Skyrim

ThePhilosopher wrote:

I think you've made your point far better than I've made mine, Feral

I couldn't be able to make these connections mostly because I don't know shit about Judea ( except the "Assyrians killed nearly everyone" part).

Thanks! If only Assyrians...

Orcs are Hunnic/Mongolic inspired. Their armour and savage rider mentality are dead on.

Khajit are Italians:

Rude gesture being

High Rock is indeed Norman/French and Feral made a good case for Dunmer being inspired by Jews, though I still think there are other influences.

Altmer as Germans means Thalmor are Nazis, which seems sensible at first glance, but it doesn't fit the general scheme. They are the closest to the Old Ehlnofey and theirs is the first great civilization of Tamriel. They are based more on Tolkien's elves than on any real world civilization.

Bosmer are standard Wood Elves with a twist. The twist being they don't eat plants, but do eat each other.

Redguards are Arab in clothing and geography, but I do not see any cultural or historical parallels. That said, I am not particularly familiar with pre-Islamic Arab history, by which I mean I don't know shit about it. I did look a bit into Redgaurds though and there are some parallels with Japan. They had sword-signers who at some point gained an exclusive right to carry swords (samurai). The best of them were know as ansei or sword saints (kensei) and were able to create spirit sword with their mind (anime bullshit inspired by zen philosophy). On their ancient homeland of Yokuda they had an empire, but eventually the emperor became a figurehead (like in Japan). There emerged a military dictator (shogun) and there's this Frandar do Hunding Hel Ansei No Shira guy who was the bestest ansei and won countless duels (Miyamoto Musashi) who wrote the Book of Circles (The Book of Five Rings). And then there was Hira the Last Emperor who fought a war against the sword-singers (semi-parallel to Meiji restoration, but the outcome was different). I also vaguely remember something about spirit swords being able to slice atoms and cause nuclear explosions, but I can't find the source.

"Khajiit" literally means "desert walker" (or more accurately "person who does what you do in the desert") and I saw them as more Arab than the Redgaurds. But to be honest, that was mainly because of the desert thing and the caravans thing, so yeah. I may look into them tomorrow, I've already spent enough time on learning about Redguards today.

I see no real world parallel for Argonians.

ThePhilosopher wrote:

I actually feel the dunmer were much more worked on than the other races that we've seen so far (Haven't played ESO so I don't know it's lore)

Dunmer have the good fortunate that the game in the series with the best developed lore was set in their homeland province. The other provinces used to be cool too, but then it was easier to make Cyrodiil into a more standard fantasy land and they stuck with it.

As for ESO lore, it is an abomination and I reject it. The game wasn't even made by Bethesda and it's actual developers completely misunderstood the interregnum (they thought it was a period where all the races fought for control of Tamriel rather than a period where Cyrodiils fought for the Imperial throne other while everyone else was happy to not have an empire) and they teamed up the races based on proximity rather than logic. They actually thought it would make sense to have Nords + Dunmer + Argonians as one of the three playable factions. And they threw in an Oblivion crisis, except with Molag Bal instead of Mehrunes Dagon.

I could live with the Redguards as Japanese in Arabo-Persian clothes and architecture... You forgot the piracy thing (wako).

The Argonians seem Slavic: weak and disorganized tribal people who lived in the marches, worshiped strange gods of the forest, spoke a tongue nobody understood and were raided and enslaved by everyone around. Just like Slavic tribes in the Prypec pre-expansion period. Finally they used a crisis of nearby nation of Morrowind (Germanic kingdoms and tribes after Attila and Avars) to conquer some fertile land and form a stable state.

As for Altmer being straight from OldElhofey: it took two world wars to convince Germans they didn't...

They're not straight from Old Ehlnofey. Or rather, not any more than any other elves. But their culture seems to have deviated the least.

Dragatus wrote:

They're not straight from Old Ehlnofey. Or rather, not any more than any other elves. But their culture seems to have deviated the least.

That is what links them to Krauts exactly!


Wait, I am a half German by ancestry...
As a matter of curiosity, what do you get when a male Altmer impregnates a Dunmer woman, according to the lore?
On a second thought, whould the Altmer father be actually punished for this?

I've become really curious about the outcome of this discussion.

Feral wrote:

Dragatus wrote:

They're not straight from Old Ehlnofey. Or rather, not any more than any other elves. But their culture seems to have deviated the least.

That is what links them to Krauts exactly!


Wait, I am a half German by ancestry...
As a matter of curiosity, what do you get when a male Altmer impregnates a Dunmer woman, according to the lore?
On a second thought, whould the Altmer father be actually punished for this?

According to the book Notes on Racial Philogeny whenever you get a mixed race pairing, the child inherits the mother's race, but may have some traces of the father's race as well. Or if you translate it into cynical English: "It would be too much work to create 45 mixed races."

So a child of an Altmer man and a Dunmer woman would be a Dunmer with some Altmer traits. A bit more magicka, a bit more intelligence, and less speed and fire resistance.

That's actually also a major plotpoint of The Firsthold Revolt. The Altmer king Reman of Cloudrest is married to the Dunmer Morgiah (Helseth's sister) and that means that in the next generation there will be a Dunmer sitting on the throne if nothing is done about it.

So I am basically a Judeonazi, according to Elder Scrolls lore... Much wow...

But it makes sens. Now you reminded me of this books and the Shoddycasts' episode on it on YT.
It was also the case of Empress Katariah. The Empire was almost ruled by a Dunmer Septim...
("Brief History of the Empire v 2", Stronach k'Thojj III)

I bursted at work... So true...

It is the purest truth!

Mod makers are capable of making entire new games from scratch, but they are not paid to do so, so they don't. Instead, they make years worth of gameplay for FREE.

Yep. Every year or so I return to Skyrim and play it a little thanks to mods

Granted I'm starting to run out of possibilities.

Why running out of possibilities?

Maybe there are fewer modders now.
Maybe good mods are coming to an end.
Maybe his tastes got better and better so now he has options to chose from.
But probably he's finally getting tired of the game.

Cretino wrote:

Maybe there are fewer modders now.
Maybe good mods are coming to an end.
Maybe his tastes got better and better so now he has options to chose from.
But probably he's finally getting tired of the game.

Nah, can't be... Skyrim is like beating off: you may take a break but you will get back to it eventually...

Feral wrote:

Cretino wrote:

Maybe there are fewer modders now.
Maybe good mods are coming to an end.
Maybe his tastes got better and better so now he has options to chose from.
But probably he's finally getting tired of the game.

Nah, can't be... Skyrim is like beating off: you may take a break but you will get back to it eventually...

Quote worthy

Honestly there's only so much a mod can do. There's only so much 200+mods can do.

The thing that does it for me is the basic gameplay. No matter how much mods I have, I'm still trekking on the same land I have in 6 years.
Quests, factions or not are still shit.
And even with all the combat + AI + monster mods, the game can still get bland and boring.

Even with plenty of mods to make combat and character evolution interesting, it's still a game of "go there, fight, come back". Eventually that gets tiring, and there aren't enough mods to change that.

It reaches a point where the direction I want to go with the character is just too bland for me to keep playing with it. Let's say I want to make a Heavy Armor Mage and make him king of the Volkihars. Well that's just the entire Dawnguard questline with all it's flaws. And if I want him to own some daedric artifacts, to have connections / high rank in the mages guild or db, these are more bland questlines for me to follow yet again.

If I want my character to use certain types of spells, I need to go through the entire Mage Guild opening yet again. If I want him to have certain shouts, I am forced to either go through the specific dungeons that have the shouts and then kill dragons for it or use the console. And honestly using the console for character creation doesn't appeal to me, plus it might break my game.

That's rough shit. If only modders could be paid for their work, even if the game developer or platform (e.g.: Steam) would profit from them, it would at least incentive them to make more mods/better mods and bring in new modders (and modders could be hired by the devs, eventually!).

"Could" as in there could still be Free mods, and you can still charge 1 cent to download your mod (or make it overpriced).

I don't know if that would work so well, Cretino.
Adding monetary rewards tends to make people less creative, not more. Modders would become incentivized to make not the mod they feel it's missing from the game or that they wanna play, but rather the mod that gets the most purchases.

Most of the content added in Dawnguard DLC were made in "Bethesda's free work week" where every employee had to submit something, but the employee decided what he wanted to make. Over half of Google's services were made in similar "free work weeks" aswell.

Not to mention that the way such a system would work would probably be via paid mods, which is a notion I'm not big on either. Philo's right imo.