I've been wanting more skills in since Morrowind cut some good ones. Oblivion did terrible job. I suggested a skilll ist of 35 to Skyrim, but the dumbkopfs keep cutting them. Im so frigging annoyed about it, and the simplification can be seen on EVERY aspect, not just the in the number of skills and factions.

And the # of joinable factions are more like:
Daggerfall 30-35
Morrowind 16
Oblivion 4

I'm am not expecting much from TES5, and this time I will try it before buying it. In my sig you find a decent list of suggestions, which can be summarized: "Just Make Daggerfall 2"

I think the biggest reason is that modern games take so much time to create the graphics and voice acting. If half your budget is spent making the game look awesome, not much can be spent making the game BE awesome. Not even just RPGs. Look at platformers. They svck in 3D. Shooters are probably the exceptiom, but you'll never have the complex god games like the old civilization games.

boo hoooooo. I guess according to you, I need a doctorate to understand Morrowind because of the extra skills it has. I mean it just adds sooooo much complexity by having medium armor opposed to light and heavy armor. The complexity difference between the two just hurts my brain. I played Morrowind before Oblivion, and I hardly think the removal skills adversely affected the gameplay. If Morrowind had a skill system like Oblivion, I wouldn't have thought any less of the game. What about the fact that in Morrowind that they clumped bows,crossbows, and throwing weapons in all one catagoy? I didn't hear you whine about that. You can't pick up a crossbow and expect to shoot it like a bow and arrow. And being a good knife thrower, doesn't all of sudden make you an expert archer. You'll whine when Oblivion did something wrong, but your type overlooks when Morrowind did something wrong. Both games did things wrong, and I hope Skyrim will adress all the issues Oblivion. I liked Oblivion, but it had stuff I didn't like about it such as excessive level scaling,level scaled loot,lack of dungeon variety,lack of landscape variety, bad AI, etc.

I've never understood this massive need for the game to make you feel intelligent, usually it's when you do something yourself which then makes you feel intelligent, you did a smart decision. You cannot rate your IQ based on games, unless the game is an IQ test. This whole thing with gameplay insulting your intelligence, just makes you appear insecure about it. It's like someone asking you for a ride and you instantly go "oh so you think I can't walk! Don't be insulting!"

Especially when you then imply Daggerfall and Morrowind challenged your brain, now that is insulting your intelligence, and this is coming from someone who started with Oblivion and loved the game. I had fun with Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion, in all of them I was stimulated and entertained, but to say that any of them challenged me intellectually? No way.

If Morrowind had a skill system like Oblivion (which it does, for the most part, but Oblivion didn't use it for anything meaningful), I'd have gotten bored with Morrowind too, and I wouldn't be here on the forum trying to get Bethesda to return to what made MW enjoyable to me.

Morrowind may have clumped bows, crossbows, and throwing weapons into one category, but how does that make Oblivion's approach "better" by doing away with most of them completely? It's not so much that Medium Armor was taken away, but that the diversity of available armor was drastically reduced in the game, and what we got was doled out one at a time (or rather two at a time: one Light, one Heavy) as a linear "rat race" of equipment, where each one was just one step better in stats, so you had to upgrade to keep pace. At the start, all that existed was some rusty iron, fur, and a couple of other rare odds and ends. Compare that to MW, where almost every piece of armor was available somewhere in the game world from the start, and completing the MQ with a bit of moderately decent "starting equipment" was not only possible, but not all that difficult.

Your comments about "your type" are downright insulting; just because somebody doesn't agree with your tastes doesn't permit you to call them a "whiner", especially when all I hear is you whining about how they're whining.

Morrowind had its fair share of problems, and a lot of Oblivion's biggest debacles are the direct result of overcompensating for the problems in Morrowind. In essence, half of the "fixes" were to amputate the whole limb, and you wonder why we complain?

By far, my biggest complaint with Oblivion was that it took away the possibility of failure completely. Morrowind was brutally harsh at the start, at least until you figured out how to "manage" failure and improve your chances (in combat, spellcasting, potion making, repair, lockpicking, or speechcraft) by various means, but the CONCEPT behind it was right. The sense of improvement and satisfaction of being able to do what was previously beyond your abilities made it worth the effort. The reward was well worth the risk. Oblivion took failure out of the game completely, and made it so that any inept starting fighter could cast spells right along with a starting mage, or open locks with an aspiring thief, with exactly the same odds of success: 100%. They made it so you couldn't possibly get lost, couldn't accidentally kill someone important, couldn't accidentally throw away the most important item in the game for the MQ, or do anything so monumentally wrong or stupid that you'd have to work at it to fail. If you chose a wrong response to a question, you could just go back and answer it again, so there were NO meaningful consequences to anything. With no real challenge, there was also no sense of satisfaction, merely a feeling of "here's my token freebie for following the big arrow like a good little child". If that's your idea of an improvement, then you and I are obviously from different worlds. If you're playing strictly for the combat, then maybe Oblivion is a "better game" from that perspective, and I don't fault you for liking it, but even if you can't understand why I don't like it, you have no right to insult me for being critical of it.

Oblivion may have been a good game, but I didn't enjoy it. You might, but I didn't, and no amount of you or other OB supporters telling me that it's wonderful is going to change the fact that I found it boring and shallow. That has NOTHING to do with Morrowind. Oblivion, by removing the risk of failure, reducing the importance of character skills compared to player skills, and by blatant "hand holding", felt like nothing more than an "activity", with no point or purpose. The more I played it, the more I came to realize that I wasn't getting anything out of it. If I keep pushing for a return to a style of game-play that I found entertaining and challenging, can you blame me?

"In 1929, the flappers and such were having the same debate over silent films vs. talkies, with ardent fans of silents bemoaning the fate of the art of movie-making."

Red herring. With sound and speech, movies could get out more dialogue, with more nuance, more efficiently.

With the move from text-dialogue to speech dialogue, they cut the amount of dialogue by 90%

It's the same with many other advancements in the technology.. the more neato physics/graphics/features you put in, the less flexibility the actual game has to do anything. That's why Dwarf Fortress and its ilk have the MOST powerful gameplay.

Movies are a form of expression, the move to speech and sound wasn't about getting out more dialog, it was to better express the movie, to tell the story better and more immersively. It wasn't about quantity, it was about quality.



And they enhanced the last 10% of dialog, 90% more.



Features and physics are part of the gameplay experience, I disagree about Dwarf fortress, it's a good example of quantity, you can do a lot of stuff, but there's no significant difference between using axes, maces, or swords, or any of the other weapons skills beyond a label and a number. In essence, you have a lot of skills, but all the skills are skin deep.

I agree with everything you said wholeheartedly. Only I will be buying Skyrim.
If it follows the trend of Oblivion too much, it will be my last though. And I will be sad about that, but better to move on than see something you love willfully destroyed.

I do not really understand how streamlining does not mean oversimplification. To me they are one and the same.
Just a slightly nicer name for it. Like calling a war a police action, its still the same thing.
Streamlining removes options, hides gameplay mechanics and to me basically just means: 'Aimed at casual gamers who get really upset when confronted with choice or the need to think.'

Look at how many people on this forum (Skyrim section specifically) clamour to have the game restricted even more!
Often under the umbrella word of 'overpowered'.
The most inane argument I have encountered went along the lines of: 'Levitation should be taken out because it is overpowered. It allows you to easily circumvent painstakingly created content and head straight for the goal.'
That is a perfect example of what I mean. Fine if youre talking about a shooter, but an RPG? come on.
Its not just levitation too. Any and all things that allow open gameplay need to be stunted or removed according to this part of the fanbase. Spellmaking. Invisibility. Sneaking. Acrobatics. Playing on after the main quest (yes, really).

Now this should not be surprising, considering Oblivion went away from their true RPG fanbase to attract other styles of gamers, as the OP stated. This isnt bad for Bethesda, they sell more copies and get to make even more expensively made games. But it may be bad for people like me. People who feel that they like the kind of games that just arent made anymore.
I often get a little angry even, when I see a game like Fable, that has 'RPG' proudly on its cover.
Fable is not an RPG. Neither is mass effect.
I have in fact not seen a game since Morrowind that I would class a true RPG, though maybe I havent looked hard enough.
I hear good things about Witcher.

I really wish game makers would realise that they can make a profit if they do not try to appeal to the largest common denominator by default. The gamers that want flash and slick and fast and easy.
I really couldnt care less about graphics, or voice acting, or even audio for that matter. To me, that is all icing.
And I care about the cake.

Morrowind had more weapons, but some of them were vastily inferior to other popular weapons. Hence the reason why they removed, they couldn't balance them correctly so they got rid of them. The issue with the armor your describing is really the level loot scaling problem which I also didn't like about Oblivion. Brutally harsh? Maybe. How is it fun for a new player to accidently throw away an important item? You consider that fun? I think not being able to kill essitional NPC's is perhaps not necisarily to prevent freedom to the player, but to stop the character from being killed by other AI. Radiant AI could be pretty goofy at times, so how fun would it be for a character essitional to the main quest to die and it wasn't your fault? I agree, Oblivion did hold your hand too much. On the other hand, I could get lost while doing a quest in Morrowind. Perhaps they could strike a balance? I didn't say it was wonderful. I think some of your reasons are very superficial at best. It is rather foolish you'll let one bad game in your opinion, ruin the whole series for you, and already judging the other game to be crap. You might say that now, but I bet you'll try Skyrim.

I agree with this. For me, this was the most disappointing thing about Oblivion. The developer's headlong, unthinking rush to control my game experience felt constricting to me. I hated that I could not even catch a glimpse of, say, glass armor anywhere in the game at any time no matter what I did until the developers said I could. It felt kind of totalitarian to me, and definitely against the spirit of freedom that I see as a cornerstone of the Elder Scrolls series.




I'm going to have to agree with this, too. As much as I enjoyed Oblivion's combat, I felt no exhilarating sense of accomplishment when my character began (at last!) to hit something. In Oblivion my characters hit just as often and just as easily at level 1 as at level 50.




Generally, I agree. But there are a few select cases where I felt Oblivion did a good thing by consolidation. For instance, I thought Morrowind's division of skills into Short Blade and Long Blade was pretty pointless. I felt it made no roleplaying sense that my character could slice the wings off a fly with a Long Blade but could not hit an Ogrim at point-blank range. I prefer Oblivion's consolidated Blade skill.




Oh yes, I was floored when I read that thread. That was a real eye-opener for me. Up to then I had no idea any Elder Scrolls fan could possibly think like that. To seriously advocate that an Elder Scrolls game should end after the main quest is finished frankly kind of scares me. I don't want to meet these people in real life.




The irony here is that many fans of Bioware's games will tell you that Morrowind is not really a true RPG at all. I was shocked to discover this after Dragon Age came out. I learned then that the term "RPG" is in the eye of the beholder. Me, I prefer Bethesda's style of open-ended games. I actually have a much harder time trying to roleplay in one of Bioware's linear games. To me, Bioware's games are for those who like to be told a story. Bethesda's games are for those who like to tell their own stories.

You are misunderstanding what it means to streamline something, and what it means to be a casual gamer.

Streamlining basically means make something more effective, or convenient. A streamlined car is a car with a shape that makes it so there's less wind resistance when you drive. Basically, it makes it easier to drive, and uses less energy.

A casual gamer is not someone who only plays casual games, it's has nothing to do with there choice of games, or content of those games, it deals with how much of there spare time they use on games, it means that they "game casually", they play games occasionally, not that they "play casual games".



I don't see how these are necessarily "casual gamer" points, the argument against levitation which you say you have encountered, is basically the same as the one against Fast Travel, which is mostly made by people who entitle themselves "hardcoe".



True RPG fanbase? There are people who think TES series can't be considered RPGs, including morrowind. Some people say the cornerstone of an RPG is Choice and Consequence, and dialog choices, which TES is severely lacking and Mass Effect is highly specialized in. Same with Fable.

How was Morrowind a true rpg, and why is fable and mass effect neither? What is a "true" rpg?

Granted,out of all that variety of weapons in MW, some of them were clearly inferior. Guess what, it didn't matter. They were still fun, and the game had enough "leeway" that you could still use them in spite of that.

Not existing in the game at all until you reach a certain level, and then all-but vanishing again after you reach another level, was more than a "level loot scaling problem". It was a fundamental shift in design philosophy, from one where you can do pretty much anything you want, if you can manage to pull it off, to one where you're told how you can play. For an "open world" game, OB's world was a lot less "open" than MW's in a number of respects.

Whether my reasons are "superficial" or not (I regard some of yours with a bit of concern), that doesn't change the FACT that I did not like the way that Bethesda handled many of the most fundamental aspects of Oblivion, and no matter whether you find it foolish or not, I'll be eyeing the posts very closely here after Skyrim's release to determine whether or not I'll be buying TES V. There's no reason for running out and picking up another "game without a point" that's just going to end up sitting in the bottom drawer, along with the copy of OB that hasn't been touched in several years (I keep hearing that SI is worth playing, but can't seem to get past the bad experience with the basic game to try it). At this stage, I won't commit either to buying it or not buying it, but Bethesda's promises of "improvement" are no longer enough to make me do so, especially when I keep hearing how they consider "cutting content" an improvement.

To me, a true RPG is what a poster above said. Its about telling your own story. Bioware makes adventure games, not RPG's, because they tell you the story, and it is impossible to deviate. (I do not call a 'nice' or 'nasty' dialogue tree a real choice)
Some of them are really good adventure games, I quite enjoyed Jade Empire. But it is in no way shape or form an RPG.
It is too linear, too much like riding a rollercoaster. Fun, but in the end stuck on rails.

People that state 'levitation is overpowered because it allows you to avoid painstakingly created content' just make me want to facedesk. Playing how you want to play is an RPG hallmark. There is no such thing as 'avoiding painstakingly created content.'
It just does not exist. And that is what I mean by Bethesda pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Never did I use the phrase 'casual gamer' but I do think that the newer generation of gamers are fundamentally different from the old generation. I read on Skyrim section of the forum about how someone was glad spell creation was gone, because 'it allowed for really cool looking spells, not just a ball of light.' And that is exactly what I mean. All flash, no substance.
What do i care for how a spell looks? I care for what it does.
That is RPG.

Any game that puts you on rails, and takes you by the hand down a pre-set path, with no room for deviation, no room for inventiveness, no room for customization (besides cosmetic), no room to tell your own story is, by definition, not an RPG.

Fable did not have dialogue trees at all, and Mass Effect only allowed you to choose between 'nice' and 'nasty'. Basically, its two games in one, where you get a different ending if you play a nasty guy instead of a goodie two shoes. But there was hardly any character customization, the weapon customization was a joke and there was nothing at all to do in the entire game besides questing.

Not that adventure/ fighting games like Fable arent fun, but they are just that. Adventure/ fighting games. Not RPG.

So linear RPG's aren't rpgs? Free roaming is a sandbox element not an Rpg element.

I don't see how it is impossible to deviate, you can literally alter the end of the game, not only that, but to a much greater extend than Morrowind, You can even avoid a large part of a battle by talking the boss into committing suicide. The "nice"/"nasty" are still more dialog dependency than Morrowind.

You also state Jade Empire, which has two different endings, where Morrowind has one. And concequently shows the effects of the people you met and who survived to the end of the game. Sure Jade Empire is a Action Rpg, it even labels itself this, but If Jade Empire isn't a rpg in any way shape or form, than an rpg requires neither dialog nor choice or consequences, neither story.

And since when was choice and consequence, skill based dialog choices, a hallmark of adventure games? In adventure games you aren't allowed to change the course of the story. The legacy of Kain series is a proper adventure game.



hey, I agree, that is not a reason to avoid levitation.





I believe the above is you using the phrase causal gamer, and using it in the wrong context.



How is that not the exact opposite of of flash no substance. In Oblivion/morrowind/daggerfall, the difference between fire dmg and cold dmg, is a label and a colour, and which dmg gets to effect what, but other than that they might as well have been similar. Instead of Fire/cold we could have called it purple/brown, it would make no difference, because there's nothing about the fire in the former games that indicates that this is fire, beyond the flash. If we have a person with the same resistance to everything, than the difference between fire and cold is trivial at best. That is not a proper representation of fire and cold. I would love to have spell creation, but the new magic system sounds interesting enough to that I would rather have that than, spell creation with spells that are trivial in difference. I mean in skyrim, fire is not just a label, it's a property, is a real thing with it's own characteristics, just as cold is property with it's own characteristics. If anything, I want spell creation that involves the new system.



So skills don't matter at all? I mean the hack 'n' Slash genre is a branch of RPGs which decided to focus purely on Stats and abilities, but to say imply that they don't matter can't be true. What about Vampire The Masqurade Redemption isn't that an Rpg? Any linear Rpgs aren't Rpgs? What about Sandbox games, are these rpgs? Is GTA an rpg simply because the world is open and you can play how you want? In San Andreas you can do a lot of different stuff, make your own story. I can't join House Dagoth, so now Morrowind isn't an rpg?



Hardly any character customization? You could specialize in any given weapon type, you could make your character look however you wanted, and you had you could specialize in to different approaches, or both, or none, and the nice/nasty choices which were skill governed, and had nice/nasty consequences to a measure that morrowind hadn't, could you talk dagoth ur to give up? Morrowind doesn't have dialog trees in the same sense, and when you have a choice in Morrowind, it's not skill governed, and there no neutral approach, I mean at least there's even neutral approaches in Mass effect.



And then fable, the game which sacrifices most other rpg mechanics, and specializes specifically in one, which is exactly to tell your own story. I didn't particularly like the newest addition to the series, but you can't say that there aren't consequences to your actions in that game, the game world literally changes to your decisions, I mean seriously, I can kill vivec, but it doesn't really change much, the world stays the same, dagoth never wins, it tells me I'm doomed, but really, nothing happens, if that message hadn't come up, you wouldn't have noticed anything other than that the world has just frozen in a little time pocket, the world moves on as if nothing happened, only it doesn't really move on, because like in Oblivion, it only really moves when I move.

What should we call games where you can change the course the outcome of the game? where the ending is determined by you? I mean according to you, they aren't rpgs, but adventure games don't have this ability, nor requires it. Is Fable a fighting game like tekken? or a hack 'n' slash like Diablo?, in diablo you can't effect the story, but in Fable you can, does this mean nothing? Is a branching storyline irrelevant?

I guess it comes down to: An RPG is what I point at when I use the term.
Exactly the same as science fiction. I bet we could have interesting debates on that too, as I do not consider star trek scifi.
(Its western.)

I dont think there is any point in taking my post apart sentence by sentence as you do in your previous post however.
In the end it comes down to: This is how I think about this.
So, for me, Fable will continue to not be an RPG, while Morrowind will continue to be one.

I think Morrowind was the perfect level of complexity. Daggerfell was fun but it was too much for a casual player and Oblivion I feel was designed exclusively for casual players. Morrowind was the perfect balance between the two ,at least that's how I feel.

Not by definition, but that's the way that game designers have use the term nowadays; saying that you're streamlining a game sounds a lot better than saying that you're simplifying it or dumbing it down.

Automatically sorting your inventory into categories such as "Weapons", "Armor", and so on is an example of streamlining without detracting from depth. It removes a frustrating and time-consuming element of the game but doesn't detract from difficulty or the complexity of gameplay. However, for the last five or so years, whenever a developer says "streamlining" in an interview, it's used as a buzzword in the context of explaining why they're removing stats/skills, making it so that any character can access all of the content regardless of his class/skills or in-game decisions (see Oblivion's factions and linear quest design), and lowering the difficulty of the game to make it "accessible" - another popular buzzword - to a wider fanbase. So streamlining doesn't necessarily mean loss of depth, but that you shouldn't take developers' words as gospel when they speak of streamlining as though it's universally positive.



I would be wary of this claim. When Oblivion was being hyped, they described a similar possibility with regard to a quest where you had to retrieve a diamond from a shopkeeper. They said there would be literally hundreds of methods to solve such a quest by taking advantage of RAI, including cutting off the town's food supply, thus forcing him to pawn it at a discount to keep from starving. We all know how that turned out.



This isn't a good example for the topic at hand. It's merely a change, not a decrease in complexity. And as another poster noted, the transition from silent text to full voicing and increased emphasis on graphics has placed limitations on games. With full voicing as a requirement, you couldn't release a game like Planescape: Torment today, which is a damned shame, and the level of graphics "required" for a major release these days places large restrictions on gameplay. Levitation had to be dropped because of closed cities, themselves necessary because open cities would have caused major slowdowns unless the graphical detail of the game was decreased. Crossbows and spears were dropped because they would require unique attack animations and were not popular enough options to warrant the resources that would have been required. We won't be seeing climbing or languages anytime soon for similar reasons.



Yes, they can. That's not pertinent to what Kovacius was saying, and he didn't imply otherwise, so what's your point? Are you denying that Oblivion set out to appeal to people who hadn't typically been fans of RPGs in the past? The developers said as much quite freely, speaking frequently of their goal to appeal to a wider base than RPG enthusiasts. Are you denying that a large number of RPG fans were disappointed by the game? If so, I can gladly point you to a large community full of examples.

And in response to Kovacius: unfortunately, it's not a trend limited to Bethesda. Every major western RPG studio on the market right now is solely producing real-time action RPGs and all of them except maybe New Vegas possess increasingly diluted RPG elements. Compare Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 2 to their predecessors. Mass Effect 2 would be considered a pure action game if instead of using experience points and money to earn upgrades you used some sort of colored sphere dropped by your enemies like in Devil May Cry. Dragon Age 2 looks like it's going the same direction. I don't mind "development" as Leydenne describes in and of itself, but it becomes a problem when everyone ignores the good ideas of the past in favor of the latest trends.



How about climbing and levitation, tools which greatly enhanced exploration (a major part of the appeal of TES games for many players)? How about spears, which opened up a completely different style of battle in Morrowind? My Argonian assassin depended on his spear to keep enemies at a distance when fighting, using his superior reach, speed, and unarmored skill to keep from getting hit.



Why should he have whined about that? It wasn't relevant to his point. To use an anology, if someone's arguing about how they thought a TV series really went downhill in the last season, would you expect them to list all of the flaws of the earlier seasons first? Just because someone doesn't point out the flaws of something doesn't mean that they don't recognize those flaws.



"I saw a mud-crab today. Horrible things, I avoid them whenever I can."

PC: "I'm looking for my father, a middle-aged man." NPC: Instant recognition.

"[Intelligence] So you fight the good fight with your voice on Galaxy News Radio."

I see what you mean.

Or were you talking about how Patrick Stewart and the four voice actors who voiced practically everyone else in a bland, uninspired tone made everything come alive for you? There are a few good examples of voice-acting in games (Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, Grim Fandango) but not enough to make up for the emotionless or jarringly hammy voice acting that makes up the rest.



"Adventure" is the genre that includes games such as Monkey Island, Myst, and the old Sierra "Quest" games, where you spend most of your time interacting with the environment in order to solve puzzles, usually with commands like "Pick Up", "Look At", and "Use". The word you're looking for is "action".

I disagree. As evidence I will cite http://www.minecraft.net/ Minecraft is a game whose graphics are 15 years behind the times. A month after entering Beta status on December 20, 2010 Minecraft had sold over 1,000,000 copies. As of February 12 the game the game has sold 1,279,479 copies. This compares favorably to Oblivion's 1.7 million copies sold by April 10, 2006. Gamers will buy an unvoiced game with less than next-gen graphics in large numbers if they find the gameplay absorbing.




A caveat: major slowdowns on the XBox. The Open Cities mod has demonstrated that Morrrowind-style open cities cause no appreciable slowdowns on the PC.

Bad voice acting is not a good argument against voiced dialog, the same way bad writing is not a good argument against written dialog. When voice acting is done right, it enhances the experience far beyond everything written dialog could ever achieve, because of the nature of the medium.

Oh lets make it more complex let's add pointless weapon skills with bland animations split previously combine skills into two and add back thaumaturgy and mysticism since clearly they're aren't pointless so we could have 60 skills clearly none of them would be pointless and it is going to make leveling characters so much easier and add more diversity to our game play when players are definitely not going to chose skills that they wouldn't use to avoid level scaling in all TES games so they could stick in level 1 and continue to fight weak bandits, alits, weak fauna and scribs (I am not using morrowind as an example obviously :rolleyes: ) with our maxed out blade skills wraith guard and true flame offing them in one hit just because the games leveling system is the best ever and it is totally not flawed also it *didn't have level scaling unlike oblivion .

Also we should have sixty two factions with dumb fetch quest because it is definitely way funner unlike http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:A_Brush_with_Death http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:The_Ultimate_Heist http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Accidents_Happen http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Canvas_the_Castle which the developers noticeable didn't put more time in those than the entire thieves guild, fighters guild (the fact that these guilds quest-lines can be beaten in under 20 minutes clearly shows that they are superior), and mages guild quest line from morrowind for example the final quest for the http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Kill_the_Telvanni_Councilors in morrowind is clearly superior than the oblivion's final quest for http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Confront_the_King and your thread is the most original thread in existence we haven't had one of those in like 6 days?

enough sarcasm aside complexity must be sacrifice to give more depth, Depth does not equal complexity it never does and it will never will the OP I don't get why you prefer the old way? did you know you could be the head of the fighters guild in morrowind in 6 minutes? if you don't believe me don't make me put up a you-tube video of me doing this, do any of us actually remember the countless flaws of morrowind ? our your giving it pure praise just for nostalgia? I am replaying morrowind for old time sake waiting for skyrim in 11-11-11 amusing it will come out that date and I must admit there is no mount of texture and MGE shaders will cover the bad game play mechanics I don't care if I get bashed for it Morrowind is not as good as you though and don't even question me about daggerfall a game where it's only good redeeming quality to this date is it's dungeon crawling features which get stale easily.


*All Elder Scrolls game in the main continuum has level scaling the amounts varied but it seems more level scaling to an extent will make the game to hard and less level scaling will make it too easy but that's for another thread.

only part of your statement I agree on.



Remember when morrowind came out and most of the forums back in the original Elder Scrolls were complaining about the insanely large system requirements?
Remember PC is not the main audience unlike back in the day and not every body has a kick ass graphics processing card maybe you do but I certainly don't.

Ick. Personally, with DaggerXL underway I think that the continued survival of the "first generation" of the Elder Scrolls is assured, and the classic RPG is in good hands. I have confidence in Bethesda that Skyrim will be comparable to Morrowind in quality and quantity.

The only area where I would express concern is that I feel as if Skyrim is focused too much on interactivity of the world, and not enough on your character's own personal progression. But we'll see.

I take it that you'd be thrilled with one overall "Weapon Skill", one overall "Spell", and a single weapon and armor type that automatically morphs itself into whatever is "current for your level"? That would certainly get rid of all that needless complexity and allow you to play the simple FPS game that you really wanted to buy, instead of this awkward and confusing "RPG" thing you accidentally picked up. Maybe it just needs a big "I WIN" button to save you from all the unnecessary distraction. BTW - Oblivion suffered far more heavily from the problem you attribute to MW (continuing to fight weak bandits and wildlife at Level 1 because the game just got more difficult if you levelled). Oblivion's excessive levelling and scaling made it counter-productive to level. Morrowind, on the other hand, had plenty of "static" opponents, including almost all of the bandits in caves, so failing to level was a good way to get your posterior handed to you. You could still find those Scribs, Alits, and other more basic creatures at any level, just a few less of them and a few nastier things instead. Either you never played MW beyond the "safe" area at the start, or else you've compeletely misunderstood what was happening around you. Granted, some of those high-level artifacts could have been a bit better protected against low-level characters (although I don't think that ANY new player would ever "accidentally" stumble across both Wraithguard and Trueflame, as you suggest), and the tricks and techniques to get some of those items was somewhat of a game within the game. It certainly beats having a world that's got nothing in it of interest, just because your character isn't at Level 15 yet, or a world where all of the common creatures have somehow vanished by Level 20 or so, replaced by Minotaur Lords and bandits with rare Daedric and Glass armor and weapons. Both games used levelled lists (which is a valuable tool if used sensibly), but Oblivion made annoyingly excessive use of them, made it so that some low-level choices vanished from the list, and used level scaling to make certain spawned opponents' stats higher, which led to absurdities like gazillion hitpoint goblins that just wouldn't die.



It's a lot easier to write quests when they're totally isolated from everything else. In MW, there were interactions between certain factions, and the conflicts made it seem much more "real". In Oblivion, nothing you did made any difference to anyone else, and all of the factions existed in total isolation from each other. A few of the quests in OB were quite well done, but I would certaily hope that a game with half the content would at least show SOME increase in quality to account for the drastic decrease in quantity, especially with a much expanded development team to do the work.



Normally, depth and complexity go hand-in-hand. A well-designed game may HIDE the underlying complexity, or use an easy enough interface for it that it doesn't SEEM complex. Removing elements for the sake of "simplicity" limits depth as well as complexity, which apparently is the route that OB took. FO3 made a few "lateral moves", added a few "skill checks" to limit totally unskilled characters from doing things jut because the player could, and one or two minor shifts toward a balance, but further gutted other aspects of gameplay for the sake of "simplicity". Personally, I liked the difficulty level and overall "gameplay" of the original FO, but freely admit that FO3 was far more presentable and had a much less clunky interface. FO3 was "style over substance", just as OB went that route from MW and MW from DF. There was an improvement in some respects, but at a huge cost. I didn't find the high cost of what was lost to be "acceptable" for what little was gained between MW and OB.

It may be possible to do the entire MW FG questline in 6 minutes, but how many hundred hours did it take to figure out the tricks, details, and ways to optimize the whole pattern to do so? I understand that someone managed to pull off the MW MQ in about the same, but again, it probably took them hundreds of hours to get the whole sequence "just so", even after figuring out how to do it from months or years of playing experience at the game. In OB, on the other hand, you can become head of all factions at Level 1. Both games have their share of blatant flaws, but I'm still enjoying Morrowind's "bad game play mechanics", as you put it, regularly, long after retiring OB to a bottom cabinet drawer, where it's sat untouched for the last few years since I got sick and tired of the stupid and boring gameplay. Mods have been able to put some shine on MW's rather dated graphics, whereas no amount of "shine" will cover up OB's inherently flawed design (a popular "overhaul" mod was at least enough for me to "get through" OB long enough to finish the annoying MQ, but still couldn't mask the problem).

In OB it will require the same lvl of tricks, details and optimization to become head of all guilds at lvl 1, as both the dark brotherhood and the mages guild, has quests that require you to sleep, meaning you'd have to know which other quests will allow you to get a work around. Let's also not forget that staying at lvl one is an exploit, since you will be roleplaying a character who never sleeps, at all. In effect, you aren't playing the game like a roleplaying game.

He also said he doesn't think "do we want spears or crossbows" he says he thinks "which skills are superfluous?"


I don't like the way he approaches everything with a negative viewpoint, looking to remove skillsets. One day we'll just have "hitty" and "magicy".