every time I click a video from tildes I'm like "ehhh do I really want to watch this" and invariably it's fucking awesome. This is probably the prototypical example lol
every time I click a video from tildes I'm like "ehhh do I really want to watch this" and invariably it's fucking awesome. This is probably the prototypical example lol
This is a good analysis, but I feel the need to take a crack at its foundation: the thesis is pretty much "what do they eat"¹ levels of relevance. The rivers don't flow because Bethesda didn't...
This is a good analysis, but I feel the need to take a crack at its foundation: the thesis is pretty much "what do they eat"¹ levels of relevance. The rivers don't flow because Bethesda didn't have the tech at the time to make them do so. They don't have interesting sources because that wasn't where they focused their world modeling efforts, because they didn't think most players would be interested in that. (For all the cliff racers you end up killing, Morrowind's gameplay focus is very clearly on its people and towns, especially compared to Oblivion or Skyrim.) While the Inner Sea being a volcanic crater from an ancient supermassive Red Mountain eruption may be geologically improbable, the much bigger problem with the hypothesis is that the people of the island clearly think of and talk about the Odai as being a river, in a world which clearly has flowing rivers in canon. All the game is an abstraction over a platonic "lore" world which is much deeper and more sophisticated than the game can, just due to technical limitations, fully reproduce; by far the best explanation for Morrowind's stubby, stagnant rivers is simply this.
¹ Morrowind has an NPC population just under 2,700—though that does include all the named-but-uninteresting bandits who populate the island's many caves—but something like half a dozen active farms, plus three-ish working egg mines, a quantity of food production which could not possibly sustain that population. The explanation for this discrepancy is "stop thinking about it and get back to deicide, you dummy".
I’m not sure if I misunderstand your perspective, or if you misunderstand the video. The video is tongue-in-cheek and somewhat “death of the author”. It takes the game at face value, assuming the...
I’m not sure if I misunderstand your perspective, or if you misunderstand the video. The video is tongue-in-cheek and somewhat “death of the author”. It takes the game at face value, assuming the digital rendering is the platonic ideal for Morrowind.
Oh, no, I get it. My reply is partly in kind; but I do think the video suffers for being too straightfaced. The premise is ridiculous; it needs at least some nod to that ridiculousness, or it kind...
Oh, no, I get it. My reply is partly in kind; but I do think the video suffers for being too straightfaced. The premise is ridiculous; it needs at least some nod to that ridiculousness, or it kind of reads like the author is just… kind of a jerk about the limitations of 2002 videogames.
(I watched the author's Skyrim waterways video, and IMO it works a lot better, because it breaks the "fourth wall" of game design in its analysis. Why does Skyrim have a river which reverses direction at one point? Because it's a videogame! There's no actual physics acting on the water, and the designers just… needed it to be going the other way.)
Also, if you really get into the weeds, assuming the game is the platonic ideal of Morrowind is self-contradictory, since the in-game lore plays with the concepts of the "player character" and the game as window into the world. But that's some real lore dweeb shit; I'm not judging anyone for staying far afield of that rabbit hole.
The analysis here never remotely attempts to treat the game as "the platonic ideal of" Morrowind, though. It's just only interested in analyzing the game itself -- studying the shadows, to...
Also, if you really get into the weeds, assuming the game is the platonic ideal of Morrowind is self-contradictory, since the in-game lore plays with the concepts of the "player character" and the game as window into the world.
The analysis here never remotely attempts to treat the game as "the platonic ideal of" Morrowind, though. It's just only interested in analyzing the game itself -- studying the shadows, to continue the platonic metaphor, can be interesting even if it ultimately doesn't reflect the platonic ideal that's casting them. Taking what's presented in-game a bit too seriously can be both humorous and illuminating, and it's largely what made AnyAustin's channel popular.
It's a stylistic choice. I kinda love it when something isn't at all what it appears to be and yet I'm fully aware of what is really going on. Although if I'm not aware I do get annoyed.
It's a stylistic choice. I kinda love it when something isn't at all what it appears to be and yet I'm fully aware of what is really going on. Although if I'm not aware I do get annoyed.
I see it as an extension of the illiteracy surrounding the 36 Lessons: "If I can interpret what I see literally, it must mean the developers intended this, were stupid, or just plain liars." The...
I see it as an extension of the illiteracy surrounding the 36 Lessons: "If I can interpret what I see literally, it must mean the developers intended this, were stupid, or just plain liars." The key to Morrowind's neo-gnostic point is that word and world are not truly separate, and the Matrix-truth about what you (the player who is Nerevar) see before you is actually just beneath the surface, right outside of the light.
This may be deep-lore, but the land in its current state is supposed to be the result of the Six Realities which simultaneously happened, hence the intentional discrepancies in the texts you find. Rather than pick an ending from Daggerfall to use as canon, the writers opted to make the dilemma itself an aspect of the mythos. They developed it into the notion that every time they come up with a new god (i.e. every time someone apotheotizes), the ouroboros of spacetime is severed and relinked to reflect the new reality of that person's pre-existing deification, e.g. the Red Moment of the Tribunal, the Warp in the West of Talos, etc. The Mundus never really functioned under the physics or definitions of real life.
Morrowind itself exists to be at odds with Summerset, Veloth exists to be at odds with Trinimac, Nerevar exists to be at odds with Dagoth Ur—it's all a continuation of the circumstances which lead to Nirn in the first place: the conflict between Auri-El and Lorkhan, who are manifestations of Anui-El and Sithis, who are the personified reflections of Anu and Padomay—stasis and change, the two principles of Mundus' reality. They are the word-made-life out of The Elder Scrolls' oldest religious text: The Light And The Dark.
All other aspects of the universe exist as arbitrary aids in contemplating and sorting that conflict, brushstrokes on a canvas of a world that exists between the game's medium (stasis) and it's player-observer (change).
Okay, needless sermon over. lol
In truth, this video is a fun bit of nerdiness and I really like how excited this person gets about rivers and waters in games. Does anyone who played Halo back in the day remember Frank O'Connor's Bungie Weekly Updates regarding Halo 3? I was so impressed with Far Cry's water shaders and physics, but I did not have a computer capable of running it for a long time. Reading his posts about Bungie's development of their water engine got me pretty excited to play with something similar (but better).
For how impressive Far Cry looked, it's waterways did not push you along the way that, say, Zelda 64's did. Seeing Halo pull off impressive shader effects and physics objects which not only floated, but moved with a virtual current are the kinds of details I love about certain games.
Specifically, the way water is implemented in Morrowind is that there’s a global water level. Everything that goes below that is covered by water (interior cells work the same, though many of them...
The rivers don't flow because Bethesda didn't have the tech at the time to make them do so.
Specifically, the way water is implemented in Morrowind is that there’s a global water level. Everything that goes below that is covered by water (interior cells work the same, though many of them have water turned off entirely)
Ironically I think Skyrim (or oblivion?) was the first game to have actual rivers and lakes at different heights. Arena and Daggerfall while much larger did not have rivers - Arena could have had...
Bethesda didn't have the tech at the time to make them do so.
Ironically I think Skyrim (or oblivion?) was the first game to have actual rivers and lakes at different heights. Arena and Daggerfall while much larger did not have rivers - Arena could have had them if they made some sort of tile-river system since it's a raycaster game but it doesn't (Arena does have boats though).
Oblivion also lacks flowing rivers. There are ponds and swamps at different elevations, in contrast to Morrowind, but the "rivers" are all, like in Morrowind, just inland extensions of the...
Oblivion also lacks flowing rivers. There are ponds and swamps at different elevations, in contrast to Morrowind, but the "rivers" are all, like in Morrowind, just inland extensions of the zero-elevation overworld water plane.
(IMO the game hides this fact better, though; the Niben is broad and plausibly sluggish, and its tributaries are for the most part very remote. In contrast, the Odai runs slap through the middle of one of the major quest hubs, serves as a landmark for a handful of quests, and you're moderately likely to end up swimming in it to escape from guards.)
Made all the more likely because the Odai is largely lacking slaughterfish. Yes, slaughterfish! You're not one, are you? Are you? All I want to do is catch some slaughterfish. Go ahead! Do your...
and you're moderately likely to end up swimming in it to escape from guards.
Made all the more likely because the Odai is largely lacking slaughterfish. Yes, slaughterfish! You're not one, are you? Are you? All I want to do is catch some slaughterfish. Go ahead! Do your worst! I am a god!!!
Huh, never played oblivion so I never took note. It is really weird that they didn't get flowing rivers or some sort of moving water material working with their games. But yeah the games tend to...
Huh, never played oblivion so I never took note. It is really weird that they didn't get flowing rivers or some sort of moving water material working with their games.
But yeah the games tend to hide it better and it's not something you pay attention to: I never really paid attention to the fact that balmora's main river never moved, to be fair!
I liked the video and I don't play those games. It is definitely one step above the already high level of nerdiness of that fandom. He seems to have an entire series about Elder Scrolls bodies of...
I liked the video and I don't play those games. It is definitely one step above the already high level of nerdiness of that fandom. He seems to have an entire series about Elder Scrolls bodies of water.
He has a variety of similar videos for The Legend of Zelda, Grand Theft Auto (tracing power grids), woodworking (zelda and skyrim), unemployment rates for a large variety of videogame cities,...
He has a variety of similar videos for The Legend of Zelda, Grand Theft Auto (tracing power grids), woodworking (zelda and skyrim), unemployment rates for a large variety of videogame cities, tracing where the bombs dropped in fallout, and other weird, overly-literal game topics.
I like the video where he follows released prisoners in Fallout across the map to see where they run off to. Normally you’d just let them run off into the sunset. But they do have planned routes....
I like the video where he follows released prisoners in Fallout across the map to see where they run off to. Normally you’d just let them run off into the sunset. But they do have planned routes. It’s actually a bit hard because they have a tendency to get themselves killed.
I was only just made hip to this channel a couple weeks back but I am really enjoying it. Austin’s videos are perfectly banal in the best kinds of ways. He has a whole series of determining the...
I was only just made hip to this channel a couple weeks back but I am really enjoying it. Austin’s videos are perfectly banal in the best kinds of ways. He has a whole series of determining the employment rate of various towns and cities, all of which are great. His delivery and tone has really developed in the past year and it’s a lot of fun while remaining totally “harmless” if that makes sense.
The videos very much have the energy of a sleepover at a friend’s house where you’ve been playing the same game for 6 hours and are just coming up with silly stuff to try to figure out while trying not to fall asleep.
Thanks I enjoyed that. What I didn’t enjoy was him reminding me that Morrowind (Elder Scrolls 3) came out in 2002 and Skyrim (Elder Scrolls 5) came out in 2011, because we are now in 2024 and...
Thanks I enjoyed that.
What I didn’t enjoy was him reminding me that Morrowind (Elder Scrolls 3) came out in 2002 and Skyrim (Elder Scrolls 5) came out in 2011, because we are now in 2024 and where is my Elder Scrolls VI?
I remember keeping note of that Elder Scrolls "Equinox", when Skyrim was as old as MW was when Skyrim came out. Must've been 2020 give or take a few months. Let that sink in. The time when TES6...
I remember keeping note of that Elder Scrolls "Equinox", when Skyrim was as old as MW was when Skyrim came out. Must've been 2020 give or take a few months.
Let that sink in. The time when TES6 was already a longer wait than Oblivion and Skyrim combined was during the initial pandemic craziness, which is also again a distant memory. At this point no product that I believe Bethesda is capable of developing will live up to the expectations. They've done themselves in thoroughly.
I've been pronouncing it like "cough" this entire time, because I didn't realize this was a different word than the other "slough", pronounced differently despite being spelled the same....
I've been pronouncing it like "cough" this entire time, because I didn't realize this was a different word than the other "slough", pronounced differently despite being spelled the same.
I think rhyming with "cough" has a different vowel than rhyming with "enough", but they're definitely more similar to one another than the pronunciations without the final "f" sound. I'm from...
I think rhyming with "cough" has a different vowel than rhyming with "enough", but they're definitely more similar to one another than the pronunciations without the final "f" sound.
I'm from "slow" country myself but the first time I encountered the word was reading Pilgrim's Progress as a kid and I think I too guessed something that rhymes with "cough".
Like a snake sloughing off its skin. I'm just going off what I'm seeing on Mirriam-Webster, where the two words have different pronunciations in both US and UK.
Like a snake sloughing off its skin.
I'm just going off what I'm seeing on Mirriam-Webster, where the two words have different pronunciations in both US and UK.
Same felt a bit odd hearing that pronunciation the entire time, though personally for me I'm mainly used to hearing the word in reference to the UK town of Slough (pronounced Slau). Anyone not...
Same felt a bit odd hearing that pronunciation the entire time, though personally for me I'm mainly used to hearing the word in reference to the UK town of Slough (pronounced Slau).
Anyone not familiar the town in day to day life may know it from The Office (original UK version).
every time I click a video from tildes I'm like "ehhh do I really want to watch this" and invariably it's fucking awesome. This is probably the prototypical example lol
lol yeah every video he makes is like that for me. Luckily their length makes it easy for me to start watching and he hooks me quick.
This is a good analysis, but I feel the need to take a crack at its foundation: the thesis is pretty much "what do they eat"¹ levels of relevance. The rivers don't flow because Bethesda didn't have the tech at the time to make them do so. They don't have interesting sources because that wasn't where they focused their world modeling efforts, because they didn't think most players would be interested in that. (For all the cliff racers you end up killing, Morrowind's gameplay focus is very clearly on its people and towns, especially compared to Oblivion or Skyrim.) While the Inner Sea being a volcanic crater from an ancient supermassive Red Mountain eruption may be geologically improbable, the much bigger problem with the hypothesis is that the people of the island clearly think of and talk about the Odai as being a river, in a world which clearly has flowing rivers in canon. All the game is an abstraction over a platonic "lore" world which is much deeper and more sophisticated than the game can, just due to technical limitations, fully reproduce; by far the best explanation for Morrowind's stubby, stagnant rivers is simply this.
¹ Morrowind has an NPC population just under 2,700—though that does include all the named-but-uninteresting bandits who populate the island's many caves—but something like half a dozen active farms, plus three-ish working egg mines, a quantity of food production which could not possibly sustain that population. The explanation for this discrepancy is "stop thinking about it and get back to deicide, you dummy".
I’m not sure if I misunderstand your perspective, or if you misunderstand the video. The video is tongue-in-cheek and somewhat “death of the author”. It takes the game at face value, assuming the digital rendering is the platonic ideal for Morrowind.
Oh, no, I get it. My reply is partly in kind; but I do think the video suffers for being too straightfaced. The premise is ridiculous; it needs at least some nod to that ridiculousness, or it kind of reads like the author is just… kind of a jerk about the limitations of 2002 videogames.
(I watched the author's Skyrim waterways video, and IMO it works a lot better, because it breaks the "fourth wall" of game design in its analysis. Why does Skyrim have a river which reverses direction at one point? Because it's a videogame! There's no actual physics acting on the water, and the designers just… needed it to be going the other way.)
Also, if you really get into the weeds, assuming the game is the platonic ideal of Morrowind is self-contradictory, since the in-game lore plays with the concepts of the "player character" and the game as window into the world. But that's some real lore dweeb shit; I'm not judging anyone for staying far afield of that rabbit hole.
The analysis here never remotely attempts to treat the game as "the platonic ideal of" Morrowind, though. It's just only interested in analyzing the game itself -- studying the shadows, to continue the platonic metaphor, can be interesting even if it ultimately doesn't reflect the platonic ideal that's casting them. Taking what's presented in-game a bit too seriously can be both humorous and illuminating, and it's largely what made AnyAustin's channel popular.
It's a stylistic choice. I kinda love it when something isn't at all what it appears to be and yet I'm fully aware of what is really going on. Although if I'm not aware I do get annoyed.
I see it as an extension of the illiteracy surrounding the 36 Lessons: "If I can interpret what I see literally, it must mean the developers intended this, were stupid, or just plain liars." The key to Morrowind's neo-gnostic point is that word and world are not truly separate, and the Matrix-truth about what you (the player who is Nerevar) see before you is actually just beneath the surface, right outside of the light.
This may be deep-lore, but the land in its current state is supposed to be the result of the Six Realities which simultaneously happened, hence the intentional discrepancies in the texts you find. Rather than pick an ending from Daggerfall to use as canon, the writers opted to make the dilemma itself an aspect of the mythos. They developed it into the notion that every time they come up with a new god (i.e. every time someone apotheotizes), the ouroboros of spacetime is severed and relinked to reflect the new reality of that person's pre-existing deification, e.g. the Red Moment of the Tribunal, the Warp in the West of Talos, etc. The Mundus never really functioned under the physics or definitions of real life.
Morrowind itself exists to be at odds with Summerset, Veloth exists to be at odds with Trinimac, Nerevar exists to be at odds with Dagoth Ur—it's all a continuation of the circumstances which lead to Nirn in the first place: the conflict between Auri-El and Lorkhan, who are manifestations of Anui-El and Sithis, who are the personified reflections of Anu and Padomay—stasis and change, the two principles of Mundus' reality. They are the word-made-life out of The Elder Scrolls' oldest religious text: The Light And The Dark.
All other aspects of the universe exist as arbitrary aids in contemplating and sorting that conflict, brushstrokes on a canvas of a world that exists between the game's medium (stasis) and it's player-observer (change).
Okay, needless sermon over. lol
In truth, this video is a fun bit of nerdiness and I really like how excited this person gets about rivers and waters in games. Does anyone who played Halo back in the day remember Frank O'Connor's Bungie Weekly Updates regarding Halo 3? I was so impressed with Far Cry's water shaders and physics, but I did not have a computer capable of running it for a long time. Reading his posts about Bungie's development of their water engine got me pretty excited to play with something similar (but better).
2006-11-10 (bottom section)
2006-12-22 (second paragraph)
2007-01-19 (fourth paragraph)
2007-02-23 (below screenshot)
2007-03-02 (second section)
2007-03-09 (first two paragraphs)
2007-03-16 (second section)
2007-03-23 (second section)
2007-06-15 (first section)
2007-08-10 (Q&A below comic scans)
For how impressive Far Cry looked, it's waterways did not push you along the way that, say, Zelda 64's did. Seeing Halo pull off impressive shader effects and physics objects which not only floated, but moved with a virtual current are the kinds of details I love about certain games.
Specifically, the way water is implemented in Morrowind is that there’s a global water level. Everything that goes below that is covered by water (interior cells work the same, though many of them have water turned off entirely)
Ironically I think Skyrim (or oblivion?) was the first game to have actual rivers and lakes at different heights. Arena and Daggerfall while much larger did not have rivers - Arena could have had them if they made some sort of tile-river system since it's a raycaster game but it doesn't (Arena does have boats though).
It is a bit weird to think about.
Oblivion also lacks flowing rivers. There are ponds and swamps at different elevations, in contrast to Morrowind, but the "rivers" are all, like in Morrowind, just inland extensions of the zero-elevation overworld water plane.
(IMO the game hides this fact better, though; the Niben is broad and plausibly sluggish, and its tributaries are for the most part very remote. In contrast, the Odai runs slap through the middle of one of the major quest hubs, serves as a landmark for a handful of quests, and you're moderately likely to end up swimming in it to escape from guards.)
Made all the more likely because the Odai is largely lacking slaughterfish. Yes, slaughterfish! You're not one, are you? Are you? All I want to do is catch some slaughterfish. Go ahead! Do your worst! I am a god!!!
Don't let them bite you.
I don't know anything about that. I never even met Morrowind! Nosy fish, you are.
Huh, never played oblivion so I never took note. It is really weird that they didn't get flowing rivers or some sort of moving water material working with their games.
But yeah the games tend to hide it better and it's not something you pay attention to: I never really paid attention to the fact that balmora's main river never moved, to be fair!
Mr bttongue's "but what do they eat - Shandification in Fallout" video is like the best on all or YouTube. Great reference. Majestic.
FINE I'll watch it :D Youtube has been showing this in my recommended videos for two weeks as well now.
Glad one of us took the plunge, guess I have to now as well. It's just been there... Watching me...
I liked the video and I don't play those games. It is definitely one step above the already high level of nerdiness of that fandom. He seems to have an entire series about Elder Scrolls bodies of water.
He has a variety of similar videos for The Legend of Zelda, Grand Theft Auto (tracing power grids), woodworking (zelda and skyrim), unemployment rates for a large variety of videogame cities, tracing where the bombs dropped in fallout, and other weird, overly-literal game topics.
I like the video where he follows released prisoners in Fallout across the map to see where they run off to. Normally you’d just let them run off into the sunset. But they do have planned routes. It’s actually a bit hard because they have a tendency to get themselves killed.
Yup, I also never played Morrowind and found it an interesting video. Even learned a new word today, "slough".
Ah Christ I skipped the watch as there was zero comments so I guess I have to now. Morrowind is one of my all time favs so I need to know more
Same, it's been continuously popping up. This is the day I'll give it a spin then.
I was only just made hip to this channel a couple weeks back but I am really enjoying it. Austin’s videos are perfectly banal in the best kinds of ways. He has a whole series of determining the employment rate of various towns and cities, all of which are great. His delivery and tone has really developed in the past year and it’s a lot of fun while remaining totally “harmless” if that makes sense.
The videos very much have the energy of a sleepover at a friend’s house where you’ve been playing the same game for 6 hours and are just coming up with silly stuff to try to figure out while trying not to fall asleep.
I guess I'm gonna start caling it Odai slough from now on... Maybe there needs to be a mod for this!
Thanks I enjoyed that.
What I didn’t enjoy was him reminding me that Morrowind (Elder Scrolls 3) came out in 2002 and Skyrim (Elder Scrolls 5) came out in 2011, because we are now in 2024 and where is my Elder Scrolls VI?
I remember keeping note of that Elder Scrolls "Equinox", when Skyrim was as old as MW was when Skyrim came out. Must've been 2020 give or take a few months.
Let that sink in. The time when TES6 was already a longer wait than Oblivion and Skyrim combined was during the initial pandemic craziness, which is also again a distant memory. At this point no product that I believe Bethesda is capable of developing will live up to the expectations. They've done themselves in thoroughly.
Ah Valve's HL3 deadlock
As someone who hasn't played Morrowind, but wants to get to it eventually, is this video spoiler free?
Yes it is literally about rivers.
The only spoiler is that it's actually not about rivers, it's about sloughs.
Well now you've taken all the fun out of it
Hearing "slough" pronounced as "slew" throughout this video was wild. I was raised deep in "slau" country, I guess (though really more like "slow").
I've been pronouncing it like "cough" this entire time, because I didn't realize this was a different word than the other "slough", pronounced differently despite being spelled the same.
Definitely an "awry" moment.
A relevant song about the English language.
Like "slough" in cards? Rhymes with "rough"? IIRC he mentioned that was the British pronunciation.
I think rhyming with "cough" has a different vowel than rhyming with "enough", but they're definitely more similar to one another than the pronunciations without the final "f" sound.
I'm from "slow" country myself but the first time I encountered the word was reading Pilgrim's Progress as a kid and I think I too guessed something that rhymes with "cough".
Like a snake sloughing off its skin.
I'm just going off what I'm seeing on Mirriam-Webster, where the two words have different pronunciations in both US and UK.
Yes, like a snake. It's the same sense in cards, of discarding something useless.
Same felt a bit odd hearing that pronunciation the entire time, though personally for me I'm mainly used to hearing the word in reference to the UK town of Slough (pronounced Slau).
Anyone not familiar the town in day to day life may know it from The Office (original UK version).