"Blackwood" doesn't really have any woods??

Supreme_Atromancer · April 2021

emilyhyoyeon wrote: »

phantasmalD wrote: »

emilyhyoyeon wrote: »

Not sure how alone I am in this, but I would rather they not make up ''lore reasons'' as to why things that in game look the way they do due to game limitations (ex. not many trees in Valenwood because the engine or whatever can't handle it).

I'm not really versed on timeline related lore stuff, so I don't know if that's how they're going about the sparseness of Blackwood for example, but I would rather they just say ''yeah the river is small because of game limitations sorry we know it sucks,'' not ''the river is small because ships might pass through Leyawiin without stopping'' or whatever.

I'm completely ok with making up new lore obviously, and even retconning some stuff, but I don't see a reason to make up lore to justify things in the game that are only there because video games have limitations. Idk if I made sense

Some of the coolest and most memorable lorebits were born out of the desire to justify early game mechanics and limitations. Like the Lunar Lattice or Dragonbreaks or Talos achiveing CHIM.

I dunno, I personally don't mind having the lore written around the game, kinda gives the lore a sort of organic feel.
But I like 4th-wall breaking things in general, so shrug.

Dragonbreaks are one of the only things in TES that I deeply despise, so if that gives any indication of the kinds of things I do/don't like to see then yeah...

You wouldn't be alone. Even the original writer who included cringes when he discusses it. I guess its a credit to later writers that they could work it into the sexy metaphysics a lot of people seem to like.

But yeah, this kind of device you want to use very sparingly. Done well, it can be great. But when you're over-reliant on it, your world begins to lose substance and verisimilitude because it feels contrived.

phantasmalD wrote: »

Tbh Tamriel canonically is a good 12 million square km, or a bit bigger than Europe. So Niben would logically be prob ~800-1000 km long, therefore those big ships have every right to exist, even if they can't actually leave the Niben and are only moving things between IC, Bravil and Leyawiin.

Scale is a limitation that I think many people can forgive. For me, the Leyawiin bridge is the same sort of problem. I'm not really thinking about it too much. Contrived lore reasons are much more grating.

Danikat · April 2021

Elsonso wrote: »

Snowstrider wrote: »

Darkstorne wrote: »

I think the engine can't do it. It's bizarre. Even Valenwood and Cyrodiil's great forest are just sparsely scattered mature trees. And there is zero change to ground flora within a "woodland/forest" part of a map compared to grassland.

As an ecologist it's my biggest pet peeve with the game

Why cant the engine do it when older games with a way older engine can do it? Isnt it all on ZOS and their design and not the engine?

Engines are built for the purpose of the game, and are different from game to game. It might be handy to think of the game engine as what you end up with on your plate when you eat at buffet. It is a collection of choices based on what you want and what is offered, and it does not have to be the same for every game.

The ESO "engine" is their design, and it has been created over the last 14 or 15 years based on the what they want to do with the game. Dense forest tree rendering was apparently not at the very apex of the list.

It also depends on things like how complex the models are and how much "stuff" needs to be loaded at once. For example a dense forest map would be relatively easy to do in a 2D pixel art game because it's just a matter of drawing it and you can use some simple shortcuts like making the background colour green and reusing the same tree trunk several times (or reusing entire screens for the 'in the woods' sections between landmarks). Aside from the limit on how many colours could be on screen at once there's no real difference for the computer in running a pixel art image with lots of detail vs one that's all the same texture over and over.

Recreating that same forest in a 3D game is harder because now each tree and rock and plant and whatever else is a separate object which has to be loaded and loading too many things at once will slow down or crash the computer. (I once crashed my PC just by adding 1 chair to every single square in a maximum size Sims house, then I couldn't load that house again because it just kept crashing.) If any of them are animated (like leaves moving in the wind) that's even more to do. I think this is why a lot of games which have large procedurally generated maps like Minecraft or Valheim tend to use simplified graphics.

There are some ways around that. For example I think in Guild Wars 2's jungle maps which do feature lots of huge, dense trees a lot of those trees are actually terrain and it's only the leaves and smaller branches which are separate objects. But whether it's possible to do that depends on the tools you're using to make the landscapes.

Iccotak · April 2021

Behold Western Skyrim with its....rocks and some trees