Degeneration of technology? Or just a dark age?

[Exanthos]

Throughout the ages (from the time of Elder scrolls Morrowind to Skyrim) it seems that the magic powers of people are degenerating, and that the level of technology is staying the same (or just about the same).
The people of Nirn seem completely uninterested in learning from Dwarven artifacts too, despite all of the quests you do involving them. They might as well just be writing books on it and then burning them right afterward.
I understand that Nords are far more interested in their own freedom and hacking appart the nearest giant than learning new technologies, but that still doesn't excuse the fact that the biggest technological advancement that the entirety of the imperium has made since the Oblivion crisis has been in the construction of armor and weapons - and even then, two-hundred year-old armorments from the Blades tend to outperform them.

The only possible explanation is that the imperium is in a dark age. But under the Aldemeri Dominion, a more technologically advanced nation, they should be able to at least learn something from them, but instead the variety of magic has decreased, and the relative technology level of weapons and armor have stayed the same. I also understand that the demand for magic other than magic used mostly for combat is in low demand, but Skyrim is home to the College of Winterhold, the greatest magical college north of the Imperial city (and possibly greater). So the only excuse for the extreme lack of magic is that the knowledge is simply being lost, or stolen by the Aldemeri Dominion, so the Imperium is degenerating, even Skyrim, which has been mostly independant from the magic-thieving elves.

I wonder if the Elder Scrolls VI will enlighten us to if the Imperium really was in a dark age, or if the technology will continue to disappear.

You all might just say that this is a game and that the devs are lazy, but I don't buy that, as the Elder Scrolls games are an ongoing story, and therefore an explanation is required for this.

[Girthu]

ur gae

[258789553873]

Its a common trope in fantasy, where technology never advances for some reason. Elder Scrolls sticks to a lot of rpg fantasy cliches that clearly make no sense.

As for the blades armor, well, you're supposed to get that near the end of the main questline, the probably just gave it those stats to make sure it would actually be a reward. Why give you an armor that's inferior to what you currently possess, considering all you have to go through to get to that point.

You could just say that magic is weakening as time goes on. The history books describe people doing all kinds of rediculous things that the modern inhabitants of Tamriel seem incapable of (and not just the dwarves, another race of elves is clearly described building space ships and landing on other planets).

Yeah, it makes no sense that no one can rebuild dwemer technology, It may be that its just so advanced that they aren't anywhere close to replicating it. If you gave billions of computers to people in the middle ages, would they be able to figure them out? They may use them, but they probably wouldn't be able to replicate them. Unless the computers came with instructions on not only how to build computers, but how to build the various machines used to make computers, and how to build the components for those machines, and the components for those components, etc etc....

Even with all that tech just laying around, there's no guantee that anyone could figure out all of it. And besides, it doesn't look like the dwarves left behind much of use. Yeah, you see moving machinery inside their 'cities', but what are those machines actually doing? All they seem to be doing is producing more dwemer automotons to kill anyone that enters these ruins. There's no evidence they had running water or mass communication or fancy transportation or anything. All you see is giant metal cities with moving machinery that's doing god knows what, and an endless army of robots that will assault anyone who enters these places. They give no evidence that they can even rapair these things and make them fight for them. They don't even know what powers them, all they know is if you take one far away from dwemer settlements, it'll stop functioning until you return it. Nobody knows what is causing this.

The only 'progress' they seem to have made with dwemer tech is dwarven metal. They still have no idea how to produce it, but they've figured out that you can melt down already existing dwemer artifacts and produce new things out of the metal (you couldn't even do that prior to Skyrim). Of course, this would result in dwemer artifacts being destroyed in mass. Its likely they would melt down anything they could possibly remove and carry away. Eventually, this could culminate in people actually dismantling the dwarven ruins just to recycle the metal. Aka, all dwarven artifacts would be destroyed to make armor and weapons long before anyone became advanced enough to make sense of the technology. The fact that this hasn't happened already, honestly, is a mystery. I mean, you don't need anything fancy to melt dwarven metal, any normal forge will do. I mean, you can melt dwarven metal in the skyforge which has been there since time immemorial. Its unbelievable that all this tech even still exists given that its just been sitting there for the past 3,000+ years.

[Ēarendel]

To put it in layman terms, most of Skyrim and indeed Tamriel are busy worshipping Aedras and Daedras, while people such as Dwemer chose to "worship their Gods of logic and reason" therefore pursuing science and technology.

[cyäegha]

and to be fair, being constantly at war tends to either cause massive leaps and bounds in technology, or causes it to stagnate and wither

mundus happens to be the latter thanks to the smart people all getting displaced in time sucked into the numidium collectively zero-summing turned into tang

[Exanthos]

All fair points. I wonder what's happening on the other side of Tamriel with the Aldemeri Dominion, since they seem to have subjugated their biggest threat and more or less eliminated Talos. Its hard to imagine that they'd remain technologically stagnant, especially in the magical capital of the world.

[tarkin96]

Tamriel, especially among the human races, seems to have went from early middle ages to early high middle ages over the span of 4500 years (First Era to Fourth). Their social and technological advancement occurs about 9 times slower than our real human history it would seem.

My little conspiracy theory is that the Aedra/Daedra have plotted to keep Tamriel in a state of little to no advancement. Through providing Tamriel with magic, there are few attempts at creating technologies that overwrite or take advantage of this. The ones that do are often considered too powerful and quickly destroyed or contained. If it seems things are becoming too stable, the daedra attempt to stir things up. For example, Mehrunes Dagon invading in order to send the empire into disarraty, under the guise of just trying to take over everything. Mephala's quest in Oblivion is also another example of a quest with a not-so-subtle objective. I'm sure there's plenty of illusion and alteration magic at play here.

[cyäegha]

of course, we also only really know about tamriel

all we know about akavir is that the human settlers were 'devoured', though literally or culturally is open to interpretation

the sload are their own little bubble of boundless magickal energy that wants almost nothing to do with tamriel

and the other continents are pretty much undocumented

worth nothing that the argonians supposedly had ships capable of traversing, or harnessing, the aether, but that's kirkbride stuff, so it comes down to if you believe c0da is canon or not

[alexander_dougherty]

Originally posted by IXBlackWolfXI:

Even with all that tech just laying around, there's no guantee that anyone could figure out all of it. And besides, it doesn't look like the dwarves left behind much of use. Yeah, you see moving machinery inside their 'cities', but what are those machines actually doing? All they seem to be doing is producing more dwemer automotons to kill anyone that enters these ruins. There's no evidence they had running water or mass communication or fancy transportation or anything.

Several books indicate Dwemer had some method of mass communication, in fact they imply they may have had something along the lines of a Hive Mind (possibly with divisions for the seperate cities as well as a Racial Overmind). The great lifts indicate they had some transportation methods as well, although with cooperation between the cities being negligible, they probably didn't have anything like railways or highways underground.

Running water would be one of the first things to fall apart, just look at the roman aquaducts during the dark ages (the failure of the roman water system is the reason everyone in the dark ages drank beer, since the beer was safer to drink than the water).