@001zlnv No, I noped out instantly when the racism showed up. Doesn't surprise me to hear that though, fuck the Thalmor.

@Soreth

yeaaaah there's no real choice there.

anyway the reason the forts are empty is that the empire is on a catastrophic losing streak.

morowind blew up, then oblivion happened and demons ate their troops, then they lost a war to the thalmor, then they got tied up fighting an insurgency in their founding Provence.

empire is doooooomed

@001zlnv Yeah, but even if you never trigger the main quest in Oblivion and the daedra never show up, the forts of Cyrodiil have clearly not been maintained or garrisoned in decades. Which is, uhm, what?

@Soreth

true.

Morrowind is the last of the elder scrolls games I think really worked well.

@001zlnv I can buy somewhat into Skyrim. The climate is clearly hell on any kind of roads or stonework buildings and it's very clearly largely In Decline. But yeah, Morrowind did a much much better job of giving you islands of stability and civilization in the middle of a harsh and unforgiving expanse of hostile wilderness.

@Soreth

it also gave you a better reason for the factionalism.

you had imperial occupiers in a client state with an ethno religious regional government, that also had an underclass made up of escaped or freed slaves, and then ruins of dwemmer all over the place filled with magic plague monsters! tons of reasons to have weak imperial governance and discord.

then you get to oblivion where you're in the imperial capital, I could see it being a bit under garisoned if it was just a "there's no threats here why would we keep troops" but it isn't it's still weirdly neglected and filled with monsters.

Then skyrim has this weird time skip and seems to take place after the interesting stuff really happened.

I don't know... I kind of would like to see them just leave the empire totally behind if they do another game, and do elswhere or black swamp or something. just get back to the magical weird alien stuff that made morrowind great.

@001zlnv They'll never do Black Marsh. It's too weird and too strange and they'd have to have Argonians everywhere with very few humans. Same with Elsweyr, it'd be cats everywhere and almost nobody human. No, next game will be Hammerfell or maybe High Rock. Maybe maybe maybe Summerset Isle.

@Soreth

yeaaaah you're likely right.
and that makes me sad

@001zlnv Honestly I'd rather they didn't do Black Marsh than they do it and fuck it up.

@Soreth There's a pretty hefty time jump between Oblivion and Skyrim during which the Empire is Having a Bad Day.

no excuse for the Oblivion forts though.

@Doephin Yeah, that's kind of the big kicker. The Oblivion forts _should_ have been properly built up and maintained and just... under Daedric siege. Wandering around in Oblivion, I kept wondering where the actual civilization was... everything was frontier.