Eh? Looks pretty modern to me. But then to me the Source engine is still cutting edge.
I meant I'd pay for a modern version of Severance.
Oh, right. Well I don't mind the age, I actually still occasionally play it. It does have fully dynamic shadows being cast by absolutely everything, which is something Carmack made a big deal out of in Doom 3. Severance had it three years earlier.
I think they were. I'm not sure on the exact source, but I think that someone in Morrowind theorized that the reason the Dwemer strongholds still have operational machinery after three thousand years of sitting around next to an active volcano is that the Dwemer could mess with the primal forces that control aging. And they did all mysteriously disappear, following an attempt to transcend to a higher plane of existence or something. Anyway, "warping the laws of nature" is basically what magic does. Nothing that special. The Dwemer were just exceedingly good at it, owing to their tendency to set up experiments to figure out how the world works.
Well no, not really. Magic doesn't really warp the laws of nature in the TES world, magic is part of the laws of nature. It still follows rules, even though these are different than the rules of our own world. I'm thinking the dwemer had abilities of an entirely different nature. Not just "magic, only more so", something completely different, more fundamental.
I never had any idea what "ritualistic anti-creations" could mean. Human (elf) sacrifice is... well, possible. I never saw it that way, but it does kind of fit.
Well if sacred = magical, then the whole quote about anti-creations to create the sacred out of the death of the profane might just mean they killed things to soultrap them and then enchanted their machinery with the captured souls. Who knows. Bethsoft did write that dialog (and everything else pertaining to the dwemer) to be as indecipherable as possible, after all.