The Next Province

[Túrelio]

As I said, since I haven't been on the project for a long time, things are different for me. Definintly should still come into the equation. Not actually for doing Morrowind itself right away, but a province nearby it, bordering it, so that it would be easy and simple to pick Morrowind up once you feel like you are ready. This lends itself to the Blackmarsh and even more so to Skyrim, I'd think.

Yes you are definitly right about Elsweyr... still merely looking at it from the idea of just be able to see it... yea. Definitly a pain, that should be saved for last once things can be figured out.

[Lud]

Ok, look at it this way:
Most of the lore we have on anything comes from Morrowind.
Oblivion will supposedly contain more lore than Morrowind.
Therefore we will have a huge amount of new lore to play with as soon as Oblivion comes out. For all we know, Oblivion could contain a series called "The Illustrated Guide To Every Single Thing In Elseweyr".(Yes, I am exaggerating, but I'm just trying to make a point) Until we know what new lore is available, we won't be able to make an informed descision.

That said, talking about it won't do any harm and some good points have come up already. (Dex is pretty close to swinging me in the direction of Hammerfell)

[SirCabbage]

Frankly id prefer Argonia, exploring the great swamp that is But with lack of lore, id say Skyrim... Maybe because im a Nord.

Also we dont know where the expansion packs will go... the safest thing to do might be one of the non connnecting provences.



ps: I just looked on the offical site and seemily my graphics card will be able to run oblivion YAY!

[Dexter]

Morrowind didn't really give us more lore on one province than any other. The exception is Argonia, but that's a different story. We supposively have more lore on Nords because of Bloodmoon, but again, Solstheim Nords are totally different from Skyrim Nords.
Another con of Skyrim is that, while the landscape may be varied, odds are the climate is still pretty freakin' cold. Therefore, a climate change means new creatures. Hammerfell seems to have a climate similar to Cyrodiil (a bit warmer, maybe), so it would require fewer new creatures.
Plus, with the Redguard ideals of individual heroism, Hammerfell would be the perfect place for an adventurer. Skyrim, with its holds, would be a much more guild-oriented province, while Hammerfell would have more quests that are more personal for the player, and provide more direct rewards.
Now, all of this is coming from a guy who never played Morrowind with anything but a Nord character. I was initially biased towards Skyrim, but Hammerfell really is the logical step for me.

[Lady Nerevar]

i ahve one major objection whith hamerfell *initiate dream sequance**you are sucked into a dream induced trance of horor*
*34 year old tes fan loads up tr: hammerfell. *
*loads the game, nad goe into the main city*
tesgek34: where are all the half naked whores? and why cnat i kimb walls? thins mod sux!
*end dream sequance*
basicly, if we deside to do a province alredy coverd, not only is our creatifity sevearly compromised (as the amount of lore increases, the amoutn of freedonm decreases) but we have to live up to the province as it was during dagerfall. which will be hard, since there are some hard core fans(and alot of them) who prefer this game above all else. not ot mention that to do this to the dest dergee posible(as close to the original as posible) we will need ot play dagerfall. which i dont have the money, time, or interest to buy.

my opinion. and please, if you dont know atleast basic info about oblivion or tr, dont resopond to this thread. it just makes you sound stupind and me get more pised then i alredy am.

[fanfas]

Well... all provinces were in dagerfall.

[Orix]

So, what you're trying to say, Lady Nerevar, is that we should leave Hammerfell for now, because it has too much lore, too much to inspire its creation and that Daggerfall fans will think its a bastardisation of a game that was released about 8 years ago.

I agree that we should try to follow a lot of the foundations that Daggerfall laid down, but then again, I dont think that we should be limited to copying the exact same town layout or style (because basically they'd all end up flat and square shaped and very similar to each other... or so I've read), and should pospone an entire province because there is no nudity, or climing skill/mod in Oblivion (if ever, for the latter).

I would hope that anyone who has been a TES fan since Daggerfall came out, would have the open mind to overlook such frivelous things.

On a side note, I dont wish to be ignorant or insulting, but a few of your sentences are a little hard to follow (and not just he ones in your last post). I apologise and understand that english may not be your first language, but that doesn't really stop you from checking your spellings here and there.

[CommonsNat]

There's only so much you can tell from screenshots, and sequels aren't always better. (FF9 anyone?)

-from page 2

Hey... I like Final Fantasy IX

Anyways, since it looks like the vote has been narrowed down to two choices, I'm going to give the links to both sections of the PGE.

For Skyrim (which still recieves my vote): http://til.gamingsource.net/pge/skyrim.shtml

And for Hammerfell: http://til.gamingsource.net/pge/hammerfell.shtml

Still, like everyone's saying, there are two games full of lore from Hammerfell, but the idea of doing it first isn't appealing to me.

[Lady Nerevar]

look dude, i dont use spell chek for forums unless what im saing is an oficial document. and i wont go changing just cause you say so. i admit, my speling is even worse today then usual, but its readeble. and no, im not saying that we should not do hemefel casue it has to much lore. what im esentaly trying to say is that the more lore we have on a place, the less original we can be. true, we would not make the town a flat square, but we WILL have to folow the NPC names, house names,shops etc. just limits creativity. and as i said before, it will require us to eitehr post up huge threads of information for each town, or us all get dagerfall.
the dream sequence i use to show -- althoigh EXADURATED -- what MIGHT hapen if a hard core player sat down whit ha mod that dosent exactly folow the game. i emplesise migh and exadurated becasue those are the key words. sure, not all people like dagerfall. If we wander from teh very close perameters the the game set for us,we will break our principle. TR aims to create tamriel jsut as the devs would, and the devs alredy created it onece(therefore we can see how they would do it, and therefore we need to do it that way ourselfes)

if that still didnt make sence, then i dont know what to do.

[Saibot]

Well... all provinces were in dagerfall.

Uh... No, you're probably thinking of Arena.

And I agree completely with Lady N. Well, almost completely.

[Haplo]

Pros for Hammerfell -

Cool name
Desert
Port Cities
Ocean/Sea Travel/Battles
Good for Adventurers & Thieves
Lots of Quests
It's Big
It's Easy to Make.
It's Popular.
We know lots about it.
It will be much quicker to build than Skyrim, Argonia, or Morrowind.

[Eraser]

I'm actually getting kinda concerned about your writting. You used to be very clear, but now you're beginning to sound like arcadea. I'm afraid you might start sympathizing with silgrad or start talking like a spy or something like he did.

Hammerfell, except for maybe the southern area most near cyrodiil, is moslty either tropical or desolate and harsh. Both of which will require different creatures(though not nearly as many as a cold arctic like environment)We do have to give it its own look and use plenty of new models, we don't want people to expect most of the continent is just going to wind up as a rehash of cyrodiils environment.

Daggerfall the game isn't a problem, there are several people who have it and can use it for reference. I can look stuff up, but I've yet to be able to take a screenshot in the game. BTW only high rock and northern hammerfell were in Daggerfall.

OH! one other thing I thought of, we'll have to remake alot of dwemer arch meshes, since Hammerfell was also home to some dwarves. Fang Lair would also be rather cool to see in a spectacularly cool engine.

[Orix]

we WILL have to folow the NPC names, house names,shops etc. just limits creativity. and as i said before, it will require us to eitehr post up huge threads of information for each town, or us all get dagerfall.

You're forgetting one (big) thing. When was Daggerfall set?
3E405, and Oblivion will be set sometime late in the 3rd era. I'm sure that not all the houses, shops and people that were around in Daggerfall would all still be present. So, while we have a large base on which to produce a lot of stuff on, who's to say it will all still be the same? Sure, quite a lot of it will be...

I understand why you wouldn't want to buy Daggerfall(despite it only being under £20 on most Ebay sites... at least in England), and why you wouldn't want to play it with the looming release of Oblivion. But I'm sure that you dont speak for everyone here, especially those that may own, or have played the game.

Many people say that Skyrim is the easiest choice. But if what Dexter said about the gaps of knowledge stands in the way of our creation (of course, until Oblivions release, we dont really know what will be revealed to us), then I think Hammerfell is the easiest and wisest choice, despite the partial dependance on already exitent knowledge of NPCs, Shops etc.

[Vernon]

KTHX I GUESS WE KNOW UR OPINION NOW

[Eraser]

Vern, even though you're teh admin, don't spam.

There's no way in hell we are recreating daggerfall's NPCs. Aside from special characters, they're all named stuff like theodistyr yeohmsley and very similar gibberish. I actually found in one town, two npcs with the same name.

[Sload]

look dude, i dont use spell chek for forums unless what im saing is an oficial document. and i wont go changing just cause you say so.

It is generally considered polite to fix your post when someone says it's difficult for them to read. Ofcourse, we don't have a rule to be polite or I'd be banned.

And I disagree with your point. Do we use even the same city names from Arena in Morrowind? No, and that's just as many games apart as Daggerfall and Oblivion. While we should have some well-known places from Daggerfall just for the nostalgia of the older players, we are not by any means inhibited by the fact that a game was already set there. Infact, I'm very interested in seeing how we can make Stros M'kai change after 500 years.

[Eraser]

The thing is sload, in arena, cities in morrowind(and everywhere else) were really generic. Nothing was fleshed out, and all the names were in plain english. In TES3, the Devs detailed alot, especially language-wise. Stoneforest became Balmora, dagoth ur, a specific person, not simply a mountain and dungeon(why is it that the eternal champion in arena didn't encounter the sixth house and akullahkhan getting the piece to the staff of chaos anyway?)

Meanwhile, most of the names in daggerfall, are well made enough and do sound as if they were named by redguards. For most of the cities we've got to stick to their names, we can't go about renaming wayrest.

[fanfas]

Well... all provinces were in dagerfall.

Uh... No, you're probably thinking of Arena.

Right you are, my friend

[Orix]

KTHX I GUESS WE KNOW UR OPINION NOW

If this is aimed at me, I'm sorry, but I like to discuss and debate... even if I ave a tendancy to be overally verbose. Besides, threads like this are made for discussion and debate. Would you be happier if I just kept my thoughts to myself, and limited myself to some lifeless statement like "yeah, Argonia would be cool... end of"?

[Resadyn]

I'm sorry, but i'd die if we didnt do Black Marsh next. Sure it would be hard, but it would be waaaaayyy more fun as well.

Just my 2 cents

[Eraser]

Shall I call the coroner ahead of time then?

Pretty much all but Hammerfell and Skyrim are ruled out at the moment.

Hammerfell along with all the other arguements for it, have some locations I'm sure alot of people would find very interesting: Sentinel, Stros M'Kai, Fang Lair, Scourge Barrow, the dwemer ruins in the alik'ir desert and the dragontail mountains to name a few.

What does skyrim have? Labyrinthian, High Hrothgar, and some really mountainous and snowy places, and scandinavian and/or canadian like forests and glaciers. Essentially, the variety we'd see in the world, would be what we've seen in bloodmoon and what we'll see in northern cyrodiil.

Sure it makes for one hell of an exterior world to build, but it would be much less than the locales of Hammerfell, and a varied environment. In Hammerfell, There's a formidable desert in the westernmost area with tons of rocky mountains and rough terrain with plenty of potential for things like gorges and canyons nearby. a tropical Coast line with some plains and a more temperate areas near cyrodiil.

[Sload]

I think we have a winner.

[Orix]

Seems that way Sload

(I'll keep this brief) In terms of landscape, Skyrim could be more interesting than people first think. The landscape could have all sorts of arctic style bits, snow plains, but also take on ideas of the snowy areas as seen in LOTR and the new Chronicles of Narnia movie.

Just as an experiment, I typed "Snowy Landscapes" into Google image search and there is some seriously breathtaking reference you could use...

[url]http://www.azcolt.com/images/landscapes1020_2004.jpg[/url]

...and a wierd picture of Adrien Brody (Hey! You said brief! Right, right, sorry!). So, just for the sake of argument, Skyrim could be an equally awesome place to build. A decent shader for the snow that really looked like snow and realistically reflected sunlight would be "cool" to see in action too.

[url]http://www.dphoto.us/forumphotos/data/1124/icypath.jpg[/url]

One last thing, is there anything in Lore that mimics the Auraura Borealis (aka Northern Lights)? I realise that this is a rather generic idea, since it copies real life phonemena, but it might be sweet to see in Skyrim should it fit in.

[Swiftoak]

Skyrim:
Advantages:
-Easy lore, because I know alot, will be done faster.
-We already prepared for it, look at the concepts, we are more ready to make this.

Disadvantages:
-Very large, needs a bigger team, lots of detail, might reduce framrate for low-end comps.
-Names might be confusing and mispeled alot.

Hammerfell:
Advantages:
-I have a rough idea of its geological terrain, its small and simple to do.

Disadvantages:
-We are far away, not many people are interested, not well prepared to do this above skyrim.


So lets add teh polls to teh thread. Hammer or Sky? Agreed?

[Nomadic1]

Wouldn't a poll be done on a separate thread? Besides, I think the core are only after opinions, and it seems that the concensus is either Hammerfell or Skyrim next. And no decision could possibly be reached until Oblivion is released and we get more lore, making a poll pointless.

[Sload]

As much lore as you may know about Skyrim, the Elder Scrolls community as a whole knows more about Hammerfell. I also think most people are getting reasonably interested in it, I know I'm liking it.

[Haplo]

So Eraser comes in, rewords some **** we've heard a dozen times on this thread alone, and tries to act like he alone knows exactly what's what...

As far as I'm concerned, he should be near the bottom of the list of people TR cares about when making this decision.

[Orix]

I guess that would probably make me the ultimate bottom person (or close to) Haplo, all I've done for TR is add a voice acting profile and generally added my (usually, entirely, overly verbose) comments here and there.

[Dexter]

Skyrim:
Advantages:
-Easy lore, because I know alot, will be done faster.
-We already prepared for it, look at the concepts, we are more ready to make this.

Swiftoak, buddy, I realize that you consider yourself to be a Skyrim lore master. However, you can only know as much lore as there is for the place, and it is the hard fact that there is more lore for Hammerfell than there is for Skyrim.
About turning this into a poll:
That may not be the best idea at this point. There are a lot of people in this thread that would vote for their own favorite province, and not the most logical province. A discussion is a much better way to see who is going for what.
Also, the complete inability of some people to act in a civil manner to one another is pissing me off.

[Arthmodeus]

not many people are interested

I have seen a lot more posts about Hammerfell, than Skyrim. IMO, Hammerfell is a hell of a lot more interesting than Skyrim.

[Sload]

[img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v86/stanley/vot4ham.jpg[/img]

[Swiftoak]

Ok Dex. But give me a ring whenever you need lore. I actually am writing a 6 part mini series on Skyrim;s history.
But if Hammerfell is what you are leaning on, I will get my books out and start reading.

-Swiftoak

[Eraser]

Just what is your problem with me haplo? Where did I claim to be the only person "who knows whats what"? are you somehow confusing how I state things without always specifying something is only my opinion or view(it does get really annoying and repetitive to type and read "I think... IMO.... etc" every single time you state something) with me stating things as some kind of undisputable fact?

Orix, gorgeous pics, I think I actually did a hand drawing of the first one in an art class a few years ago.

Both provinces offer alot of potential for their exterior worlds, but we have to look at all the different features, locales and experiences to incorporate along with the pretty exterior world. Hammerfell really does offer alot more.

[Stalker]

Skyrim:
-interesting landscape
-no.2 biggest mountain in the world
-huge archeological site
-Labyrinthian
-interesting political division which won't include constant wars thus we won't have to guess what happened where and why and how it changed the landscape since than
-general preparations were leaning towards Skyrim before now
-vote for Skyrim - get a free T-Shirt

[Sload]

A vote for Skyrim is a vote for oprezzion! Don't be oprezzed! Vote Hammerfell today!

Seriously,

-interesting landscape

An opinion that could be given to every province

-no.2 biggest mountain in the world

*Sload tries to figure out why this affects any decision made

-huge archeological site

I see why you want it now, Stalker. You love the archeologists. However, I don't see what you're referring to, and I think the ruins at Stros M'kai (with the only Dwemer orrery to boot) and the ruins in northern and northwestern Hammerfell are atleast as interesting.

-Labyrinthian

There's something like this in every province.

-interesting political division which won't include constant wars thus we won't have to guess what happened where and why and how it changed the landscape since than

I don't understand your point with this one.

-general preparations were leaning towards Skyrim before now

Which boils down to a pretty but pretty useless map. The rivers on it do not follow lore. It is not finished. It has one city on it. The rest is what we already know: snow, mountains forest.

-vote for Skyrim - get a free T-Shirt

We have free T-Shirts too. Infact, Napoleon Dynamite is modelling them.

The only point I really think you have, Stalker, is one that I can't refute because I don't understand it.

-interesting political division which won't include constant wars thus we won't have to guess what happened where and why and how it changed the landscape since than

Explain this so I can tell you why I think you're wrong.

[Stalker]

Bah, it's easier to kill you than

I don't understand your point with this one.

Remember the situation with Forebears and Crowns in TESA: Redguard ? We'll have to count that in too.


P.S. I have never imagine myself to be agitating for Skyrim :p

[Lud]

Ok, here's a question:
Will the Oblivion engine allow us to add new weather effects?
There probably aren't any sandstorms/duststorms already in Oblivion, so the ability to add new weather effects like this would be quite important for the Alik'r desert.

I'm now officially undecided, but I'd just like to give a few points:

Hammerfell
pros: -Smaller than Skyrim
-More lore
-More varied terrain

cons: -Possible inabilty to add desert effects.
-Some people will have less interes in a province that has been present in a couple of TES games already.

Skyrim
pros: -Intersting political structure
-Possible Oblivion meshes

cons: -Bigger province
-Less lore
-Less variation (could also be considered a pro from the point of view of work)

[Eraser]

I remember from yonks ago(before bloodmoon came out) that someone here got snow working as weather from modifying the morrowind.ini, can't remember who though, but we can probably do something similar if the editor doesn't allow you to make new weather.

[Dexter]

cons: -Possible inabilty to add desert effects.

Where'd you get this from? This is total speculation. Most of what we are doing with Oblivion is mostly speculation, based on a few facts. But this...

pros: -Intersting political structure

Huh? It has nine Holds, which will operate more or less like the Great Houses of Morrowind, and the Empire will have a stronger presence there. That's not very interesting.

[Eraser]

They're more like traditional kindoms than great houses.

Actually, after reading in the PGE that some redguards go naked in the streets in certain cities...my vote is back for skyrim...no wait..nevermind, the nords are the kings of nakedness, especially when witches are involved