Oblivion was going to be VERY Different... #oblivion #tes #lore #bethesda #toddhoward #redguard

[Varil]

Basically the mod Province Cyrodiil for Morrowind, folks.

[Firealone]

Introducing "Dragon Breaks" into the lore really helped out with this one.

[joshsmith]

The lore is so cool but they never do it justice in game, even skyrim is missing lots of stuff unfortunately

[skylordthest]

Honestly I would have loved to have played that game

[alex_ho]

This won't be the last time Todd watered down a province to be as generic as possible

[yuin]

I'm so torn on this one. I hate things being retconned so eggregiously especially when the game could've been put elsewhere and retained the same style Todd and pals went with, but at the same time... Man i do love so much about how Oblivion turned out. And to be fair lore wise: if the imperials were always traipsing around sprawling jungles, then by the nine what could have been so difficult for them about Blackmarsh? Yes the Hist trees and argonians were a real wildcard, but they had easily dealt with incredibly dangerous peoples and places of power, so again, why was Blackmarsh so special in the original lore? Both have a pretty glaring flaw as far as I can tell, so it really just comes down to what you personally prefer.

I'm in love with both typical fantasy land, and viscerally strange and alien fantasy that keeps just enough touch stones in place to ground you and keep you immsersed while you're dazzled and at times overwhelmed by the odd. One feels like home, while the other expands your mind as to what a home could be in every sense of the words. I couldn't pick if I had to make the choice.

[NorseHamr]

I feel like the Shivering Isles took care of that... It had a dark and bizarre, Morrowind feel to it.

[Alpachini]

i pray that one day i will dimension shift into the universe with this oblivion

[OgieSifter]

To me it didn't bug me as much, it was appropriate that cyrodil was gentrified as fuck. Like "oh fuck yeah it definitely looks like someone made a massive land development deal to convert swampland into florida

[blueninjanoname]

And yet oblivion was still a magical game.

[infinitybreak]

Edit: some of yall are acting like I said Oblivion was a mistake and I just wanna clarify that I was still quoting the author of the post Micheal Kirkbride. Oblivion is my favorite elderscrolls game lol and this video was just showcasing how it potentially could have been different accourding to Micheal Kirkbride, thats all :3

I'm re-editing my old shorts and videos because of the recent demonitization, if you want to support me like Bex go check out my patreon! It helps me make new cool lore videos :)

[TeenageMutantZuckerTurtle]

Tbh I think it worked out for modern Elder Scrolls that not every province in the newer (post Daggerfall) games is wild and alien. I appreciate going back to Morrowind more because of it, and it made going from the beautiful but not alien Skyrim to a little slice of Morrowind in the Dragon Born DLC more interesting.

I love the open worlds of all three games for their own reasons, they’re all beautiful in their own ways. Morrowind is bizarre like another world, Cyrodiil is serene and comfortable, and Skyrim is cold, unforgiving, and in a noticeable state of decline, but epic. I like that each one does something different instead of all being alien, or all being earth-like.

[deadknight]

With Oblivion having been my first game in the series, it's hard for me to imagine Cyrodiil as a jungle as Kirkbride described. The game still holds a special place in my heart, but at the same time, I acknowledge just how much we have lost out on, and just how irreparable the damage is that that game had done to the lore.
[EDIT] Yeah, after I had looked into it further, this was not really a great comment. As it turns out, whilst Kirkbride was removed from the development of the game, it was the writer from the first two games who took over.

[Bob-bsok]

by the reclemations, I've always loved Kirkbride's art direction (the writing is a bit more messy though, like, he's amazing at concepts but can stumble in execution) and the more I see of his Oblivion concept art I wish we got that instead. At least the skyrim and morrowind fan projects are shaping up to be far more interesting.

[Kuchhh]

To be fair, there was a lot of bizarre and alien shit you could find in The Elder Scrolls IV.

[MuttonTheDragon]

And it suddenly makes sense. Fantasy in the eyes of the public was Tolkien-esque at the time, so Oblivion reflected that.

Then dark fantasy became a more popular thing, and Skyrim was apparently originally going to be a Game of Thrones game, so Skyrim changed tones to match.

Perhaps this is why Elder Scrolls 6 is taking forever; because there isn’t a new kind of fantasy in the public eye that hasn’t been done or would be better suited for other titles (like sci-fi stuff for Starfield or Fallout).

[Ilzhain]

I conceptually really like the earlier portrayals of the various regions of Tamriel although that being said I love the more modern TES games too, Kirkbride's stuff is really interesting to read about. Still, it often feels like it's just trying to one-up itself on how weird it can be which I imagine would get old pretty quick if they made all the TES games like that. I think from the perspective of trying to make a game that appeals to the largest amount of people possible making it more generic makes sense, too much weirdness makes it seem more inaccessible to new players. I do however wish that more of the uniqueness of TES made it into the newer games, the Ayleid ruins in oblivion felt very lord of the rings and so did much of skyrim. I do really like the portrayal of the Ayleid ruins in 'the cause', The architecture remains true to oblivion but the grey-white stone is replaced with a green-blue marble with bright and decorative gold accents. I hope in TES VI bethesda embraces a little more of what makes TES special but I've no doubt it'll be a fun game regardless.

[chandler]

I don't think you understand how games are made. Many concepts are brought up and discarded at the beginning. Oblivion was a massive technical challenge and there's no way they could have rendered jungles - they struggled to implement trees. It wasn't because Todd watched LOTR, it was also the limitations of technology at the time.

[ipxperfect]

I always like the idea of the heart of an Empire to be more rich and advanced, and civilized. Like Rome. A place where people want to live there.

[UdderlyEvelyn]

I knew it felt off, and I knew our lord and savior Kirkbride left, but I did not know they deviated THAT far or for such stupid reasons.