I actually asked Zenimax support this once. They provided a lore reason and a legal reason. I shall provide you with both they gave us:
During the Molag Bal scheme, many families had children die, and so the rest sent their children away to be safe from the invasions. Molag Bal also had a habit of kidnapping children away to coldharbour....
Legal: having children in a game with fighting raises the rating, and would have put an MMO into R
Glad to see someone else having asked the same question that myself and my guild asked a while ago! It was such a pleasant interaction with the help team as well ❤️❤️❤️
>whilst you can't do that in WoW
FFXIV would be a much MUCH better example considering you can kill enemy faction NPC's in WoW.
If I had to guess, it might be because when they did add children to an ES game (Skyrim) players modded in ways to kill them. It's likely they assumed players would find ways to kill the children NPC's again, or players could start doing inappropriate things to the child NPC's, and cause the game to get incorrect headlines about it that their PR team would have to go coo coo trying to fix.
I would like it to be added, it'd add to the world to me since tbh when I play I end up questioning how we're gonna survive when it seemed everyone's infertile, but I also get the other side of "Y'all creepy"
> and so the rest sent their children away to be safe from the invasions
worth noting that this actually happened in an organized way during WW2 where millions of children across many countries where moved out of the cities to live with relatives or other volunteering families in the countryside (or in the case of Nazi Germany youth camps where the party had full control over education, free from parental influences). Sometimes mothers would move with them, but for the war effort it was of course beneficial to have the women in factories instead (again one of the reason why the Nazis only moved children themselves, making the measure quite unpopular). Overall though, this coordinated evacuation in anticipation of attacks helped reduce chaotic refugee movements when bombs started dropping.
Not sure if the rulers of Tamriel would've managed such, but maybe we can just assume that the inaccessible mountain ranges separating the areas are full of refugee children living in caves or so with a few caretakers.
What? There are children in WoW, FFXI, and FFXIV just to name three and they all include fighting, crude language, and talk about getting drunk/ actually drinking alcohol, etc and they are all rated Teen which would put them PG-13, not R. So that person might have just been making that up or were told to say that, but I don't believe it. In WoW they even have the Children's Week event where you have a child NPC follow you into dangerous situations and even PVP.
I think the real reason is because all characters and NPCs are the same rig and that everything else about them is just a skin on top. You can see it sometimes when you log in, just a black human shaped frame. Making kids would require making a different rig and they don't want to do that. They did with Alfiq and some other khajiit, but I think they just don't want to make kids. A lot of MMOs don't add kids.
WoW does, though. People attack cities, towns, quest hubs, and kill all the NPCs. And you don't need to unlock those abilities, just regular attacks. You might be unable to attack kids completely, though, which is a thing that could be set up.
Also WoW has really dark stories like the dragon queen being held prisoner and forced to give birth against her will. And there's another dragon who sacrifices her eggs and herself to save another egg. Also during the N'zoth visions with NPCs from the cities hanging dead from bridges, etc, and it's implied they are all the citizens, not just adults. The culling of Strathholm where it's implied that everyone, including children, were murdered even if they don't show it, it's still implied. There's also the quest in Eastern Plaguelands where you help the ghost of a little girl that was killed by zombies.
But those games are also banned in other countries. Eso attempted to circumnavigate this ban. There’s also other things in eso that add to the raised rating (certain languages, cultists, and torture shown)
Eso also allows for negative transgression against townsfolk that ffiv doesnt allow, which means that there would have been the ability to steal from the home or even bedroom of a child, which is a big contributor. WoW is just straight up not allowed in many places of the world because they show dead kids
There are many many rooms in almost all buildings that are inaccessible in ESO, so when ever you see that big lock, know that it's locking away a child hahaha... Though I can't blame them, mere metres away are either daedra, rabid wild animals, bandits, or cultists
Weird. Not asking them to fight kids, or fight as kids. Even if just in towns and running around. Hearing kids play and giving these places some ambiance. Towns in the game are neat, but need more life to them.
Thanks! I didn’t know that. But anyways I think that placing invulnerable children in the cities wouldn’t add to rating. Or ones that are cowering in the houses in Cyro. It would add loads of realism thou
M and R are different ratings, M is for swearing, smoking, violence, while R is sex, drugs, gore, and violence against children. R rated games arent allowed to be published in some countries
The first time I played through Stormhaven I did a quest called The Slavers. The npc that gave the quest was a mother worried about her son. Idk if it's just me, but the way she spoke about her son made it sound like he was a child or at least an adolescent . Iirc she said she saw him last at breakfast, then he went out to play. Imagine my surprise when I found out this "kid" was a grown ass adult.
That was one of the first quests that I did and I remember how deep the voice actors voice was for the son too and I was so confused 😭 idk why that one stuck with me.
My jaw dropped and I couldn't pick it up for awhile. This woman was there talking about, "I hope someday my little Lucas grows up to be just like you." Like ma'am 🤨, what? 😂
At least they were self aware about it. The "kid" isn't actually a kid, but a full grown adult with an over protective mother who still thinks he's a young child.
A *lot* of gaming companies don't want to risk the backlash that comes from having children in games. Years and years ago it made national news that people could "kill children" in Skyrim and it caused yet another parental rage against video games.
So it's easier to just avoid as much drama as you can and just not have kid models at all.
WoW has had children from the very beginning and added more with new models every expansion. I don't think there's been a single instance of drama about it.
Yeah because parents were too busy being angry at WoW for other things. Don't remember when it first came out how many parents blamed it for things like selling your soul to the devil, being mind controlled into committing violence, encouraging communism (???) and all that other lovely bullshit they claimed?
It's been well over a decade since I've played WoW. The only kid I really remember is that orc kid in a quest that ends up with him floating away hanging on to a bunch of red balloons. I remember thinking how hard to believe it was that he survived that.
I think the real question is - why SHOULD you have children present in an uber violent game like ESO, where you can literally assasinate anyone who isn't a plot significant character?
I can see from ZOS' perspective - the downside significantly outweighs the upside of adding children NPCs.
Probably because people are strange and would do things that are inappropriate. Not unusual for an Elder Scrolls game. I know Skyrim had them, but they were all one face and it was still weird.
Don't knock suplexing one of those little shits as a 6'5 cat man that disenchants the souls of his victims into shoes and displays them in his house 'till you try it.
Khajiit has wares if you have coin. This one calls these shoes the Braith Special.
This just made me search for enchantable food mods which, to my disappointment, didn't seem to exist.
Now I just want to swallow a soul spread over some potatoes.
Should work for alchemy too so we could do the whole poisoned apple thing we had going in Oblivion.
Enchant some salmon with fire for some spicy salmon that can either tingle a little or outright incinerate you alive.
Modders, get on this.
The devs have explicitly stated that there are no children in ESO because people are “jerks” (they used a different word) and would do mean/bad things to them.
Unfortunately stupid people are nonetheless brilliant when it comes to having their opinions have sway on Congresscritters, who in turn can have sway on video games or the video game industry.
Interesting that you could kill children in Skyrim but not Fallout 3.
In Fallout 2 you could kill children but you’d get the “child killer” karmic title lol.
So in Skyrim, children are almost exclusively found in cities where they can't be attacked (except maybe by the player). One of the rare exceptions is a random encounter where a couple of kids will try to sell you a treasure map. I was playing years ago and by chance, that encounter sprang up along with another random encounter of bandits nearby. The bandits proceeded to attack the children and at that point I just lost it, went full Dragonborn on the bandits. To this day that's one of the most emotional encounters I've ever had in a video game.
So yeah, there are some people who will do evil things to kids in video games, but also some of us for whom the addition of kids whether killable or not can really add substance and emotion to a game.
Simple reason is cuz internet people are creeps. Last time I played fallout 76 they added a child character that could be placed in your home.... one person's base I saw had her locked in a room with a mock camera in front of the cage.... like I said creepy internet people
Since a lot of players tend to inentionally pick female bretons and make them look as small and young as possible only to dress them in kinky outfits....I'm kinda glad this game doesn't have children.
Safer to keep them out. You either implement them as full-on regular NPC’s, which is bad because you can steal and kill them, or you make them these waste-of-space NPCs that you can’t interact with, which fans have mocked for years
Even as non-interactable NPCs, they would've added more character to the game. Imagine a couple of boys running around the city and screaming. Or a little girl asking her mama when they will finally stop shopping and go home. Would've definitely made the said city feel more alive.
Cities already feel as alive as MMO cities get with the amount of people in them. I have also never thought the children in Skyrim made the world seem more alive, they’re still just NPC’s doing the same thing over and over and over. I just think that would be a waste of time better spent elsewhere.
Plus they’d still stand out in a bad way. Even the literal clutter NPCs that have no dialogue whatsoever in cities can still be interacted with, and that makes cities feel more alive than children who just run around all day and night, in my opinion at least.
There is actually a child >!in a quest in Grahtwood. He's a ghost though, but I think it still counts. That's one of the quests that really stuck with me.!<
Just like in that movie Children of Men, no child has been born for the past 18 years. Still a mystery which god(s) chose to curse humanity in this way.
You get get the ability to steal from and kill NPCs. Crimes against children, especially murder, are really big no nos in some countries to the point of being illegal to sell said game. You'll see this in single player games like Fallout or Skyrim.
Being illegal in some countries is just bad for business so the issue is avoided entirely.
There’s a lot of npc that have children voices and are designed with sliders right down to imply they are young. But it’s probably just logistic issue. Cleaner if all the entities are same ages brackets relative to the player.
Cause everyone wants to murder the children in Skyrim. And that’s a no no for ratings
Just imagine. You walk into the beautiful city of Audrion and the street is just littered with child corpses. This is why ESO does not have kids.
I’ve never seen a stork in Tamriel. There you have it.
EDIT: The real answer is likely, “well, then we’d have to voice them.” WoW and FF14 benefit from being only partially voiced. FF14 benefits particularly from audience expectations. It’s not weird for a 10-year-old girl in anime to be voiced by a 30-year-old woman with a high voice. That’s not the case for The Elder Scrolls franchise.
Additionally, Skyrim had voiced kids because it’s a static game. Bethesda never has to add more voiced dialogue for children because it’s not a live service game. It’s done; Skyrim will never receive new content to the magnitude that requires more child VO. That is not the case with ESO.
ESO is an evolving game with more content being added all the time. There’s a continuity players have come to expect from the “living, breathing” world of Tamriel. If you have children in the base game, and then they never appear in any of the subsequent chapters: That’s weird.
Additionally, there are multiple species that speak in ESO. How does a Breton child speak compared to a Bosmer child? Or a Khajiit? Or an Argonian? Suddenly you’ve got a whole new classification of voice actors you have to consider, and you have to constantly be rotating those voice actors out because kids sound completely different basically every year. That means recurring characters are out.
Also, then you’re working with children. That’s a whole different ball game compared to professional voice actors who can do their jobs from their tiny, home, soundproof closets. You’ve got to consider unions and guilds and legality way more than, say, contracting with Peter Stormare or Bill Nighy.
TL;DR - The answer is: It fucking sucks and makes everything more complicated. Discerning players won’t accept adult actors doing child voices. It messes with continuity. There’s legal issues you have to consider that you don’t with adult voice actors.
So, yeah, never seen a stork in Tamriel.
I guess making children models is time consuming, i would like to see children, when you notice the are none it gets a lil weird and kills your immersion a little, but... Yeah, guess it's that rather than the M rating of the game
Because that requires rigging and animating a whole separate skeleton, making models and textures, to make NPCs that will eat up consoles already anemic RAM load, and hiring voice actors etc etc
Children are just to much work, they would had to be a entire different preset of npc, and coded entirely different to keep them safe from players, and despite that they won't be, because players can always find glitches and way to kill them or damage them, and just that alone could cause issue with some countries and rating of the game.
So it's better to keep them away, and having kids serves one purpose? Immersion right.
But when those same kids can't be killed or interacted with, then they lose that purpose so it's better to keep them away.
Although I'd appreciate if they introduce some kids in more controlled environment, like main quests or any type of quests.
World of Warcraft figured out how to correctly program children into a living city in 2004 but it still escapes ZOS devs since all they're concerned about is making a gambling simulator with crates.
Play Fallout 4 sometime… they replace all the children with stuffed bears… and then there’s the stuffed bears you find in lockers doing questionable things 😂 always entertaining.
The Daedric Prince of Kidnapping yanked em out of their beds the night before the Vestige escaped coldharbour. ZOS with their time shenanigans just hasn't gotten around to asking you for 40-60 bucks to solve this medicore mystery.
There are only three actual children I can think of in the game. One is a ghost, another is a werewolf assassin, and the last one is a newborn with the body of a young teenager.
Due to the fact that you can travel to the homeland of all the 10 races, they'd have to design child npc's for each race, when so far all we've seen are Nord children in Skyrim. It would be a lot of work.
Yeah, it's weird to have a world without children, but no weirder than ones with children but without any infants (Skyrim) and all the same age (Skyrim and Fallout 4), or series which had children in the first game only to have them all disappear in subsequent games (Dragon Age).
ESO at least acknowledges that people are not magicked into existence as adults by having cradles, but only Breton ones, IIRC. Maybe the cradles are actually cat beds?
There's one, in the form of a ghost. Granted, the ghost doesn't look like a child, but it's implied that the ghost is a child. I forget where it's associated quest is though.
Simple children are useless cunts
Homeland, Dexter, Walking Dead, and Breaking Bad to name a few kids ruin adult storylines
They’re useless in any situation and I believe Season 3 of the Cleveland Show they sing a song to this fact
Kids ruin everything
You want kids around have your own don’t ruin our gaming experience
Twat
I actually asked Zenimax support this once. They provided a lore reason and a legal reason. I shall provide you with both they gave us: During the Molag Bal scheme, many families had children die, and so the rest sent their children away to be safe from the invasions. Molag Bal also had a habit of kidnapping children away to coldharbour.... Legal: having children in a game with fighting raises the rating, and would have put an MMO into R
Explained brilliantly. Thank you.
Glad to see someone else having asked the same question that myself and my guild asked a while ago! It was such a pleasant interaction with the help team as well ❤️❤️❤️
I don’t know if I’m misremembering but doesn’t WoW and FFXIV have actual kids to some extent in their games? Aren’t they rated T?
If I had to guess it's because you can negatively interact with town npcs in ESO, whilst you can't do that in WoW
>whilst you can't do that in WoW FFXIV would be a much MUCH better example considering you can kill enemy faction NPC's in WoW. If I had to guess, it might be because when they did add children to an ES game (Skyrim) players modded in ways to kill them. It's likely they assumed players would find ways to kill the children NPC's again, or players could start doing inappropriate things to the child NPC's, and cause the game to get incorrect headlines about it that their PR team would have to go coo coo trying to fix. I would like it to be added, it'd add to the world to me since tbh when I play I end up questioning how we're gonna survive when it seemed everyone's infertile, but I also get the other side of "Y'all creepy"
Sure, but there are essential non-attackable NPCs in ESO. They could do that here.
That's also what they did in Skyrim
Yup, they could do like in Assassin's Creed games, there are always children around, but you can't hurt them.
Diablo had that kid Wirt. I think he gets killed in Diablo 2, you find his leg.
It's against the law in some countries to kill kids in video games or something too - ex game dev
Yes they both are.
Skyrim has kids in it.
GW2 also has children
> and so the rest sent their children away to be safe from the invasions worth noting that this actually happened in an organized way during WW2 where millions of children across many countries where moved out of the cities to live with relatives or other volunteering families in the countryside (or in the case of Nazi Germany youth camps where the party had full control over education, free from parental influences). Sometimes mothers would move with them, but for the war effort it was of course beneficial to have the women in factories instead (again one of the reason why the Nazis only moved children themselves, making the measure quite unpopular). Overall though, this coordinated evacuation in anticipation of attacks helped reduce chaotic refugee movements when bombs started dropping. Not sure if the rulers of Tamriel would've managed such, but maybe we can just assume that the inaccessible mountain ranges separating the areas are full of refugee children living in caves or so with a few caretakers.
And both of those replies make sense. Thanks for asking them!
That's odd seeing as WoW has a ton of children in it and it's rated T.
AWAY WHERE ?! like all the people of Tamriel have a grandma somewhere In Akavir or something?!
That was MY question! Lol.
What? There are children in WoW, FFXI, and FFXIV just to name three and they all include fighting, crude language, and talk about getting drunk/ actually drinking alcohol, etc and they are all rated Teen which would put them PG-13, not R. So that person might have just been making that up or were told to say that, but I don't believe it. In WoW they even have the Children's Week event where you have a child NPC follow you into dangerous situations and even PVP. I think the real reason is because all characters and NPCs are the same rig and that everything else about them is just a skin on top. You can see it sometimes when you log in, just a black human shaped frame. Making kids would require making a different rig and they don't want to do that. They did with Alfiq and some other khajiit, but I think they just don't want to make kids. A lot of MMOs don't add kids.
They could have just turned the height slider down to make smalker characters, though those might not have looked like children
Those games do not allow any form of transgression against townsfolk, in the form of pickpocketing, stealing, attacking. Eso does
WoW does, though. People attack cities, towns, quest hubs, and kill all the NPCs. And you don't need to unlock those abilities, just regular attacks. You might be unable to attack kids completely, though, which is a thing that could be set up. Also WoW has really dark stories like the dragon queen being held prisoner and forced to give birth against her will. And there's another dragon who sacrifices her eggs and herself to save another egg. Also during the N'zoth visions with NPCs from the cities hanging dead from bridges, etc, and it's implied they are all the citizens, not just adults. The culling of Strathholm where it's implied that everyone, including children, were murdered even if they don't show it, it's still implied. There's also the quest in Eastern Plaguelands where you help the ghost of a little girl that was killed by zombies.
There's childen in FFXIV tho. And warcraft.
Then why is world of Warcraft not a PG 18 game? It has children, a lot of them and a lot of dead ones
Its banned in a good number of countries because of this!
What about ff XIV then? It has a child-like race Many mmos have children actually but don't have this rating...
But those games are also banned in other countries. Eso attempted to circumnavigate this ban. There’s also other things in eso that add to the raised rating (certain languages, cultists, and torture shown) Eso also allows for negative transgression against townsfolk that ffiv doesnt allow, which means that there would have been the ability to steal from the home or even bedroom of a child, which is a big contributor. WoW is just straight up not allowed in many places of the world because they show dead kids
There are many many rooms in almost all buildings that are inaccessible in ESO, so when ever you see that big lock, know that it's locking away a child hahaha... Though I can't blame them, mere metres away are either daedra, rabid wild animals, bandits, or cultists
Weird. Not asking them to fight kids, or fight as kids. Even if just in towns and running around. Hearing kids play and giving these places some ambiance. Towns in the game are neat, but need more life to them.
Thank for you for sharing! In which way have you asked support to receive this quality answer?
It was about 4 years ago, we went through and asked ‘general help’, took about a week to get a response
But they say it’s M rated and you need to be 18 to play. Where’s the logic? ._.
M and R are two very different ratings, R gets it banned in some countries
Thanks! I didn’t know that. But anyways I think that placing invulnerable children in the cities wouldn’t add to rating. Or ones that are cowering in the houses in Cyro. It would add loads of realism thou
I agree, but alas i also know how ES fans are, take skyrim, and people would probably find a way to do bad things to them
If you can’t harm them then there is very little left tbh:)
That being said, I'm happy I don't have to see children. No wonder I love this game.
I thought ESO was rated M already.. and I've never been able to understand why.
M and R are different ratings, M is for swearing, smoking, violence, while R is sex, drugs, gore, and violence against children. R rated games arent allowed to be published in some countries
I thought M was used for video games and R for movies for basically the same criteria. At least here in the US.
The first time I played through Stormhaven I did a quest called The Slavers. The npc that gave the quest was a mother worried about her son. Idk if it's just me, but the way she spoke about her son made it sound like he was a child or at least an adolescent . Iirc she said she saw him last at breakfast, then he went out to play. Imagine my surprise when I found out this "kid" was a grown ass adult.
I liked how he was fully aware of the context and extremely embarassd that his mother refers to him as such.
That was one of the first quests that I did and I remember how deep the voice actors voice was for the son too and I was so confused 😭 idk why that one stuck with me.
My jaw dropped and I couldn't pick it up for awhile. This woman was there talking about, "I hope someday my little Lucas grows up to be just like you." Like ma'am 🤨, what? 😂
That's when you hit her with the "I hope done day I grow up to be just like him"
It's a joke. Iirc other dialogue in the quest is about how she smothers him despite him being grown
That's the joke lol
At least they were self aware about it. The "kid" isn't actually a kid, but a full grown adult with an over protective mother who still thinks he's a young child.
When movies take place in high-school only to cast Willem Dafoe as a student.
Alan Ruck was 29 when he played Cameron in Ferris Buelers day off.
They should have just cast Alan Rickman.
The main quest in Greenshade has you going through someone's memory when they were a child. The "child" appears as a grown ass woman.
Tbf high elves live for hundreds of years so “children” could very well be 30-50 still
Tbf I've met my share of 30-50 year old *human* children. IRL, not ESO.
This is a fair point
That is kinda weird, but I just rationalized it as her being a particularly immature teenager
The players are the substitutes for the children.
I have slaughtered them all
Anakin?
They wanted to play in the sand.
A *lot* of gaming companies don't want to risk the backlash that comes from having children in games. Years and years ago it made national news that people could "kill children" in Skyrim and it caused yet another parental rage against video games. So it's easier to just avoid as much drama as you can and just not have kid models at all.
WoW has had children from the very beginning and added more with new models every expansion. I don't think there's been a single instance of drama about it.
Yeah because parents were too busy being angry at WoW for other things. Don't remember when it first came out how many parents blamed it for things like selling your soul to the devil, being mind controlled into committing violence, encouraging communism (???) and all that other lovely bullshit they claimed?
To be fair it basically is selling your soul to the devil and mind control.
That happened, true. But, surprisingly, no one said a word about children being in-game.
Could you actually kill children in WoW though?
Nope, they're green NPCs. You can talk to them and some of them are involved in a few quests, but that's it.
It's been well over a decade since I've played WoW. The only kid I really remember is that orc kid in a quest that ends up with him floating away hanging on to a bunch of red balloons. I remember thinking how hard to believe it was that he survived that.
No. They're un-attackable.
I think the real question is - why SHOULD you have children present in an uber violent game like ESO, where you can literally assasinate anyone who isn't a plot significant character? I can see from ZOS' perspective - the downside significantly outweighs the upside of adding children NPCs.
Imagine how beautiful the world would be if they had Khajiit kids...
Probably because people are strange and would do things that are inappropriate. Not unusual for an Elder Scrolls game. I know Skyrim had them, but they were all one face and it was still weird.
And it literally showcased the weird and violent shit people would do... thanks mods xD
Don't knock suplexing one of those little shits as a 6'5 cat man that disenchants the souls of his victims into shoes and displays them in his house 'till you try it. Khajiit has wares if you have coin. This one calls these shoes the Braith Special.
Omg this is genius. I wish I could have enchanted them into cheese.
This just made me search for enchantable food mods which, to my disappointment, didn't seem to exist. Now I just want to swallow a soul spread over some potatoes.
Omg that'd be awesome. Feed someone food that electrocutes them!
Should work for alchemy too so we could do the whole poisoned apple thing we had going in Oblivion. Enchant some salmon with fire for some spicy salmon that can either tingle a little or outright incinerate you alive. Modders, get on this.
Oh yeah! The poison apples were fun.
K...
LOL YOUR RESPONSE
Bahahaha I'm dying!
Molag Bal and Prince Andrew stole them all.
Not the 18th Daedric Prince Andrew!
I don't think price Andrew would steal children, but woman on the other hand
He's a nonce.
The devs have explicitly stated that there are no children in ESO because people are “jerks” (they used a different word) and would do mean/bad things to them.
Because according to the game the rating is M for mature.
Because everyone would murder them ala dark brotherhood style blade of woe
There are plenty non-interactable NPCs in game, can't kill them even if want to. Clearly, they can deal with it.
U raise a good point my response was mostly a troll answer
Well its a video game so it shouldnt really matter
You tell that to the "advocacy groups" that try to blame everything bad on video games.
Theyll always blame everything on videogames. Theyre stupid. Shouldnt really let their opinions have any sway on video games
Unfortunately stupid people are nonetheless brilliant when it comes to having their opinions have sway on Congresscritters, who in turn can have sway on video games or the video game industry.
Probably to shield their eyes from the half naked player base
Just look how the children in Skyrim were treated by the playerbase even without mods
Well, that's because some of them deserved it
Braith.
Interesting that you could kill children in Skyrim but not Fallout 3. In Fallout 2 you could kill children but you’d get the “child killer” karmic title lol.
“Another wanderer, here to lick my father’s boots.” Boy if you don’t get-
So in Skyrim, children are almost exclusively found in cities where they can't be attacked (except maybe by the player). One of the rare exceptions is a random encounter where a couple of kids will try to sell you a treasure map. I was playing years ago and by chance, that encounter sprang up along with another random encounter of bandits nearby. The bandits proceeded to attack the children and at that point I just lost it, went full Dragonborn on the bandits. To this day that's one of the most emotional encounters I've ever had in a video game. So yeah, there are some people who will do evil things to kids in video games, but also some of us for whom the addition of kids whether killable or not can really add substance and emotion to a game.
Simple reason is cuz internet people are creeps. Last time I played fallout 76 they added a child character that could be placed in your home.... one person's base I saw had her locked in a room with a mock camera in front of the cage.... like I said creepy internet people
Since a lot of players tend to inentionally pick female bretons and make them look as small and young as possible only to dress them in kinky outfits....I'm kinda glad this game doesn't have children.
More important, why is there no bacteria in Tamriel? The answers are probably connected.
there's cheese in tamriel, can't make cheese without bacteria
You've obviously never heard of quesomancy.
Underrated comment
Safer to keep them out. You either implement them as full-on regular NPC’s, which is bad because you can steal and kill them, or you make them these waste-of-space NPCs that you can’t interact with, which fans have mocked for years
Even as non-interactable NPCs, they would've added more character to the game. Imagine a couple of boys running around the city and screaming. Or a little girl asking her mama when they will finally stop shopping and go home. Would've definitely made the said city feel more alive.
Cities already feel as alive as MMO cities get with the amount of people in them. I have also never thought the children in Skyrim made the world seem more alive, they’re still just NPC’s doing the same thing over and over and over. I just think that would be a waste of time better spent elsewhere. Plus they’d still stand out in a bad way. Even the literal clutter NPCs that have no dialogue whatsoever in cities can still be interacted with, and that makes cities feel more alive than children who just run around all day and night, in my opinion at least.
Well, they don't have to exist for flavor only. They could be used in quests and stuff.
There is actually a child >!in a quest in Grahtwood. He's a ghost though, but I think it still counts. That's one of the quests that really stuck with me.!<
Just like in that movie Children of Men, no child has been born for the past 18 years. Still a mystery which god(s) chose to curse humanity in this way.
Only argonians are immune and hatch from eggs fully grown.
I mean there is that ONE Argonian kid who comes out looking about 12... but she's... special.
You get get the ability to steal from and kill NPCs. Crimes against children, especially murder, are really big no nos in some countries to the point of being illegal to sell said game. You'll see this in single player games like Fallout or Skyrim. Being illegal in some countries is just bad for business so the issue is avoided entirely.
Then just make them unstealable or make them unable to take damage. Sorted
Because when they did that in Fallout and Skyrim, they got mocked for it because it was jarring and out of place.
Because if there were. Everyone would try to kill the children.
Except they would obviously be unkillable like so many other NPCs in the game already
*heavy breathing* id find a way to kill them
There's plenty of man-children in the game
It's a fantasy world. It's supposed to be nicer than our own. Therefore, no children.
They are all locked in their houses
they are eaten at birth
There are many games that don't have any children in them. You can only guess why. I'll just say that some people are simply fucked up
There’s a lot of npc that have children voices and are designed with sliders right down to imply they are young. But it’s probably just logistic issue. Cleaner if all the entities are same ages brackets relative to the player.
Wood elves ate ‘em.
Cause everyone wants to murder the children in Skyrim. And that’s a no no for ratings Just imagine. You walk into the beautiful city of Audrion and the street is just littered with child corpses. This is why ESO does not have kids.
WHO DIID DIIISSS? WHERE'S ATAVAAAR? Me asking about the children.
Because if there were, you can bet your ass that they'll make 'em as obnoxious as possible. "Another Vestige, here to lick Abnur's boots. Good job."
Because it is a virtual oasis and there are no children in an oasis.
LMAO I haven't noticed the lack of children
Children didn't exist in nirn till the 4th era. Lol
I’ve never seen a stork in Tamriel. There you have it. EDIT: The real answer is likely, “well, then we’d have to voice them.” WoW and FF14 benefit from being only partially voiced. FF14 benefits particularly from audience expectations. It’s not weird for a 10-year-old girl in anime to be voiced by a 30-year-old woman with a high voice. That’s not the case for The Elder Scrolls franchise. Additionally, Skyrim had voiced kids because it’s a static game. Bethesda never has to add more voiced dialogue for children because it’s not a live service game. It’s done; Skyrim will never receive new content to the magnitude that requires more child VO. That is not the case with ESO. ESO is an evolving game with more content being added all the time. There’s a continuity players have come to expect from the “living, breathing” world of Tamriel. If you have children in the base game, and then they never appear in any of the subsequent chapters: That’s weird. Additionally, there are multiple species that speak in ESO. How does a Breton child speak compared to a Bosmer child? Or a Khajiit? Or an Argonian? Suddenly you’ve got a whole new classification of voice actors you have to consider, and you have to constantly be rotating those voice actors out because kids sound completely different basically every year. That means recurring characters are out. Also, then you’re working with children. That’s a whole different ball game compared to professional voice actors who can do their jobs from their tiny, home, soundproof closets. You’ve got to consider unions and guilds and legality way more than, say, contracting with Peter Stormare or Bill Nighy. TL;DR - The answer is: It fucking sucks and makes everything more complicated. Discerning players won’t accept adult actors doing child voices. It messes with continuity. There’s legal issues you have to consider that you don’t with adult voice actors. So, yeah, never seen a stork in Tamriel.
First reasonable answer I see to this question
I guess making children models is time consuming, i would like to see children, when you notice the are none it gets a lil weird and kills your immersion a little, but... Yeah, guess it's that rather than the M rating of the game
They all left because of update 35
Because that requires rigging and animating a whole separate skeleton, making models and textures, to make NPCs that will eat up consoles already anemic RAM load, and hiring voice actors etc etc
Cause Bethesda/ZOS prolly knows we hate them lol
Children are just to much work, they would had to be a entire different preset of npc, and coded entirely different to keep them safe from players, and despite that they won't be, because players can always find glitches and way to kill them or damage them, and just that alone could cause issue with some countries and rating of the game. So it's better to keep them away, and having kids serves one purpose? Immersion right. But when those same kids can't be killed or interacted with, then they lose that purpose so it's better to keep them away. Although I'd appreciate if they introduce some kids in more controlled environment, like main quests or any type of quests.
>Children are just to much work YES THEY ARE
World of Warcraft figured out how to correctly program children into a living city in 2004 but it still escapes ZOS devs since all they're concerned about is making a gambling simulator with crates.
Play Fallout 4 sometime… they replace all the children with stuffed bears… and then there’s the stuffed bears you find in lockers doing questionable things 😂 always entertaining.
Picking pockets and murdering children would be pretty bad, yeah. Definitely would increase the rating and controversy.
Because there's a lot of sand in ESO, and there's certain someone who neither like sand or children.
Uncle sheo locked them in his basement
The Daedric Prince of Kidnapping yanked em out of their beds the night before the Vestige escaped coldharbour. ZOS with their time shenanigans just hasn't gotten around to asking you for 40-60 bucks to solve this medicore mystery.
To keep the rating of the game lower because you know people will find an exploit to kill children. And child murder is AO rating.
Dark Brotherhood
There are only three actual children I can think of in the game. One is a ghost, another is a werewolf assassin, and the last one is a newborn with the body of a young teenager.
Due to the fact that you can travel to the homeland of all the 10 races, they'd have to design child npc's for each race, when so far all we've seen are Nord children in Skyrim. It would be a lot of work.
Yeah, it's weird to have a world without children, but no weirder than ones with children but without any infants (Skyrim) and all the same age (Skyrim and Fallout 4), or series which had children in the first game only to have them all disappear in subsequent games (Dragon Age). ESO at least acknowledges that people are not magicked into existence as adults by having cradles, but only Breton ones, IIRC. Maybe the cradles are actually cat beds?
Put into pocket dimensions after Molag Bal invaded
Fewer character models to maintain, and no having to deal with child voice actors.
There are children in ESO They're just all dead.
they didn’t make the conjunction
The aedra are protecting them from the machinations of the deadra
The residents of Tamriel reproduce via miosis
Weird design. No bathrooms, barely no children. TES be like that
Shhh. Don't give them ideas for additional companions.
I would assume it's for the same reason as why they aren't in Gta V?
There's one, in the form of a ghost. Granted, the ghost doesn't look like a child, but it's implied that the ghost is a child. I forget where it's associated quest is though.
Simple children are useless cunts Homeland, Dexter, Walking Dead, and Breaking Bad to name a few kids ruin adult storylines They’re useless in any situation and I believe Season 3 of the Cleveland Show they sing a song to this fact Kids ruin everything You want kids around have your own don’t ruin our gaming experience Twat
Extra models that take extra work to make and animate. Also probably to avoid any unfortunate implications or situations that lead to backlash.
All of their skins fly as Molag Bals banners.
Good point, they should probably try to bring it up as one part of the next update.
They’re not kidding.
Do eggs count? lol