Riding on the coattails of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind’s tenth anniversary nostalgia-fest, The Elder Scrolls Online was announced the other day, its expected release date a vague “2013”. As expected given the series’ recent boost in popularity (see: Skyrim), the internet’s gone berserker mode over the news. Reactions have ranged anywhere from uncontrollable flails of pure joy to quiet suspicion to seething fanboy/girl rage (that’s the worst kind of rage, FYI).
I’m a party-pooper by nature, so the first thing I did was attempt to pick apart what few details have been released so far via Game Informer’s announcement and their already-leaked June cover story on the subject. Let’s begin, shall we?
The Elder Scrolls Online will take place over most of Tamriel about a thousand years before the events of Skyrim, placing us towards the end of the Second Era (according to some calculations, roundabouts 2E 531)—a few hundred years before any of the other titles in the series. Several factions are warring for power over Cyrodiil , but apparently the main baddie is Molag Bal, who is working with the ever-familiar Mannimarco to suck all of Tamriel into Oblivion—presumably into his own realm, which is called Coldharbour and is a corrupted mirror image of the world under his reign.
But here’s the thing—so far as Elder Scrolls nerds are concerned, this event has never ever been mentioned. The most we’ve ever read of Coldharbour was simply a visual description, and well, struggles between Daedra and the Mundas are pretty well documented in the lore. I mean, I’m pretty sure that even if none of the series’ many scholars had thought to record that one time when everyone in Tamriel was suddenly sucked into a realm “spattered with blood and excrement,” then at the very least the story would have lived on through bard songs, or one of those four thousand-year-old wizards would have remembered it and maybe mentioned it to someone.
The prevailing theory seems to be that Zenimax will work in a ‘Dragon Break’, a plot device which requires an explanation of its own—a Dragon Break is an occasion in which linear time breaks, becoming non-linear. The ‘Dragon’ refers to Akatosh, Dragon God of Time. The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Page wiki defines it best: “It is a re-alignment of time and space in response to an event which makes the normal continuity of reality impossible.” The series made use of this wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey plot device as recently as in Skyrim so that the presence of Alduin would make some sort of sense. Potentially the most documented Dragon Break in Elder Scrolls lore, however, is the Warp in the West, which made each possible ending of Daggerfall canon by claiming that all three endings had happened at once.
What I’m getting at here is that the only way I could see Molag Bal feasibly squeezing himself into the timeline of Tamriel’s Second Era along with one faction that wouldn’t have existed for another couple hundred years (The Aldmeri Dominion) and two factions that had never been mentioned at all (The Ebonheart Pact and The Daggerfall Covenant) is if the entire game takes place in some sort of alternate timeline or reality that isn’t strictly canon. Wow. That was a mouthful.
It’s not quite as elegant as writing a history that actually makes linear sense, but what can you do? For me, Bethesda and now Zenimax’s insistence upon adding new history to the series instead of just pulling from the crazy amount of in-game books bursting at the seams with untouched lore is odd. Especially when, to quote Adam Biessener’s feature that nobody’s supposed to have read yet (I’m sorry dude), “The powerful abilities conferred by [porphyric hemophilia and lycanthropy] are practically impossible to balance for a multi-player game without breaking the lore, which Zenimax Online is unwilling to do.” That a studio willing to play around with factions, wars, and questionable communications with Daedric Princes is worried about breaking vampire lore strikes me as bizarre…but in a strangely comforting sort of way. As in, maybe they really do have their shit together and we need to stop worrying and learn to love the Bal.
Regardless of nerdy lore implications making my head spin, I can’t help but be girlishly excited over the announcement and to see what Zenimax Online does to mix up the generic fantasy MMO formula.
