pointless flame removed

Anti-Nord prejudice!

Well, I got news for you. You can still find huts made of thatched together leaves and straw here on Earth too.... right now.

Yeah, 200 years is hardly a long time when you consider the game is like the bronze age on earth. the bronze age was a very long time.

I like that it's set 200 years after Oblivion. We get to look back on history we didn't know about. If it didn't jump ahead 200 years, we wouldn't have the awesome Thalmor related lore.

Bronze age? Nah. Later than that. All the technological development is more like medieval Europe, for the most part. The heavy use of iron and steel place it well beyond Bronze Age technology.

Id like to mention something if you havent realised.
back i oblivion you remmber sinderion right ?
he helped you with nirnroot and starts a quest in skyrim return to your roots.
he gets killed by falmers but if you go to a dark elve she says he was her mentor this implies that sinderion is over 250 years old.

You may want to thgink about your story bethesda fact/fiction still needs a good story

Because that is what the artist visualized...

(As for the statements, "Not much happens in 200 years."... Ug, seriously... What did robots, computers, cars, sky-scraqers, look like 200 years ago? It has nothing to do with time, it has to do with advancement and education and lack-of-set-backs. Which I believe, they were hinting at... when they call nords stupid, simple, burdened by dragons and war... Specifics.)

Magic is a joke, fighting is a little better, cities/towns stink, and dangerous wilderness is way-more-abundant. Education and advancement is almost completely absent in the game. Apparently the only advanced people were the Dwemer, who had more luxury structures in this area, than in any other area. They also had better metal-polish-preservatives here!

My problem is the length in time. The other games took place in the 3rd era, then all of sudden there is a huge jump 200 years later.

While I like the concept of dragons in the game, I would have preferred the game to be centered around The Great War, not after. Its kind of like walking in the theater when the movie is over and the credits are running.

You may want to go back to Cyrodiil at this point. From the lore it has been torn apart also by the Great War. You have to remember it has been chaos, civil strife, and war since the Oblivion Crisis. Also the 2 books in between explain alot of why Tamriel is ripped apart 200 years later. The one thing I find annoying is half the NPCs are ugly and literally dirty like Fallout 3. There is no excuse for not jumping their [censored] in a river and cleaning up. Atleast in FO3 people had the excuse that the water was irradiated.

yes in Elder Scrolls technology decreases overtime.

You think the people in Skyrim are ugly? You need to go back and play Oblivion for about ten minutes...

I am talking about about dirty looking like people were in fallout 3. Oblivion was too cartoonish and day glo. But what pisses me off is playing a female character. Most of the famales from the Dunmer and other elven races are just ugly and look like old hags. I end up making a human female every time because of the crappy CC they made. Can not wait till I get this svcker on PC with the CK and better CC mods. I have never been fond of Beth's CC and hate to say it, But I have seen better on other game series. Still I have loved the TES world for almost 10 years now.

Well, I'll agree that the elven women - really the elven men too - have too-harsh a bone structure. It gets to the point of looking completely non-human, and people aren't going to consider that attractive. There was a thread somewhere about making attractive characters where somebody posted a link to an article about how to make characters attractive, and one of the big rules was to minimize the features that stray too far outside of human norms. Long story short, the ideal thing to do is to minimize the somewhat extreme bone structure in the elven races. Some degree of pushing the boundaries will make them look exotic, but go much further at all and they'll look unattractively alien.

Well, Skyrim if you listen NPC's and have a little knowledge of the lore, Skyrim was plagued by dragons a long time ago, so it might be nord tradition to build houses with only the bare essentials, and they mainly focus on facing problems like dragons head on, and not just preparing for them, and in the years since Mehrunes Dagons holiday, the Thalmor have caused a great war and then a civil war, I pretty much expected to see a slum when I heard about Solitude, I was surprised.

Yeah I tried to minimize the features and they are still pathetic....lol I end up sticking with Nord all the time. Although I might do a Redguard female for my next character.

I really hate how so many people post stupid [censored] like this and then NEVER come back to their own thread. To the posters in this thread I thank you for answering his asinine question. To the OP. man up and thank them for answering your dumb post. It's rude and lazy to post a complaint and then never come back in the thread to acknowledge your own stupidity.

Oblivion had the same thatched roofs in the same places (villages). If you want to see whether technology advanced look at what the rich players have. The Blue Palace, for example, is far ahead of the castles in Oblivion. Asthetically it looks like a 17th/18th-century European palace -- at least on the outside.

The other thing to keep in mind is most fantasy media are terrible with technology. You'll see bronze-age stuff mixed with 19th-century stuff and everything in between. The Elder Scrolls games are a perfect showcase for this. Games are designed primarily by artists who create something appealing rather than realistic. My favourite Skyrim example of this is the upstairs area of Proudspire Manor. The ceiling is divided into four vaults with no column supporting the centre. It should fall down. Drives me mental, but I'll probably live.

Skyrim is an entirely different province.

Cyrodiil is influenced by the surrounding provinces (though not exactly like the surrounding provinces):
Anvil=Summurset Isle or Hammerfell
Chorrol=High Rock
Skingrad=Valenwood or traditional Cyrodiilic architecture
Bruma=Skyrim
Cheydinhaal=Morrowind
Bravil=Argonia
Leyawiin=Elsweyr

Skyrim doesn't have just thatched roof houses.


@Gram - Mer are not human, so they don't have to look human

Skyrim is a harsh, cold environment

Cryodill was the center of the Empire at the height of its power.

lol

This gets back to a recurring theme of mine. The visuals in Skyrim are pretty good, overall. I can tell that the art crew did a good job of researching, well, not exactly what actual Norse styles of art and armor and such looked like, but they do show the influence of later nineteenth century representations of Norse culture. The horned helmets show that much. The actual norse didn't wear horned helmets, but they were depicted that way sometimes in 19th century art, so to me they did a pretty good job.

But so many other fantasy artists betray no sense of having ever looked at anything outside of fantasy art, just as a lot of comic artists appear never to emulate anything except older superhero comic book artists - and by "older" I mean artists from waaaaay back in the eighties and the like. This applies to science fiction as well. Why is the original Enterprise a classic piece of fictional design, while the ships from the later series stink? Quick - what did the Reman ship in the last Next Generation movie look like? What did the Romulan mining ship in the most recent Trek reboot movie look like? You probably can't picture them, just as I can't, and I'm willing to bet it's because they were designed by some artist with no experience outside the world of science fiction art design.

In contrast, the designer of the original Enterprise, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Jefferies, had a background in drafting, was a flight testing engineer and restored old aircraft as a hobby. He knew how mechanical devices worked and was very concentrated on designing a ship that gave the air of being a functional, practical vehicle, regardless of the fantastic technology involved. Modern spaceship designs in most movies, however, look like the artist said "Well, these are the bad guys, right? So I guess I'll need to make their ship look scary. Better give it some spikes and blades protruding from the hull. That ought to work."

Ah, but here's the thing. Khajiit and Argonians are completely non-human. Hell, I think they should probably be even less human. Make them bipedal, sure, but stop putting boobs on their females where a human would have boobs. As a reptile, an Argonian woman - even a Lusty one working as a Maid - shouldn't have boobs at all! But elves and other mer-people (Dwarves, orcs) are simply exotic humans. Yes, I know that in terms of lore they share no ancestry, but if you're gonna make them interfertile with humans and expect humans and elves to find each other attractive enough to mate with each other - as they do in TES and Lord of the Rings and other fantasy works - then you have limits on just how non-human-looking you can make the elves. Giving them slightly pointed ears and some exotic features makes them just that - somewhat exotic. If you give them a fairly out-of-the-human-norm bone structure, as they do in Skyrim for most elves, then they stop being "exotic-looking" and start looking alien. Well, that's fine if you want, but then it makes intermarriage exceedingly implausible, and TES has an entire race of humans - the Bretons - defined by the fact that their distant ancestors in fact interbred heavily with ancient elves. So it makes sense to limit just how non-human the elves look.

http://totallyfalse.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/rage_face_1.jpg

It's says something like that in his journal in black reach, so it's intentional. I didn't check any lore about the nirnroot so I'm taking a guess that it extends your life, they just changed the effect in oblivion because it's a game and a potion that lets you live forever would useless (?)

Because it is a different place. Doing research of our own history will tell you that not all areas of humanity progressed at the same rate. You will also learn that progression is not steady. There are hiccups along the way, steps made, steps retreated.

Take the early medieval period following the fall of Rome. Much of Europe existed in a very dark age with little to know growth. You can actually call this period in those locations a retraction where an earlier, more advanced way of life was lost. This happened while other portions of Europe lived on in much the same fashion as they did before Rome fell. This is no more apparent than in the architectures of each.