Has anyone acknowledged this?

[drakvyr]

It's been said by others that Bethesda erases the legacies of previous protagonists of the Elder Scrolls game in the writings and story of a sequel to give players more freedom of creating a new character in a different place of the known Elder Scrolls world.

But I think that's quite unfair, because it essentially diminishes the time and roleplay players had put into their protagonist in the previous games. It makes it seem like creating your own character in the previous games was a waste.

BioWare was able to do the opposite of that with the Dragon Age series. So why didn't Bethesda do the same? Is it lack of time and resources on Bethesda's part to execute a similar videogame design?

[Faust]

In short - different region and different timeframe who cares lol lmao ecksdee rofl zozzle. Bethesda doesn't care about narrative continuity or really anything beyond making a murderhobo sim. Look on the bright side, though, at least it's not Fallouts where sequel games had set-in-stone canon protagonists and events, so there is not even a shred of ambiguity as to whether or not your roleplay mattered, because it didn't.

[Morgan Fun Gamer]

In skyrim there is a book called the oblivion cirsis that documents the events of oblivion and explains the adventures of the hero of kvatch and martin and in dragonborn dlc the npc in the mushroom tower talks about the neravine and in skyrim it is implied that sheogorath is hero of kvatch and that the shivering isles questline was completed but this is only alluded to and in oblivion jaufree mentions and talks about the events of the elder scrolls arena and in oblvlivion cyrus is mentioned npcs in the imperial city waterfront will take about him and sing songs about him there is also a character in oblivion he is a blade and he has the same name as cyrus but I don't know if it is a coincidence or if he was named after him.

[Death Approaches]

ahh... simplistic and a bit asinine, and kind of bait-y too. they just don't reference what you, the player, did in the previous titles. time still passes. the events that transpire over the eras and ages still occur.

you're set to lvl 0 anonymous coward mode, so I cannot see your hours, but imagine in a game like this, many hundreds of quests, gawd only knows how many hours, that TES6 had to reference various big events the protagonist did, and include dialogue and voice lines for NPCs and main characters for all the varying choices.

yes lots of games are this way, take the Witcher series, in 3 they handled it in an interesting way, where Morvran Voorhis "interrogates" you before your meeting with Emhyr, if you didn't load a Witcher 2 save at the beginning to pull from, to control attitudes and available quests. (can't likely go save Letho if you previously killed him.)

but these are much more linear games, DAs and Witchers etc, while ES is more loose.... they could do it for the bigger events, which side of the Skyrim civil war were you on, etc and include references to the protagonist... but remember, in those games it's A PERSON, and in ES it's a POSITION, a title, you can be either sex and any race and behave in any manner, so how would history remember you?

it's just easier to slot out that from the next iteration of ES, while the world of Nirn keeps on spinning. I would have made a similar decision if I was project lead after wasting weeks discussing how we would handle it... because what seems simple on first glance ends up being a massive undertaking.

[FauxFurry]

There is too much player choice and too many variables to account for in a sequel so players will just have to use their imaginations to fill in the blanks if they do not actually want their choices disregarded as they were in Fallout 2 by 'canonizing' a given player path (Only a male character who marries a specific female NPC is acknowledged, something further reinforced by the now out-of-continuity Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel).
I am glad that they went with this method rather than continuing the process of tossing away the advantages of video games as a story telling medium in pursuit of mimicking older media.

[Valden21]

Others? Ah yes, the modern version of the invisible "everybody", as in "everybody knows". I've seen people make this allegation, but it's never been a widespread phenomenon, and it's disproved in-game. For example, Sheogorath's dialogue during his Daedric quest mentions things that only the Champion of Cyrodiil, the fourth game's protagonist, could ever have known; the Champion of Cyrodiil BECOMES Sheogorath at the end of the fourth game's expansion. The Dragonborn DLC also mentions Boethiah, Azura, and Mephala as the New Tribunal; that state of affairs is due the events of the third game. There are also in-game history books covering the Warp in the West; that was the second game.

Your claim has been disproved, OP. If your goal was to troll, this attempt is profoundly weak.

[Liquid Inc]

Originally posted by drakvyr:

It's been said by others that Bethesda erases the legacies of previous protagonists of the Elder Scrolls game in the writings and story of a sequel to give players more freedom of creating a new character in a different place of the known Elder Scrolls world.

But I think that's quite unfair, because it essentially diminishes the time and roleplay players had put into their protagonist in the previous games. It makes it seem like creating your own character in the previous games was a waste.

As others have said, there *is* writing from the previous games in the later ones, but at the same time you have to remember that the protagonist for each person is different, and unless you do it via the Dragon Age way of having some form of uploaded "world system" (Which IMHO, really sucks), you can't know what someone did and didn't do in the previous game.
Some people don't side with the vampires in Dawnguard, Some people don't side with the Dark Brotherhood, and some don't side with the Imperials. If you were to put those 3 in the next TeS and say that specifically the Dragonborn did them, that would throw a lot of people's characters in the trash....

Bethesda have always gone with the "eluded" to method, of saying "this happened" but not naming anyone who did it. The Emperor will be dead in the next game, but it will probably be followed by "killed by an unknown assassin" or "who did it, we'll never know" or something like that. It's the only way they can do it without picking a specific way of playing, and Bethesda haven't done that before so i see no reason why they'd suddenly do that now....

[steventirey]

There was one time where all the possible endings did occur. Even the contradictory ones. But having a Dragon Break for each game is a little overboard.

[Caramel_Clown]

It's not lack of time or resources. It's just not that kind of world building. Timeline of ES is much more chaotic, and even non linear in places. Making this kind of continuity detrimental.

[Masshiron]

It's kind of hard to account for all the different choices and ways of playing you could do to reference them all in later games, isn't it?
Anyway, I think it's part of the ES brand that each game is kind of it's own self-contained thing. It's probably better that way since the writing can just do whatever it wants without having to be locked in too much to anything.

[psychotron666]

Originally posted by Morgan Fun Gamer:

In skyrim there is a book called the oblivion cirsis that documents the events of oblivion and explains the adventures of the hero of kvatch and martin and in dragonborn dlc the npc in the mushroom tower talks about the neravine and in skyrim it is implied that sheogorath is hero of kvatch and that the shivering isles questline was completed but this is only alluded to and in oblivion jaufree mentions and talks about the events of the elder scrolls arena and in oblvlivion cyrus is mentioned npcs in the imperial city waterfront will take about him and sing songs about him there is also a character in oblivion he is a blade and he has the same name as cyrus but I don't know if it is a coincidence or if he was named after him.

Yes, and the oblivion crises book has to be the worst written book in elder scrolls, it was like they copy when pasted the wiki.

But even then nobody knows the race or sex or the hero of kvatch.

Bethesda fans are sensitive and have meltdowns if you make a canon protagonist. There was massive meltdown over neloth calling the nerevarine a he,, so much so that the unofficial Skyrim patch removed the part where he says he, implying it's a bug (it's not, Bethesda fans are just whiny ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥).

Also none of the elder scrolls games are sequels in the sense that dragon age or Baldur's Gate are.
And with the prophecy of the prisoner and existence of dragon breaks, you can almost treat every elder scrolls game as it's own branching timeline of the universe, so they don't make canon protagonists, in each alternative universe the previous protagonist is exactly whatever you want them to be.

[withered]

BioWare was able to do the opposite of that with the Dragon Age series, you say... And its all about role playing? Then im not on the same page. For me DA ended on Origins level, exactly because of mc and roleplay, of all that freedom there. And here? I dont really care. My rp was treating this universe as temporary stop in a long journey. Its all personal in the end, no need to be bounded by canons.

[Freeman]

Originally posted by psychotron666:

Originally posted by Morgan Fun Gamer:

In skyrim there is a book called the oblivion cirsis that documents the events of oblivion and explains the adventures of the hero of kvatch and martin and in dragonborn dlc the npc in the mushroom tower talks about the neravine and in skyrim it is implied that sheogorath is hero of kvatch and that the shivering isles questline was completed but this is only alluded to and in oblivion jaufree mentions and talks about the events of the elder scrolls arena and in oblvlivion cyrus is mentioned npcs in the imperial city waterfront will take about him and sing songs about him there is also a character in oblivion he is a blade and he has the same name as cyrus but I don't know if it is a coincidence or if he was named after him.

Yes, and the oblivion crises book has to be the worst written book in elder scrolls, it was like they copy when pasted the wiki.

But even then nobody knows the race or sex or the hero of kvatch.

Bethesda fans are sensitive and have meltdowns if you make a canon protagonist. There was massive meltdown over neloth calling the nerevarine a he,, so much so that the unofficial Skyrim patch removed the part where he says he, implying it's a bug (it's not, Bethesda fans are just whiny ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥).

Also none of the elder scrolls games are sequels in the sense that dragon age or Baldur's Gate are.
And with the prophecy of the prisoner and existence of dragon breaks, you can almost treat every elder scrolls game as it's own branching timeline of the universe, so they don't make canon protagonists, in each alternative universe the previous protagonist is exactly whatever you want them to be.

iirc, it was treated as a bug because Michael Kirkbride said it was one. Even though he had no involvement with Dragonborn whatsoever, so he would have had no idea of knowing whether or not it's a bug.

Just worthless headcanon, really, especially since the Nerevarine was confirmed to be male in Morrowind's intro.

[Aethrys]

Most of the choices made by the previous protagonist simply don't matter enough to impact the next one. There can be hundreds of years passing between games, by that point they've faded into myth and legend.

[Morgan Fun Gamer]

Originally posted by psychotron666:

Originally posted by Morgan Fun Gamer:

In skyrim there is a book called the oblivion cirsis that documents the events of oblivion and explains the adventures of the hero of kvatch and martin and in dragonborn dlc the npc in the mushroom tower talks about the neravine and in skyrim it is implied that sheogorath is hero of kvatch and that the shivering isles questline was completed but this is only alluded to and in oblivion jaufree mentions and talks about the events of the elder scrolls arena and in oblvlivion cyrus is mentioned npcs in the imperial city waterfront will take about him and sing songs about him there is also a character in oblivion he is a blade and he has the same name as cyrus but I don't know if it is a coincidence or if he was named after him.

Yes, and the oblivion crises book has to be the worst written book in elder scrolls, it was like they copy when pasted the wiki.

But even then nobody knows the race or sex or the hero of kvatch.

Bethesda fans are sensitive and have meltdowns if you make a canon protagonist. There was massive meltdown over neloth calling the nerevarine a he,, so much so that the unofficial Skyrim patch removed the part where he says he, implying it's a bug (it's not, Bethesda fans are just whiny ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥).

Also none of the elder scrolls games are sequels in the sense that dragon age or Baldur's Gate are.
And with the prophecy of the prisoner and existence of dragon breaks, you can almost treat every elder scrolls game as it's own branching timeline of the universe, so they don't make canon protagonists, in each alternative universe the previous protagonist is exactly whatever you want them to be.

And in Fallout series which in some games of Fallout series some are made by the same team as elder scrolls in fallout new vegas marcus who was an companion in Fallout 2 you can talk to him and he mentions the Fallout 2 protangist and how he traveled with them but he doesn't mention the player selected details of the protangist and and in fallout new vegas arcade gannon mentions that the events of the enclave being defeated and he mentions that someone stopped them but he doesn't mention any more of them from that because of the player customizing protangist he only says someone stopped them to respect player choices I thought he was talking about the events of fallout 3 at first but I think now he is talking about the events of fallout 2 and I think he might not know what happened in fallout 3 yet because it happened on the other side of the land so fallout series also tries to respect player character choices as well like in Elder Scrolls but in Fallout 1 the first Fallout they don't really did this.

[steventirey]

Originally posted by Aethrys:

Most of the choices made by the previous protagonist simply don't matter enough to impact the next one. There can be hundreds of years passing between games, by that point they've faded into myth and legend.

Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion all take place withing the life of a single human emperor. Skyrim is the only game in the main line of games that takes place after hundreds of years. And considering the lifespan of some of the races, 200 years is not long enough for things to turn to myth and legend. There are still people running Skyrim around who were alive for the events of the earlier games.