Wtf why isn’t this the guy in charge of Bethesda??
Because sadly AAA games are produced on the basis of how they perform vs putting that same amount of money in the stock market, not whether they are good 😔
I looked it up, he left Bethesda in the year 2000 to move to California. He was also art director while Todd was project lead.
Maybe if he was in charge instead of Cyrodiil, Skyrim and (I assume) Hammerfell we could have gotten games set in the weirdest provinces like Black Marsh, Elsweyr or perhaps even Akavir.
He wrote a lot of Skyrim-centred stuff. There are a bunch of references to it in the game of the same name, and a good few other things clearly influenced, but his vision of Skyrim was pretty wild. Same goes for the stuff he wrote for Cyrodiil. Knights of the Nine was him
I’ve always wanted a Black Marsh setting. Argonians are my dudes.
Elder scrolls online set a major expansion there.
95%+ of the content in the whole game can be done solo if you don’t like the second M in MMO.
That’s how I do it. The quests are a step above typical MMO fetch quests, but still aren’t terribly deep or consequential as every player is the chosen one and nobody can wipe their own butt without the protagonist being there. It’s adequate but not super compelling. Every dialog has two sentences, three response options, and each of those results is a two sentence response. Seeing some of the places reimagined is cool but also a little odd sometimes, like Vivec city.
My understanding is that the “re-imagining” is due to the timeline.
Vivec City in ESO is 700+ years before Vivec City in Morrowind, for example.
Yeah, they’re in the process of building it, just feels odd to be able to run across it on a single bar of stamina. The scale feels off, I guess.
Elsweyr
One of the things that persistently annoys me about TES is Khajiit morphology - there are 17 different distinct physical makeups of Khajiit (based on the phases of the moons at their birth) ranging from able to be accidentally mistaken for men or mer to sentient housecat and the vast majority of them just…never appear in any given TES game. A TES game set in Elsweyr would have to care about that a lot more.
Don’t most of them appear in TES Online?
TES Online and Legends are the exceptions (and I think only in one expansion for TES Online). For a franchise that’s been around since the early 90s with 5 main series games and multiple spinoffs.
I dunno how I feel about a game set in Akavir. At least with Skyrim you have to mod in the weeb. Black Marsh sounds cool, though. Bring back spears!
If you read c0da and then put yourself in the shoes of someone trying to turn that into a game, it makes a lot of sense to have Todd in charge
For those unfamiliar, here are The 36 lessons of Vivek
That absolutely reads like the author was fucking blasted
Note that what you are reading was heavily edited. There was a time when it was even more crazy.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg for weird TES lore. For example, there’s a figure from early on in the timeline that depending on who you ask and what sources they prefer may or may not be either a cyborg from the future or a manifestation of the Missing God.
Or just about anything regarding the secret syllable of royalty known as CHIM, the Six Walking Ways or AMARANTH.
That wiki is worse than TV tropes, beware
Wait it just clicked for me that the Telvanni, the magic faction, fucking love building their stuff out of giant mushrooms.
Funny meme and stuff but this is fake.
So they didn’t just make no fucking sense to me, they actually didn’t make sense in fact.
They can kind of make sense once you understand vivec’s role as warrior-poet. He’s just shitposting, then does something very important, then goes back to shitposting.
I want to believe…
Kind of wild that you can play like 6 quests in Elder Scrolls Online where you save Vivec, one of the three Living Gods of the Dark Elves, from some wannabe Neravarine.
And then you can play Morrowind and skeev your way past all his defenses to destroy the heart, then go shank Dagoth Ur. Or you can just straight up kill Vivec.
Like it really puts a strange twist on all of the events.
Somewhere on my original Xbox I have a save file where Vivec is stored in a soulstone.
“I bet you wish you believed me now, huh, Vivec? That’s okay. Now you can just watch.”