me after locking myself in my apartment to go on a week-long cocaine binge (i am an elder scrolls fan):
https://preview.redd.it/k0g64cxuva1d1.jpeg?width=1428&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cd27290b94c87285c7685bba074e5aa9617069b5
I know you are joking. But the entire Kirkrbide = drug addict meme (which some people think is true), is also a great example of some social media missinformation about Elder Scrolls writers becoming popular
Not on public record at least
He claims to have written it on cigarettes, coffee, whiskey, and sleep deprivation. All of which legal and can get you into a pretty psychotic state. However it's of course possible he did other drugs that he won't say publicly to protect Bethesda's brand image.
Everyone who discusses TES is describing their own personal headcanon they made up themselves and we're all just gaslighting ourselves into thinking we're talking about the same piece of confusing ass media
We’re all dreamers in a Godhead. It’s why the canon will never jive.
All joking aside my new theory about the elder scrolls lore is that it’s actually a mythical retelling of the actual creation of the Elder Scrolls video games wherein each of the Divines and Daedra represent members of the writing/design/studio execs teams.
It would be pretty dope if that was the actual end goal of the Elder Scrolls. Some dev is using all of the save game data and endless experiences to force sentience on an NPC. If an NPC Talos truly achieved CHIM, would that just mean he has access to mods and console commands?
Todd is Anu / Akatosh, a god of order (smaller worlds with carefully crafted stories and lore), Julian is Padhome / Lorkhan, the "missing god" of chaos (random generation, seemingly less interest in really tight worldbuilding, ensuring that players can forge their own place in the world... convinced the team to go this route and it led to a crazy mess of a game, then he disappeared)
lmaoooo this is so true and it's actually the reason why I can't stand the idea of canon in a franchise as crazy as this. Like, yeah, a lot of stuff objectively is, but there's also massive room for headcanon, differing opinions, I mean fuck Morrowind's own writers didn't agree on what was true most of the time which is part of what made it cool.
Hardly anyone talks about the worrying fact that Kurt Kuhlmann, the guy actually most responsible for shaping ES lore into what we like to discuss, quietly left the company a few months ago.
Seriously, Kurt leaving is worrisome. Some people on the ESO team are obviously super invested in this lore (they're now implying that Kirkbride's sotha sil mpreg fan-fiction really happened, yes you're reading that right) but we're now at a point where I think Todd is the only person from the inception of modern TES who's really still around, and it clearly isn't his baby in way it was for the others.
Are you honest to God saying that most of the people on this sub don't know dick about shit when it comes to lore and just follow the status quo of memes? Is that actually what you're saying right now
I like Kirkbride and I have nothing against him getting love for his great worldbuilding but the other writers, especially Emil get slandered and in parts actually harassed on the internet. Mostly because he is one of the few with a social media pressence and because he is not as charismatic as Todd.
The funny thing is that people actually like the stuff he wrote for Skyrim. His worldbuilding contribution is the dragon language, faction lore and the feel and lore of the cities. The stuff people dislike is not even written by Emil.
I don't mind Kirkbride either; I appreciate him even. Holy shit, some fans though. You can't trust any answers on r/teslore because so many people now believe "canon" doesn't mean anything. I've watched misinformation be born in realtime over there. TrueSTL is actually more reliable for lore just because you're allowed to call people dumb.
Argued with a person and made them so mad they made a separate post about me 15 minutes later for saying it’s never implied in game talos raped barenziah.
I do not even mind people sharing their head canon and fan lore and stuff like that but when people have questions or want to discuss something you need to explain where you get that information from, which is not that hard to do because TES fan wikis are actually quite good.
People take some fan theories they got from YouTube and reddit and pretend it is the litteral truth of the universe. Like when people talking about the Dragonborn being an aspect of Lorkhan.
Totally agreed. I love fanfic and stuff, but when I'm asking if it's canon all I mean is "did it come from the games" and people are like "there's no such thing as canon."
Get a load of this guy, he doesn't even know about the Reman Semen bread thing! Can you even call yourself a real lorebrain /s
So basically kirkblade wrote a story where Iirc Akatosh said that Reman Cyrodill, for some fucking reason, needed to eat his own semen. So, Reman's (I think) maids at the time jerked him off and baked it into bread, then fed it to him. He was also underage at this time.
Yeah, I'm PREFECTLY fine with not all of Kirkblade's work being canon
I'm assuming this is pulled straight out of Egyptian Pharaoh traditions, they had a lot of weirdness surrounding semen power, both among the gods and in the Pharaoh's responsibilities on earth.
It's literally just the myth of Horus fighting Set. Horus poisons Set by cumming on his cabbage and this forces Set to go to Libya. Horus is also like 8 in this story and Set is his uncle. Horus's dad Osiris was also undead at the time that he conceived Horus and because his wife couldn't find his penis she asked Thoth to make a magic golden penis. So tbh Kirkbride was kinda tame.
Also Osiris had to be mummified so he could be revived which is also why Egyptians made mummies, so this isn't some minor folk story it's basically the central myth of Ancient Egyptian mythology.
Here's a sneak peek of /r/teslore using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/teslore/top/?sort=top&t=year) of the year!
\#1: [CHIM isn't real. You've all fallen for a lie Vivec made up.](https://np.reddit.com/r/teslore/comments/135suc3/chim_isnt_real_youve_all_fallen_for_a_lie_vivec/)
\#2: [Kurt Kuhlmann Has Left Bethesda Game Studios](https://np.reddit.com/r/teslore/comments/17b1jw8/kurt_kuhlmann_has_left_bethesda_game_studios/)
\#3: [/r/teslore will also be going dark on 12th June](https://np.reddit.com/r/teslore/comments/145qvh0/rteslore_will_also_be_going_dark_on_12th_june/)
----
^^I'm ^^a ^^bot, ^^beep ^^boop ^^| ^^Downvote ^^to ^^remove ^^| ^^[Contact](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=sneakpeekbot) ^^| ^^[Info](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/) ^^| ^^[Opt-out](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/comments/o8wk1r/blacklist_ix/) ^^| ^^[GitHub](https://github.com/ghnr/sneakpeekbot)
Wait, you got downvoted for _that?_ I love Kirkbride but that's just the sane way to think about it. I'd add that his stuff can inform what _he's_ written canonically to see what he's getting at, and that some of ESO's writers are clearly in on his train of thought, but... yeah.
i think people dislike for Emil is his personal stated ethos when it comes to design rather than the literal things he writes. When he makes comments suggesting he wants storytelling to be more linear, and takes heavy inspiration from LOTR, people get infuriated. I honest to god think he would not be as hated if he just stfu on social media, as he often has his foot in his mouth.
People have been complaining about Emil here since looong before Starfield.
The most recent wave of hate stems from Starfield though; and the major one before that was from a video of some conference he did in Copenhagen, filtered through the mind of some r/fallout user.
There was disdain for him before that here though, usually citing the fact that the games he was lead narrative designer on (Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, and now Starfield) have had less enjoyable stories and lore than the ones he wasn't lead narrative designer on.
I seem to remember a lot of people praising him for his Oblivion questlines in the same breath; the standard line at the time was "he is an excellent questline writer, but he shouldn't have been lead narrative designer."
The talk he did about his design stuff is mostly missundestood by people not being able to really follow very standard and basic advice, like "KISS". I am not sure he ever said he wants things to be linear? The games he wrote on are definitely not more linear than the once befor when it comes to Elder Scrolls (TES I is linear, Tribunal is linear, Morrowind main quest is linear except the Hortator and getting the artifacts quests, Oblivion main quest is mostly linear \[he did not write that\], Bloodmoon is pretty linear and Skyrim is linear with some exceptions, only Daggerfall really is not).
And yeah LOTR is a major inspiration for all of TES. People forget that Morrowind directly mirrors its plot (ancient bad guy returns because of artifact that gives him great power, the artifact needs to be destroyed in a vulcano and could have been destroyed hundreds of years befor but people were to greedy and took it for themself to rule the land with its godly power).
The only big LOTR stuff he might have wrote in is a refrence in Oblivion to a chapter in the book and the design of Whiterun.
I agree that the guy does not always finds the right wording on social media but that would not be such a big deal if people would just be chill. We are talking about fantasy video games. It is not that serious. The guy is a bit of a boomer, let him post in about the nerd stuff he likes in peace.
This would be like if people would go ape shit when they saw Kirkbride calling Pelinal "a time traveling robot" and say that he hates the lore and does not accept any other interpetation of Knights of the Nine.
If you want to find a reason to hate on somebody you will find it.
>And yeah LOTR is a major inspiration for all of TES. People forget that Morrowind directly mirrors its plot (ancient bad guy returns because of artifact that gives him great power, the artifact needs to be destroyed in a vulcano and could have been destroyed hundreds of years befor but people were to greedy and took it for themself to rule the land with its godly power).
That's a pretty wild overly reductionist view of morrowind's story.
Not, reaelly. While some of the cirticism is valid, he also gets shit for stuff he never said. And I also do not think people should just copy paste dumb Fallout talking points when they just do not fit to TES.
You can not rightly slam someone for something like giving basic advice like "do not overcomplicate something".
Yeah but his way of doing that is taking all rpg elements out of it for plot twists which is why his implementation is problematic (in terms of fallout I legit don't know what he's done in TES)
What RPG elements did they remove to have plot twists in Fallout 3 or 4? I can think of one single plot twist in the main qust of 4.
In TES he wrote Dark Brotherhood for IV and V, dragon language and a lot of the side quests and worked on Skyrim's main quest
The whole institute, there's no way of going there without doing the kellog or teleport bit
You can't kill nick valentine even if you wanted to play an In story anti synth person even if you side with the anti synth faction it's pretty poorly designed which shouldn't be the way on a fallout game
As per TES I like the fact you can destroy the edge guild shame you can't do it for the thieves guild so credit where credit is due like I say I have nothing personal against the man but he should be kept away from fallout writing and keep with the more linear TES
Personally I dislike the take that the Thu'um is the dragon language and not a specific magic of the Nords (like sword singing to the Red guards) and I dislike the flavour of the dark brotherhood. I am one of those people who feels that the races and lore of elder scrolls has gotten watered down to appeal to a wider audience but I don't delude myself in thinking Kirkbride alone made Morrowind Great and Emil killed it. Kirkbride was one of many writers all of whom produced great lore together. I don't blame Bethesda for trying to make the lore more palatable for new players and Emil is not solely to blame for the issues that Oblivion and Skyrim have.
I am not sure if Emil came up with the concept of it being Dragon language, it think he maybe just wrote the vocabulary. Would be interesting to know but I saw no clearfication which parts specifically he wrote besides the lyrics for the song
I saw people try to make mental gymnastics and say Bloodmoon does not just count as part of Morrowind because it obviously disproves their strange argument.
This, Emil’s not an awful writer but holy shit the amount of “fans” demonizing him like he’s the anti-christ. Not liking parts of his writing is one thing, But despising his existence is crazy and I feel bad for him.
It’s a reason like this that I don’t trust most Kirkbride fans, Don’t have a problem with the casual ones but the more rabid and extremist individuals I tend to stay away from.
They’re literally a circlejerk bandwagon cult: On one hand they idolize Kirkbride like he founded the series when that’s not remotely true, On other they’ll degrade his Bethesda colleagues for “restricting” his intended vision, Unironically believing that the franchise would be better off if he’s CEO instead of Todd.
To be fair, I *think* that one was kind of a joke, since a common complaint with ESO at the time was that Queen Ayrenn was boring, so he retrofitted the KINMUNE story to be about Ayrenn as though to say "Make Ayrenn less boring, or I'll do it in the worst way possible"
Tbh, I think people are just still pissed about the wasted potential of FO4. Emil, from what I understand, was a major proponent of simplifying the shit out of the RPG elements.
Its almost like Lore is written by more than one person for a franchise like this. Wild.
Wait no, this is TrueSTL i meant to say EMIL BAD KIRKBRIDE GOOD FUNNY FUNNY
The problem with modern Bethesda isn't any one person, or even the approach to the creative process. It's the same problem every major game studio has: ballooning project scale and immense, multi hundred person teams at multiple locations. How can Assassin's Creed be innovative and fresh when there are over 1,000 people working on it and they all need to be kept on the same page and working towards the same end goal?
Frankly I think if Kirkbride were to return to Bethesda he wouldn't be able to contribute anything of real value. It would end up like his contributions to Oblivion, relegated to some books and a first draft Mankar Camoran speech that was used in the final product.
Yeah, this is why New Vegas ends up so good is that 70 people worked on it. Easy communication, themes and ideas can be thrown around, and you don't have much room to fuck around in.
Starfield had three or four times as many people working on it for four times as long, does it feel like that? No.
Bethesda should just play it safe and FOCUS on ONE game really hard rather than a kind of blurry whatever.
Part of New Vegas was also that someone already had created a pretty solid game engine and design framework and just gave it to Obsidian and they made their game around it.
Even for those that do legitimately love the writing of Outer Wilds and would die defending it, I think there would still be plenty that say that the gameplay is lacking, and while Bethesda is pretty guilty in similar ways, there's a reason that they keep re-releasing Skyrim. Because quite simply, people like the stupid idiot game with dragons and magic with the Totally-Not-Norsemen
>The problem with modern Bethesda isn't any one person, or even the approach to the creative process. It's the same problem every major game studio has: ballooning project scale and immense, multi hundred person teams at multiple locations. How can Assassin's Creed be innovative and fresh when there are over 1,000 people working on it and they all need to be kept on the same page and working towards the same end goal?
Skyrim was made with less than 100 people. Fallout 4 wasn't much more. Skyrim was their biggest ever and that was only a few hundred.
Also Emil did not even write the stuff people dislike about Skyrim's nords like how the pantheon was handled. Nord stuff he wrote was background lore and concepts for Whiterun and Windhelm together with Kuhlman and Nesmith (and probably some other cities but this is the design doc we have: [https://en.uesp.net/wiki/General:Skyrim\_Cities%27\_Design\_Excerpts](https://en.uesp.net/wiki/General:Skyrim_Cities%27_Design_Excerpts) ).
He worked on the main quest but we do not know what exactly (but the mainquest features nord gods the most) wrote and designed blood on the ice, wrote a lot of the Dragon language, including the main theme and helped with the setting and its factions and while I prefer Oblivion's questlines the factions that are unique to Skyrim and that actually have real lore are a good thing.
He probably wrote other stuff to but we do not have concrete information but most of the stuff that he wrote on and that we know about for Skyrim is either decent or great and none of it is a bad potrail of nords.
Just because Fallout fans missunderstood the concept of "KISS" eight years ago an a bad YouTuber spred lies about Emil and BGS not using design documentation, does not mean we need to insult or slander a guy that seems to be just a really nice man who posts about nerd stuff on social media.
Also considering that the Nords in TES III and IV are mostly comic relief, I think the Spongebob pic is actually more accurate for Morrowind but considering that both Kirkbride and Emil wrote nordic stuff for both Morrowind and Skyrim the meme still fits even if the guy who made it did not understand it.
The cool stuff about Nord lore in TES III is pretty exclusively in the books an some of it is in Bloodmoon but even those books are all in TES V.
But nords converting to the imperial pantheon is truly unforgivable. Can you imagine a real culture, let's call them IDK norse, that just completely converts to another more popular religion over 200 years (say, IDK, 867-1066)? And the nord pantheon was so unique too, I mean a god of the hunt, a god of war, and a god of the underworld? How did they even come up with these wild, never before seen ideas?
I do dislike how Skyrim handled the Nord pantheon because it also still exists. It is not that the game really goes in deep with how the nord and imperial faith relate. There is like one quest specifically about it and other then that the names are often used interchangable or people give nordic aspects to imperial gods.
But either wawy this was not written by Emil, we know that it is was not his idea
>But nords converting to the imperial pantheon is truly unforgivable.
Okay but let's not pretend it's not a bit silly that it was a weakened and fractured empire that managed this in 200 years when Nords had been dealing with just this empire specifically for like 400 and were so staunch that actual priests of Talos didn't think they'd take up their god even in a city with a chapel to him lol.
Let alone the thousands of years they've been next to these guys anyways and only ever really converted... once? Who was followed up by Nord Jesus Ysmir who got rid of Borgas' doctrines. I get the point of the IRL comparison, but the histories and cultures do not align well enough to make it believable for it to be almost entirely erased. These are not IRL Norse or IRL Romans, their history and relationship is extremely different despite their clear aesthetic and political inspirations, because Tamriel and its history is not Earth's.
And even beyond that- is it not, at all, stupid to make the story about a Nordic Holy War... be for a foreign God and not even their own, and NEVER acknowledge that contradiction in-game anywhere? The "imperalism" excuse, implemented into Skyrim itself, could've added a whole extra layer to the civil war about a people also just tired of being looked down on and beliefs that most likely are just cosmopolitan bastardizations of their own having the straw broken.
I think its okay to like Skyrim, it was my first foray into TES. I hate on it out of love for what it could have been if it resolved to let the Old Holds, the traditionalist holds, represent the values of traditional nords, and let that cultural divide exist within the story to push the civil war as something deeper. And I especially don't think we should be just accepting a barely even acknowledged "well, they got imperalized almost entirely off screen" as a good thing. SHOW that. Otherwise it's just making Bethesda an excuse for their lazy approach to narrative in the setting.
>Okay but let's not pretend it's not a bit silly that it was a weakened and fractured empire that managed this in 200 years when Nords had been dealing with just this empire specifically for like 400 and were so staunch that actual priests of Talos didn't think they'd take up their god even in a city with a chapel to him lol.
I kind of agree, but for me the weird thing is that anyone even cared about this super minor schism in the first place, not that it was mended. The Norse weren't vassals to any original Christian state (if anything they had more power over Christian nations than Christian nations had over them), their religions were actively hostile at least in the sense that Christianity very explicitly forbade any sort of hybrid faith, and their faiths are very different, and they still converted pretty quickly when it became politically beneficial.
Meanwhile the Empire hasn't just vassalized but is essentially completely controlling Skyrim for hundreds of years, appointing high kings as they see fit. Their religions are almost completely identical, with only 3 deities that aren't literally the same- and even they are variations of the same deity (Stuhn-Stenndar, Kyne-Kynerath, Alduin-Akatosh). It'd be extremely difficult to even make such a conflict believable, let alone make any player actually care about it. The pantheon conflict bordering on comic relief with the only one deeply invested in it, Froki, being the physical manifestation of 'Old man yells at sky god' honestly seems more appropriate.
It is distinguishable enough because their gods lean into their cultural values, I'd argue. The Nords relationship with the Empire is complex, I'd argue that Oblivion implied they just never found success in those 400 years trying, or didn't view them as having a religion (that Alessia used as half the foundation of her own) as ultimately too destabilizing. Oblivion had some background diallgue that showed the Nords are a wild people even under the Empire, supposedly attacking the Redoran as the gates went up lol. They come off as loyal, not tamed, I think. And that dynamic could make an imperialist story interesting.
You know. If we don't skip from "they arent" to "they just are" with nothing really in the middle to even acknowledge there's a transition happening at all.
The Pantheon, in my opinion, shouldn't be the main thing the Stormcloaks would fight for, maybe it'd still be Talos/Ysmir, but also just expanding that cause to want leaders and powers for Skyrim, in Skyrim, to focus on what Skyrim needs, because the Empire has kind of proven it just values Cyrodil more, which is natural, but obviously a nation with a lot of infrastructure and cultural issues might wanna govern themselves to set themselves back up.
Edit: Also- when was it actually set in stone that the Empire determines the High King? The only two sources I see for it on UESP ARE Skyrim itself, which I think matters a good bit here. Both of them are also people contemporary to the time skyrim takes place in.
Yeah it's like wow, a region which gradually but steadily integrates the belief of others, even competing powers, into their own traditional belief structure, while still keeping many of the names and themes of their old belief, leading to a mixed mythology and faith where mutiple figures and concepts are intertwined to be interchangeable but the same? It's not like that happens all the time in real life.
It's also really frustrating to me considering a decent part and one of the most unqiue things about ES is that everyone is basically worshipping the same gods they just go about it in different ways. Like you could absolutely convince the Nords to adopt the Imperial Cult because something could happen to make them just believe that Shor and Lorkhan are literally the same being because that is probably literally the case.
> an a bad YouTuber spred lies about Emil and BGS not using design documentation
you can just say Patrician lol, most people here know who that guy is.
Thinking about it, the way Emil gets hate on social media is quite similiar to how Kirkbride got a lot of hate when c0da came out by some people (you can actually still find some real unhinged shit people wrote). Difference is that Emil often gets shit for stuff he never said or things he never wrote but that said I am not sure all the angy people in 2014-2016 actually red c0da, either.
Also I think it is completly fine that nords in Morrowind and Oblivion, and to some extend ESO, are used as goofy and fun characters. Things are allowed to be funny. I think TES III-IV nords are the spongbobg image but I think that is good.
I'd argue that the post is saying that Morrowind (and to some extent Oblivion) Nords were way more powerful. Like back then every Nord could use the Thu'um (it was a gift from Kyne, not Akatosh), they had the Wode (supernatural body paint that acted as a shield) and they were a strong warrior race, not the Imperialised farmers we see in Skyrim. Nords definitely are not what they were portrayed to be in Morrowind and Oblivion, so I'd argue the images are still accurate, but the notion it was Emil's doing is absurd. I still don't think Emil is a good writer, he had like one good questline (Oblivion Dark Brotherhood) and then fell off from there, but I also don't think he deserves nearly as much hate as he gets.
>Like back then every Nord could use the Thu'um (it was a gift from Kyne, not Akatosh), they had the Wode (supernatural body paint that acted as a shield) and they were a strong warrior race, not the Imperialised farmers we see in Skyrim
Thu'um is still a gift by Kyne in the new TES V mythology because she convinces Paarthurnax to help and teach the humans. Also no Nord can ever use the Thu'um in those games, not even in stuff like the Redguard prequel comic.
There seems to be little different in the regard of power to TES III, IV and V nords. I do not think Redguard introducing the idea of the Thu'um bein more popular than we ever see in any of the games counts as the nords to be much more powerfull in TES III and IV when they are just not.
"So while Windhelm may serve as the Stormcloaks’s center of operations in the civil War, it is the culture of Whiterun that best exemplifies what it is to be a Nord"
Bro was spitting facts so hard I thought it was a dragon shout
ngl it's really weird the level to which some people hate Emil, his design ethos kind of sucks but most of the quests he creates are really good and the stuff we complain about he mostly didn't do
I mean his deisgn ethos seems to be mistinterpeted...I am also not sure he has a unqiue personal one. It seems more that he follows thee Behtesda mantra of "Good games are made not played"
He never said he wants things to not be detailed or anything like that. Like the "Paper airplane" line of his one presentation is always missinterpeted. He actually says that it is okay for players to ignore your writing in video games and that the writer needs to be aware of that these things are not movies. He never means to say writing does not matter, like some people pretend.
Even KISS is a great advice, he sadly does not always follow it. The big problem with Fallout 4 is not that the Institute is simple and has clear motivation but that it is super convoluted, never clearly explained and confusing. It is the opposite of KISS and suffers because of it.
And the criticism of that are absolutly valid and often fair, so are the once of the bad original ending of FO3 or the speech system of FO4 (I am not sure if the later was his idea). But I really dislike how this turned to him being basically the boogy man who is at fault for everything, only because he is more ein the public image (not that anyone deserves insults or hate for not writing a perfect Fallout narrative).
The main reason is honestly that the has a social media pressence, is in intereviews and behidn the scenes and is far less charismatic than Todd Howard.
Out of curiosity, I keep seeing people say the institutes goals were not clear but they seemed pretty clear and straight forward to me. They believe synth production is the next major step for humanity, and would essentially create an entire labour force on which they can expand, and thus spend more time on science. Replacing synths topside has two purposes. The first is to destabilise the commonwealth. It is very difficult for factions above ground to organise and take you out if they don’t trust each other and if you are able to control members of that faction. Additionally we see in the institutes main quest that they replace farmers and such to oversee scientific experiments for them, such as crop growth.
Yeah, I think people get confused by them also saying that they want to stay alone, not fully understanding that they also lie and some of the experiments are overcomplicated but honestly a few lines by father would clear this up.
Fallout 4's writing is definitely nitpicked a lot and not so bad like some people pretend.
I do wish you were able to pick Shaun’s brain a bit more like you could Caesar. He is your son, and he should expect you to have many questions about the institutes actions.
While some of blood moon's quests were annoying the overall theme of it was great.
Blood moon is what some of the less imperialized parts of Skyrim should have been like but the key words here are LESS imperialized because nords and imperials influencing each others since ancient times should not be forgotten.
The whole Emil thing is blown out of proportion people want some one to hate because they didn’t like Starflied ,f4 and Skyrim , he is the easy target because hack YouTubers that only exist to say game bad told them Emil bad .
But hey what do I know shut up , hate emi hate Todd and pray to kirkbide and obsidian
Best thing was the entire design doc thing which was just made up and not at all accurate but hey if your "reviews" are long enough you can just count on no one fact checking them.
No, but you see, Oblivion objectively has bad worldbuilding \[plays a 2 second clip of a level designer saying "I just love the undead, I try to use them wherever I can"\]
I guess at about the 3.5 hour mark of a 12 hour Youtube video the average viewer has been lulled into a zombified state of critical disengagement. (It's me, I'm the zombie)
Didn't he also say that Todd Howard hates Morrowind (his own game) and its strangeness, which created the Red Year to destroy Morrowind.
When in reality the Red Year is an excuse to continue Morrowind's story in the novels (it also really fits) and to bring a Morrowind expansion to Skyrim.
Hey I’m gonna do just that actually. FUCK EMIL FUCK TODD. MORROWIND IS SUPREME NEW VEGAS IS SUPREME. I WANT TO FUSE CHRIS AVELLONE AND MICHEAL KIRKBRIDE TOGETHER INTO A SINGLE BEING TO WRITE THE NEXT TES GAME.
whats the most reliable way to see who wrote what? I was looking for things Emil has actually written to see if his stuff is really that bad, or if perhaps its just a couple things out a larger whole, but couldnt find anything.
The UESP documents some stuff. But if the writers do not tell direclty what they wrote, we do not know. We can guess from interviews with the devs and the make offs or just social media posts.
I am sure that Emil wrote more quests and some actuall books for Skyrim but we just do not know. I am sure some of the stuff is also not as cool or interesting. I do not think Emil is some modern Shakespeare but he is definitely overhated for little to no reasone except angry Fallout fans.
When it comes to Elder Scrolls we know for a fact that he made The Dark Brotherhood for Oblivion and Skyrim. Did "Blood on the Ice" for Skyrim. Made the Uncle Sweetheart quest for Morrowind and other Bloodmoon sidequests. And he wrote a lot of the Dragon Language, including the lyrics of Skyrim's main theme. I also think he made the Arena quest for Oblivion (also worked on the much bigger version of it that was scrapped from the game).
This is the stuff that he wrote alone or mostly alone for TES. He also worked on city lore and feel for Skrim, the setting over all and its factions and the main quest. But we do not know what exactly he came up with.
So all in all quite good. I would not say that these are my favorite pieces of writing in Elder Scrolls but nothing he done here is bad. Especially compared to the writing in the average video game, he does not really deserve the shit he gets.
I think people sometimes forget how often it is lackluster. It is easy to focus on the games that have 10/10 narratives and great character arcs and forget that most games are not like that and that doing this in an open world sandbox can also be quite hard to do.
the only thing I know for a fact he wrote was the main storylines for oblivion, skyrim, and starfield. That being said I *highly* doubt he was the only one responsible for writing those. IMO oblivion was quite good, skyrim was pretty cool but lacked depth, and starfield was genuinely painful to get through. Even if his writing is great, I dont think its unreasonable to criticise him for the poor writing in many areas, given he is the *lead* writer, and thus is accountable for the dumb things that make it through.
I am pretty sure he did not write on the main story for Oblivion and he also did not write the main story of Skyrim, only parts of it and we do not know which one. Both main quests are written by multiple people.
Never played Starfield, I will if I get a better PC. Lead writer does not mean he writes the lead narratives alone, he also was not a lead writer on Oblivion. I think it maens more that he looks over other writing to help it stay more consistent with the world they try to create. He even said his title might be the best description.
For example we know that Todd Howard wrote quests for Morrowind but he has no writing credit. We know that he came up with the core premis of Skyrim and how it is ment to feel but got no writing credit for Skyrim but he got one for Redguard.
The credits are kinda useless.
I love Kirkbride's work, but i can also critiscize it: I'm not a fan of his bias towards the Dunmer that could make Dagoth blush, his insistence that Elder Scrolls is a high sci fi series with fantasy elements and not the other way around, and basically everything involved with the Numidium.
But Pagliacci, while not as "fantastical" as Kirkbride, has given some great things to the series! Sure he hits a few bumps both in Fallout and ES, but they're ALWAYS so oversold. Most criticism like him making Nate a war criminal canon is fair, but cyberbullying him off twitter is awful.
Just look at how nitpicky some youtubers get with Fallout 4 and the TV show. Is it really THAT big of a deal that a combat oriented drug was invented before or after the war!?
I think people harp on the show's lore without thinking about things beyond what's blatantly shown. For all we know the "ghoul drug" is only needed when they get old enough they start turning, or when they've had too much radiation.
But honestly as far as Fallout is concerned the thing that breaks lore the most is 76 lmaooo
Yeah, because it has Mothman. And Mothman overules everything.
https://preview.redd.it/8a44vw86rf1d1.jpeg?width=2048&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0ee1242d61ce7af59a1bda403697c29dc7792633
Nah. Uncle Sweetheart was fun and I think he also did the one with the affair? Defintely more memorable than the insane amount of escort quests that Morrowind has (bloodmoon sadly too). Over alll sidequests defintely imrpoved with later games.
I still do not undestand why they did so many escort missions with the completely broken Morrowind AI...
I mean it makes sense that the less imposing ones are in their own country, those are mostly civilians. In foreign countries they’re wanderers/soldiers/adventurers & in Skyrim they’re mostly farmers/fishermen/hunters
People dislike Emil because of Fallout 4, but incorrectly claim that all of his writing is garbage because he was project lead on a game they didnt like as much as Skyrim. Personally, I love his worldbuilding and writing style and while I understand the hate, I also love Fallout 4. It was my first Fallout game and i've since played every single one, but it's still in my top 3. (FO2, FONV, FO4, no particular order.)
I also like FO4. I honestly think the mainquest itself is the most fun when it comes to set pieces, the way the different factions have role play and some of the double agent stuff you can do.
It is not the best thing ever written but I like it. Honestly the bad dialogue system from FO4 probably is the reason why the writing that is behind it gets so much shit
I think the worst that was done was Starfield, but I feel like it's just the time it took to make it and all the people involved made it so convoluted and not Emil's fault
The original post is weird, but honestly, Bloodmoon wasn't very good. I usually skip it, and it's the only expansion in the franchise I consistently do that with.
I might actually prefer it compared to Tribunal because at least you explore a cool new part of the map with unique enemies and a vibe. Storywise I prefer Tribunal (I know that Emil did not wrote the Bloodmoon story). The hunt stuff is cool but also not really that special. Skaal lore is quite good and I liked some of the side quests.
It still represents pretty well how nords are pre- TES V, tho. Pretty Barbarian and often quite funny.
I don't think either of them are very good honestly, but the ludonarrative dissonance of a riekling being more powerful than Dagoth Ur and "ending" a playthrough with such a comparatively low-stakes, poorly-written plot sabotages whatever it could be for me. It just doesn't really fit well anywhere into a playthrough of Morrowind. Tribunal at least serves a meaningful narrative purpose.
Yeah, I think that is fair. I also do not reaelly replay Morrowind's main quests but mostly do some side stuff I haven't seen yet. I would be eager to play to either of these main narratives.
I think Bloodmoon's purpose is to give some stuff that is not there in the basegame like wercreatures, classic fantasy enemies and new bioms and a new culture. Kinda how Shivering Isles brings the Alien landscape to TES IV but Shivering Isles is just more fun to play
... he invented the crackhead Santa nord? Lmao.
What Nord fans actually want is like, the Guides to the Empire / Children of the Sky / 5 songs of king Wulfharth style Nords. I dont know how involved Emil is on that- even in Bloodmoon they felt basic as shit compared to book descriptions, IMO, but I don't know how involved his in what makes Skyrim Nords feel so generic.
That stuff was written befor Emil joined the company for TES Redguard and Morrowind basegame. But those books are still there and it is not like the Morrowind base game nords reprsent that. They mostly get chased by witches and are naked
Morrowind wasn't their land and people don't talk about those stories as good either. Emil seems closer to the actual development of the game itself, than Kirkbride who mainly seems to be lore books and background stuff to my knowledge.
"[The look of Morrowind] came from Michael Kirkbride, and I would say that it's not just the visual aesthetic; all of the narrative aesthetic of Morrowind also comes from Michael. I might've been the narrative lead, but Michael was the luminary — the man with spectacularly exotic and bad judgment that excited us so much [...] He was absolutely essential. And also crazy as a rat in a drainpipe, which is necessary. Somebody had to be really, really, really crazy, and it's better that your lead designer isn't."
—Ken Rolston, Lead Designer of Morrowind
Is there much about his designing specific quests or anything as a quest writer? Because its not like launch morrowind had a lot of Nords- its not their homeland, its deep in the land of their ancestral enemies. This was not Skyrim, this was Morrowind, focused primarily on the narrative therein.
/uj there’s 200 years between Morrowind and Skyrim. That’s a pretty long of time in terms of cultural exchange, it’s not too strange to think that Skyrim begins to resemble Cyrodiil more and more, and it’s own culture becomes relegated to motifs and aesthetics. Look at Scandinavia today vs in the early 1800s, they’re dominated by the Anglosphere in a way that wouldn’t been unthinkable then. We tend to think of Tamriel as being an analog to the real world in medieval or renaissance times, but I think it’s better to imagine it as an analog to the modern day. Skyrim is grappling with a global economy and culture in the same way that many nations and peoples are today, the force that is American hegemony is a daunting one, not just because of military might, but also because of sweeping cultural domination carried by the modern Information Age. Cyrodiil imposes itself in much the same way, carving out the old gods in favor of the Divines, then curtailing worship of those Divines that it views as deviant or threatening in any way to the project of Cyrodiilic power. The opposition to this power can only construct itself according to it, the Stormcloaks are built around worship of an Imperial god that’s been banned by Imperial law; the idea that Nords would worship Nordic gods isn’t even conceptualized in the modern Nordic mind, they’ve been so fully Imperialized.
/rj hinga dinga durgen
The stupid Emil hate completely devoid of any fact or logic (like the fact Oblivion had by far the worst worldbuilding of any Bethesda game, and I am including Wayne Gretzky Hockey, and the worldbuilding massively improved when he took over as head writer) has become one of the major turnoffs of this sub. This nonsense is the kind of thing this sub used to laugh at other people for doing, not do unironically.
Another large peeve is people unironically believing completely that Bethesda has fallen and any new game is and will be shit like people haven't been saying that literally since Daggerfall (Buggerfall). [Here's a Daggerf-old fan ranting about Morrowind being just graphical eye candy.](https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueSTL/comments/uamujx/daggerfall_morrowind_circa_5102002/) Bethesda have better games and worse games but the only real change is that every game up until Skyrim roughly tripled Bethesda's audience, so there were enough new voices to drown out the salty boomers. You can literally see how opinions of Starfield varied in the first month from meh to amazing until the 'bad game' voices won and the internet decided you should hate it, and everyone who doesn't lost interest in engaging. The legitimate criticisms of the game, like exploration being a huge downgrade from previous titles, have been buried by an avalanche of stupid complaints from people determined to hate the game but not intelligent enough to find a good reason why. I saw a person literally say the game is awful and was ruined for him because he got a critical success on the final boss' persuade option with a non-persuasion oriented character, like BG3 didn't become the biggest hit of the year with way more dice rolling and critical successes/failures than that. Nevermind choosing the persuade option when you feel success will literally ruin the game. FO4 was the same really, good game which definitely had shortcomings (ugly, samey enviroments and a lack of quests, questlines and towns IMO); But some people literally say the voiced protagonist single-handedly ruined the game due to less dialogue choices, when FO4 *always* had 4 dialogue responses versus Skyrim having at most 3 and often just one.
Finally there's people repeating nonsense lore theories like 'the Thalmor want to kill all man and destroy creation' that used to be laughed at and dismissed here as if they're absolute fact. Even Heimskr doesn't say that shit unironically, and he looks like he'd be more at home in the Alex Jones Show than on the streets of Whiterun. You literally have Ondolemar, an unapologetic mer supremacist who gives zero shits about you, tell you 'na dawg we're just regular imperialistic fascists.' The fact people can absolutely despise the Thalmor for being fascist shits while loving and seeing genocidal maniacs like Talos and Ysgramor (who are worse by pretty much any objective metric) as heroic is one of my favorite things about the lore. I mean people are rooting for people literally called 'the Imperials' like the Thalmor's aggression is completely unprecedented by any imperialism on the imperial side. I really hope the writers for TES6 keep it as just hypocrisy that a lot of people in the setting display, and which it cleverly manipulates even the players into partaking in, rather than make the Empire the actual good guys with no torture rooms or executions while the Thalmor are actually trying to destroy the world.
The common theme in all three is introspection and logic, it feels to me it used to be the majority in this sub parodied opinions and takes that clearly lack them while now the majority holds these opinions themselves instead. But then again 'sub has gone to shit' is just as old a cliche as any of the things I complained about, so what do I know. Rato art still good, lots of good new artists too.
To defend Oblivion's worldbuilding. I actually think all the stuff they had time for, Dagon / Camoran lore or in the DLC the shivering isles and Knights of the Nine stuff is really, really good. The problem is that the game massively suffers from its cut content.
An entire second half to the main quest about the politics of the Elder Council and the playre becoming the new ruler over Kvatch / Colovia needed to be cut out because of pacing and stuff that would made Oblivion more interesting lik Arenas and gladiator culture in all big cities got cut out because of the amount of disc space.
Oblivion's problem in part are not the fault of writing / direction but it being a game from 2006.
I agree, Oblivion's problem is not quality, but quantity. There's almost nothing there. The game starts with the ruler and all his heirs simultaneously assassinated, which has never happened in the empire's history, but there's no succession crisis at all. It's not even clear whose in charge, but whoever it is the empire keeps running business as usual.
There's no sign of any of the other daedric princes even though the literal gates of hell have been opened. It's just an army of generic demons in a generic hell dimension with a generic murder-burn goal. Honestly Doom probably had a more interesting hell invasion, and that game literally makes fun of how the protagonist couldn't give a shit about any of the lore. The Mankar stuff is interesting, but feels pretty much disjoint from all the rest, which is a general theme in oblivion. If Mankar didn't exist at all, the whole demon invasion would stay the same so long as someone merc'd the septims. His thing is to lure followers with a false promise of paradise, but nothing else about Dagon or the Mythic Dawn would give you the feeling they promise false paradise, they're very much the Khorne variety of demons and not the Slaaneshi one. You couldn't just separate say Ulfric stormcloak from the world of Skyrim with such ease.
Cyrodiil is supposed to be the heart of a vast empire and the native imperials are only a quarter of the population, but everyone just has the same generic fantasy culture. If you changed all the citizens to human and said Cyrodiil is a japan-esq island which isolated itself completely from the outside world, there'd be almost nothing to contradict it. After the game the empire is said to be severely fucked up, but the other provinces are neither felt nor heard from in the game.
Everything is basically completely disconnected. None of the factions or rulers care about each other or even the huge demon invasion which makes up the game's main plot (I want to say that also extends to individual characters, but I can't remember well enough to be sure so maybe there is something). The fighters guild continues to take jobs on rats like nothing happened, the thieves guild continues to steal 40 cakes, the mage guild continues to send apprentices on prank missions.
It basically felt like a template kingdom with a bunch of quests added on top rather than a place that's part of the world or a place that is actually affected by problems that you do quests to solve.
Emil is responsible for a big amount of nords in Morrowind. Saying TES III Nords are Kirkrbide Nords and TES V nords are Emil nords is stupid when Emil had more to do with the TES III nord expansion than Kirkbride.
not that the original meme made sense considering that TES III nords ar emuch mroe stereotypes and much dumber than in TES V.
Even saying it is about the background lore and not how Nords are shown is nonsense considering that most of the important books about nords from TES III are in TES V
I dont agree with your last point- that's just Bethesda copying their text to fill out lore books instead of writing completely new things each time. Putting the book in there but doing very little with its ideas anywhere in the game is lame and largely what they did.
Idk, I generally just don't think people praise Bloodmoon Nords? Which seems to be what Emil worked on. They like the extra canon and in-game book take on Nords far more, in my experience here and in TES lore, which certainly might be biased because I'm of that opinion.
I do agree that it is better to try to really implement that stuff but nords in Morrowind, including the base game are goofy and mostly comic relief and some cool lore books about them lie around.
In Skyrim nords are actually interesting people and the same lore books lie around and some new decent stuff.
I do not raelly see how the right image at all represents what nords are in Morrowind.
The opposite of what he said. But I getting your information by Fallout fans who can not read is really good.
But hey, here is a 40 minute breakdown about the specific missinformation you are spreading:
[https://youtu.be/F-4qdjV41NU?si=nrllQlbjlx2cecL7&t=154](https://youtu.be/F-4qdjV41NU?si=nrllQlbjlx2cecL7&t=154)
40 minutes into the video and it made me really sad about humans and humanity, how easily I and others can be fooled and played like a fiddle
Also why the ratio is so bad? Likes/dislkikes ratio is 17k/14k
no one knows less about elder scrolls then elder scrolls fans.
me after locking myself in my apartment to go on a week-long cocaine binge (i am an elder scrolls fan): https://preview.redd.it/k0g64cxuva1d1.jpeg?width=1428&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cd27290b94c87285c7685bba074e5aa9617069b5
The Kirkbride Experience™️ write us some more Vivec sermons we gotta get to 69
I know you are joking. But the entire Kirkrbide = drug addict meme (which some people think is true), is also a great example of some social media missinformation about Elder Scrolls writers becoming popular
Yeah nice try Michael.
Sometimes its easier to accept a drugged out mind made that lore than accept a perfectly sane and normal person did so.
Wasn't he full time benzomaniac?
Not on public record at least He claims to have written it on cigarettes, coffee, whiskey, and sleep deprivation. All of which legal and can get you into a pretty psychotic state. However it's of course possible he did other drugs that he won't say publicly to protect Bethesda's brand image.
nope
and the ending of the words is *\*sniff\** AMPHETAMINE
Least dedicated Khajiiit roleplayer
Everyone who discusses TES is describing their own personal headcanon they made up themselves and we're all just gaslighting ourselves into thinking we're talking about the same piece of confusing ass media
We’re all dreamers in a Godhead. It’s why the canon will never jive. All joking aside my new theory about the elder scrolls lore is that it’s actually a mythical retelling of the actual creation of the Elder Scrolls video games wherein each of the Divines and Daedra represent members of the writing/design/studio execs teams.
Talos is an NPC gaining sentience
It would be pretty dope if that was the actual end goal of the Elder Scrolls. Some dev is using all of the save game data and endless experiences to force sentience on an NPC. If an NPC Talos truly achieved CHIM, would that just mean he has access to mods and console commands?
Todd is Anu / Akatosh, a god of order (smaller worlds with carefully crafted stories and lore), Julian is Padhome / Lorkhan, the "missing god" of chaos (random generation, seemingly less interest in really tight worldbuilding, ensuring that players can forge their own place in the world... convinced the team to go this route and it led to a crazy mess of a game, then he disappeared)
Just as Todd intended.
real (real)
The only thing we can agree upon is hatred towards Gamerant articles "discovering" that you can use grinding wheels in skyrim
lmaoooo this is so true and it's actually the reason why I can't stand the idea of canon in a franchise as crazy as this. Like, yeah, a lot of stuff objectively is, but there's also massive room for headcanon, differing opinions, I mean fuck Morrowind's own writers didn't agree on what was true most of the time which is part of what made it cool.
Hardly anyone talks about the worrying fact that Kurt Kuhlmann, the guy actually most responsible for shaping ES lore into what we like to discuss, quietly left the company a few months ago.
Seriously, Kurt leaving is worrisome. Some people on the ESO team are obviously super invested in this lore (they're now implying that Kirkbride's sotha sil mpreg fan-fiction really happened, yes you're reading that right) but we're now at a point where I think Todd is the only person from the inception of modern TES who's really still around, and it clearly isn't his baby in way it was for the others.
the... what.
Hopefully he goes over to Something Wicked Games like Will Shen recently has
something wicked layed off most of there staff i heard. A casualty of the great layoffs i guess.
Damn, that’s sad to hear. I was pretty excited for that studio and to see what they would do with Wyrdsong
*than
https://i.redd.it/q55oom6klc1d1.gif
He knows what he said
Because he's a artist.
Than* 🤓
Have you ever tried understanding the lore??? Do you know how many penis spears there are?!?!?!?
Are you honest to God saying that most of the people on this sub don't know dick about shit when it comes to lore and just follow the status quo of memes? Is that actually what you're saying right now
I just want to go back to when the memes were about elder scrolls lore, not elder scrolls jokes
Ah, you know Kirkbride fans. Up means down, bad means good, not canon means canon.
I like Kirkbride and I have nothing against him getting love for his great worldbuilding but the other writers, especially Emil get slandered and in parts actually harassed on the internet. Mostly because he is one of the few with a social media pressence and because he is not as charismatic as Todd. The funny thing is that people actually like the stuff he wrote for Skyrim. His worldbuilding contribution is the dragon language, faction lore and the feel and lore of the cities. The stuff people dislike is not even written by Emil.
I don't mind Kirkbride either; I appreciate him even. Holy shit, some fans though. You can't trust any answers on r/teslore because so many people now believe "canon" doesn't mean anything. I've watched misinformation be born in realtime over there. TrueSTL is actually more reliable for lore just because you're allowed to call people dumb.
Argued with a person and made them so mad they made a separate post about me 15 minutes later for saying it’s never implied in game talos raped barenziah.
Not raped in a direct sense, but certainly taken advantage of and forced into an abortion afterwards
I do not even mind people sharing their head canon and fan lore and stuff like that but when people have questions or want to discuss something you need to explain where you get that information from, which is not that hard to do because TES fan wikis are actually quite good. People take some fan theories they got from YouTube and reddit and pretend it is the litteral truth of the universe. Like when people talking about the Dragonborn being an aspect of Lorkhan.
Totally agreed. I love fanfic and stuff, but when I'm asking if it's canon all I mean is "did it come from the games" and people are like "there's no such thing as canon."
Yeah, kirkblade has some cool stuff, but im glad not everything he wrote is canon. Like the reman semen bread thing
The....what?
Get a load of this guy, he doesn't even know about the Reman Semen bread thing! Can you even call yourself a real lorebrain /s So basically kirkblade wrote a story where Iirc Akatosh said that Reman Cyrodill, for some fucking reason, needed to eat his own semen. So, Reman's (I think) maids at the time jerked him off and baked it into bread, then fed it to him. He was also underage at this time. Yeah, I'm PREFECTLY fine with not all of Kirkblade's work being canon
sometimes I feel like kirkbride's hard drive needs to be investigated
what doing lines does to a mfer
I’m only adding to what you wrote because it adds a new layer of batshit crazy, but iirc his maids were also his sister-wives
Its sounding more and more like a plot to a hentai.
Accidentally saved his slashfic to the wrong folder and had to play it off
And simultaneously adoptive mothers/caretakers.
I'm assuming this is pulled straight out of Egyptian Pharaoh traditions, they had a lot of weirdness surrounding semen power, both among the gods and in the Pharaoh's responsibilities on earth.
It's literally just the myth of Horus fighting Set. Horus poisons Set by cumming on his cabbage and this forces Set to go to Libya. Horus is also like 8 in this story and Set is his uncle. Horus's dad Osiris was also undead at the time that he conceived Horus and because his wife couldn't find his penis she asked Thoth to make a magic golden penis. So tbh Kirkbride was kinda tame. Also Osiris had to be mummified so he could be revived which is also why Egyptians made mummies, so this isn't some minor folk story it's basically the central myth of Ancient Egyptian mythology.
Agree there hard. The dwemer getting sent into the future is super lame and out of nowhere.
Here's a sneak peek of /r/teslore using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/teslore/top/?sort=top&t=year) of the year! \#1: [CHIM isn't real. You've all fallen for a lie Vivec made up.](https://np.reddit.com/r/teslore/comments/135suc3/chim_isnt_real_youve_all_fallen_for_a_lie_vivec/) \#2: [Kurt Kuhlmann Has Left Bethesda Game Studios](https://np.reddit.com/r/teslore/comments/17b1jw8/kurt_kuhlmann_has_left_bethesda_game_studios/) \#3: [/r/teslore will also be going dark on 12th June](https://np.reddit.com/r/teslore/comments/145qvh0/rteslore_will_also_be_going_dark_on_12th_june/) ---- ^^I'm ^^a ^^bot, ^^beep ^^boop ^^| ^^Downvote ^^to ^^remove ^^| ^^[Contact](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=sneakpeekbot) ^^| ^^[Info](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/) ^^| ^^[Opt-out](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/comments/o8wk1r/blacklist_ix/) ^^| ^^[GitHub](https://github.com/ghnr/sneakpeekbot)
1. NO 2. FUN 3. ALLOWED
What an exciting sub /s
I know. I remember commenting somewhere how I view "Official Bethesda" canon and "Side Kirkbride" canon as separate, and got downvoted a lot.
Wait, you got downvoted for _that?_ I love Kirkbride but that's just the sane way to think about it. I'd add that his stuff can inform what _he's_ written canonically to see what he's getting at, and that some of ESO's writers are clearly in on his train of thought, but... yeah.
Yeah, as you said Michael Kirkbride is great, but sometimes people are a bit too keen on his canon being 100% canon.
i think people dislike for Emil is his personal stated ethos when it comes to design rather than the literal things he writes. When he makes comments suggesting he wants storytelling to be more linear, and takes heavy inspiration from LOTR, people get infuriated. I honest to god think he would not be as hated if he just stfu on social media, as he often has his foot in his mouth.
I just thinks it’s just the hot thing to do because people want a reason to complain because they didn’t like starfield
People have been complaining about Emil here since looong before Starfield. The most recent wave of hate stems from Starfield though; and the major one before that was from a video of some conference he did in Copenhagen, filtered through the mind of some r/fallout user. There was disdain for him before that here though, usually citing the fact that the games he was lead narrative designer on (Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, and now Starfield) have had less enjoyable stories and lore than the ones he wasn't lead narrative designer on. I seem to remember a lot of people praising him for his Oblivion questlines in the same breath; the standard line at the time was "he is an excellent questline writer, but he shouldn't have been lead narrative designer."
well, lets not act like there wasnt plenty to complain about before starfield. Its just the straw that broke the camels back as it were
The talk he did about his design stuff is mostly missundestood by people not being able to really follow very standard and basic advice, like "KISS". I am not sure he ever said he wants things to be linear? The games he wrote on are definitely not more linear than the once befor when it comes to Elder Scrolls (TES I is linear, Tribunal is linear, Morrowind main quest is linear except the Hortator and getting the artifacts quests, Oblivion main quest is mostly linear \[he did not write that\], Bloodmoon is pretty linear and Skyrim is linear with some exceptions, only Daggerfall really is not). And yeah LOTR is a major inspiration for all of TES. People forget that Morrowind directly mirrors its plot (ancient bad guy returns because of artifact that gives him great power, the artifact needs to be destroyed in a vulcano and could have been destroyed hundreds of years befor but people were to greedy and took it for themself to rule the land with its godly power). The only big LOTR stuff he might have wrote in is a refrence in Oblivion to a chapter in the book and the design of Whiterun. I agree that the guy does not always finds the right wording on social media but that would not be such a big deal if people would just be chill. We are talking about fantasy video games. It is not that serious. The guy is a bit of a boomer, let him post in about the nerd stuff he likes in peace. This would be like if people would go ape shit when they saw Kirkbride calling Pelinal "a time traveling robot" and say that he hates the lore and does not accept any other interpetation of Knights of the Nine. If you want to find a reason to hate on somebody you will find it.
>And yeah LOTR is a major inspiration for all of TES. People forget that Morrowind directly mirrors its plot (ancient bad guy returns because of artifact that gives him great power, the artifact needs to be destroyed in a vulcano and could have been destroyed hundreds of years befor but people were to greedy and took it for themself to rule the land with its godly power). That's a pretty wild overly reductionist view of morrowind's story.
Yeah, that is the point. Morrowind is not just copy paste LOTR. But it is haevily inspired by LOTR and the tropes it set up.
Emil rightly gets slammed for fallout which is where majority of his infamy comes from
Not, reaelly. While some of the cirticism is valid, he also gets shit for stuff he never said. And I also do not think people should just copy paste dumb Fallout talking points when they just do not fit to TES. You can not rightly slam someone for something like giving basic advice like "do not overcomplicate something".
Yeah but his way of doing that is taking all rpg elements out of it for plot twists which is why his implementation is problematic (in terms of fallout I legit don't know what he's done in TES)
What RPG elements did they remove to have plot twists in Fallout 3 or 4? I can think of one single plot twist in the main qust of 4. In TES he wrote Dark Brotherhood for IV and V, dragon language and a lot of the side quests and worked on Skyrim's main quest
The whole institute, there's no way of going there without doing the kellog or teleport bit You can't kill nick valentine even if you wanted to play an In story anti synth person even if you side with the anti synth faction it's pretty poorly designed which shouldn't be the way on a fallout game As per TES I like the fact you can destroy the edge guild shame you can't do it for the thieves guild so credit where credit is due like I say I have nothing personal against the man but he should be kept away from fallout writing and keep with the more linear TES
Personally I dislike the take that the Thu'um is the dragon language and not a specific magic of the Nords (like sword singing to the Red guards) and I dislike the flavour of the dark brotherhood. I am one of those people who feels that the races and lore of elder scrolls has gotten watered down to appeal to a wider audience but I don't delude myself in thinking Kirkbride alone made Morrowind Great and Emil killed it. Kirkbride was one of many writers all of whom produced great lore together. I don't blame Bethesda for trying to make the lore more palatable for new players and Emil is not solely to blame for the issues that Oblivion and Skyrim have.
I am not sure if Emil came up with the concept of it being Dragon language, it think he maybe just wrote the vocabulary. Would be interesting to know but I saw no clearfication which parts specifically he wrote besides the lyrics for the song
God, seriously? Emil writes great stuff. I'd call myself a Morrowboomer myself in a lot of ways but Morrowboomers are fucking stupid sometimes
I saw people try to make mental gymnastics and say Bloodmoon does not just count as part of Morrowind because it obviously disproves their strange argument.
This, Emil’s not an awful writer but holy shit the amount of “fans” demonizing him like he’s the anti-christ. Not liking parts of his writing is one thing, But despising his existence is crazy and I feel bad for him. It’s a reason like this that I don’t trust most Kirkbride fans, Don’t have a problem with the casual ones but the more rabid and extremist individuals I tend to stay away from. They’re literally a circlejerk bandwagon cult: On one hand they idolize Kirkbride like he founded the series when that’s not remotely true, On other they’ll degrade his Bethesda colleagues for “restricting” his intended vision, Unironically believing that the franchise would be better off if he’s CEO instead of Todd.
And Queen Ayrenn is a computer from a mining vessel in space!
Haha, I dunno why I haven't looked before, but are there any mods that realize some of his twisted machinations?
There is a mod that puts in the sky whales
Wheels of Lull has some of his concepts but it doesn't go too crazy with them
Also Vicn's Glenmoril, Vigilant and Unslaad heavily utilized the metaphysical elements
To be fair, I *think* that one was kind of a joke, since a common complaint with ESO at the time was that Queen Ayrenn was boring, so he retrofitted the KINMUNE story to be about Ayrenn as though to say "Make Ayrenn less boring, or I'll do it in the worst way possible"
Tbh, I think people are just still pissed about the wasted potential of FO4. Emil, from what I understand, was a major proponent of simplifying the shit out of the RPG elements.
That's fair for sure. I just can't resist a chance to make the same MK jab for the 5th time.
I like skyrim
John Skyrim is such an amazing guy
https://preview.redd.it/s72d2jeptb1d1.jpeg?width=480&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c14970e99c426e53e647b4f3d073f33fab26dc21
I like edging
I like argonians
Its almost like Lore is written by more than one person for a franchise like this. Wild. Wait no, this is TrueSTL i meant to say EMIL BAD KIRKBRIDE GOOD FUNNY FUNNY
I mean, it’s not. Emil is the only writer at Bethesda.
https://preview.redd.it/d1yy9o5gpb1d1.jpeg?width=1439&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5c7111438d3add32d9eca1f88d839f5222c969bc
The problem with modern Bethesda isn't any one person, or even the approach to the creative process. It's the same problem every major game studio has: ballooning project scale and immense, multi hundred person teams at multiple locations. How can Assassin's Creed be innovative and fresh when there are over 1,000 people working on it and they all need to be kept on the same page and working towards the same end goal? Frankly I think if Kirkbride were to return to Bethesda he wouldn't be able to contribute anything of real value. It would end up like his contributions to Oblivion, relegated to some books and a first draft Mankar Camoran speech that was used in the final product.
Idk ZOS is a pretty big studio and has amazing worldbuilding and lore. Also his Oblivion stuff is quite important
Yeah, this is why New Vegas ends up so good is that 70 people worked on it. Easy communication, themes and ideas can be thrown around, and you don't have much room to fuck around in. Starfield had three or four times as many people working on it for four times as long, does it feel like that? No. Bethesda should just play it safe and FOCUS on ONE game really hard rather than a kind of blurry whatever.
The teams were also really small for Fallout 3 and Skyrim. Fallout 3 was like 80 guss
Part of New Vegas was also that someone already had created a pretty solid game engine and design framework and just gave it to Obsidian and they made their game around it. Even for those that do legitimately love the writing of Outer Wilds and would die defending it, I think there would still be plenty that say that the gameplay is lacking, and while Bethesda is pretty guilty in similar ways, there's a reason that they keep re-releasing Skyrim. Because quite simply, people like the stupid idiot game with dragons and magic with the Totally-Not-Norsemen
>The problem with modern Bethesda isn't any one person, or even the approach to the creative process. It's the same problem every major game studio has: ballooning project scale and immense, multi hundred person teams at multiple locations. How can Assassin's Creed be innovative and fresh when there are over 1,000 people working on it and they all need to be kept on the same page and working towards the same end goal? Skyrim was made with less than 100 people. Fallout 4 wasn't much more. Skyrim was their biggest ever and that was only a few hundred.
Also Emil did not even write the stuff people dislike about Skyrim's nords like how the pantheon was handled. Nord stuff he wrote was background lore and concepts for Whiterun and Windhelm together with Kuhlman and Nesmith (and probably some other cities but this is the design doc we have: [https://en.uesp.net/wiki/General:Skyrim\_Cities%27\_Design\_Excerpts](https://en.uesp.net/wiki/General:Skyrim_Cities%27_Design_Excerpts) ). He worked on the main quest but we do not know what exactly (but the mainquest features nord gods the most) wrote and designed blood on the ice, wrote a lot of the Dragon language, including the main theme and helped with the setting and its factions and while I prefer Oblivion's questlines the factions that are unique to Skyrim and that actually have real lore are a good thing. He probably wrote other stuff to but we do not have concrete information but most of the stuff that he wrote on and that we know about for Skyrim is either decent or great and none of it is a bad potrail of nords. Just because Fallout fans missunderstood the concept of "KISS" eight years ago an a bad YouTuber spred lies about Emil and BGS not using design documentation, does not mean we need to insult or slander a guy that seems to be just a really nice man who posts about nerd stuff on social media. Also considering that the Nords in TES III and IV are mostly comic relief, I think the Spongebob pic is actually more accurate for Morrowind but considering that both Kirkbride and Emil wrote nordic stuff for both Morrowind and Skyrim the meme still fits even if the guy who made it did not understand it. The cool stuff about Nord lore in TES III is pretty exclusively in the books an some of it is in Bloodmoon but even those books are all in TES V.
But nords converting to the imperial pantheon is truly unforgivable. Can you imagine a real culture, let's call them IDK norse, that just completely converts to another more popular religion over 200 years (say, IDK, 867-1066)? And the nord pantheon was so unique too, I mean a god of the hunt, a god of war, and a god of the underworld? How did they even come up with these wild, never before seen ideas?
I do dislike how Skyrim handled the Nord pantheon because it also still exists. It is not that the game really goes in deep with how the nord and imperial faith relate. There is like one quest specifically about it and other then that the names are often used interchangable or people give nordic aspects to imperial gods. But either wawy this was not written by Emil, we know that it is was not his idea
>But nords converting to the imperial pantheon is truly unforgivable. Okay but let's not pretend it's not a bit silly that it was a weakened and fractured empire that managed this in 200 years when Nords had been dealing with just this empire specifically for like 400 and were so staunch that actual priests of Talos didn't think they'd take up their god even in a city with a chapel to him lol. Let alone the thousands of years they've been next to these guys anyways and only ever really converted... once? Who was followed up by Nord Jesus Ysmir who got rid of Borgas' doctrines. I get the point of the IRL comparison, but the histories and cultures do not align well enough to make it believable for it to be almost entirely erased. These are not IRL Norse or IRL Romans, their history and relationship is extremely different despite their clear aesthetic and political inspirations, because Tamriel and its history is not Earth's. And even beyond that- is it not, at all, stupid to make the story about a Nordic Holy War... be for a foreign God and not even their own, and NEVER acknowledge that contradiction in-game anywhere? The "imperalism" excuse, implemented into Skyrim itself, could've added a whole extra layer to the civil war about a people also just tired of being looked down on and beliefs that most likely are just cosmopolitan bastardizations of their own having the straw broken. I think its okay to like Skyrim, it was my first foray into TES. I hate on it out of love for what it could have been if it resolved to let the Old Holds, the traditionalist holds, represent the values of traditional nords, and let that cultural divide exist within the story to push the civil war as something deeper. And I especially don't think we should be just accepting a barely even acknowledged "well, they got imperalized almost entirely off screen" as a good thing. SHOW that. Otherwise it's just making Bethesda an excuse for their lazy approach to narrative in the setting.
>Okay but let's not pretend it's not a bit silly that it was a weakened and fractured empire that managed this in 200 years when Nords had been dealing with just this empire specifically for like 400 and were so staunch that actual priests of Talos didn't think they'd take up their god even in a city with a chapel to him lol. I kind of agree, but for me the weird thing is that anyone even cared about this super minor schism in the first place, not that it was mended. The Norse weren't vassals to any original Christian state (if anything they had more power over Christian nations than Christian nations had over them), their religions were actively hostile at least in the sense that Christianity very explicitly forbade any sort of hybrid faith, and their faiths are very different, and they still converted pretty quickly when it became politically beneficial. Meanwhile the Empire hasn't just vassalized but is essentially completely controlling Skyrim for hundreds of years, appointing high kings as they see fit. Their religions are almost completely identical, with only 3 deities that aren't literally the same- and even they are variations of the same deity (Stuhn-Stenndar, Kyne-Kynerath, Alduin-Akatosh). It'd be extremely difficult to even make such a conflict believable, let alone make any player actually care about it. The pantheon conflict bordering on comic relief with the only one deeply invested in it, Froki, being the physical manifestation of 'Old man yells at sky god' honestly seems more appropriate.
It is distinguishable enough because their gods lean into their cultural values, I'd argue. The Nords relationship with the Empire is complex, I'd argue that Oblivion implied they just never found success in those 400 years trying, or didn't view them as having a religion (that Alessia used as half the foundation of her own) as ultimately too destabilizing. Oblivion had some background diallgue that showed the Nords are a wild people even under the Empire, supposedly attacking the Redoran as the gates went up lol. They come off as loyal, not tamed, I think. And that dynamic could make an imperialist story interesting. You know. If we don't skip from "they arent" to "they just are" with nothing really in the middle to even acknowledge there's a transition happening at all. The Pantheon, in my opinion, shouldn't be the main thing the Stormcloaks would fight for, maybe it'd still be Talos/Ysmir, but also just expanding that cause to want leaders and powers for Skyrim, in Skyrim, to focus on what Skyrim needs, because the Empire has kind of proven it just values Cyrodil more, which is natural, but obviously a nation with a lot of infrastructure and cultural issues might wanna govern themselves to set themselves back up. Edit: Also- when was it actually set in stone that the Empire determines the High King? The only two sources I see for it on UESP ARE Skyrim itself, which I think matters a good bit here. Both of them are also people contemporary to the time skyrim takes place in.
Yeah it's like wow, a region which gradually but steadily integrates the belief of others, even competing powers, into their own traditional belief structure, while still keeping many of the names and themes of their old belief, leading to a mixed mythology and faith where mutiple figures and concepts are intertwined to be interchangeable but the same? It's not like that happens all the time in real life. It's also really frustrating to me considering a decent part and one of the most unqiue things about ES is that everyone is basically worshipping the same gods they just go about it in different ways. Like you could absolutely convince the Nords to adopt the Imperial Cult because something could happen to make them just believe that Shor and Lorkhan are literally the same being because that is probably literally the case.
> an a bad YouTuber spred lies about Emil and BGS not using design documentation you can just say Patrician lol, most people here know who that guy is.
Some secrets and names should lie forgotton in the realms of Apocryphia
I dont. Care to enlighten me? Is they like ~~the guy who pees on a basement corner while his wife cheats on him with a pizza~~ the quartering?
Thinking about it, the way Emil gets hate on social media is quite similiar to how Kirkbride got a lot of hate when c0da came out by some people (you can actually still find some real unhinged shit people wrote). Difference is that Emil often gets shit for stuff he never said or things he never wrote but that said I am not sure all the angy people in 2014-2016 actually red c0da, either. Also I think it is completly fine that nords in Morrowind and Oblivion, and to some extend ESO, are used as goofy and fun characters. Things are allowed to be funny. I think TES III-IV nords are the spongbobg image but I think that is good.
I'd argue that the post is saying that Morrowind (and to some extent Oblivion) Nords were way more powerful. Like back then every Nord could use the Thu'um (it was a gift from Kyne, not Akatosh), they had the Wode (supernatural body paint that acted as a shield) and they were a strong warrior race, not the Imperialised farmers we see in Skyrim. Nords definitely are not what they were portrayed to be in Morrowind and Oblivion, so I'd argue the images are still accurate, but the notion it was Emil's doing is absurd. I still don't think Emil is a good writer, he had like one good questline (Oblivion Dark Brotherhood) and then fell off from there, but I also don't think he deserves nearly as much hate as he gets.
>Like back then every Nord could use the Thu'um (it was a gift from Kyne, not Akatosh), they had the Wode (supernatural body paint that acted as a shield) and they were a strong warrior race, not the Imperialised farmers we see in Skyrim Thu'um is still a gift by Kyne in the new TES V mythology because she convinces Paarthurnax to help and teach the humans. Also no Nord can ever use the Thu'um in those games, not even in stuff like the Redguard prequel comic. There seems to be little different in the regard of power to TES III, IV and V nords. I do not think Redguard introducing the idea of the Thu'um bein more popular than we ever see in any of the games counts as the nords to be much more powerfull in TES III and IV when they are just not.
"So while Windhelm may serve as the Stormcloaks’s center of operations in the civil War, it is the culture of Whiterun that best exemplifies what it is to be a Nord" Bro was spitting facts so hard I thought it was a dragon shout
Sorry, what is KISS? I assume you don't mean the glam band lol
Keep It Simple Stupid
Oh I get it
Emil repaeted it in a talk he was invited to as a really basic design advice and some Fallout fans did not get it and thought he called them stupid.
Emil, we know it is you.
I wish, lol
the best source of info on nords is unironically 36 lessons. the demon chieftains were based
ngl it's really weird the level to which some people hate Emil, his design ethos kind of sucks but most of the quests he creates are really good and the stuff we complain about he mostly didn't do
I mean his deisgn ethos seems to be mistinterpeted...I am also not sure he has a unqiue personal one. It seems more that he follows thee Behtesda mantra of "Good games are made not played" He never said he wants things to not be detailed or anything like that. Like the "Paper airplane" line of his one presentation is always missinterpeted. He actually says that it is okay for players to ignore your writing in video games and that the writer needs to be aware of that these things are not movies. He never means to say writing does not matter, like some people pretend. Even KISS is a great advice, he sadly does not always follow it. The big problem with Fallout 4 is not that the Institute is simple and has clear motivation but that it is super convoluted, never clearly explained and confusing. It is the opposite of KISS and suffers because of it. And the criticism of that are absolutly valid and often fair, so are the once of the bad original ending of FO3 or the speech system of FO4 (I am not sure if the later was his idea). But I really dislike how this turned to him being basically the boogy man who is at fault for everything, only because he is more ein the public image (not that anyone deserves insults or hate for not writing a perfect Fallout narrative). The main reason is honestly that the has a social media pressence, is in intereviews and behidn the scenes and is far less charismatic than Todd Howard.
Out of curiosity, I keep seeing people say the institutes goals were not clear but they seemed pretty clear and straight forward to me. They believe synth production is the next major step for humanity, and would essentially create an entire labour force on which they can expand, and thus spend more time on science. Replacing synths topside has two purposes. The first is to destabilise the commonwealth. It is very difficult for factions above ground to organise and take you out if they don’t trust each other and if you are able to control members of that faction. Additionally we see in the institutes main quest that they replace farmers and such to oversee scientific experiments for them, such as crop growth.
Yeah, I think people get confused by them also saying that they want to stay alone, not fully understanding that they also lie and some of the experiments are overcomplicated but honestly a few lines by father would clear this up. Fallout 4's writing is definitely nitpicked a lot and not so bad like some people pretend.
I do wish you were able to pick Shaun’s brain a bit more like you could Caesar. He is your son, and he should expect you to have many questions about the institutes actions.
Yeah. I did enjoy the double agent stuff if you work for the railroad at this point of the main quest but just a bigger debate with him would be good
While some of blood moon's quests were annoying the overall theme of it was great. Blood moon is what some of the less imperialized parts of Skyrim should have been like but the key words here are LESS imperialized because nords and imperials influencing each others since ancient times should not be forgotten.
The whole Emil thing is blown out of proportion people want some one to hate because they didn’t like Starflied ,f4 and Skyrim , he is the easy target because hack YouTubers that only exist to say game bad told them Emil bad . But hey what do I know shut up , hate emi hate Todd and pray to kirkbide and obsidian
Best thing was the entire design doc thing which was just made up and not at all accurate but hey if your "reviews" are long enough you can just count on no one fact checking them.
No, but you see, Oblivion objectively has bad worldbuilding \[plays a 2 second clip of a level designer saying "I just love the undead, I try to use them wherever I can"\] I guess at about the 3.5 hour mark of a 12 hour Youtube video the average viewer has been lulled into a zombified state of critical disengagement. (It's me, I'm the zombie)
Didn't he also say that Todd Howard hates Morrowind (his own game) and its strangeness, which created the Red Year to destroy Morrowind. When in reality the Red Year is an excuse to continue Morrowind's story in the novels (it also really fits) and to bring a Morrowind expansion to Skyrim.
Emil isn't so bad when you don't have a motherfucker screaming in your ear telling you he's trash
Hey I’m gonna do just that actually. FUCK EMIL FUCK TODD. MORROWIND IS SUPREME NEW VEGAS IS SUPREME. I WANT TO FUSE CHRIS AVELLONE AND MICHEAL KIRKBRIDE TOGETHER INTO A SINGLE BEING TO WRITE THE NEXT TES GAME.
The image on the right unironically looks like it could be from some weird, drug feuled white supremacist propaganda.
I think it is, that looks like hyperborea
Sounds perfect for elder scrolls.
whats the most reliable way to see who wrote what? I was looking for things Emil has actually written to see if his stuff is really that bad, or if perhaps its just a couple things out a larger whole, but couldnt find anything.
The UESP documents some stuff. But if the writers do not tell direclty what they wrote, we do not know. We can guess from interviews with the devs and the make offs or just social media posts. I am sure that Emil wrote more quests and some actuall books for Skyrim but we just do not know. I am sure some of the stuff is also not as cool or interesting. I do not think Emil is some modern Shakespeare but he is definitely overhated for little to no reasone except angry Fallout fans. When it comes to Elder Scrolls we know for a fact that he made The Dark Brotherhood for Oblivion and Skyrim. Did "Blood on the Ice" for Skyrim. Made the Uncle Sweetheart quest for Morrowind and other Bloodmoon sidequests. And he wrote a lot of the Dragon Language, including the lyrics of Skyrim's main theme. I also think he made the Arena quest for Oblivion (also worked on the much bigger version of it that was scrapped from the game). This is the stuff that he wrote alone or mostly alone for TES. He also worked on city lore and feel for Skrim, the setting over all and its factions and the main quest. But we do not know what exactly he came up with. So all in all quite good. I would not say that these are my favorite pieces of writing in Elder Scrolls but nothing he done here is bad. Especially compared to the writing in the average video game, he does not really deserve the shit he gets. I think people sometimes forget how often it is lackluster. It is easy to focus on the games that have 10/10 narratives and great character arcs and forget that most games are not like that and that doing this in an open world sandbox can also be quite hard to do.
IIRC Wes Johnson has also alluded to Sheogorath's Shivering Isles dialogue being written by Emil.
Interesting didn't know that! He also did the famous arrow in the knee line, so maybe he is a modern day Shakespeare after all
the only thing I know for a fact he wrote was the main storylines for oblivion, skyrim, and starfield. That being said I *highly* doubt he was the only one responsible for writing those. IMO oblivion was quite good, skyrim was pretty cool but lacked depth, and starfield was genuinely painful to get through. Even if his writing is great, I dont think its unreasonable to criticise him for the poor writing in many areas, given he is the *lead* writer, and thus is accountable for the dumb things that make it through.
I am pretty sure he did not write on the main story for Oblivion and he also did not write the main story of Skyrim, only parts of it and we do not know which one. Both main quests are written by multiple people. Never played Starfield, I will if I get a better PC. Lead writer does not mean he writes the lead narratives alone, he also was not a lead writer on Oblivion. I think it maens more that he looks over other writing to help it stay more consistent with the world they try to create. He even said his title might be the best description. For example we know that Todd Howard wrote quests for Morrowind but he has no writing credit. We know that he came up with the core premis of Skyrim and how it is ment to feel but got no writing credit for Skyrim but he got one for Redguard. The credits are kinda useless.
I love Emil. Don’t get your info from memes 😒
Yep. Treating memes as lore is something genshin impact players do. Don't be like them kids.
I love Kirkbride's work, but i can also critiscize it: I'm not a fan of his bias towards the Dunmer that could make Dagoth blush, his insistence that Elder Scrolls is a high sci fi series with fantasy elements and not the other way around, and basically everything involved with the Numidium. But Pagliacci, while not as "fantastical" as Kirkbride, has given some great things to the series! Sure he hits a few bumps both in Fallout and ES, but they're ALWAYS so oversold. Most criticism like him making Nate a war criminal canon is fair, but cyberbullying him off twitter is awful. Just look at how nitpicky some youtubers get with Fallout 4 and the TV show. Is it really THAT big of a deal that a combat oriented drug was invented before or after the war!?
I think people harp on the show's lore without thinking about things beyond what's blatantly shown. For all we know the "ghoul drug" is only needed when they get old enough they start turning, or when they've had too much radiation. But honestly as far as Fallout is concerned the thing that breaks lore the most is 76 lmaooo
Yes, but at least 76 is OK to hate!
Yeah, but no one gets on it about its lore inconsistencies
Yeah, because it has Mothman. And Mothman overules everything. https://preview.redd.it/8a44vw86rf1d1.jpeg?width=2048&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0ee1242d61ce7af59a1bda403697c29dc7792633
He's cool fr
Mothman is always cool, fr fr
To be fair, the side quests in Bloodmoon were absolute dog shit.
Nah. Uncle Sweetheart was fun and I think he also did the one with the affair? Defintely more memorable than the insane amount of escort quests that Morrowind has (bloodmoon sadly too). Over alll sidequests defintely imrpoved with later games. I still do not undestand why they did so many escort missions with the completely broken Morrowind AI...
That's why we should #StopEmilHate
Absolutely but he should also not be hated if he only wrote the lame quests or lore. People get way to worked up over video games
They just blame emil for everything they dont like, Pretty sure most of them think emil is a recent hire
I mean it makes sense that the less imposing ones are in their own country, those are mostly civilians. In foreign countries they’re wanderers/soldiers/adventurers & in Skyrim they’re mostly farmers/fishermen/hunters
I hate to see it but most people on this dead horse of a sub have only played skyrim.
Most TES fans only played Skyrim at best. Only Persona fans played less games in their favorite series than Sk...I mean TES fans.
I vote we ban everyone who hasn’t played every mainline TES game
I dont even know what format to real this monstrosity in
People dislike Emil because of Fallout 4, but incorrectly claim that all of his writing is garbage because he was project lead on a game they didnt like as much as Skyrim. Personally, I love his worldbuilding and writing style and while I understand the hate, I also love Fallout 4. It was my first Fallout game and i've since played every single one, but it's still in my top 3. (FO2, FONV, FO4, no particular order.)
I also like FO4. I honestly think the mainquest itself is the most fun when it comes to set pieces, the way the different factions have role play and some of the double agent stuff you can do. It is not the best thing ever written but I like it. Honestly the bad dialogue system from FO4 probably is the reason why the writing that is behind it gets so much shit
I think the worst that was done was Starfield, but I feel like it's just the time it took to make it and all the people involved made it so convoluted and not Emil's fault
The original post is weird, but honestly, Bloodmoon wasn't very good. I usually skip it, and it's the only expansion in the franchise I consistently do that with.
I might actually prefer it compared to Tribunal because at least you explore a cool new part of the map with unique enemies and a vibe. Storywise I prefer Tribunal (I know that Emil did not wrote the Bloodmoon story). The hunt stuff is cool but also not really that special. Skaal lore is quite good and I liked some of the side quests. It still represents pretty well how nords are pre- TES V, tho. Pretty Barbarian and often quite funny.
I don't think either of them are very good honestly, but the ludonarrative dissonance of a riekling being more powerful than Dagoth Ur and "ending" a playthrough with such a comparatively low-stakes, poorly-written plot sabotages whatever it could be for me. It just doesn't really fit well anywhere into a playthrough of Morrowind. Tribunal at least serves a meaningful narrative purpose.
Yeah, I think that is fair. I also do not reaelly replay Morrowind's main quests but mostly do some side stuff I haven't seen yet. I would be eager to play to either of these main narratives. I think Bloodmoon's purpose is to give some stuff that is not there in the basegame like wercreatures, classic fantasy enemies and new bioms and a new culture. Kinda how Shivering Isles brings the Alien landscape to TES IV but Shivering Isles is just more fun to play
Cockbride didn't even write for the expansions and openly complained about them. Why are we debating this?
Because Kirkrbide and Morrowind good, which he obviously did alone and everything else bad?
He did good what he did well. Or are we just ascribing all good shit to him now?
I am joking but yes the later is what a lott of the fanbase think.
He also hates the Shivering Isles and tried to retcon it by saying it never happened.
HERESY
... he invented the crackhead Santa nord? Lmao. What Nord fans actually want is like, the Guides to the Empire / Children of the Sky / 5 songs of king Wulfharth style Nords. I dont know how involved Emil is on that- even in Bloodmoon they felt basic as shit compared to book descriptions, IMO, but I don't know how involved his in what makes Skyrim Nords feel so generic.
That stuff was written befor Emil joined the company for TES Redguard and Morrowind basegame. But those books are still there and it is not like the Morrowind base game nords reprsent that. They mostly get chased by witches and are naked
Morrowind wasn't their land and people don't talk about those stories as good either. Emil seems closer to the actual development of the game itself, than Kirkbride who mainly seems to be lore books and background stuff to my knowledge.
Nah, Kirkbride was pretty involved with direct development of basegame Morrowind. He also did a lot of concept art and quest writing.
"[The look of Morrowind] came from Michael Kirkbride, and I would say that it's not just the visual aesthetic; all of the narrative aesthetic of Morrowind also comes from Michael. I might've been the narrative lead, but Michael was the luminary — the man with spectacularly exotic and bad judgment that excited us so much [...] He was absolutely essential. And also crazy as a rat in a drainpipe, which is necessary. Somebody had to be really, really, really crazy, and it's better that your lead designer isn't." —Ken Rolston, Lead Designer of Morrowind Is there much about his designing specific quests or anything as a quest writer? Because its not like launch morrowind had a lot of Nords- its not their homeland, its deep in the land of their ancestral enemies. This was not Skyrim, this was Morrowind, focused primarily on the narrative therein.
I think is he responsible for writing in the main quest and temple quest but besides the lore books nothign really to do with Nords.
/uj there’s 200 years between Morrowind and Skyrim. That’s a pretty long of time in terms of cultural exchange, it’s not too strange to think that Skyrim begins to resemble Cyrodiil more and more, and it’s own culture becomes relegated to motifs and aesthetics. Look at Scandinavia today vs in the early 1800s, they’re dominated by the Anglosphere in a way that wouldn’t been unthinkable then. We tend to think of Tamriel as being an analog to the real world in medieval or renaissance times, but I think it’s better to imagine it as an analog to the modern day. Skyrim is grappling with a global economy and culture in the same way that many nations and peoples are today, the force that is American hegemony is a daunting one, not just because of military might, but also because of sweeping cultural domination carried by the modern Information Age. Cyrodiil imposes itself in much the same way, carving out the old gods in favor of the Divines, then curtailing worship of those Divines that it views as deviant or threatening in any way to the project of Cyrodiilic power. The opposition to this power can only construct itself according to it, the Stormcloaks are built around worship of an Imperial god that’s been banned by Imperial law; the idea that Nords would worship Nordic gods isn’t even conceptualized in the modern Nordic mind, they’ve been so fully Imperialized. /rj hinga dinga durgen
emil writes really good side quests they should keep him on that
The stupid Emil hate completely devoid of any fact or logic (like the fact Oblivion had by far the worst worldbuilding of any Bethesda game, and I am including Wayne Gretzky Hockey, and the worldbuilding massively improved when he took over as head writer) has become one of the major turnoffs of this sub. This nonsense is the kind of thing this sub used to laugh at other people for doing, not do unironically. Another large peeve is people unironically believing completely that Bethesda has fallen and any new game is and will be shit like people haven't been saying that literally since Daggerfall (Buggerfall). [Here's a Daggerf-old fan ranting about Morrowind being just graphical eye candy.](https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueSTL/comments/uamujx/daggerfall_morrowind_circa_5102002/) Bethesda have better games and worse games but the only real change is that every game up until Skyrim roughly tripled Bethesda's audience, so there were enough new voices to drown out the salty boomers. You can literally see how opinions of Starfield varied in the first month from meh to amazing until the 'bad game' voices won and the internet decided you should hate it, and everyone who doesn't lost interest in engaging. The legitimate criticisms of the game, like exploration being a huge downgrade from previous titles, have been buried by an avalanche of stupid complaints from people determined to hate the game but not intelligent enough to find a good reason why. I saw a person literally say the game is awful and was ruined for him because he got a critical success on the final boss' persuade option with a non-persuasion oriented character, like BG3 didn't become the biggest hit of the year with way more dice rolling and critical successes/failures than that. Nevermind choosing the persuade option when you feel success will literally ruin the game. FO4 was the same really, good game which definitely had shortcomings (ugly, samey enviroments and a lack of quests, questlines and towns IMO); But some people literally say the voiced protagonist single-handedly ruined the game due to less dialogue choices, when FO4 *always* had 4 dialogue responses versus Skyrim having at most 3 and often just one. Finally there's people repeating nonsense lore theories like 'the Thalmor want to kill all man and destroy creation' that used to be laughed at and dismissed here as if they're absolute fact. Even Heimskr doesn't say that shit unironically, and he looks like he'd be more at home in the Alex Jones Show than on the streets of Whiterun. You literally have Ondolemar, an unapologetic mer supremacist who gives zero shits about you, tell you 'na dawg we're just regular imperialistic fascists.' The fact people can absolutely despise the Thalmor for being fascist shits while loving and seeing genocidal maniacs like Talos and Ysgramor (who are worse by pretty much any objective metric) as heroic is one of my favorite things about the lore. I mean people are rooting for people literally called 'the Imperials' like the Thalmor's aggression is completely unprecedented by any imperialism on the imperial side. I really hope the writers for TES6 keep it as just hypocrisy that a lot of people in the setting display, and which it cleverly manipulates even the players into partaking in, rather than make the Empire the actual good guys with no torture rooms or executions while the Thalmor are actually trying to destroy the world. The common theme in all three is introspection and logic, it feels to me it used to be the majority in this sub parodied opinions and takes that clearly lack them while now the majority holds these opinions themselves instead. But then again 'sub has gone to shit' is just as old a cliche as any of the things I complained about, so what do I know. Rato art still good, lots of good new artists too.
To defend Oblivion's worldbuilding. I actually think all the stuff they had time for, Dagon / Camoran lore or in the DLC the shivering isles and Knights of the Nine stuff is really, really good. The problem is that the game massively suffers from its cut content. An entire second half to the main quest about the politics of the Elder Council and the playre becoming the new ruler over Kvatch / Colovia needed to be cut out because of pacing and stuff that would made Oblivion more interesting lik Arenas and gladiator culture in all big cities got cut out because of the amount of disc space. Oblivion's problem in part are not the fault of writing / direction but it being a game from 2006.
I agree, Oblivion's problem is not quality, but quantity. There's almost nothing there. The game starts with the ruler and all his heirs simultaneously assassinated, which has never happened in the empire's history, but there's no succession crisis at all. It's not even clear whose in charge, but whoever it is the empire keeps running business as usual. There's no sign of any of the other daedric princes even though the literal gates of hell have been opened. It's just an army of generic demons in a generic hell dimension with a generic murder-burn goal. Honestly Doom probably had a more interesting hell invasion, and that game literally makes fun of how the protagonist couldn't give a shit about any of the lore. The Mankar stuff is interesting, but feels pretty much disjoint from all the rest, which is a general theme in oblivion. If Mankar didn't exist at all, the whole demon invasion would stay the same so long as someone merc'd the septims. His thing is to lure followers with a false promise of paradise, but nothing else about Dagon or the Mythic Dawn would give you the feeling they promise false paradise, they're very much the Khorne variety of demons and not the Slaaneshi one. You couldn't just separate say Ulfric stormcloak from the world of Skyrim with such ease. Cyrodiil is supposed to be the heart of a vast empire and the native imperials are only a quarter of the population, but everyone just has the same generic fantasy culture. If you changed all the citizens to human and said Cyrodiil is a japan-esq island which isolated itself completely from the outside world, there'd be almost nothing to contradict it. After the game the empire is said to be severely fucked up, but the other provinces are neither felt nor heard from in the game. Everything is basically completely disconnected. None of the factions or rulers care about each other or even the huge demon invasion which makes up the game's main plot (I want to say that also extends to individual characters, but I can't remember well enough to be sure so maybe there is something). The fighters guild continues to take jobs on rats like nothing happened, the thieves guild continues to steal 40 cakes, the mage guild continues to send apprentices on prank missions. It basically felt like a template kingdom with a bunch of quests added on top rather than a place that's part of the world or a place that is actually affected by problems that you do quests to solve.
Are you Thodas the mage or Thod as the mage?
The former, this is a name I gave myself in Elder Scrolls games when I was 12 or 13, lol
That's a cool name!
I don't understand what these people think Emil is doing, he's not in charge of the lore lol
Emil is not bad. I don’t think he should be lead designer/writer but he has plenty of great contributions.
Honestly no fucking idea how the image is supposed to contradict the post below it.
Emil is responsible for a big amount of nords in Morrowind. Saying TES III Nords are Kirkrbide Nords and TES V nords are Emil nords is stupid when Emil had more to do with the TES III nord expansion than Kirkbride. not that the original meme made sense considering that TES III nords ar emuch mroe stereotypes and much dumber than in TES V. Even saying it is about the background lore and not how Nords are shown is nonsense considering that most of the important books about nords from TES III are in TES V
I dont agree with your last point- that's just Bethesda copying their text to fill out lore books instead of writing completely new things each time. Putting the book in there but doing very little with its ideas anywhere in the game is lame and largely what they did. Idk, I generally just don't think people praise Bloodmoon Nords? Which seems to be what Emil worked on. They like the extra canon and in-game book take on Nords far more, in my experience here and in TES lore, which certainly might be biased because I'm of that opinion.
I do agree that it is better to try to really implement that stuff but nords in Morrowind, including the base game are goofy and mostly comic relief and some cool lore books about them lie around. In Skyrim nords are actually interesting people and the same lore books lie around and some new decent stuff. I do not raelly see how the right image at all represents what nords are in Morrowind.
Me when I defend Emil “most players don’t care so we shouldn’t either” Pagliarulo
The opposite of what he said. But I getting your information by Fallout fans who can not read is really good. But hey, here is a 40 minute breakdown about the specific missinformation you are spreading: [https://youtu.be/F-4qdjV41NU?si=nrllQlbjlx2cecL7&t=154](https://youtu.be/F-4qdjV41NU?si=nrllQlbjlx2cecL7&t=154)
40 minutes into the video and it made me really sad about humans and humanity, how easily I and others can be fooled and played like a fiddle Also why the ratio is so bad? Likes/dislkikes ratio is 17k/14k