Fallout 3 just about make sense to me, despite having a lot of issues with distances between locations - but I'm not really sure what that abstraction is meant to suggest in Oblivion. You could be right in that the idea is that the forts are abandoned since they're no longer necessary, but then we see that they're all on main roads and have been completely taken over by bandits, necromancers, goblins and marauders, which would surely suggest a world in which the Empire has so little control of its own heartland that it's practically nonexistent.
I agree that the game does actually do a very effective job of giving the impression of a lawless world where the Imperial authority has waned and the country is in a devastated state, but I suppose the problem was that I didn't assume that was intentional on the part of the devs!
If the sieges of the Aylied settlements were protracted events that took months or years, you might expect the humans to build their own forts a stone's throw from the Aylied ones. The Crusaders did this at Antioch, fortifying a hill right next to one of the main gates right outside of the city. This is probably giving Bethesda too much credit though.
Would have been cool if the devs made it so that many of the "bandits" you came across in the ruins were actually just freebooters from rival counties stationed wherever in order to extract the wealth out of the given area and into another, akin to robber barons. That would explain their overwhelming presence if the counts themselves were under some sort of corrupt accord with the Imperial administration so that officials would just look the other way, so long as the counts kept providing the legions with manpower and provided they didn't get too brazen about it.
The assassination of Patrick Stewart might cast a shadow over the Empire, but the amount of disarray the world is in would suggest it had experienced some kind of decades-long decline, which doesn't track with what we're shown in Daggerfall and Morrowind.
I wouldn't put much stock in anything that happens past Morrowind, because it is obvious at that point the writers were more focused on making up cool scenarios (such as kicking Oblivion off with the assassination of the emperor), rather than keeping the universe cohesive.
Mannimarco comes to mind - technically he exists both in Daggerfall and Oblivion, but it is clear that people who worked on Oblivion didn't really know what they were doing when they put him in Oblivion the way they did. As a result there is a huge disconnect here, because it is all very superficial. It's a lot like "Hey, let's take this cool/famous name from history and put him into our game!" without much thought behind it.
That said, Empire in Skyrim at least seems to visibly suffer from both external and internal problems (thanks to two factions fighting each other and the gossip system used by NPCs, which is one of the reasons why I recommend to never finish the war). Something that Oblivion (with the Empire being in the middle of the supposed crisis) doesn't really show too well.
Even the supposed final battle to close off the gates is laughable in terms of size. If you don't have technical means to pull it off, then at least come up with excuses why the player should do something on his own that will contribute greatly to the final victory. That way you at the very least maintain the illusion, instead of shattering it right in front of the player.
I forgot how bad it was and actually howled when I saw it on this playthrough. Literally about six guys standing in front of the gate, going "OUURGH" as level-scaled Scamps come up and hit them. Even funnier when you know that they were deliberately trying to capitalise on LOTR, and this was Gamebryo's best possible attempt at a movie-style "epic" battle scene.
The best way to play Oblivion would probably be to just deliberately not go to Weynon Priory and thus never start the Oblivion crisis - I do the same thing in Skyrim, never giving the Bleak Falls Barrow stone to the mage guy so as to avoid the dragons spawning. I guess then you'd miss out on enchanting due to the insane decision to have enchanting done via sigil stones, but it's a small price to pay.
Kvatch gets a little better if you delay the main quest instead of going there immediately as the main quest suggests. The hordes are more threatening if they aren't lvl 5 stunted scamps. (the city guards will all probably die, if they do some legion guards appear as reinforcement)
Oblivion meanwhile seems to just take it as a given that the Empire is a force for good, and that the player will want to assist Sean Bean in securing Imperial might (Knights of the Nine gives a similarly ultra-whitewashed view of the Empire).
Lord of the Rings is the mother of all fantasy, it became generic fantasy because fantasy fiction since then has been ripping off it. Not a fair comparison.
Lord of the Rings only became popular in the United States following the release of paperback versions in 1965, and it wasn't until 1977 that the first fantasy novels appeared that were derivatives of Tolkien's epic fantasy. Although Tolkienesque derivatives snowballed in the 1980s, so that by the early 1990s there wasn't much else left in new fantasy literature, to state that LotR is the "mother of all fantasy" is to ignore a century of fantasy literature from its beginnings before World War I into the 1980s:
H. Rider Haggard- King Solomon’s Mines, She
William Morris- The Well at the World’s End
W.H. Hodgson- The House on the Borderland, The Night Land
Lord Dunsany- Various stories
Abraham Merritt- The Moon Pool, The Ship of Ishtar, Dwellers in the Mirage, Creep Shadow Creep
Eric Rücker Eddison- The Worm Ouroboros
H.P. Lovecraft- Various stories (though primarily horror, secondarily SF)
Robert E. Howard- Conan the Cimmerian stories, Solomon Kane stories
Clark Ashton Smith- Various stories
J.R.R. Tolkien- The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings trilogy
Fritz Leiber- Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories
Mervyn Peake- Titus Groan, Gormenghast
Jack Vance- The Dying Earth stories and novels, Lyonesse trilogy
Poul Anderson- Three Hearts and Three Lions, The Broken Sword
Peter S. Beagle- A Fine and Private Place, The Last Unicorn
Michael Moorcock- Elric stories (1961-1977, in publication order)
Roger Zelazny- Lord of Light, original Amber novels, Dilvish the Damned stories
Gene Wolfe- Book of the New Sun (originally published as a tetralogy)
Criticism of Oblivion being generic is basically saying Morrowind and Skyrim did a way better job in standing out and not being generic. You can see why Bethesda is not in a rush to make TESVI cause they know it will be a challenging to find a place in Tamriel which on one hand is not generic and yet on the other hand isn't going to be super exotic and unsellable like Black Marsh.
Bethesda has already indicated they will be returning to Hammerfell in the next Elder Scrolls game, possibly also including part of High Rock as in TES II: Daggerfall. Sadly, it's unlikely they would even be willing to make another game in one of the elven provinces, and certainly not in Khajiit or Argonian lands.
Skyrim's setting is very boring but, for some reason, it does feel more tangibly like the Elder Scrolls setting to me. I can draw a line from Daggerfall through Morrowind to Skyrim and believe that they all take place in the same world, but Oblivion is the weird outlier. I'm not sure why, exactly, since the dialogue in Oblivion is loaded with references to Daggerfall, Morrowind, Redguard, and the wider TES lore in general.
Skyrim is a pulp fantasy Vikingland, which wasn't terribly original but worked well enough as a coherent setting for an Elder Scrolls game, in the spirit of TES II: Daggerfall, which combined parts of High Rock and parts of Hammerfell, with the former being a combination of pseudo-medieval England and France, while the latter was a pseudo-medieval Islamic North Africa. Cyrodiil should have been a pseudo-Roman Empire or post-Roman Italy, but instead TES IV: Oblivion decided to depict the Imperial Province as an incoherent pseudo-medieval grab-bag, with every city having a different architecture but everything being quite bland and boring.
Interesting - maybe "boom" was the wrong word but I didn't get the impression from the quests and story that the Empire was meant to have collapsed, or be on the brink of collapsing. The assassination of Patrick Stewart might cast a shadow over the Empire, but the amount of disarray the world is in would suggest it had experienced some kind of decades-long decline, which doesn't track with what we're shown in Daggerfall and Morrowind
Uriel Septim is sick, and wizards say his heir, Geldall Septim, and the younger Septims, Enman and Ebel, are just doppelgangers placed in the household during Jagar Tharn's tenure as Imperial Battlemage. They say the Guard charged a mob demanding destruction of the false heirs... lots of folks were killed.
Uriel Septim was never a strong Emperor. And now he's finally dying of age and illness. A coward's death. They say Ocato makes the real decisions. They say Uriel's heirs are really Daedra or shapeshifters planted by Jagar Tharn. They say the Emperor might pull back the Legions to try and protect himself. Some of the generals in the Legions have one eye on Uriel Septim and one eye on the throne. At a time like this, only the Imperial Guilds with strong allies will survive.
The Emperor is getting old. Don't know how much longer he'll hang on. So is the whole Empire, for that matter. Getting old, that is. The Emperor and the legions have held the Empire together for hundreds of years. It's been a good thing, by and large. But maybe it's time for a change. Time for something young and new. What? No idea. Because I'm old. Old dog doesn't get new ideas. But maybe young folks like you should try some new ideas. I don't know. Could be messy. But change is never pretty.
the actual imperial occupation of morrowind is portrayed very cynically; tiber respected ALMSIVI enough to come up with the armistice, but they only signed it because they were losing their divinity and didn't want to fight a suicidal war while simultaneously fending off dagoth ur. by the time morrowind takes place, vvardenfell's only been colonized by outlanders for 13 years, and the imperials treat it like a backwater shithole that's only good for its ebony while mostly ignoring the native dunmer, their questionable yet legal practices like slavery and morag tong assassinations, their feuding great houses and corrupt temple, the spread of the sixth house, and nearly everything else happening there at the time. uriel vii was an exception, but he shipped the nerevarine off to become an imperial cia operative for his own political benefit, and the empire ended up abandoning morrowind anyway after the red year. seyda neen is literally where you start the game and it's a rotten swamp village with a census office that's so overbearing someone murdered its tax collector, and useless guards that bully dorks like fargoth while overlooking a smuggler's cave that's just outside of town. i can't vouch for daggerfall, but i really don't see how morrowind doesn't show us a corrupt, declining empire when it's something the game, and the series in general, repeatedly touches upon.
seyda neen is also a solid first town which makes you distrust the imperials far more naturally than skyrim's opening, where the imperials try executing you even though the game wants you to join them in the stupid fucking civil war 5 minutes later, but i digress
so oblivion portraying cyrodiil as a decaying capital run by fuckups coping with their empire's death would've made sense after morrowind... except it's oblivion, so instead of political scheming or nibenean moth priests, we got bright bloomy Tolkienland™ which is less interesting than middle-earth instead, complete with tons of imperial forts that are all inexplicably overrun with baddies, even the ones two inches away from the imperial city. there are multiplemods that fix this, but as always, that doesn't excuse bethesda's incompetence and their decision to just... not do any kind of coherent worldbuilding at all. maybe todd is secretly an oblivion npc who chimmed out and escaped the godhead's dream so he could make crappy videogames for frat bros about his own kalpa, who the fuck knows
I wouldn't put much stock in anything that happens past Morrowind, because it is obvious at that point the writers were more focused on making up cool scenarios (such as kicking Oblivion off with the assassination of the emperor), rather than keeping the universe cohesive.
a few hours before you posted this, i'd just rembered this old pre-shivering isles fan interview with todd (and bruce nesmith) where he actually addressed some of these complaints, something he'd probably never do now:
I know the heart of this comment is that some people preferred the writing and storytelling in Morrowind to Oblivion's. I'm perfectly ok with that. They are very different stories and games. They intentionally have different flavors, and different types of writing. The thrust of Morrowind was to put the player in the "stranger in a strange land" feel, so most of the writing and story is focused on the land and its history. With Oblivion, coming off Morrowind, we felt a lack of immediate story from Morrowind, that we told a good story of something that happened a thousand years ago, but there wasn't a good story that was happening to you, the player. It was very "a long time ago this awesome thing happened, read all about it, and walk in its wake." With Oblivion our motto was "don't tell me, show me", so we wanted the epic story to happen in front of you, and that's where we focused things. So in contrast, you don't get to read lots of new ancient histories or culture things
In regards to the politics comment, that's a valid statement, in that Daggerfall and Morrowind both have main stories dealing with a lot of politics, and that wasn't the story we wanted to do this time. There was a time that the Oblivion main quest featured a ton of that, dealing with the Elder Council, but we did end up cutting it while it was still on paper, in all our story reads, it really defocused the main quest from dealing with the daedra, which we wanted the focus to be. Anyway, I think the lack of actually seeing and dealing with the Elder Council is certainly one of my "I wish it had this" things, as we wrote some great stuff for it that just didn't make it in. It was the "nobility" faction line, where you made your way up and became "The Duke of Colovia" and sat on the Elder Council. The only remnant of that questline is the dead Duke in Castle Kvatch, which was to be the beginning of that line.
it makes todd seem even more enigmatic to me; on one hand, he's obviously a normie who loves dumb action stuff, streamlining and generally making everything as basic as possible, but on the other hand, he's well aware that dweebs like us enjoy morrowind for specific reasons, that it's the game which kickstarted his career and that he doesn't want to go back and tamper with it, he just... doesn't care about sacrificing mass appeal and trying to recreate what made morrowind special on anything other than a superficial level. it's so fucking frustrating, i want to respect him for acknowledging what made morrowind one of a kind and i also want to kick him in the balls for deliberately throwing all of those things away in favor of making a game about "a knight on horseback running around and killing things" instead. this is why passive-aggressive toddposting is a meme that will last until the heat death of the universe. someone needs to go back in time and make sure that man never watches the fellowship of the ring
Kvatch gets a little better if you delay the main quest instead of going there immediately as the main quest suggests. The hordes are more threatening if they aren't lvl 5 stunted scamps
you can also wait way too long and fight nothing but endless hordes of spongy dremora on steroids that you're likely too poorly levelled to easily take down. the only thing that makes oblivion "a little better" is either running uninstall.exe, or alternatively, modding it until it breaks and makes you run uninstall.exe anyway
The best way to play Oblivion would probably be to just deliberately not go to Weynon Priory and thus never start the Oblivion crisis - I do the same thing in Skyrim, never giving the Bleak Falls Barrow stone to the mage guy so as to avoid the dragons spawning. I guess then you'd miss out on enchanting due to the insane decision to have enchanting done via sigil stones, but it's a small price to pay.
You can also stop following the main quest at a later point (e.g. after Kvatch) without it really affecting other quests. That way you have some more enemy variety with Daedra strolling around and gates to close if you want to. Delaying the main quest does make the final battle slightly better as guards won't level scale with you but the invading enemies do.
i can't vouch for daggerfall, but i really don't see how morrowind doesn't show us a corrupt, declining empire when it's something the game, and the series in general, repeatedly touches upon.
That's more or less what I said - I wrote in the same post you quoted that DF and MW portray the Empire with great skepticism (and Redguard even moreso, though that's set in the past). But neither game gives the impression of an Empire that's actually already experienced a decades-long collapse, which is what you'd need for Oblivion's world of abandoned forts and roads overriden by bandits to make sense. Urlel VII's "weakness" is a recurring plot point in DF and MW (there's a source, I think maybe "The Daggefall Chronicles" but don't quote me on that, that says his decade of mind-bending terror after being whisked away by Tharn changed him and made him less outwardly imperialist and more hesitant), but Urlel VII being indecisive and ill doesn't explain why 300% of the population have turned to banditry, why there are only four Legionaries on patrol in the entire world, and why 80% of structures in Cyrodiil are ruins.
And again, Oblivion's own quests and dialogue give no indication that some kind of collapse is meant to be underway, partly because the game is wholly uncritical of the Empire and instead reinterprets it as "(good) knights on horseback running around killing (bad) things", presumably so the player can swing a sword around and chat with Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean without worrying about the moral implications.
The explanation is that ruins are much cooler than civilization in most fantasy settings and games. Ruins can be old, mysterious, full of secrets and dungeons to explore. A well maintained country with safe roads is not cool. It's a difference between Shire itself and everything between Shire and Lorien/Rohan/Gondor. Shire is boring even if nice. Ancient ruins, "magical" forest or abandoned underground metropolis on the other hands are fun. Obviously you can have ruins and mysterious places without being retarded about it and keeping geography that is coherent with the story and setting - but that requires some thinking and effort. That is assuming you even care about geography of the world in your game making sense in the first place. Most fantasy CRPGs do not. Funny thing is that postapo rpgs seem to be better in that regard. After all (almost) nonexistence of boring civilization make sense there.
And that's your reason why.
Urlel VII's "weakness" is a recurring plot point in DF and MW (there's a source, I think maybe "The Daggefall Chronicles" but don't quote me on that, that says his decade of mind-bending terror after being whisked away by Tharn changed him and made him less outwardly imperialist and more hesitant)
as far as "empire bad" stuff goes in daggerfall; i remember "brief history of the empire" being in that game and painting a somewhat bleak picture of the septim dynasty despite being a pro-imperial source, and i almost forgot about tiber septim betraying the underking. there might be more but i'm not an expert on daggerfall, to put it lightly. doesn't really help that your pc is a friend of the emperor in that game
and obviously i agree that oblivion's worldbuilding is lazy, oversimplified dogshit that doesn't make sense or even match with what we're shown in-game, you can still find a book describing cyrodiil as "endless jungle" for fuck's sake, i just wasn't entirely sure what you meant when you said oblivion's portrayal of the empire "doesn't track" with previous entries in the series. two years ago, kirkbride expressed regret over oblivion not following up on any of the weird spooky elder council rumors from morrowind that i posted earlier, and he's fucking right about the game being worse off for it. i'll probably wonder what oblivion in a better timeline looks like 'till the day i drop dead
too bad oblivion's dungeons are all boring copypasted slogs made using the same three tilesets. a lot of posters here still shit on morrowind's dungeons for being tiny and dull, and rightfully so, but at least most of them are actually believable in terms of worldbuilding. i'd rather have actual functional mines in cyrodiil than "fun" abandoned ones that are identical to every other inexplicably deserted mine in the country
I see - all I meant was that there's nothing in the previous games to explain the level of borderline post-apocalyptic devastation that Oblivion's worldspace seems to suggest, with banditry at unbelievable levels and ruined forts on main roads. DF, MW and especially Redguard all portray the Empire as ambivalent at best and corrupt and fascistic at worse, but never in a way that would offer an explanation for Cyrodiil being the anarchic wasteland that it appears to be in Oblivion.
Though again, the original point was that the level of decay Oblivion portrays can't be an intentional creative decision even within Oblivion itself, given that no NPCs or quests ever mention it. I think you're meant to just assume the Empire is doing fine (barring the Martin succession crisis obviously) and accept that Cyrodiil visibly being a ruined warzone is just an abstraction for gameplay purposes. The same way you're meant to accept that the Oblivion crisis in ongoing but also that people are happily farming potatoes despite a gate to hell being in eyeshot of their farm.
I always wondered if the "dear friend" thing in the intro FMV is because you were originally meant to be the same person as you were in Arena. As it stands in the finished Daggerfall, your friendship with the Emperor is explained in the auto-generated character history sheets, but it's typically something very incidental which doesn't suggest a personal allegiance to the Empire either way - usually it says you accidentally saved his life or something and were immediately offered the mission without ever meeting him prior to that.
Which sets you up nicely to ignore Brisienna's summons, side with the Empire's enemies, and actively work to keep the Totem out of Uriel's hands in the finale, if you desire.
...because the NPCs look like the love children of Mr. Potato Head and Gollum. And then we're forced to endure their charming good looks in extreme closeups <shudder.>
