:cold: You're going to make me cry. *sniffles*

What they need to realise is that one of the reasons that Morrowind did so well was that it was very clearly unique, set apart from all the other fantasy rpgs out there.

And dammit, I want special politics. The whole count and council thing? Boring.

That's why I'm really hoping the next game will be somewhere really exotic- just so that it all seems different, and there's lots to explain, lots of new things.

You may get your wish - seen MK's 101 thread? It may be misdirection, but although the roleplay supposedly may not be accurate it looks promising - maybe a look into the past or the future? Either when the Nord Gods first started out or maybe at the start of an entirely new Kalpa

MK also posted Lore to Oblivion. Thats not yet a sign for hope...

Beg to differ - it is a sign of hope - just not a guarantee, unless MK has inherited a few $100 million and bought gamesas

It doesn't have anything to do with the actors learning about the world - that's irrelevant, the actors just need to read the script (they're good as long as the guy that wrote the script knows about the world).

I blame voiced dialogue because it naturally limits the amount of dialogue a character can have. Any dialogue options require more acting time and effort on the parts of various individuals and also more disc space. With written dialogue you can have as much as you want without any problems, which means you can expand it significantly at the tip of a hat and make it non-repetitive. As it is with voiced dialogue, everybody ends up saying exactly the same thing because there's only so much voice-acted material to work with. This is also one reason why it svcks to mod npcs in Oblivion, as well as quests tied to them...

down with mp3 - the death of memory.

Thing is that developing a game is very different to creating your standard film or a play. Respect to those other media, but game development is a damn site more complicated and inherently trickier and so requires a hell of a lot more time, effort and co-ordination to get up to the same standards. About the only media that compares is cartoon and even then it's just one run-through.

With a play or a film (99 times out of a hundred) you have one basic timeline and set of actions that is set. So you have a comparatively straight-forward set of planning goals. Games like ES require multiple options and timelines. None of it comes ready-made. We know you don't just buy a chair you have to create one and the chair does not come with physics, you have to add the UV etc to make that work too. Ok that's simplifying it all, but most of us have been modding and we know it's true.

Film and such has its complications and nuances ofc, but it has other advantages too, For example another string for their bow that gives them an edge is trickery. With film you can make a few hundred extras look like the entire mongol horde etc ... Games could do such things but developers and makers just sort of gave up on trying because to many of the money men 'it's just a game'. That is not just the fault of the businessmen who have not been promoting their games properly, but it's real.

Next big deal that film and actors have is that the central figures also have skills ideal for self-promotion - they are the actors and this could be you - it's real. Games are still caught in the 'almost real', virtual reality thing = not real. Look at the way the films made LotR acceptable. Developers seldom have RL charisma equal to that of 'celebs'. what developers have is talent. That's entirely different. so what happens? If a film is terrifying or sickeningly violent th eactors and actresses make it acceptable - games just get [censored] on. I hope that gamesas don't employ Max Clifford though - that would really be the death of ES.

Put all those factors together plus I believe that the Devs have loads of ideas and plans, but what they actually do is accumulate 'piles of the good stuff' for each Province until a pile reaches critical mass and they have quality art, books and Lore enough to create a game at that point from what is there, and then that becomes the next release.

However, because they are basing it on pre-created stuff they have and at that stage the process becomes a jig-saw puzzle the 'creative process' then tends to get shoved out of the window in favor of the practical 'we convinced the money men we have something now we have to take it to the next level and get it out - do not over-complicate things'. There is less room for manoeuver and less time as the budget then gets inflated to accomodate all kinds of new specialists who need specific script-based input or pre-created code, whatever to base their work from. So that is the factoty stage. The devs ca do some things, but they are then limited and a lot of it disappears into the producer's corner. Once all that is shaken out and packaged 'everyone involved' then knows what they were doing and sequals can be planned more coherently from a Lore point of view.

It seems that what is needed is for various areas of software coding and production to create and maintain spaces in which the Devs can continue to work with more freedom - so the 'crazy devs' can then ensure that the quality of the Lore and general continuity is maintained. And that should (hopefully) keep devs and techie newbies more in touch with each other.

There is one big deal that rpgs have going for them - they are empowering the fans. Long live rpg - we are the Lore!

No offense, but I have no idea what you're talking about, it's definitely not the same thing I'm talking about. My only point is that voiced dialogue naturally limits itself to having alot less dialogue, just because it's so much harder to make more of (and then because of that, we don't get all the in-dialogue lore that we got in Morrowind)...

That's it, it has nothing to do with businessmen, developer charisma, 'crazy devs', films, plays or timelines. It's just that you can't do as much with voiced dialogue.

I like how Morrowind hardly had any natural creatures that came from Earth except for the bears and the wolves in Solstiem, then in Oblivion we have bears, wolves, deer, horses, pine trees...it still had other creatures like trolls and ogres, but still...it had too many RL creatures...

For my part, I strongly preferred Morrowind's dialogue system. I don't care about a lot of spoken dialogue. I want options to choose from that I can read and re read at my own pace.

? You are not obliged to read or understand my posts - but then why bother to respond? :shrug:

You may not be able to do anything much with voice dialogue, but I can - and so can a lot of people - but it takes more time effort and costs more than writing a few lines. Most of all the speaker has to be intimately involved in his understanding of th egame - read very well briefed or the dialogue writer has to know what he/ she is doing as the writing / creation thereof is so different from writing - it's a fixed thing that has a lot of powerful nuance.

I never said anything about being able to do "anything much", I said it can't do "as much" (the primary point being that you can't do 'as much' as easily, and further, even if you put as much voiced dialogue in-game as Morrowind did text-dialogue, nobody's going to want to wait through all that talking). And the speaker is irrelevant, they just have to read lines as they're told.

Not withstanding 'de gustibus non disputandem' but voice can do different things. A skilled voice actor can multiply the sense of written dialogue or hone it into a shaft that hits the point spot on.

Great Poets and writers spend their lives trying to achieve with the written word the same effects that ordinary people create and re-create day-by-day.

I would be willing to concede however that there are things that can be done with the written word that voice is less efficient at. Thing is that so much of the written word is so very poorly done when it comes to dialogue - that is why voice actors so frequently have to re-write or re-invent dialogue.

The essence of roleplay is that it is become truly multi-media through computers and why refuse to use the best of all worlds?

eg: ohh lookeee we have a pen and paper. Words say more than pictures so we are not going to have any pictures ... <_< Is that how you want things to go?


The problem that most fans had with Morrowind 'conversation' before Oblivion was that it was generally so banol and lacking in content or responsiveness. A lot of words there going nowheres. Basically the fans were crying out for more and better and Beth came up with the Oblivion approach in partial response. But what people really want is to be able to have intelligent conversations with the characters. Something along those lines might be achieved, but it would take a vast amount of work - or someone with a true genius for it. And it would have to fit in with the vast plethora of everything else that is happening during development - and that apparently is the stuff that you do not want to consider

While I greatly enjoy graphics... I'd be in for that. I've often hoped that, since Oblivion's graphics are so amazing, they will focus instead on more depth, freedom, and better gameplay in the next game and not try too hard for even more detailed graphics.

Some of the best games I've played have been quite old and poor graphics, but amazing living world.

And perhaps a compromise in voice actors? I was partial to Arcanum's system for that, where most people simply used text, but for specific characters who had particular personality or were particularly important to the plot. That way, you don't need a voice actor do everything and thus lose out on detail, but you also get the dynamic feel of there being real voices- unique to certain characters.

Um... maybe you aren't cued into the essence of a Roleplay, matey.

The Essence of a Roleplay is to dive into another world, another life, as another person. Nothing at all to do with multi-media. Now Computer RPGs utilize this media to reach their ends, but it is not the ESSENCE of CRPGs to use this multi-media. The ESSENCE of CRPGs is to replicate the table-top rpg experience on a monitor.

And yes that is how I want things to go. Have you ever played Daggerfall? Or Dungeons and Dragons atop a dining room table? There is an amazing world open to the character, almost completely without limitation, and without fancy shiny graphics.

In fact, dare I say it, Daggerfall looks GOOD. (Gasp, I dared say it) Despite it's graphics coming from an era when I was still in my Gameboy kick and hadn't even begun puberty, the graphics for the tiny, old game look GOOD, even when compared to the shininess of Oblivion. And everything available in Oblivion (fast travel, horse riding) and several other things not even included in Morrowind's world, come in Daggerfall. There was more included in that single game world than either Ob or Morrowind combined.

Heck, it holds the world record for largest game world!

Degradation of TES Games, anyone? I think so. 1999, I think you are pioneering graphic evolution, not Roleplaying evolution.

No worries FC4 - we all misread things from time to time - this was your time. I started playing Daggerfall before you from the looks of things - I always wanted to play Arena ever since it came out but I could never find a copy and now do not have that kind of comp ... and I enjoyed my time with AD&D immensely because of the fine roleplayers in the Guild of Melee and Magic (as was) and well before. I also designed scenarios, landscape and painted figures for tabletop gaming etc.

What was being said in my thread is that you have look very carefully at your media to get the best out of it and find a balance ... and if you had been keeping up with current and past threads that touch on this you might have realised that I feel Ob sacrificed a lot to fit into the console thing - actually more than just ES Lore - I suspect they had a big hand in seriously damaging the entire off-line computer market in GB - though there are obviously other factors there and that was what I was getting at here.

Basically it might help you to take another look at what was said, thanks FC4. <_<

One thing that may not have occured to you is that as computers and screens have been 'upgraded' they have not bothered about showing the real quality of older games to best advantage.


I enjoyed Arcanum too Illusory - for different reasons and I like mixing media. That's the whole point of my post - that it's a mistake to overload one sort of media at the expense of the others. You need to find ways that all the media can be used to best advantage allowing for their different needs. and then you have to actually put quality stuff in and leave it in. A lot of quality stuff was pulled out of Ob sadly. CraftyBits and other mods are discovering more and more unused capacity in Ob and ways to upgrade not just the graphics to make them more efficient but also adding to the kind of things that characters can do. Some stuff makes the gameplay more exciting, other stuff makes it more real - and yet more stuff opens up options to mod new scenarios in different ways.

The reason most of us liked Caius was the way his voice and presence blended - same with 'St Jiub' and I will add Azura in on my own account - all beautiful voice acting by people who were well briefed and/or versed in what was being aimed at in the game. That was roleplay. Other stuff that was excellent was Vivec - he really had me fooled in a lot of ways. I knew he was a rogue, but I just did not want to believe it. Now THAT is roleplaying.

Having said all that without the stories and general run of key dialogue Morrowind would have been poorer. Same goes for Daggerfall. Come to thnk of it a lot of th ewritten dialogue in Daggerfall was superficial - but at that time, who cared? We had the stories that were a cut above Arena.

It is interesting that although some of the countryside in Daggerfall was beautiful, it was also for the most part every bit as 'ordinary' as in normal European as Cyrodiil in Ob. What made the difference in Dagerfall was the sound effects and music - they blended beautifully - add in the fact that we had not played Morrowind. And most especially the Dungeons - scary without the need for excessive blood and bones.

Contrasting tone of word there much? I wasn't quoting your entire argument, just that snub anyways. But perhaps this was, indeed, my time to misread. Like you said, no worries. So stop glaring and snapping please.

Especially since in a single post you managed to show we have pretty much the same viewpoint ANYWAYS.

And yes it has occurred to me that as hardware has upgraded, companies have forgone what made the old games great and have focused more and more on the appearance. Showing the games at their best, rather than displaying their GAMEPLAY at their best. But as we get more and more realistic, closer to the goal, maybe we'll finally focus less on realistic looks, and more on quality gameplay. I hope.

And hopefully they won't cater to Consoles as much. Granted, I loved the new combat system for Oblivion so much more than Morrowinds... but I liked Daggerfall's even better!

I wasn't arguing with you, and I didn't say anything about Daggerfall. No worries; I'm not out to get 'cha. People can have their own opinions happily, as far as I'm concerned; I'm no more or less right than anyone else.

And I do like shiny graphics- I really really do. But I also like really big game-worlds, interesting characters and lots and lots to learn, explore, and do. If there was a way to do both and still play it on my tragically poor computer (God, I miss my old one) then yes please.

I'll admit to a quick glare in the direction of what you said FC$, but not a snap more.

I did not think you were 'argui8ng with me so much as arguing your point of view which is enjoyable Illusory.

As for shiny graphics - they have their moments too - as do big game worlds. What I have seen of the console worlds is mostly 'hemmed in with have to do this next' and that's it. :shrug: and I believ e there are ways to get that big game world with loadsa gameplay etc and all - but it will take commitment on the part of gamesas - and some hard bargaining with the consoles.

It may sound strange but I don't want to harm the consoles - because even platform games are the right kind of game for me at certain times. But I do want the best of ES and that is more than a console platform game = me greedy

yeah, I pretty much have nothing to say after that. Sums it up great.

Oh, wait, one more thing, it didn't bring much to the table at all as far as new stuff goes. I mean, let's look:

Morrowind: We knew it had dark Elves and lots of flying ash. When we go there, we discover a vibrant world that has those and so much more.

Oblivion: we know it's the seat of the Empire, with a massive jungle and a huge, stagnant and corrupt burocracy. When we go there, not only does nothing new get added to it, but even that is replaced with LotR.

Lack of originality means the.... can't say that on these forums, can I?

I have nothing to argue with in that. I like consoles- I just think TES is a PC game first, console game second (much as I love console games).

all the agreement floating about in this thread is scary!