Years later, I find a reason to be upset with the Elsweyr Chapter

ArchMikem

ZOS, your Lore and Sound teams had a perfect opportunity. You could've made me and countless others happy campers when walking around Rimmen and Senchal.

You could have had Khajiit background NPCs holding chit chats in Ta'agra, instead of Cyrodiilic. It would have pumped Immersion up to eleven.

There's even a whole group of Fans that have done most of the work for you fleshing out the language!

zaria

While cool it would made lots of people confused, you you could have translation texts but far from all have dialogue text on. According to lore Alfiq can only talk Ta'agra as they are to small to speak imperial, this would make some quests problematic.

Mesite

Not the huge khajiit cats with 4 paws and no hands? I'm still confused.
Not to mention the alfiq.

ArchMikem

zaria wrote: »

While cool it would made lots of people confused, you you could have translation texts but far from all have dialogue text on. According to lore Alfiq can only talk Ta'agra as they are to small to speak imperial, this would make some quests problematic.

I don't see why confusion would be warranted when concerning subtle background chatter that's not meant to be paid attention to. Bioware did this with the Angara in ME: Andromeda. You hear the locals talking to each other in their tongue as you visit their cities, but you're not meant to know what they're saying as you pass by. It's pure ambience.

WhiteCoatSyndrome

And here I was only annoyed they barely used the ‘this one’ and other Khajiiti verbal tics in Elsweyr. And reused the Anequina assets in Pellitine, despite the two being wildly different culturally.

Having them speak their own tongue in their homeland would have been awesome, yes.

IsharaMeradin

It is a side effect of being the Vestige. As Vestiges we have built-in Universal Translators, we automatically understand everything anyone says in their native language. Probably not lore friendly, but it works.

Tenthirty2

IsharaMeradin wrote: »

It is a side effect of being the Vestige. As Vestiges we have built-in Universal Translators, we automatically understand everything anyone says in their native language. Probably not lore friendly, but it works.

I like this explanation!

Next we need an explanation for the "Story-Writers Curse" that forces the Vestige to act thick as stones by having to ask the dumbest, repetitive questions when conversing with story NPCs.

WhiteCoatSyndrome

Tenthirty2 wrote: »

Next we need an explanation for the "Story-Writers Curse" that forces the Vestige to act thick as stones by having to ask the dumbest, repetitive questions when conversing with story NPCs.

My headcanon for my main is that she’s playing dumb to see if the answers she gets the second time she asks match the first time, or match what she knows from other sources - basically trying to catch the person she’s asking in a lie.

ZOS_Hadeostry

Greetings,

After further review we have decided to move this thread to a category we think is more appropriate for this topic, as it's lore related.

Thank you for your understanding

SeaGtGruff

Harry: "Didn't you all hear the snake talking to me? Couldn't you hear me replying to it?"

Everyone: "All I heard was a lot of hissing."

KingArthasMenethil

IsharaMeradin wrote: »

It is a side effect of being the Vestige. As Vestiges we have built-in Universal Translators, we automatically understand everything anyone says in their native language. Probably not lore friendly, but it works.

It's pretty much every TES player character. NPC languages arn't really touched on only when it's on enemies be it Ayleidoon with Umaril in TES4 and Dragon with Dragons and Dragur in Skyrim. Though I think Daggerfall or Arena had language skills but i've not played them

SeaGtGruff

Daggerfall has language skills but they probably aren't what you're thinking. The more you fight certain types of enemies, the higher your skill related to that type of enemy becomes. If it gets high enough, you're supposedly able to avoid fighting those enemies, but I've yet to reach that point so I'm not sure how it works.

My guess is that it doesn't involve talking, but is probably similar to the "non-target" spell in Arena and Daggerfall where most enemies will be non-hostile toward you because they don't consider you to be a threat, as though you're "one of them."

16BitForestCat

I was also hoping for more Ta'agra than we got. It's there as flavor (one example: some of world boss Thannar the Graveprowler's lines in combat), but not majorly featured. I'm betting the real-world reason is that working with another language doesn't eat up too much time for snippets of text and dialogue, but writing large chunks of Ta'agra was probably too much on the already loaded devs, seeing as there are no native speakers of Ta'agra on this planet to consult. (Though I've long suspected my neighbors' cat might be an Alfiq spy. I do wonder what whoever sent her would think of the fact that she seems to spend all her time "spying" on the birds and squirrels, or doin' me the wink/slow-blink when I walk by the window. I always return the gesture. )

spartaxoxo

Tenthirty2 wrote: »

IsharaMeradin wrote: »

It is a side effect of being the Vestige. As Vestiges we have built-in Universal Translators, we automatically understand everything anyone says in their native language. Probably not lore friendly, but it works.

I like this explanation!

Next we need an explanation for the "Story-Writers Curse" that forces the Vestige to act thick as stones by having to ask the dumbest, repetitive questions when conversing with story NPCs.

I personally figure the vestige would have some issues with memory and cognition sometimes as a side-effect of becoming the vestige. We see a more extreme version with soul shriven because they don't have perfect recreations of their bodies. But I can imagine that the vestige would occasionally struggle with that being as they can die and come back over and over. They're also experiencing time different to everyone else, so that would be hard to keep track of since everything is happening all at once.