Why not go back to Daggerfall's system?

Are you being sarcastic? As far as I know Daggerfall had blanket level scaling too! Or at least, blanket enough that there was not much incentive to level.

Morrowind toned the scaling way down, but somehow forgot to put in any content challenging to characters over level 10.

So yeah, challenge balance in general is something TES needs a LOT of work on

And don't tell me "lol TES is open ended, not linear, so you can't do that". Just scale levels within ranges and have different areas with different ranges.

Yea, I agree with you. And I've seen hundreds of posts that also say similar things.

Still, it bears repeating. A TESV that's basically a mix of Daggerfall and Morrowind would completely blow my mind.

I saw a mudcrab the other day.

All that quote and I was expecting some mind blowing point.

...well, in any case, They are nasty creatures. I hope to never see another.

It is mind blowing.

All that description is essentially meaningless. The vivid imagery conjured from the author of the pocket guide is nothing more than a lie to prey on the hopes and dreams of would-be adventurers. There is no Cydrodiilian jungle. There are no great rivers and rich trading ships. There is no grand city with towers of gold. The region is not large and diverse, no mangroves, no forest fires to light up the night skies, no major trading ports, no great merchants, no haughty nobility with their envious excess and power. There are mudcrabs. There are only mudcrabs. And the people... they all talk about mudcrabs. That world, that grand world we read about after opening the box that contained Redguard, that we remembered and fantasized about while traversing through the strange lands of Morrowind... that world was dealt a fatal blow by the people and their mudcrabs.

I saw a mudcrab the other day in Cyrodiil. And that is all I saw.

If TES V does indeed get set in Skirym as speculation suggests, can we expect the same out of this world feel we felt in Morrowind? I'm not big on lore or anything, but I don't think Skirym would feel as supernatural and we could just expect the Cyrodill-esque predictable landscape.

On another note, I also agree with the OP, Oblivion felt empty and predictable compared to Morrowind, and I so hope that Bethesda revert to a great deal of things featured in Morrowind and implement them in TES V.

No! Don't say that! whenever someone hates having too many of a creature, they decide to take it out completely. Just look at the skys in Cyrodiil... how empty are they?

That's because they didn't want to mess with flying. Which is also why levitation isn't in.

I definitely do not agree with this. Any environment can be made uniqe and interresting. Cyrodiil, Skyrim, Daggerfall may sound as more common, easier to imagine and easier to compare to our world we know, but it is devs who decide on this. Morrowind was so unique because the devs wanted it ot be. Not because it was Morrowind. Cyrodiil was bland and uniterresting not because it was Cyrodiil, but because it was made so. I believe that if they try hard hthey can make Skyrim to be a very interresting, alien and unique place taht will have the same ammout of atmosphere as Morrowind did. It does not have to end up as a Skandinavia clone (no offense ment, I think that Skandinavia is a great place). Nords are not your every day vikings. They are guys who can use thier voices to tear down city walls and mountains.

I really should play DF.......Anyways...
I thought MW was absolutely mind blowing in many many ways, and was insanely fun/involving to play... I felt like there was so much left in the game to not only explore, but actually still side-quest, even after 400+hours of play.
Oblivion on the other hand, I played for well over 700 hours, w/ just 2 characters; and I felt like I had played through the entire game multiple times, and more importantly/disappointing, had explored the entire map multiple times (which I had)... But I still had a lot of fun exploring what I felt was a watered down version of Tamriel.

If my xbox1 was still working, I am 100% sure I would have played through MW again; far surpassing the 400+ from my first MW character.... but even with a lot more time, I do not know if I would have explored the entire MW map, or even finished all the side quests... and that is cool to me.


I agree that Bethesda is trying to make TES games more mainstream, and I think that is a massive mistake as far as the quality of the game goes... which is what I care about.
But it is not something Bethesda can't stop, or better yet, properly balance as far as creating another TRUE ES RPG, as well as appealing "to the masses".

When I think back on playing MW... It was a very unique and mentally involving game. A mature game, not in the sense of the rating, but how story and gameplay was... and I absolutely loved that aspect of MW. At certain times, MW actually made me feel nervous, and even scared at some points in the game/map; I REALLY liked that; I have not really experienced that with other games. I also thought MW's diverse assortment of weapons and armor was at par, to Oblivions' sub-sub par armor/weapon list..... not to mention in MW how the armor could be mixed and matched, that was awesome.... As well as the length of the main story in MW, how the story was laid out, the quantity/quality of side quests, the unique armor/weapons, the unique surroundings, the limited fast-travel, the lvl system... it all added to a better RPG.

On the whole, MW and Oblivion were awesome games... to say the least...... and I really hope TES5 is an absurdly long, insanely in-depth, true-to-ES lore RPG, RPG!!!
I hope Bethesda does not place 2 much emphasis on "easy/quick game play", appealing to "younger gamers", or attempting to achieve crazy graphics.... None of those are characteristics of what I have come to think of an ES game as..... I have super high expectations for TES5, and I have faith in Bethesda to come through with an RPG that wraps up DF, MW and Oblivion into a nice RPG eggroll of awesomeness.

(This is from left field, I know.. But... IMO, Diablo2 has one of the all time best ITEM lists I have ever seen/played, the near-limitless possibilities in magic/base/unique/rare/set/craft items is crazy... TES5 needs a lot more weapons/armor! and for sure more lore/unique items/weapons/armor!)

Sure, it's meaningless now, but that's only because the devs were lazy. They wouldn't have made that kind of lore if they didn't intend to use it, but then they got lazy and decided to throw it all away.

However, if TES has any basis in reality (to build a believable story) then to achieve such an empire as the Imperials did, by necessity you will need/have/end up with major trading ports, great merchants, nobility, and natural resources on home turf (mangroves, fertile lands, productive rivers, etc).

What I see as a bad direction is that Cyrodiil was not a convincing world - not the landscape, and not the people - and their necessary infrastructure and industry. Where are the miners, rock quarries, masons, cobblers, craftsmen, lumberers, potters, weavers, tanners, dyers, herders, farmers, millers, ovens, wash basins, water transportation, and on and on and on. To get bread you need a cook top, you need flour, you need wheat, you need threshing and grinding. All that pewter cutlery needs someone to mine the ore, smelt it, fashion it, transport it. All those buildings need rocks, rock quarries, masons, leveling tools, scaffolding - for both construction and maintenance. All those wooden buildings need timber, saws, mills, lathes, and other woodworking tools. A blacksmithing shop needs a furnace, bellows, and various tools (besides a hammer and tongs). The windows need silica sand, furnace, glass blowers. The clothing needs to come from plant fibres, animal skins that need rendering, tanning, dyeing.

Finished products have to come from somewhere, there are fundamental industries for even basic civilization that Cyrodiil utterly lacked. It was as if everything - the beds, the cloth, the buildings, the forts, the roads, the armor and weapons - grew pre-made from trees.

That's what speedtree is for!

All joking aside, I do agree. Morrowind NPCs may have never actually done anything, but if asked, Morrowind did have all of those things in theory. Ask a bunch of NPCs about their background, you'll find all these things. There are miners, cooks, farmers, tanners, fishermen, etc. If they were to mix the walking around and doing stuff of Oblivion with the diversity of professions in Morrowind then we'd be set.

I love Oblivion but it does feel kind of empty for the size of the game world, yes it's filled to the brim with forts, ruins and mines but there's just not quite enough substance i.e. quests etc. I've just started playing Morrowind today and from the sound of it there'll be so much to do, I won't know if I'm coming or going - brilliant

Bethesda is going down its own path. is it bad? that's up to opinions.

this horse has been beaten to death over the years.
personally, I see the sense in many of bethesdas development choices. you have to first understand some of the development problems they would have faced. Cost/time of development. as well as see things in the marketing perspective- no matter how much it makes you barf. Some things though, are actually down to poor judgment though. the level scaling in oblivion for one, that was a pure gameplay option(of many) thats ended up :wacko:. other things are technical hurdles that were faced during development, which they had to find some solution to. like nutering the AI before releas,e. what I am saying is that most opinions here cannot appreciate what goes into finishing a nextgen title. I know I want some super be all and end all sandbox rpg, with all of tamriel in all the glory that the pocket guide describes, with the best ai, graphics, all unique voice acting(or text boxes, if thats what you prefer) and super gameplay mechanics that read your mind.... but its not ever gonna happen.

suggestions, like lets have more detail game world and in depth story, bigger tamriel, better, faster etc. are great. but you can't have them all/ simply- the game has to be completed some time in the near future, and has to ship on a single dvd. so think about that when you judge the size/detail level between MW and Ob. in a lot of theses cases -Bethesda woulda if they coulda!

story and graphics are important. anyone who has said that gfx doesn't matter to them, only depth and story, are in the vast minority, and none of bethesdas games were ever developed with that audience in mind. all beth games have tried to push gfx hard during their time. So if you feel alienated by that, isn't there pnp or text browser games that satify that? I love good looking games. cohesive/beautiful/solid art design is a major factor keeping me looking at any visual media. without it, why not be reading a book.

I also love good gameplay and mechanics.

I also love a great story.

Why not have all three? I want my cake and to eat it! If I try to see those 3 things, and look at the guts of the, MW, Ob, and F3, I can start seeing steps in forward, backward, and the forward. Beth is obviously experimenting. To keep inovative in the industry, the are doing things different, sometimes they fail. Sometimes there is a limitation, and sometimes things just work out. one thing I noticed is they do stick with things that work!


perhaps they don't want ot mess with flying... but the main reason for no levitation, is that the city world spaces are split from the main oblivion world space for performance. actual flying creatures would have little impact on that. but obviously if the player is doing so, they'd be seeing what is actually behind those city walls.. so a solution to having open citys/performance impact would have to implimented, before levitation returns. citys can get really resource hungry. makes sense to split them off. I have no idea how to balance that in game without reducing the detail, vertex count, textures, ai, ncps in citys. generally lower the overall quality quite a bit. which is definitely going the wrong direction imo.



yeah I agree. this is the meat and potatoe of a beliveable world. Just imagine deving it though!

I disagree. Why is a single DVD necessary? They use to ship games on several CD's, in some cases 6-10 discs until DVD's became more popular. There are already games that have shipped on multiple DVD's. Mass Effect 2, for example, shipped on 2 DVD's. I've played other games that have shipped on multiple discs too. For example, games with large game worlds like Lord of The Rings Online shipped on 2 DVD's. This is probably more common a thing with MMO's that have huge game worlds. But I think we are going to see this more and more. If Beth wants to keep the tradition of having huge game worlds, this game will have to ship as a muti-disc package.

It's not only Bethesda that's going to wrong direction. It's the whole gaming world. Story, endless options, believable game worlds are displaced by stuff less meaningful, like bloom effects, physics, and celebrity voice actors.

I've got to disagree. I've been nothing but thrilled with many of the newer games. Dragon Age, Mass Effect (and 2), Reach looks very promising (and full of backstory and lots of lore we haven't experienced before, only heard about), Portal 2, and even Fable 2. Everything had more voices, more locations, more weapons, better options, better mechanics, better UIs, the list goes on. Just look at New Vegas as an example more close to home (for these forums). It take everything Fallout 3 did wrong, did right, didn't do, or even considered doing and makes them better. Fallout 3 tried to mesh new game styles with old, and New Vegas takes it a step further, meshing a child between the old and the new and takes an even better and more refined perspective on it.

Oblivion was the child of an older TES system and a newer, more streamlined style. Hopefully TES V will take New Vegas' lead and craft a game that is truly a beautiful blend of what we loved about the old and the cutting edge of the new.

Many of the changes that were made between MW and OB were made because of criticisms aimed at Morrowind. For instance, one of the most common complaints were the boring quests, so beth opted for fewer quests but with more depth. You cannot tell me the Morrowind guild storylines are more interesting than Oblivion's, because that was an area of huge improvement.

The combat was also a huge complaint about Morrowind, so they updated that as well, which I think turned out for the best.

Like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shining_Force? or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breath_of_Fire? I daresay these games are fantastic with incredible, gripping, and quirky stories and characters. If there was ever a time I cried because of a video game's plot, it was in these two stories. They were that good.

Oblivion may have attempted to correct Morrowind's faults, and it may have started in the right direction, but it largely overcompensated, skewing and re-breaking things in an opposite manner.

For example, I find Oblivion's guild storylines to be almost too "interesting," particularly regarding the Fighters Guild and the Mages Guild. Oblivion already had a problem, IMO, in actively grasping for "epic" via its main quest. Instead of naturally letting the player gain the feeling of epic, it was my impression that the game threw epic into the player's face at any given opportunity, as though afraid the player might experience a sudden memory lapse and forget how serious and grave and intense the goings-on were supposed to be. That was intensively magnified by several of the guilds (the MG in particular), which similarly insisted on having their own grasping-at-epic storylines unrelated to the already saturated-with-epic main quest, and which similarly threw epic into the player's face. When I join a faction, my expected plot-line from that faction is a disjointed series of tasks and and assignments and maneuverings to make myself the leader of that faction. Nothing more. In fact, when every guild under the sun has a deep and intricate and purportedly epic plot, it begins to feel incredibly unrealistic and unbelievable. Now, that's not to say that a guild can't have its own nuances and sub-plots and schemes. But they are by no means as cohesive and centric and tightly wrapped together as Oblivion presented. These are trade guilds, not conglomerate damsels-in-distress who desperately need saving. It makes sense for them to be large disjointed collections of jobs with barely any central plot-line.

And as for the combat system, while it visually is smooth and interesting, it's not without its problems due to overcompensation. People take issue with Morrowind's "swing-and-miss" combat dice rolls, and the illogic associated with a sword slashing right through something yet missing. So combat was revamped beautifully, but regarding chances-to-hit and missing, and dodging, skills and attributes were completely taken out of the equation. Instead, the player has complete control over what they hit irrelevant to their character skills, and damage is gimped to compensate. That leads to similarly illogical scenarios where something can take 40+ slashes to actually die.

Honestly, the way to do guilds is like Mass Effect does many of its missions, especially team mate related ones. You talk to them some, and they begin to reveal themselves to you (the guild gives you small quests that build up and up) until they finally truly confide in you with their loyalty quest (the related chapter master gives you a very important quest which might be very personal to them or to the guild). After the successful resolving of the quest, they usually side with you on most things (the related guild chapter master may offer you aid more often, give you extremely important quests related to the internal workings of the guild, etc).

Hell, one doesn't even have to use the team mates as an example of small, somewhat notable things building up to extremely important events that shape the local area (or the entire planet or galaxy). It shouldn't start as one SUPER EPIC event, because it really just leaves no thought for what could happen. The ending is obvious and inevitable, which makes it so boring. Explaining the events leading up to what happen at the end of Oblivion is rudimentary. Explaining the events that lead to the ending of Mass Effect, or Buldur's Gate, or Knights of the Old Republic, or many other classic RPGs (or Morrowind), is a much more drawn out process of leads that lead to more and more important, awesome, and, yes, epic events. This process is also what allows the player to become more intimate and understanding with the characters in the story. The beginning of Oblivion pretty much clean cuts who is "good" and who is "evil". The storylines of the games I mentioned certainly do not, and some, even until the end of the game, let the player decide whether someone was truly right or wrong. This is what makes stories memorable, because it lets the player have input of thoughts into the story, even years after they've beaten the game. Talk to somebody about Planescape: Torment; Expect the potential for hours of talking about their decisions and how the story changed.

The problem with modern CRPGs is technology. With poor graphic and processing capabilities, old games had to focus far more on the story-telling aspects, with all actions being determined by dice rolls. With advances in technology and a relatively niche market came pressure to add shiny new technology to CRPGs. The dice rolls began to fade away, the graphics got pimped, and the story disappeared. Even from Morrowind to Oblivion the difference is clear. The to-hit dice rolls are gone from combat, lockpicking and speechcraft became mini games, and the questlines felt like being stuck in an endless loop of Kill Teh Nekromancers!1!!1!!! (Mages' guild) or Close Teh Oblivion Gatez!11!!!!11! (MQ). With focus falling away from the storytelling, it's not surprising that a lot of new CRPGs are feeling quite bland.


In my opinion.

no