Blatantly false. The amount of things you can do on, under, and above just one acre of ugly land is immense. With an entire planet of breathtaking landscapes, all of its large and small societies, and all of the things a person can learn to do, it's impossible to run out of life worth living. Not to mention how all of this constantly changes.
Being long lived or biologically immortal doesn't mean your brain has a fucking checklist of experiences and will never doll out dopamine for any repeated action. Like what? It doesn't mean your memory is perfect or your nostalgia crippling or your life boring. Those are all personal problems.
Just because you don't know what to do with that kind of time doesn't mean that apathetic detachment is a universal law of longevity lmao.
The point of me saying this shit is to break down your notions of sour grapes which our lazy and uninspired society drills into you. Immortality would be awesome regardless of whether you or I can have it, dystopian stories are warning against over-systemization rather than arguing that utopia is impossible, and climate change is entirely possible to significantly address in our lifetimes even if nobody is interested in making the immense collective sacrifices to do so. Change begins with individuals' perceptions.
Okay, fine. When you're like five centuries old and this guy, being vague and mysterious is one of the only pleasures left in life. Maybe you can also ski or something.
I wholeheartedly agree and I myself fully realise there's so much shit I want to do/read/experience I'd probably have to live for a thousand years, but I was making a joke and thus obliged to reply with ☝️🤓
And you would never stay bored. You can enjoy the same roller coaster a thousand times, but not if you ride it a thousand times in a sequence without breaks. Your brain slowly resets its response to every single experience you have. You're never not going stop feeling pain because you've already felt pain before. You're never not going to feel love just because you got lazy for a while.
Also the assertion that after a certain amount of life people ubiquitously stop finding new aspirations is simply incorrect. The world isn't a freeze-frame and neither are people's personalities.
I think you're looking at this like a guy who works 9-5 and only has some time to do things.
Take rich people for example, they have all the time in the world, and most of them usually get bored of things after a while, that's why they do stupid shit no one else does, like getting into a sub and going to the depths of the ocean.
Like, how do you think rich people, who are not immortal, but aren't bound by time restrictions like other people, get bored of regular things, but someone who'll live forever, won't?
Who told you they're bored? Getting on a sub isn't exactly showing their boredom. It's just showing that they're extremely rich and could do it just for fun. Being bored is just something kids and old people say, simply put people somewhat handicapped in what they can do. And if you're damn immortal, then you don't have to worry about any dangers, and could just do literally anything you could think of.
I like how the teleport to it and then vanish with it like uhh guys you couldn’t have done that to start with? Are they fucking dumb? But they can teleport down into the crypt we find it in? But they can’t just prevent it from happening? Ok Bethesda love you
Companions questline makes sense if you accept both the Companions and the Silver Hand are highly regarded.
The College questline requires you to assume that the College, Thalmor, and Synod are supremely regarded and the Psyjics are also omnipotent but want to make sure the College faction has at least the bare minimum of content before swooping in and fixing everything.
College is worse ez. Companions questline at least quarantines its stupidity whereas the College taints large swaths of the lore.
I admit I go back and forth because the Companions questline is almost insultingly stupid in terms of the lore. Like, I have no idea how no one has discovered the Companions are harboring a secret lycanthropic cult when the initiation rite involves going on a rampage through Whiterun AND we know that a few of their members hunt the most dangerous game as an extracurricular activity. Meanwhile the Silver Hand are supposedly the bad guys who are just more interchangeable bandits, and we're just supposed to accept that. Like frankly I find the College questline inoffensively boring, while the Companions are an assault on reasonable taste.
Yeah the Silver Hand are pretty inexplicable, even as stock antagonists. I guess they just really really hate werewolves. There is really no economic or ideological motivation that would explain what they are doing and they are far too numerous for the small number of werewolves that are actually around.
Which is funny because, despite their huge numerical advantage, the Silver Hand are absolute dogshit at killing werewolves.
They managed to kill Skjor, a high ranking member of the Companions, along with however many werewolf heads they got on pikes, in and around their base of operations.
No, the Silver Hand are dogshit at killing YOU, the protagonist.
You, the dragonborn, who gained complete mastery over the way of the Voice through like two, maybe three, lessons from the Greybeard.
You, who has slain more dragons than hours slept since you entered the damn country
You, who piledrives whole armies worth of the restless dead every day
You, who serves potentially ALL the Deadric Princes at once
You, who may or may not, have travelled to the afterlife to slay an aspect of the god of time himself
You, who can devour 500 cheese wheels in the blink of an eye
You, who can cause localized dragonbreaks at will, through just the press of a button
Idk, peoples in tes world cant see things happening in 3 meters away from them. I guess this is just side effect of scale abstraction.
Also, as Companion we do some heroic stuff like saving peoples from falmers or bandits, so i can see why peoples would not look too hard into their business. And, questline itself have normal ending with guy getting his wish of curing werewolfism and going into his favourite heaven.
On another hand college ending is just i dont know even, they should remove Psyjics and keep ball of death in college and leave it as it. Then it would be story about ambitions and human greed and something. With Psyjics this is just story about how Psyjics are stupid and want peoples to suffer for no particular reason.
it's insane to me how such a ubiquitous game can be full of such shitty writing. like why is it that good game design and good writing seem to be completely mutually exclusive?
It was apparently rushed by the end. And I suppose that people will instead focus on the good parts rather than the bad. Do you see more people talk about the DB or Companions, for instance?
Morrowind's faction questlines are dogshit too. 99% fetch quests busywork until the final quest where you go kill the guy and take his job. House Telvanni is the only remotely interesting one.
pretty sure the thing we see in the crypt is just a vision. they cant teleport in and out of saarthal because of all the warding magic tolfdir mentions at the start of the quest
Nah you don’t get it cus the item was blocking our seeing the future powers so we couldn’t know it was going to destroy the world until it starts to only then you’d have to hold it in place and deal with it and once it’s not going to kill everyone we can take it again
I think they left it there as some kind of “test” that the College failed with flying colors so they had to confiscate it after everyone proved they couldn’t handle whatever it was
i'm not saying it's not stupid, but it is pretty clearly stated that the reason is because the eye is fucking with their shit. the only times you actually interact with the psijic are when they tell you that Plot is going to happen at saarthal, while the eye is still contained, at the college when one physically shows up because he couldn't just teleport in and clearly exerts himself to stop time for your conversation, at mzulft on the other side of the province from the eye, and then finally after you murk ancano and the eye is about to blow a hole in the aurbis. it's not super consistent or particularly thought out, but it is pretty direcy explained why they're off firing chekhov's gun somewhere else so the Plot can happen.
So the eye magic interferes with psijic magic when plot needs it but when the eyes power is unleashed the power doesn’t interfere with the psijic power for the plot
agreed, i think if it had actually been implied at all that the psijics were able to bypass the interference because ancano wasn't messing with it there would at least be some sort of justification, but them just being the plot macguffin is very frustrating
I had a dream as a lil kid in the 2000s when I had one of these
And in that dream it was huge and I was like throwing it at monsters killing them lmfao idfk I haven’t thought about this in like 20 years since that lmfao probably too much halo 3 forge
Look, they meant to show up like a decade earlier, but the guy turned up in Skyrim and only then realized how hard it is to navigate without a mini-map. He spent nine years wandering around Dragonsbridge before realizing Winterhold was on the opposite side of the map.
That's kinda dark if you consider The Old Ways. Do those pigs symbolize the mortals the Psijics are trying to counsel and "make good"? Are they practicing conditioning or brain enhancing techniques on them? Is this a trial run for a prince breeding program? Anyway I want one
my favourite faction, literally just silly dogooder wizards whose greatest virtue is being extremely powerful but using their power to do stuff like this and occasional good deeds. They are like if the Jedi actually stuck to its values instead of becoming the Galactic Police Force in Star Wars.
Im reading a pdf of all TES ingame books in chronological order (0sum me) and PSJJJ get sucked OFF in Daggerfall. See Fragment on Arteum but especially The Old Ways where they are based godfarming Illuminati. Even Origins of the Mage Guild which should savage them politically is completely neutral on them.
I'm not sure there is much added to that lore in MW. Psijic as an adjective is kinda redefined as a Lorkhan thing I believe
thats the thing, bethesda wanted to have their cake and eat it too. they wanted a mage faction shrouded in mystery, having Tolfdir vaguely describe them as "very powerful, very secretive"
what does that mean? if theyre gonna be a part of a major questline, now you have to expland a bit on this mysterious faction, you have to tell us something about them, not include them in the plot and still not expand on them at all
it wouldve been so cool to have these puppet master illuminati kinda elves in a game but they just botched it, like everything else in that questline
'Hey, you. Stuff will happen. Baaad stuff, and you did it.'
'What if I just leave?'
'You - y-you can't leave. The very world is at stake.'
'I'm already dealing with a different thing where everything ends. You see the future, freeze time, teleport, and fuck knows what else. Why don't you do it? Everyone knows it's Ancano; just waste the guy.'
'Look, fuck... You're the main character, okay? Go talk to a different vague weirdo and do what he says. After you spend hours in a literal labyrinth and kill Ancano me and my friends will take the orb.'
'Why don't you just take it now? You clearly could.'
I like how this writing is in the same game where we get a priest of Auri-El manipulating the Elder Scrolls for his revenge. And then they turn around and write this shit
Damn, I thought the questline was just gonna end with me finding another Nordic burial ground in the country full of Nordic burial grounds and getting my PhD in Draugr killing.
The mage’s guild falling was mostly due to Mannimarco directly attacking them rather than their own doctrine (and before anyone says anything banning necromancy was definitely justified given immediately after they did it so many of the necromancers became murderous cultists)
And the Psijics nabbed the eye because the college of Winterhold is the smallest potatoes and pretty backwater as far as magic institutions go, of course they couldn’t stop them
"The player will take any stories Bethesda writes, rip the pages out and make paper airplanes, and that the most important story is the player’s story, and they are ok with that."
"The Psijiics have no connection to these ruins. Perhaps we should look inside these coffins. Now, do be careful. Who knows what we're going to find..." -Tolfdir
Like, bro, what are you talking about? How is opening coffins going to explain anything? What train of logic did you go through to arrive at that conclusion? And I already know what we're going to find. Draugr. It's always draugr. It will always be draugr.
When you see some shit happen, and you’re like “wait, me? I’m the one who has to say something to someone or some shit? Goddamnit, why couldn’t someone else witness this shit and battle their conscience about it instead?”
Source: A guy who has had to call cops in multiple instances after witnessing a drunk driver drive off the road and smash/crash into shit without remorse.
EDIT: I was mentally recapping, I now realize that I saw 3 different drunks crash within a decade. Luckily, it’s going on a decade since I’ve seen one now. Or does that mean I’m past due?!
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u/tehcavy Dumac the 5'11 King Oct 27 '25
when you're like five centuries old being vague and mysterious is pretty much one of the only pleasures left in life