One of the "puzzles" in FO3 had a bunch of sounds, and it quickly became apparent to me that you needed to put them in the right order. Short of running around and activating them over and over to try every possible combination, I didn't see any way to figure out that order. As for trying 16, 32, or however many combinations, one by one, give me a break, I've got better things to do than that for "entertainment". That's not a puzzle, it's a "chore". The password protection on the computer terminals was a "puzzle", although I was sometimes happy that there were other ways around it.

Some of the vague "hints" you got in MW, and the poor directions, were good, others were annoying, where they could at least given an approximate distance. A general compass direction leaves a lot of room for error, especially when the destination is a ways off.

I thought it was a good puzzle, the code was actually in the melody. I think more people would have noticed, if the player wasn't always exposed to a background orchestra.

Morrowind directions were mostly complete, they just weren't marked on your compass like in Oblivion. Again, Bethesda has made better puzzles than these. They should draw inspiration from their less prosperous days.

Mmmm... Redguard style mind-testing contraptions and in a modern numbered TES title?
Oh hell yes.

The best part about those puzzles is they're mostly optional. With four different paths to Richton, you could pass up on many of them to do them in the next playthrough. Non linearity is the player's best friend.

I wouldn't of noticed it I am about as tone deaf as a person can be. It was in the melowhat??


I like some puzzles and don't like others. Riddles are frequently really poorly done in RPGs, sometimes they are tied to the lore of the world you really only somewhat know, sometimes there are 4 viable answers out of 10 but the clever programmer only thought one of them fit and you are stuck with the chore of guessing what the programmer thought the "best" answer is.

Still I liked puzzles in the tomb raider games and quite a few others. Heck I played a game called puzzle pirates for years.

That song that keeps repeating itself in Tranquility lane.

Am I imagining it, or did something along those lines happen in MW or its expansions.

I only remember because i was trying to figure out the puzzle with the sound turned almost all the way down, and my own music playing. Boy was it frustrating. Must have spent an hour trying to figure it out.

Which puzzle is that? I honestly don't remember anything approaching a puzzle in Morrowind or Oblivion. Maybe my memory's shot.

Say what you will, but TES has been brain numbingly simple in its last two iterations.

Wait, which puzzles in Redguard could you skip?

I'd also like to point to a jumping puzzle in Redguard where you were crawling on ledges, and were required to make a blind jump backwards. That's an [censored] thing to do. There was also one where you had to use gigantic mushrooms as trampolines, which I never figured out without the guidebook, and I still think that idea was too dumb to include in a TES game. That's some Mario stuff.

You didn't need to do the orrery quest. You can skip the soul snare. You don't need to meet with Vile. ...That's all I've got.

Naturally, ideally, the devs would make puzzles that aren't beyond the capabilities of the engine build. God, I hope they're that smart.

Whenever I think of a first-person RPG with good puzzles, I always go back to Ultima Underworld. Now there was a game with puzzles that tied in well to the gameplay.