Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-10197675-20130806142227/@comment-24590102-20140404094943

@69.246.226.115

You say that "Oblivion was full of yet more Dwemer ruins with constructs and apparent technology." which makes me wonder - have you ever played TES? If so, which ones?

You say that "The concept that they couldn't bring them back because it would "change the genre" is utterly ridiculous." which makes me wonder, who said this, exactly, other than yourself and, yes, let's see an exact quotation.

What I said about the Dwemer is that bringing them back would not be easy to do in light of conserving both immersion and genre. I didn't say that it couldn't be done.

HUDs are an elment of visual communication for semi-tactile non-visual sensations like, fatigue, pain, and malaise - in the absence of the appropriate electroshock device and advanced spinal microsurgery. As such, HUDs play the same role as the Dungeon Master by delivering in-game facts to the player. Saying that HUDs break immersion is only true for people who do not feel pain, fatigue or malaise in their day to day lives. It's just like saying that having to be told "your character beheads the goblin" is immersion breaking because it isn't seeing your character beheading the goblin in video.

Immersion is only broken when your i-m-a-g-i-n-a-t-i-o-n cannot bridge the gap between, for example; the five showing on the die rolled in the context of a 2:1 brigade-scale attack and the visualisation of decimation of both sides of the battle. Based on the success of D&D as well as napoleonic wargames, this was not even remotely a problem. The same can be said for early First Person Shooters which had clunky graphics, poor physics, gross HUDs but still a deep and consistent enough storyline to make them interesting and sufficient channels of communication to carry all of the major sources of information - not just the visual.

As for M'aiq, that cat fits marvelously with his role as a lone wandering explorer (in a long line of such who carry the same name) who would obviously not be influenced by or pay hommage to the opinions of others. Not much of a stretch here. There are plenty of people with names like William Thomas Pinkerton XXXIV, etc. and plenty of people in the same line of business as parent and granparent.

Adamantium is an unoriginal extension of an existing word paradigm which has been around for quite a long time and, to belabour the point, is not an original term like Mithril which has ties to known authorship and real world issues which, being controversial and contentious, have the potential to hijack the imagination - thus, causing a break in immersion.

Dragon shouts have been in the mythos portrayed by the lore connected with some family lines in Skyrim in every other release of TES. That, and the fact that they do not necessarily mess up balance or gameplay, made them viable as a feature of the Skyrim world. Moreover, as a matter of in-game mythos, if they couldn't effectively be implemented, they could have been just as viably left out.

Dragons, on the other hand, have always been an implicit part of the TES because of the period-mythos and genre. If anything, the absence of dragons bothered mod makers more than their presence. In other words, the absence of dragons in previous releases of TES have created a perceived conflict of genre because they are so strongly associated witht he mythos of the period. Dragons or wyverns were first introduced to TES by the modding community for Oblivion because it was generally felt that there was something not quite right about a game with knights in shining armour but no dragons to slay.

You also said, "It has not stayed even relatively faithful to itself." I'm not seeing that. The game lore has a lot of room for interpretation primarily because most of it is based on in-game superstition, in-game mythology/cosmology and NPC intrpretations. As shown by the Drow/Viconia DeVir example, there's a lot that can happen without upsetting the applecart or the apples.