#i haven't played Morrowind so that's why i didn't mention it

[nientedenada]

Five Skyrim Lore Facts You May Not Know!

And unlike some of the clickbait videos on Youtube, these ones are absolutely true. Let me address some of the most common lore confusions I regularly see. As a Listicle, because why not? (It's easier than writing out long lore posts.)

The Blades never served the Mede Empire. Martin was the last Emperor they served. They then devoted themselves to looking for a new Dragonborn and working against the Thalmor. Titus Mede I created a new organization called the Penitus Oculatus, which handled all intelligence and security for the Mede Dynasty. The Penitus Oculatus has been the official Imperial organization for more than 175 years, while the Blades have been an independent force. It makes the Mede decision to outlaw the Blades a lot easier to understand if you know they weren't their employees at all. The Blades were loose cannons they couldn't control.

Ysgramor didn't destroy the snow elves. The stories about Ysgramor say he and his 500 Companions showed up in Skyrim, killed or sent the snow elves into exile, took all of Skyrim, and then wandered over to pick fights with the neighbours. In reality, the Falmer weren't completely driven from Skyrim till the reign of King Harald, thirteen generations after Ysgramor. In the interim, there was a whole Dragon cult and war, culminating with Alduin being flung through the time wound. It's a long period. The real Ysgramor definitely clashed with his snow-elf neighbours but he's accumulated the stories of hundreds of years around his mythic name.

The Companions haven't been a Nord-only organization for a very long time. You might think that a bunch of warriors venerating the legacy of Ysgramor and his Companion would be Nord only, and that was probably true way back in the First Era. But by the end of the First Era, the Companions had boasted both a Redguard and Elf (Altmer or Bosmer) Harbinger. Cirroc and Henantier are some of the most famous Harbingers in the history of the Companions. We're in the Fourth Era now, so if you're playing a non-Nord, you're following in a long tradition by joining the companions. (As is Athis.)

The Imperial Legion didn't win back most of Cyrodiil in the Great War. People often ask why Titus Mede II agreed to the harsh peace of the White-Gold Concordat after his army had destroyed the Dominion army in Cyrodiil and taken back the Imperial City. But that's not what really happened. The Legion destroyed "the main army". Other Aldmeri armies are mentioned in Cyrodiil. After Red Ring, the Dominion still occupied Anvil, Skingrad, Bravil, and Leyawiin. "The Great War" doesn't say that any of these cities were liberated. Put those territories together and you'll realize the Empire never got back its coastline or the Niben river. Titus Mede made his deal while the Dominion still occupied half of Cyrodiil. Maybe he could have won if he'd pushed on, but his decision is a lot easier to understand with this context.

The Bretons Don't Worship Talos. This is one of my favourite lore bits to explain. Talos is not a god in TES II, Daggerfall, though he is a historical figure, Tiber Septim. He's only introduced as a god in Morrowind. So, a lot of people assume that he's been retconned into the Breton religion, like he was into the Nord/Imperial religions. This is not true. In both Morrowind and Skyrim, the book Varieties of Faith in the Empire does not list Talos/Ysmir as part of the Breton pantheon. They worship the Eight (and sometimes Y'ffre, Magnus, and Phynaster), as they always have. Tiber Septim is an important historical figure whom some Bretons regard as one of their own, but he isn't an official god. I love this tidbit because it makes the White-Gold Concordat absolutely brilliant. One remaining province, Skyrim, gets all upset while High Rock wouldn't care. Cyrodiil is presumably somewhere in the middle. It's a perfect way to drive a wedge among the provinces. (Hammerfell's left the Empire, but for the record, they don't worship Talos either.)

[elderscrollsconceptart]

how many tes games have you played, what was your first build/character in each, and why did you pick those skills/traits/etc?

Hi and thank you!

I've played admittedly not a lot of Arena. Its hard to get into due to its age 🧙‍♂️ Love Jeff Perrymans work on the game though!

I've played a good amount of Daggerfall! I played a bit of it ~13(?) years ago but it was the original version so like Arena it was super hard to both play and get into it. I was actually doing a classic "sword and board" play through via Daggerfall Unity just last year and was having fun until my saves got corrupted somehow 🥲

I actually touched Redguard for the first time this year but I'm holding off until I finish my current Morrowind playthrough 🏴‍☠️

Battlespire I've actually never touched despite owning it. Its weird because I've POURED over that games wiki and its actually my favorite old school TES game based purely on aesthetics and its designs. A full play through is on my to do list for this year!

All the old TES mobile games, shadowkey, Oblivion Mobile, etc. I have limited experience with. I've seen them IRL on friends phones back in the day but never got hands on since I actually didn't have a phone until later in Highschool. I think the internet archive has at least a few of them playable? I'd have to check, maybe it's worth checking out!

Morrowind...ahh morrowind :) its my fav TES game in terms of quests. My first play through was not a full one, it was at a friends house on the XBOX version way way back in the day. For my first REAL play through it was on my first gaming PC and I played an athletics focused halberd wielding orc who bonked people on the head 😂

Oblivion..This one PAINS me..I've only actually played though it entirely a single time and it was ages ago on the Xbox 360 and I played a...stealth archer 😵‍💫..It wasn't a meme at the time I swear! I just liked sneaking and archery! When I got it on PC, every time I tried setting it up with or without mods I had technical issues. I've mentioned it before but I absolutely loathe the bad draw distance and pop in that plagues even "ultra" settings on PC. OpenMorrowind on PC is a technical marvel. I wish they'd do something similar for Oblivion or port a stable version of Oblivion to PC. I really want to do a full playthrough again!

Skyrim. Fun fact I calculated it one time and I'm certain I collectively have 3,000+ hours in Skyrim over the past 13 years. Possibly close to 4,000 but thats from my Xbox 360 playthoughs and I don't remember the exact times for that. The base game is long worn out for me but god damn is Skyrim's modding community incredible. Thanks to mods, the game has remained fresh in various ways for the past 13 years and at this rate I'll probably add another 1k hours before TES 6 comes out 😁

ESO. I'm gonna be 100% upfront here. I got the game when it came out and had lots of issues with it. The game had a rocky start and I wasn't ever a big fan of MMOs to begin with. That said! Zenimax has done amazing things over the past 10 years and really kept that game alive with continuous improvement. I haven't kept up with it the past few years ago outside of the lore (and art) stuff but I think after I give the older TES games another go, I'll probably hop back in to ESO.

Legends. I've never played it! TBH don't like card games, Hearthestone, Gwent, etc. Legends doesn't have much going for it besides the art BUT BUT BUT...Legends art is fucking incredible 😍😍😍 Seriously, after Perhaps Skyrim's concept art, the various artists of Legends are my 2nd fav to look at. I can ignore the actual gameplay but I really wish we knew more about who actually has created all the Legends art. We only have hints such as studio names for vast portions of the art, or straight up ZERO sources for who made a lot of the core decks and original release era art. I keep my head on a swivel for that stuff because its so amazing and beautiful!

Lastly, TES Blades. I'm not a huge fan of the game since I don't like touchscreen controls (eg. I play Morrowind on my phone but with a controller). I've played a fair amount but never beat it since the controls are bleh and gameplay doesn't appeal to me a ton. Most of the stuff that interests me about blades is the armor designs and the fact it gives us a super small glimpse into the period between The Great War and Skyrim.

Sorry this went a Lil long but thanks for your ask!

[zydrateacademy]

Current Activities in Fallout 76 #1

So I haven't been blogging very much lately because my Youtube channel more or less does the "current activities" job for me. There's no point in transcribing something when it's basically just laid out in video form somewhere else. I couldn't really locate any kind of "First impressions" of Fallout 76. But that's okay because it's brief. It was boring. It was difficult. It didn't have, and still doesn't have any mod capabilities. I need the subscription service to make my own private world with its own rules (XP gains, material gains, health values) to make the game most comfortable for me personally. I have a distinct memory of struggling with having 20 to 100 bullets in the only weapon worth using at the time. Some of these problems have been alleviated. Some have not. The game just throws ammo at you now. A lot of the loot is based on whatever weapon you have actively equipped at the time of lootgen. You could gun down a bunch of ghouls with a 10mm, switch to something else, but the mobs will just have the 10mm on them. Now, this mechanic typically does not sustain a full automatic, but it is still a nice and pleasant feature. Next. Is it hard? Kind of. The enemies constantly scale with you. Some areas have caps, like even now at 89 I still run into level 50 enemies but other times they're still at-scale so even basic cultist enemies are just huge sponges against the might of my .50cal full auto machinegun. As a result, my level, health pool, armor rating, and all of that means nothing when everything in the world is just keeping up with me. I fear the days I reach into the hundreds and have to deal with some level 230 ghoul with the health pool to match and I'm still using the same 50cal because it's the only gun I've found that actually does any meaningful damage to anything. This game turned weight/loot management into one of the main gameplay loops and I really, really don't like that. I literally mod the weight out of junk in other Fallout games just so I can craft with impunity.

The game shoves me in this play-farm-repair-farm-repair-play loop that I don't much care for. Since eventually you have to start sacrificing pieces of your 1200lbs of storage... I once dumped 1000 units of steel only to later have a steel shortage because I was running out of it to craft my ammo to sustain my gun at the time.

Recently FO76 patched in such a way that makes questing almost unbearable. Every time you open the map it just slingshots to the top left. Objectives won't show up. Sometimes your teammates won't show up. Sometimes player camps won't show up. You have to hop-scotch your way towards every objective because not every quest gives you directions, ye olde-Morrowind style. Sometimes the journal just literally says "go do the thing", and my objective marker DOES show up on the minimap and nowhere else. So we have to hop location to location to see when the objective marker actually moves. It's an insane glitch and I haven't been able to progress the story in any meaningful way.

Every time I see something cool and ask about it the answer is "atom shop item" about 80% of the time.

So that is a fair bit of frontloaded negativity. There is a drive to see what's on the horizon. I'm 89, I want to reach 100 to nab that third legendary perk. The community's reputation for charity is well earned. If I'm struggling with the loop mentioned above, I can usually either ask the discord or directly ingame through the Chat mod (chat literally has to be a mod in this game because jesus christ why isn't it there to begin with). A simple matter of asking "hey can someone lend me some 50cal ammo? I'm stuck in a loop here..." and then someone gave me 20,000 ammo for my gun of choice that after three days of playing a few hours at a time, I've only expended a fourth of (meanwhile still replenishing it myself as my materials allow).

But I'm about to hit that loop again as I've run out of asbestos and springs to repair my armor. I'll have to downgrade my personal armor to something more sustainable. Or just ask chat.

Despite the glitch above I do want to see the end of the rainbow. I want to finish the story. I want... things. While I'm not sure I'll get the same 600 hours I did on FO4 through heavy modding and changing the experience on a fundamental level... I just might, kind of against my will as I get stuck in farming/repair loops and waiting for fusion cores to recharge (which is actually a very nice item to have at a reasonable atoms price of 500).

At 69 hours (heh) I'm still learning plenty. I just don't have too much hope for personal longevity.

[thegrunkiest]

Not gonna lie, returning to Skyrim over the past few days has reminded me of just how much I hope TES VI does factions like they did in Oblivion.

!Some critical ranting of Skyrim/positive rambling of Oblivion ahead!

I’m saying this after I started trying to immerse myself in the College of Winterhold, at last, after installing some good magic mods. But I just couldn’t. I couldn’t really care less about this Eye of Magnus or why the Psijic Order wants to talk with me specifically. I couldn’t care about stopping Ancano I can hardly remember what even happens in the questline aside from go into ruin, find orb, go into basement, talk to an aura, go to a ruin, beat up a skeleton dragon and something after that.

This is the same issue I’ve personally had with the Companions, and to a lesser extent, the Thieves Guild. I legit only remember the Companions as “the guild that gives you lycanthropy”. Thieves Guild is a little better, as I do distinctly remember a few of the characters and their quests could get quite creative. I never felt particularly invested however.

So why exactly do I (and possibly some of you) think Skyrim’s factions don’t work, and that they should look back on Oblivion when creating questlines for the next games? For me personally, it boils down to two components: the state of affairs, and sense of progression.

Sense of Progression

I’ll start with the simplest one first. Let’s use the College as an example again, comparing it to the Mage’s Guild of Oblivion. What do you do to gain entry to the College? Cast the requested novice/apprentice level spell (or alternatively, shout if you’re a Dragonborn or just schmooze if you, for some reason, already have 100 in speech). In Oblivion? You have to gain a recommendation from each of the individual chapters by completing a quest unique to each quild hall, which involve a little more work than simply casting a spell.

Alright, alright, so what do we do once we’re in? At the College, we engage in a little lesson with our many (see: three) fellow students. Cool (it’s also our only magic lesson from what I recall - great education system!). Then we’re immediately thrust into the questline, with no real or necessary deviations from the main subject regarding the Eye of Magnus. Then guess what - you’ve become Arch Mage!... wait what? I thought I just joined not too long ago?...

I find it hard to feel good about gaining the leadership role, despite me having just stopped a potentially devastating crisis to earn it, because I never felt more than a junior beforehand. This is how Oblivion does it right with its ranking system in my opinion. While I admit I might have chosen a bad example to draw from, as the Mage’s Guild quests also heavily concerns the main threat in at least some way, but what personally makes it more immersive for me is the fact you’re promoted whilst you’re playing - even to the point you’re being passed onto a different superior for more daring assignments! This is where the little things really count.

Then there’s the Thieves Guild. Unless there’s some backstory I’m glancing over, I don’t see why the Thieves Guild of Skyrim couldn’t have shared the same ranking system as the Oblivion branch, if no one else. In Oblivion, you can only initiate the quests after you’ve passed a certain threshold of fencing stolen goods, something that encourages you to actually be a thief to progress as a thief. I’m not just going from Pickpocket to Gray Fox, as I feel I am from an initiate to Nightingale/Guildmaster in Skyrim; you have various titles you earn in between.

If I had to summarize the point I’m trying to make - I’ll use Oblivion’s Dark Brotherhood. Arguably one of the most popular questlines in TES. Now, could you imagine an Oblivion Dark Brotherhood without Whodunit?, The Assassinated Man, Permanent Retirement, etc. - just axe those unrelated quests in favor of focusing on rooting out the Traitor. No promotions, just primarily finding ways to stop a person who, probably, has killed assassins much more seasoned than you! A deadly threat! Why? Because you’re you! And you obviously deserve to become the Listener after being a Murderer the whole questline.

Which leads me into my next point....

State of Affairs

Skyrim’s questlines seem to have a fixation on factions that are destitute and/or are on the brink of extinction. Business is dry with the Thieves Guild; in the Dark Brotherhood, all but the Falkreath sanctuary is destroyed and the Old Ways are abandoned; the Companions are struggling with the lycanthropy that plagues its strongest members; the College of Winterhold have little reputation in quite an anti-magic province; hell, even the Blades, who were previously slaughtered and run into hiding. The Dawnguard factions I feel are an exception (a reason I like that DLC so much), as the Dawnguard can excuse its low wealth and reputation with the fact that it was just reformed, and the Volkihar Clan have, for all I know, have just been... existing, in the shadows.

Admittedly, Oblivion also has a bit of a running theme among its faction - stable and well-organized factions plagued by a specific threat. The Blades have their Oblivion Crisis, the DB with their traitor ordeal, the Mage’s Guild with the necromancers/Mannimarco, the Fighter’s Guild with the Blackwood Company, Court of Madness with Jyggalag.

The reason why I prefer Oblivion’s guilds over Skyrim, I suppose, is related to my personal problem of power fantasy. Skyrim is a big old power fantasy. You’re the Dragonborn, the chosen one, the Hero of prophecy. So obviously you need to be the savior of each guild, right? You have to be the one the Night Mother deems Listener; the one the Psijics talk to; the one Nocturnal makes a Nightingale.

One might say it’s more realistic that way though, as it adds to Skyrim’s aesthetic of a darker, more unstable time with the Civil War and return of dragons. That’s a fair point. But did 90% of the guilds have to be restricted to poor little groups? Surely the Companions could’ve had other bases in some of the cities somehow, or the Thieves Guild have another hideout in, say Solitude?

You could argue you’re also chosen in Oblivion, sure. But while Uriel saw you in his dreams, you’re place as HoK wasn’t in part due to a superpower, either. I felt I was closing the Oblivion gates because my characters were who they were. You aren’t the only one who can enter Oblivion gates, but you were determined and skilled enough to make it through to the end. While in the factions, you were, for the most part, a newbie working through the ranks until eventually, you’re trusted to confront the threat. In Skyrim it feels less like organizations, and more like ragtag groups that were waiting for you to come in and fix them.

Coupled with the sense progression, this makes experiencing Oblivion’s factions much more organic and satisfying - in my opinion. That’s what’s most important. I’m not ragging on anyone who likes Skyrim’s factions, and I still love Skyrim despite my endless complaints. I understand I may have missed a few points (like the Civil War and Arena), and the ones I made could be disputed.

TL;DR: Skyrim’s fondness for power fantasy and the lack of ranks makes its faction questlines less immersive and more forced, whereas in Oblivion climbing ranks as a sort-of average joe feels organic and more rewarding. This is just my opinion. I don’t hate Skyrim. You’re free to agree or disagree and add to the discussion.