I was thinking, Bethesda should make Daggerfall, the best TES game IMO, avalabul to the public again. What I was thinking was somehow porting it to consoles and making it a bonus disk that comes with TES:V. That's just one idea. Anyone else think the great game will ever be sold again, or will it be burried forever and become just a page on the UESP wiki?

I personally heard that they actually lost the source code for Daggerfall, also it would take time to optimize it to run on modern hardware.

Ow? Well if they can't, they should give the next game some daggerfall fetures. The huge world and climbing and skills and whatnot. I lost my copy of the game long ago, and there is no way of finding it unless you have a credit card. Which I do not.

The best part of Daggerfall is the continually generated quests. You literally never run out of things to do, and failing a quest isn't such a bad thing as you can always take another. So yes, DF features in a future TES game, sure, but you'll never see DF re-released in any form.

The lost source code is but a rumor. Other rumors involve 3rd party software preventing its re-release. Of course, my theory is that they'll never release it because it blows away its successors. Put Arena out for free, sure, as pretty much anyone will look at it versus the remaining chapters and see drastic improvement; you can't do that with Daggerfall. Seriously, people look at Morrowind and say "damn, we had it good back then"... it'd be even more apparent if they saw how it really used to be.

So if they release it, it's like showing everyone they could never make something this good again. Maybe. :shrug:

Yeah, but I have played Daggerfall. Didn't like it nearly as much as Morrowind, despite understanding how many could love it. Morrowind for life!

There's actually been quite a few threads since the release of Oblivion on releasing Daggerfall specifically on an Xbox Live Arcade and Wii Virtual Console. I think it's very unlikely for that to happen though and a re-make won't happen by Bethesda.

1. Exactly what i've been after. Rather than a remake of Daggerfall, I'd like to see TES5 as good as Daggerfall. Some things that must be in to make it happen:
- Infinite quests, like Jorm. said
- More skills (my list has 35, and none of them useless like languages pretty much were)
- More guilds (I think knightly orders and temples can be almost identical, we just need to have them)
- Ditch the birthsigns and bring back advantages and disadvantages (I have also a good lits of those)
- Make the world big enough to be believable (run through Cyrodiil in an hour? Right :/ )
- Make it realistic enough to be believable (no species extinction because of your level, people impaled by 100 arrows and living, every critter attacking you on sight, killing the only solution to everything, merchants having infinite gold which they can give you only 1000gp at a time, one hour of standing around miraculously heals you, cities few hundred meters from each others, every place filled with caves, ruins etc. and a GPS telling you where they are. Etc. etc.)
- Banks, money weight, letters of credit
- Buyable houses that are not jokes
- Decent fast travel, with ships, caravans etc.
- Slower leveling
- Faction reputations
- Some requirements that make sense to fulfill before you're accepted or promoted in guilds

..the list goes on and on. The people who made TES2 were much more ambitious.



2. Just look harder. I have few of them. And you don't need a credit card.

I just found a copy of tes2. Haven't made it out of the first dungeon yet. Kind of annoyed at the absolute lack of detail in this dungeon - no furniture of any kind. I suppose I can chalk it up to the technology of the game. It also doesn't quite make sense that there are thieves, undead creatures, magical creatures and bears in the same dungeon. I have no doubt that when I do find some fresh air the game will improve. I like the fact that certain items are restricted by class (armour, weapons). Anyway...
I like the idea of gold having weight. My MW and OB characters have stupid amounts of gold. I walked into Skingrad and bought the house and all the furniture at once (and this is running OOO). You shouldn't be able to carry 500,000 gold coins. Although banks in Skyrim sound a little far fetched to me. I'm sure Beth could come up with something if they wanted to.
Climbing would be a great skill to include (along with the return of levitation) but it makes the game that much harder for the dev's to make. Instead of looking at everything from the ground up, they've got to imagine every single last way that a player is going to try at something. Look at the difference between Vice City and San Andreas. In the one a three foot tall fence is a believable game barrier. In the next you can fly over it with your jet pack.
Beth would have to make rooftops, (which they did well in SI) balconies, castle walkways/turrets and so on. It opens up some really cool possibilities for explorations and quests (imagine running along the rooftops as a thief or assassin).
Other than that... Less loot, less quickly. More unique loot. I have never had to wear fur armour because it was the best I could afford, same with iron and steel. I want to work for that glass gauntlet. Slow the game down. People are handicapping themselves in order to make Oblivion fun/challenging/remotely realistic. The game should force you to do this anyway.

Well, it's not hard to realise why we others can't find any copies if you're holding on to all of them! :angel:

I agree with making TES V to be as good as Daggerfall instead of a remake. I can see so many options for unlimited quests that wouldn't be much harder then making one quest. And maybe i'm too used to playing Oblivion, but I wouldn't really mind randomly generated outside land unless the land became repetative.

...Really? I mean, for all the things that it did well, it is an atrociously flawed game, and not just in the stuff that they didn't finish or that they half finished or the archaic visuals. So much of the setting was just so bland and unoriginal, so many of the dungeons and pretty much all of the wilderness was boring and repetitive, most of the cities looked far too similar, and the quests were... well, for the most part, they just weren't very memorable. Mostly just one uninteresting fetch/deliver/kill quest after the other, with only a bit of flavor text at the start and finish.

I like Daggerfall and all, but the notion that they won't release it for free because they're worried that the others will look so bad next to it is... well, it's a bit romantic, so say the least.

How could you do this to me? "Available" used to be my favourite word.

:sad:

Well, I'm not saying it was perfect; that would be rubbish, Rabish. But I do think that, despite it's shortcomings, it's still a better game game that its successors (moreso over one than the other).

Besides, none of the settings are all that original. Daggerfall is a ripoff of the dark ages. Oblivion is a ripoff of Tolkein. And Morrowind... well, it's certainly the most unique by far, but I always thought it felt a lot like Dune--which is in no way a bad thing; in fact, that's a very good thing. And I'm not sure you can 'ripoff' a historical era, either.

But I do wonder why people bring up Daggerfall's repetitive and empty wilderness, and yet they never actually see how similar it is to Oblivion's. They're both randomly generated, boring, and completely empty. The only thing that makes OB's remotely better is that it's dinky as hell. But Daggerfall's is better in conjunction with its nice Fast-Travel system. still, they both svck compared to Morrowind. Still, you have to look at the quality of the world in terms of its size. You can't have gangantua-sized wilderness and still get the quality of landscaping and exploration that we got in Morrowind; and most of the appeal for DF is its size.

It doesn't really matter all that much that the quests were similar, what matters is that you could fail them. A boring quest you can fail is better in my book than the most elaborate quest that is guaranteed of success. You've got to be able to foul things up, and be able to live with the consequences. With the generated quests, you can do both. And again, with a landmass as big as DF's, you have to have generated quests.

What can I say... :wub:

If they made another TES game in the style of DF, I'd like an actual random quest generator instead of a random quest selector. AS it works in DF now, you don't have an unlimitted number of quests. You have 200-some quests, which repeat endlessly, in different areas and with different targets and, rarely, some other variable of significance changing, but going into Dungeon A in Daggerfall to kill a werewolf and Dungeon Q in Orsinium Area to kill a harpy really isn't that different. Creating a much more dynamic and meaningful quest system would give much more enjoyable results and wouldn't be overly difficult to do either. I'm just going to use The Guild/Europa 1400 as an example, here, but if you implement a crafting system, a dynamic economy, and dynamic politics, you could have a lot of dynamic quests fall into place around them.

Moving on to skills. More skills doesn't necessarily mean better. Skills are only fun insomuch as they let you do a new activity. Light Armor, Heavy Armor, and Medium Armor don't let you do new things. Something like fishing, alchemy, or enchanting DO open up new player activities. I know fishing and stuff like that haven't been in TES games, but you get the idea. You don't technically need skills for this, anyway. Ultima 7, I believe, had a total of... five or so skill-esque stats, and you could do tons of stuff in that game, and in the case of System Shock 2, I always thought the skills felt a little bit tacked on.

It's also less the number of skills you have and more how they're used. I think Daggerfall had swimming, jumping, and running skills. In any case, swimming should really be its own skill, but something like jumping and running could be combined, on the logic they use pretty much the same muscles. Likewise, having seperate swimming and holding-your-breath skills wouldn't make a lot of sense, partially because the ability to hold your breath should be governed by endurance anyway.

Similarly, I'd get rid of stuff like "Streetwise" and "Etiquette" as skills. Those are more personality traits. Like, you'd pick on character creation one of the three -- streettalking, normal, high-speech, and later on you could maybe pick up the other two or change to one of them, but making them a skill seems sort of odd.

Anyway, I think the absolutely hugest issue in the series is the complete lack of meaningful NPC interaction. Morrowind probably did this the best as it had, at least, a few non-generic NPCs. Some people say Daggerfall NPCs were better because you could ask them for directions. I'd disagree. That's treating them as compasses. That's not interaction. You couldn't even ask them their job, like in Arena.

Finally, realism in a fantasy RPG should never be a goal UNLESS it makes the game more interesting. Although in general I say that realism for realism's sake is rarely a good idea unless you have a strict simulator situation.

"The people who made TES2 were much more ambitious."

They also screwed up a lot of things and failed to imlpement half of their goals, apparently. Ambition doesn't mean jack unless you actually do something with it. Seriously. There are plenty of ambitious indie gamedev groups out there. Producing vaporware.

"Kind of annoyed at the absolute lack of detail in this dungeon - no furniture of any kind."

Dungeons have a lot of furniture, actually. Just not that one.

"Less loot, less quickly. More unique loot."

Daggerfall has a huge problem with this, actually.

"But I do wonder why people bring up Daggerfall's repetitive and empty wilderness, and yet they never actually see how similar it is to Oblivion's. They're both randomly generated, boring, and completely empty."

Contrary to what everyone thinks on this forum, it's not a matter of "New-school players who started with Morrowind hate Daggerfall and like Oblivion because it's more casual" or whatever. Oblivion brings back the random, empty wilderness and dungeons from Daggerfall, and the Morrowind kids tend to dislike both Oblivion and Daggerfall for fairly similar reasons (Also, Morrowind kids wanted a sequel to Morrowind. Not a half-baked total conversion). There are some ways to make a more randomized terrain a lot more interesting, though. I think an easy way would be to have a pool of unplaced special locations that would spawn and remain permanently in the map if you just travelled long enough in some direction, actual distance being sort of randomized.

"You've got to be able to foul things up, and be able to live with the consequences."

well, yes, but the consequences in DF are fairly minor. At worst you get a province mad at you and you get kicked out of the guild. None of the games have really emulated faction politics that well, although Morrowind's take was alright, and Oblivion's take was probably the worst in the series because guild's never interacted. Not that, say, the fighter and thief guild in Morrowind ever had a lot to do with eachother, but each guild had more than ten quests in it, and you couldn't reasonably expect to become a guildmaster in every guild without getting another guild mad at you. In any case, I do remember quite a few quests in Morrowind having multiple outcomes or approaches and, at the least, you could kill everyone*. In any case, technically in all of these games there is a sense of guaranteed success. In the most basic sense, the easiest way to fail is that you die, in which case you presumably reload and try again. Daggerfall has the added chance of failing because you're too slow (or the quest was too hard, so you just let it time out. Similar). However, as I said, the quests aren't truly randomized, but just randomly selected. You WILL get a failed quest again, and if you really want to advance in that guild line, you'll probably have to succeed at it eventually.

See, when I mentioned at the top of the post you need some sort of political body in place -- this is why. And I mention Europa 1400 because it really is a low budget game that seems to do it fairly well.

* It wasn't so much fail/succeed options in Morrowind, but succeed or succeed while doing some bonus thing for extra rewards. Oblivion had a small number of these, although the only two I can remember were the ones with the brothers fighting off some goblins (do you keep the brothers alive?) and that one mage's guild quest with the book that didn't have a logical progression of events and made me quit playing.

Maybe it's because I'm on my Eee PC, but the post above me is really long. You made some great points, though, so good on you, sir.

Well, it is in some ways, but at the same time it's a far lesser game in others. The issues I'd mentioned are some, but then, there's also the issues with stability and incompleteness that I'd explicitly omitted. Of course there are things that it does right, but to claim that it's better than the others period is wildly excessive at best, especially given that there are things that the other games do right or better that Daggerfall does not (Morrowind had far better dialogue, for example, even if it wasn't a masterpiece, and from what I've heard Oblivion had considerably improved combat and stealth systems).


It's not like a historical era. Playing Daggerfall wasn't like playing a game set in the dark ages. It was like playing a game set in every high fantasy universe ever. The only thing that gave it any even remotely unique flavor was some of the text in the books, and even then they didn't stray too far from the standard high fantasy formula.

Also, I never claimed that it was a rip-off. I wouldn't have a problem if it had "ripped off" an interesting and unique setting, and I don't have a problem with that kind of unoriginality on its own. The problem with Daggerfall isn't that it ripped anything off in terms of setting, but that it basically went with the standard fall-back setting for most RPGs. It may not really be mimicking anything specific, per se, but it is mimicking the sort of bland and uninspired "base universe" that far too many fantasy games start with. Is that a problem with Oblivion too? Obviously. It's not a problem, or at least not as much of a problem, with Morrowind though.


I don't think that trying to put Oblivion's randomly generated wilderness and Daggerfall's randomly generated wilderness on the same level is even remotely fair. They're both randomly generated, yes, and for some people they're probably both boring. However, the "emptiness" involved in the two is not the same. Both lack content to fill that wilderness, but while Daggerfall's wilderness is essentially a bunch of small mounds and shallow holes with a couple of sprites to spice it up (but only sometimes), Oblivion's wilderness (or at least what I've seen of it) is far more detailed, interesting, believable, and complex. They're still empty, but exploring for the sake of just seeing the wilderness is in and of itself something that can be entertaining for a lot of people in Oblivion, and I'm not sure you can say the same for Daggerfall.

As for the size... well, it's a big selling point, and it's nice to cite the numbers on it ("TEN BAJILLION TIMES THE SIZE OF MY FOOT OMG!"), but really, what's the point? Yeah, you have a massive amount of space, but you almost never have a reason to go into any of it. Even when you do, most of the space you go through looks virtually identical, which almost seems to remove the point of having all of it in the first place. It's still nice to have all that space to explore, as it's more believable when the area you're in is actually the size of a nation and not just the size of a city, but aside from that the actual size of Daggerfall doesn't really improve the game in any way.


I never really felt guaranteed to succeed in Morrowind's quests, unless (for whatever reason) you don't consider dying to be a failure (which would be rather odd). As for a boring quest you can fail being better than an elaborate quest you're guaranteed to succeed... well, let's look at that for a minute.

Let's say that I had two games. One is an adventure game in which, should you fail to do certain things fast enough or at the right time, you have failed the game (if you've played Dark Seed, you know the kind of thing I'm talking about). Basically, it is a quest where you can most definitely fail. Now, assume that I make it boring. Basically, all you do is pick something up, bring it to someone else, get something from them, bring that to someone else... keep doing that sort of thing, until you either fail the to meet the time restraints and thus fail at the game or you complete the game. Every time you deliver something, you aren't given any real depth to anything, just an extremely short dialogue stating what you have to do next and nothing else. Finally, the motivation for the entire quest is to get your character a dollar. Would that game be worth playing? I don't really think so. You're just doing a series of boring, tedious errands, with little real rhyme or rhythm and only the barest of motivation.

Now, compare that to something like... I don't know, Syberia. In Syberia, you have no time limit, no death, no anything. The only thing that can prevent you from finishing the game is your own inability to solve puzzles, meaning that you essentially can't fail at it, you can only not finish it. So, there's no failure there. However, the "quest" you're playing through - the main plot - is extremely rich and unique. It's fraught with mystery and intrigue, it's filled with interesting characters, and the entire plot of the quest itself is so unlike most everything else you'll see in video games that it's hard not to be enamored by it. In a sense, Syberia actually is one of the most elaborate quests out there.

So, then you have the question: would you really play the former game over the latter? Would you really go for a series of tedious and pointless errands framed in an uninspiring plot with virtually non-existent characters over what some people are even inclined to call a work of art because of how elaborate and interesting it is solely because you can technically fail at the former and can't technically fail at the latter? You might say yes, but if you do then I think you're in an absolutely minuscule minority.


That provides me with an explanation as to why they're generated. It doesn't change the fact that they are generated, or that the repetitive and bland nature of the quests is a flaw in the game.

The thing I like about Daggerfall is the general realism into which the magic and mythology is injected. I don't mind at all the boring landscape, real landscapes tend to be boring. Maintaining the scale is a much more important goal than making a landscape worth exploring in detail. I didn't find the exploring in MW or OB worth a darn anyway, Morrowind's because the tortured ugly landscape only existed to be an impediment which was made worse by removing the climbing skill and standard fast travel, Oblivion's because everything worth finding popped onto your radar anyway. I hardly find oversized mushrooms and lava fields worth it, especially when both were featured prominently in Redguard, and hell DF had large mushrooms.

These posts are getting large.

Well, of course we can't really talk about games as a whole, especially if every piece has to be better in order for the whole to be better by any ruling; all or nothing and the sort. I know you can only truly judge one aspect to another; I made a http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=448953&hl= about it. Either the parts that are deficient aren't as important to me as the ones that are done well, or those parts simply outshine other aspects, and I can and will say that I prefer one--on the whole--over another. You may be interpreting my ramblings as saying that I see DF as lightyears better than MW and OB; I don't and it's not.

And I'd wait until you actually play the game to make any comparisons on the combat system. I thought it might be good in theory as well, but... Well, not so much


It still stinks of randomization, no matter how pretty and bloomiful it is. You see the same damn trees and stumps and logs everywhere, but that's not really the main problem. It's empty, and you know it's empty when you play the game. It's the same way you know DF's wilderness is empty, there's nothing of value out there but the same clusters of perfect trees. There's nothing to explore, because nothing of interest will be there unless it's a specially marked location. It's not like in Morrowind--which truly does wilderness exploration well--where you'll find hidden caves, or stumps with clues and little bits of loot, or a dead body and a quest, or other little bits of hand-placed goodness. No, the wilderness in both DF and OB is just as empty and pointless as the other; the fact that one's prettier than the other doesn't really make much of a difference, although seeing a pretty 3D tree is better than seeing a sprite.


While I do appreciate that rather slippery strawman, I'm going to have to point out a few things here: You're talking about an adventure game, and of course the quality of the story of an adventure game has to be good and elaborate. You're also confusing things that are "jobs" and things that are "main storylines", and I should have pointed out earlier that I place more importance on the former. The VAST majority of Daggerfall quests are just jobs. You go to a guild, they give you a task. Go take a mummy to tea or whatever. It's not elaborate--and it's not supposed to be. It's just a guild, did you really expect to be doing heroes' work? That's what makes it feel more realistic; the jobs aren't necessarily complex, but they do fit the setting.

And it may be that because you haven't actually played Oblivion that we're not really seeing eye-to-eye on some of these things. There are many things about DF (and MW) that I didn't realize were so important to me until I played OB. Failing quests is one of those things; didn't realize how vital it was until it was taken away. And I do hate that game; I hate it as a game, and I hate it as the harbinger of what's to come for the series. So can I do but praise the everloving crap out of the games that did it well? Well, other than hang out in my rocker and be crotchety.

"bloomiful it is."

Who even came up with bloom? Christ. I have to rant about Oblivion's graphics here, by the way. See, when Morrowind came out, the people graphics svcked but it, for the time, was a pretty solid looking game, especially since Bethesda at that point was still, you know, not rich. So for oblivion, Bethesda has all these resources -- money, facegen's pretty versatile, speedtree's a good idea, more manpower -- and what do they do? They use that stupid GameBryo engine again, everyone has an identical face for some reason, and you get horribly mutated looking characters like... the emperor.

Oblivion's cities also bring up my other point about making cities look realistic. In my eyes, it's not so much size. It's morphology. This is, to me, Daggerfall's biggest flaw with city generation -- cities are realistically big, but the layouts aren't natural. I think Arena did a much better job in comparison, where cities felt like cities, you had alleys and canols and ports and... well, you know. STuff. In this sense, Arena's biggest flaw was the fact that armor and weapon shops are the only things you see, whereas realistically you'd expect to see more general stores. Whatevo.

So, going with Morrowind and Oblivion here. This is a fault I'd levy against t...he capital city thing in Tribunal, as it doesn't seem to have a natural layout, although it's possible that's actually just a portion of the city. some sort of governmental district. I can't really remember. Anyway though I think as a whole Morrowind did a far, far better job of doing morphology than Oblivion. See, Oblivion actually had a few good points in this sense, though. The minor villages were great. I wish there were more and they were better developed. Oblivion's cities were a mess, though. I won't claim to have seen all of them. I haven't. But they all had a few similar issues. Namely, like with Arena, you mostly see weapon and armor shops and... that's it. Most of the shops in Morrowind were, well, things like publicans and junk shops and clothiers. If you DID have a city with just a weapon and an armor shop, you could also bet said city would also probably have a total of four houses and an inn, and wouldn't be trying to pass itself off as a sprawling metropolis.

The layouts are also just kind of bizarre. Chorrol has that... two pronged thing going on, the imperial city has the interlocking rings that don't seem to really add up in a reasonable manner and as I've said before, I think the entire game should've been set in a 15 square mile large imperial city, with no real wilderness at all. Then there was that one city that had the empty moat around it for no good reason and uh... I can't even remember what these things are called. Bruma was actually fairly good. You had a castle at the highest point, moving down to a rich/commercial district, with slums and inns (I believe?) area on the lowest parts.

I guess you could say the main question is whether a city's infrastructure is geared to its size.

"It's not elaborate--and it's not supposed to be."

that's sort of the problem with DF's minor quests, though. There AREN'T any. Given the nature of the dungeons, most quests in DF end up being... sort of long. This makes failing them rather unpleasant. I'm not saying long dungeon crawls are completely out of place, but I think they should be reserved for suitable epic tasks. Not... not finding a random flower, somewhere.

One of the most important things in ES games is immersion and for that ES games must be like Daggerfall and provide realistic land scales, realistic exploration (you don't bump into a tiny dungeon at every corner of the road) and realistic architecture. I didn't know that Arena had small alleys and ports and that is very cool. It's the same thing with Oblivion cities but ridiculous small scale of everything spoils immersion completely.

Another thing that TES needs is freedom. I enjoyed the way Morrowind treated guilds with localized quests and would like to see Daggerfall and Morrowind systems mixed in the future. Being able to fail SOME quests without drastic consequences. Unlike in Oblivion where you fail a quest and can't progress in the guild anymore. Having repeatable quests is very important for the player freedom.

Lastly the player should be able to role-play his mistakes for those quests that have serious consequences. This was emphasized a lot in Daggerfall manual. Lost that essential quest item, killed that essential npc, got your blood svcked by a vampire and dies and are now a vampire; allow the player to role-play his way back to his normal life instead of just reloading a previous game.

The lore and the books are essential to the series. Even if you enjoy the lore being told by game events the past must still be told in books or character dialogs. TES always had bits of the past revealed this way. Oblivion was a great opportunity to flesh out the history of Cyrodiil that Bethesda passed away.

There are a few things i would like added to ES games from Fallout. Great characters with interactive dialogs and great choices that involve multiple skills and a world map that shows roads and rivers where we can plot our path. This is essential for game with big worlds.

Oblivion's guilds svcked. Especially the mages guild. You know how in Morrowind, each guildhouse was its own questline, and then in oblivion, each guildhouse was... a single quest? But then you had the thief questline, which was substantially bigger, and the assassin questline was for all intentsive porpoises [sic. seriously.] an alternate main quest?

Yeah. WTH?

While I'm not necessarily in favor of having a twisty cave of minor guilds, all alike, as in DF, I would like more than five, thank you, and I'd like each to have a fairly even amount of quests.

Anyway, my personal solution to the random v. static quests things, for guilds, would be to have static quests, but randomized jobs. Like, for the mages guild, for instance, you'd get minor "Go gather X ingredients and we'll pay you far more than what they're worth" quests sometimes, and they really wouldnt be hard, but just there for some added income, and they WOULD hurt your standing if you didn't do them enough or in a timely fashion.

Or maybe each guild has a flat payrate and the only way to increase this would be to raise through the ranks and take jobs frequently and complete them in a timely fashion.

I think the thieves guild quests in Oblivion were sort of moving to this, where you had to steal X number of things to advance, so for another example of what I'm talking about, let's say you have a thieves guild with static quests, but you also need to steal a certain number of items every so often, or X amount of gold a month to donate to the guild (which gets divied up as a sort of payroll thing) or a specific item of some type from somewhere, or maybe bribe X number of guards through various methods.

Guilds, basically, historically and realistically, were sort of like labor unions from my understanding. Also had something to do with the rise of the middle class by getting certain privleges to skilled craftsmen and artisans. In the sense that they give you work and privleges, Daggerfall really excelled at this. What's a bit problematic, though, is that I believe people were supposed to give back to guilds, beyond just... working for them. I don't know. As I said, the games need some sort of political system in place if you really want to flesh that out completely.

Anyway, the first point I was making, about randomized minor jobs... this is stupidly easy to do, in theory, and the fact that there aren't any mods for it yet, for either game, is distressing.

In general though, I'd like to see more mod experimentation in both MW and Oblivion -- especially with Oblivion. Radiant AI, in capable hands, is incredible. In any case, the games are very, very good platforms for drafting experimental gameplay ideas and trying them out.

"Oblivion was a great opportunity to flesh out the history of Cyrodiil that Bethesda passed away."

And for a province that was largely an intermingling of conflicting cultures, everyone seemed pretty happy, and the only thing indicating that there weren't just a bunch of frumpy looking white dudes living there was... Bruma. You know how Morrowind pretty much BASED its story and setting on cultural conflicts? There were SO many opportunities to do that in Oblivion.

I do like DF's atmosphere a lot though, despite some of my issues with the gameplay. I know a lot of people say its ugly. I think they're nuts. DF's engine, for the time, was actually pretty good, and barring the NPC portraits, the sprite work is, honestly, excellent. The music was also excellent. Although in general I have to say I prefer midi, chiptunes, and mods to symphonic/orchestral scores. I'm not saying this out of some sort of oldschool >>> newschool thing. It's just that most of the symphonic soundtracks videogames get tend to be frothy and lame. Everyone hates me for this but that Sakimoto guy that Square has doing a lot of stuff? I really don't like his music. I can't remember a single track from FFXII, honestly. It's like it's not geared around melody at all. In comparison, Dragon Quest 8 had a symphonic soundtrack (and for anyone that likes exploring overworlds, I definitely feel the need to recommend this game. Tiny towns, though, but it's a far different kind of game than TES is) that used, like, drums. And melodies. And not "Okay let's have thirty string sections just 'cuz we can."

And yes, Jeremy Soule used to be a lot more creative. Give the Secret of Evermore soundtrack a listen sometimes. Luckily, some of the music from Oblivion is a lot closer to what he used to do. Ambient, slightly unconventional, scaled down things. No swelling strings.

they should port it to xbox 360 and put it in the xbox live arcade, i would buy it without thinking twice, and i already have it on computer!

I think it's been established that there are far too many issues that are preventing a port to XBLA from happening.

they should port it to xbox 360 and put it in the xbox live arcade, i would buy it without thinking twice, and i already have it on computer!

Should I insert my obligatory Wii comment here?

Nah.