I like the LotR movies but never got interested enough into the lore and such... I only watch the movies from time to time. Also, not much of a reader type of guy.

Maybe. If I knew more about Tolkien, I would change my mind but currently. I'm on TES side. Especially if you can connect the pieces together cause technically, the lore never does change from game-to-game. It is updated or we see more sides of it (Or possible truth of it rather than a lie).

What about Cyrodiils jungle landscape being mysteriously changed to Generic Fantasy Land #3, between Redguard and Oblivion?

Last I check, one of the things that Tiber Septim did was cut down the jungles greatly to make it more livable for the Empire. There also are other possible situations that could've happen. For one, land can change over time.

I'm not kissing Beth's ass on that part, but it one of the reasons for why they did that was because Todd Howard and his crew watched Lord of the Rings and took inspiration from that. So it was ironically part of Tolkein (Well, Peter Jackson honestly.) fault that Cyrodiil is Gondor's twin brother...

I don't think that a jungle could natrually change into a forrest within a few hundred years. and Tiber Septim didn't cut down the trees. He "breath" winter breath onto the land, changing it into a forrest so his Red Legions won't feel so hot anymore.

When I said cut down, I didn't mean actually and physically cutting it down. I meant as in getting rid of a lot of the trees in one way or another.

That isn't what cut down means. It means cut down.

I don't think TES relies on real world cultures with "blantant stereotypical references" any more than LotR does, and both series are better at it than many, many others. And I think much more of it comes from the fans than from the writers. (GoT has buckets of racial and colonialist issues, but that's a different thread entirely)

I think TES, in general, suffers from being interpreted on two levels. It's real easy to look at it and say "Skyrim is just a bunch of vikings," but when you take a minute to really look, it moves beyond that. Much more of LotR's deep aspects are in the foreground, largely due to the different medium. If we ignore that TES has games, it actually becomes stronger as a universe in my mind.

I think it suffers more from the game developers thinking that, because Skyrim does look like it's been designed with vikings in mind.

Well, since I don't care for anything Tolkien, I'll let you guess my preference.

C'mon, that's the answer every really devoted fan gives me. We all know it was a cop out so that they didn't have to spend the extra time devolping a jungle province. Instead they opted for the easier generic forest because building the world was easier and it would appeal to more people then a jungle. I'm no expert on the subject but I'm not aware that a jungle can turn into forest over a relatively short time. "oh nut it was magic!". [censored], it was basic laziness and trying to appeal to the widest crowd possible, which you can't blame them for but if that's the case I don't want to hear the really devoted fans trying to defend Howard and Hines as some sort of mythical geniuses.




What? Middle Earth was developed like this so its Tolkiens and Jacksons fault Oblivion looks like a generic landscape? That's actually even worse I think, and makes them look even worse. Did you seriously try and blame the LotR movies on the devs laziness?

No. I was being sarcastic about that.

Well thank god for that, I was gonna round-house your ass

By far, with all respect to Elder Scrolls.

(PS much of Elder Scrolls is based on Tolkein).

Yes and Tolkien is based on mythos and cultures from the real world. He combined ideas and tied them together in a conveniently heavily idealized christian setting. Some of TES is based on Tolkien, not anywhere even close to most of it.

Uhhh, apples to oranges I think. Tolkien defined modern fantasy. You can't really compete with that. It's impossible.

TES (at least behind the scenes) is trying it's best to be unique. It's not succeeding too much in the recent games, but the extended lore is pretty heavy stuff.

TES

Tolkien is awesome, but I despise the idea of a generic good-evil dichotomy system (e.g. in LotR, orcs are purely and unambiguously evil; while in TES, orcs have a different culture and are often looked upon as monsters by other races, but are not that "black and white").

Cut down can mean take out or take a piece of a whole out/down. (Depends on what the whole piece is).

Then the correct way of saying it would be "Tiber Septim cut down on trees" not "Tiber cut down trees".

Not that I'm actually being anol retentive about it.

Most of Fantasy is based on Tolkein.

Tolkien died too early,He said after he finished the Sillmarilion he'd go deeper into the background of the Old Creatures,Orcs,Balrogs and Even Bombadil........

And Orcs in Arena and Daggerfall were just monsters to be killed.

I would say Tolkien, but once I found out that Arda is supposed to be our own earth, it just made all his work far less satisfying to read and seem rather pointless.

How do we know it DIDN'T happen, but the Matrix rewrites our taught series of events to make us believe it didn't happen. Hell, maybe when Melkor returned to Arda, he took over the Matrix so he'd make us believe he was but a mere imagined creation by one fantasy writer. #Truth

Some have said the same about everything in TES being the godheads dream.

Except that isn't quite how it works. Think of the godhead more like a machine or even correlations to the big bang and string theory could apply to some limited degree. The godhead is a mechanism for creation. The concepts that surround this godhead are what make it interesting.

I've heard it both ways.