» Thu May 03, 2012 5:13 pm
Something that's a hybrid blend between Morrowind/Daggerfall and Skyrim/Oblivion should have nearly the accessability of Skyrim, with nearly the versatility of Morrowind.
On the one hand, Morrowind and Daggerfall offered "meaningful" character stats, where you improved noticably as you dealt with the world around you to the best of the character's abilities. While it was brutally hard at the start (at least for a gamer not familiar with the system), it got steadily easier, until your weak outcast "nobody" character became the feared and respected savior of the region. Failure was a given, and learning how to manage, work around, and overcome failure was an inherent part of the game. The risks were great, but so were the rewards, and the sense of accomplishment was greater for having succeeded against the odds.
On the other hand, Oblivion and Skyrim offered instant gratification, where you started out with everything but the tools to stand toe-to-toe with most of the NPCs in the game, and the starting tutorial dungeon in OB even handed you the basics of that. You can play the game without thinking too much about it, or play for a bit, put it aside, come back a week or two later, and not have to worry about forgetting anything important since your last episode. Since everything scaled with you, you were never in great danger from something that you couldn't handle, and you never reached the point where you could just toss the weaker opponents aside, because they got stronger as your character did. Failure at most tasks was impossible, and most of your skills had no effect other than to increase the magnitude of the effects of your actions or to trigger perks. There was never any great risk, but never any great reward, since those were scaled too. The sense of progress was metered out in dribs and drabs as you got progressively more powerful equipment and higher stats, but it still took roughly the same number of hits to kill a bandit at Level 20 as it did when you were at Level 2. I found almost 0 sense of accomplishment in Oblivion after the first 20-40 hours, but it was impressive for the short period of time while the illusion of progress lasted.
Creating a hybrid system, where success/failure is not as much of a 0/1 result as in Morrowind, but skills still make a lot of difference to the outcome, would offer most of the positives of both the "character-skill" based games (DF, MW) and the "player-skill" based games (OB, SR). A better tutorial than that of the early games (where you learn how to manage low skills through the use of enhancements, training, or simply trying easier tasks) would help with accessability. Making it possible to attempt easier or harder tasks (instead of always attempting the "best" outcome as in DF and MW), while allowing no failures at tasks below your level, a slim chance of failure at tasks that match your level, and a high failure rate for tasks one step above you, would bring back a sense of "risk versus reward". Failure itself should match the difficulty relative to your level, and the margin of failure, so a trivial failure at something at your own level could simply reduce the outcome slightly or cause other minor inconveniences, while a serious failure while attempting something far above your ability should have consequences.
A combat system based on Skyrim's animations but with modified random variations in result to reflect the character's skills (not a clear-cut "hit/miss" as in Morrowind and Daggerfall, but not a simplistic "always hit" as in Oblivion and Skyrim) might even satisfy both the player-skill based FPS and the character-skill based RPG segments of the market. Giving Daggerfall's alternative attacks for either greater risk/reward or a more consistent but reduced result, or Morrowind's ability to charge up the attack for full rated damage or spam the button for minimal effect, could bring back some "tactics" to the impressive looking but otherwise boring OB and SR combat mechanics (push the button and let the attack animation play for the same damage every time).
I don't want another Morrowind, or another Daggerfall, and I certainly don't want another Oblivion or Skyrim. I'm hoping for something that takes the BEST of these games and turns it into something even better than any of them.
