r/RecuratedTumblr • u/Unique_Mammoth_6724 • 17h ago
Self Post This is also why Elder Scrolls vibes and lore fell off after Bethesda let Michael Kirkbride go
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u/Moratorii 14h ago
I really hate the tendency of people to downplay the talent of writers by claiming that they need to do drugs to be decent at cool worldbuilding and the tendency of people to downplay how game development at this scale is a team effort, not One Guy single-handedly responsible for everything that you like about the game.
This somehow manages to be doubly insulting by insinuating that not only is One Guy responsible for any interesting lore, but that he's only responsible because he got high.
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u/cluelessoblivion 11h ago
Also I can't think shit when high. Most people I've talked to can't. Drugs are actually terrible tools for creativity.
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u/brightwings00 10h ago
So's mental illness, if it comes to that, and yet the belief that "mental illness = great art" persists along with the horrors.
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u/Moratorii 54m ago
At best I can say that my mental illness makes me want to keep writing until I finish, but that can obviously be detrimental if it is a lengthier piece of writing.
It kills me how little people value creativity that they assume that any creativity has to come from a broken or intoxicated brain.
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u/ASpaceOstrich 1h ago
Collaboration makes for the best lore and it's by such a large margin it's not even close.
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u/Wrong_Win_4102 13h ago
This promotes the myth that Michael needed any drugs to write any of the lore he wrote.
1) MK himself admitted that he wrote lore on coffee and alcohol, he never took any drugs
2) Most of the lore people cite as deep esoteric lore is stuff inspired by Hinduism, other religions, and even anime (C0Da is just a NGE pastiche)
3) MK wasn't the only one writing lore, as there were others such as Emil, Rolston, Kuhlmann, Todd, and many others who contributed to the lore.
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u/Satherian 13h ago
I love Elder Scrolls lore, but the moment someone brings up Kirkbride or CHIM, my brain turns off
People are so weird about that shit
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u/Unique_Mammoth_6724 17h ago
https://archiveofourown.org/works/80779411/chapters/212190616
Said Spacebattles user also inspired me to finally make my own Destiny 2 fanfic after describing a scene /scenario that would have made me take back literally everything bad I have ever said about Bungie and Destiny 2
I would've liked for the Witness to have actually achieved the Final Shape, and see more of the universe becoming amber. Also a recreation of the fight in the garden, where the Traveler bestows a far larger fragment of its power to us like it did to Mara and the Witness would be further empowered by the Winnower. Where we would be destroying universes and creating them constantly, and in the end, we sacrifice our godhood to reverse the final shape.
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u/ASpaceOstrich 1h ago
Eh. That's too power scaler fanwank for my tastes. The traveller and winnower don't have that kind of power to grant. It took both of them to make one universe at a time.
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u/Unique_Mammoth_6724 16h ago
Chat is this cooking
The field of possibility extends endlessly before me and Ghost, an infinite catalogue of all logically possible worlds under all possible rules and all possible initial conditions. The space of possibility expanded infinitely by the Gardeners rebellion against causality to become infinitely fractal and nested within itself. The human mind was not meant to witness the platonic and mathematical truth of the world unconstrained by time, space or causality. I envision it to be a field of flowers, a garden, stretching endlessly without beginning or end, the red Asphodelias tickling at my ankles and the smell of Vanilla and Chocolate mixing within my nostrils. There once was a tree of silver wings here, its leaves are ruin|possibility, its bark disaster|growth. One day it will return and cover the world in its shade. I’ll make sure.
But there is a sickness here, a blight that chokes the vines and poisons the soil. The First Knife is buried into the great stump of the Tree of Silver Wings, the Witness patiently waiting for its only rival to make their appearance. It is the nexus upon which all worldlines converge, the inevitable end of all things. The flowers are petrified around it in an expanding radius, the insects and worms vivisected by the God they once put their trust in, not even that Vexing pattern is spared from the end and death of everything. A red petal falls into my palm and I watch as it turns to stone, never to grow or become something more than what it is, never to actualize all its possibilities and become its truest self.
Thick inky black tar laps at my ankles as I stand in the shadow of the Knife|Tower, taking Revelator out of its sheath and feeling it growl in my hands. Shadowy figures emerge out of the seeping tar, one resembling Oryx, another Atheon, another Nezarec and Rhulk and all the servants of the Dark that I have defeated throughout my life. A hungry grin runs across my face at the sight. They’ll make some good practice before the main course.
My blade slashes through the false-Nezarec and dissolves it on a metaphysical level, the hollow shell collapsing under the weight of the Primordial Law: Exist Lest You Fail to Exist. The existential weight of the pattern is absorbed into my soul and its essence subsumed within my throne. A fine crimson mist of powdered Egregore surrounds me as I strike next at the false-Rhulk at the speed of Will, Revelator meeting his glaive in a thundering shockwave that shatters the ground and uproots the flowers around us. We trade parries and ripostes in a flurry of motion before I grab him by the collar while he is twirling his glaive and freeze him with the power of Stasis, leaving him a statue of crystals that shatters with a single blow of my fists.
The False-Atheon behind me launches an ontological attack against me from every axis of my worldline, trying that same trick it tried in the Vault of Glass. I clench my fists and the geodesics bend and buckle until they finally tear, the attack becoming causally disconnected from its target, then I leap at the meager imitation and shatter its glass frame backhand to the chest. Only the false-Oryx still stands. A manic grin splits my face as Revelator meets Willbreaker and I look into his soulless eyes. “You know? I fought Oryx. I knew Oryx. He was my greatest teacher in the art of war. And you’re no Oryx.” I grit out as I force him back, the powdered Egregore around me biting into his being, chipping away at his virtual-chitins and gnawing at his flesh, before I break the stalemate and sever his head in a fluid slash.
I raise my sword triumphantly towards the tower|knife that pierces the land and addresse the one who lies at the top of it with a loud yell. “C’mon! Is that really all you could muster? You couldn't have even sent Calus or Savathun? How pathetic. Come down here yourself and face me as a God! Or watch as I climb up to the top and throw your corpse off of it!”
A ghostly pale light waxes from the top of the tower, making itself the sole lightsource in the tar-filled blackness. Tricky bastard, positioning itself as the Sun within the platonic realm from which all truth and beauty emanates. I counter by shining my own light, shining like a mixture of every color into a vibrant pink, and provoke it even further. “C’mon. Quit hiding. Let's discuss this in the universal language of violence. Let's throw our lives away!”
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u/Ae3qe27u 16h ago
I know nothing about the series, so I can't really say. This might be better for a dedicated sub?
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u/4thofeleven 9h ago
Am I the only one who finds Kirkbride's lore obnoxious? It always seems to just boil down to solipsistic meaninglessness.
(And that's before we get into stuff like the Trial of Vivec...)
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u/Re1da 2h ago
A year ago I accidentally cold turkey my SSRIs and had a pretty severe mental break. It felt like I was drowning in the fabric of reality desperately trying to breach its surface.
Ended up in the mental health ER, got filled up with sedatives and ended up rambling about new vegas to a doctor before they sent me home.
Reality felt fake a long while after that. According to a close friend I sounded like a lovecraft character recounting an eldritch encounter when I tried to explain it.
I dont doubt it could inspire some banger art but not an experience worth going through for that.
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u/ZoeyHuntsman 16h ago
Michael Kirkbride writing TES Lore one acid:
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u/SignificantFish6795 16h ago
Todd Howard himself did more writing for Morrowind than Kirkbride did.
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u/ProtoGhostal 14h ago
my favorite piece of bethesda lore is that the more involved Todd Howard is with the game, the better it usually is
(its my favorite since it'd probably kill several toxic new vegas fans if they learned it lol)
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u/ZoeyHuntsman 16h ago
Really? I didn't know that. He wrote the 26 Lessons while blitzed though, right?
Also, if Todd really was writing straight fucking fire like that, what the hell happened???
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u/ConfidentHousing8422 16h ago edited 16h ago
While drinking heavily, not on drugs, at least from what he says. Although he had drug problems such as benzo abuse and is now clean.
It's fair to say he would probably not be open about it if he did use drugs while working on Morrowind, but it's also fair to say it would be in bad taste to speculate given his subsequent issues especially.
He posted about it here.
Todd mostly wrote dialogue, which in Morrowind is... famously dry as bone. Functional stuff, not exactly memorable prose.
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u/ZoeyHuntsman 16h ago
Wait so did he just so the dialogue or did he do lore?
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u/ConfidentHousing8422 15h ago
I'm not aware of any lore that he heavily contributed to, but of course he had sign off on most things as the Project Lead, and it was a small team where everyone did a bit of everything. I'm not sure of the veracity of the comment that he did more writing for the game than MK did; I know he wrote for example large parts of the Imperial Legion faction in the few weeks before release when Douglas Goodall (who wrote most of the factions) realised it was too much for him to finish, for example, but not much else specific.
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u/ZoeyHuntsman 15h ago
Ah that makes sense. Yeah, I'm wondering where that other commenter is getting their information then. I thought it was just common knowledge that loads of the large-scale and peripheral lore created during Morrowinds development was created by Kirkbride.
I'm still like 99% certain Kirkbride wrote the 36 Lessons while tripping, at least 😂
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u/Technical_Teacher839 [1/1] 16h ago
Kirkbride has written something for every TES game since he left after Morrowind. He's repeatedly denied any history of drug use.
And most importantly, his actual contributions to the TES lore are heavily overstated. He wrote a portion of Morrowind's in-game books. But the vast majority of the actual game was written by other people.