No this is not about that grandma in the 1980's Wendy's commercials: Where's the Beef?

I'm talking about the lack of problem solving in RPG's that seems to have begun dying in the 90's....

Remember Zork? You had adventure....and you had problem solving. This is good it gets us thinking... ZorkZero was a good example. The Ayleid Steps is a good mod for Oblivion with problems - sometimes very hard to figure out. Also, I will plug The Lost Spires just because it was so cool - but it was more of an Indy type adventure than problem-solving.

It seems like with Oblivion or MW we go places, experience things, but there is not much problem solving - especially with "God" telling us where to go in the form of a pointer. Since when did this become acceptable? Am I the only one who wants less dumb-downed games?

I wouldn't mind more problem solving. All I did in Morrowind and Oblivion's dungeons was walk, pick up items, fight, loot, and repeat until I had reached my goal. It'd be nice if there were some actual puzzles to complete or problems to solve.

Yeah I am definitely down for more puzzles.

I'd also like to see more than one way to tackle any given scenario. Such as an option to bash locks in with a high strength, but with a stealth penalty (the sound would alert any creatures or NPCs nearby) or being able to bypass obvious traps with a high Intelligence, or Luck.

i liked the dungion in oblivion that required you to solve teh puzzel of the pillar for the mages guild. It was pretty easy but it would be cool it there were more places like that

I'm all for puzzles.

The kind that actually make your head hurt.

There is.

You could smash locked doors open in DF. Causes a lot of noise and alerts a lot of mobs towards your location. Plus, it can damage your weapon too, unless you use h2h.

Puzzles could add a new element to toy around with it sounds to me a good idea,it should be integrated with a sense of realism however.

I very much enjoy problem solving but dislike "traditional" style puzzles in game. Good examples of problem solving and puzzles I liked was portal, bad examples some bits in pokemon where you had to push the boulders around, or slide on the ice (you guys know what I mean).
Can't think of other examples at the moment but I'll try to remember.

I agree with this a hundred percent.

Well see..there we go. A precedent in the Elder Scrolls series. I must really get around to playing Daggerfall sooner or later.

I would love problem solving in RPGs. As long as there is some way to get level ups from it... The problem with Oblivion is everything was leveled and i would always quit when i reached the point where i need to be level 30 to get the ________ and im 25 so i have to run around oblivion gates and kill things for levels. It would be interesting if problem solving could be a way to gain levels...

As long as there is no more 'creative' ideas from bethesda about lockpicking. It was fine in FO but OB? That was a stupid min-game for lockpicking that made me never want to have a theif character. I still havent figured it out all the way because after my third or fourth attempt i started using auto attempt.



No, i hate the compas pointer. We had too many people complaining about how there was no sense of direction and i agree it could be improved but they jumped the fence with the pointer. Morrowind would say something along the lines of "go east untill you reach a small rock then head north until you reach the great tree and turn southeast untill you reach the stronghold... But oblivion decided to add a compas and mark everything on your map before you went there. I think the only way to mark places on your map should be to go there and quests should be a litttle less detailed ( southeast of balmora, south of bruma then follow the road west, ect. )

The pointer is crazy.They should also do away with fast travel and have something like the silt striders for long distance travels to thing such as towns settlements thimgs of that sort.Bring back something related to the intervention scrolls the mark recall spells and travel metheds of this sort it is plainly better in mybpoint of veiw.

Hatred. That is all...

Actually, the best examples of puzzle solving in the series come from Redguard and Battlespire. I don't think you can find better examples from the Chapters.

Lock bashing is hardly puzzle solving.

I liked Morrowind's approach to locations. Vague (and sometimes flat out wrong) directions made finding a place feel like an accomplishment in and of itself.

no you aren't bro, lot of old and some new gamers are pissed off by that, especially since starting of this generation of gaming (x-box 360, ps3).
It has happened three or four times already, you can even draw a chart like.

http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/4157/52088581.jpg

I personaly lived though time when 2d graphics were at its peak with games like BG 2 and Torment ending the era, then comming of 3d era, then new gen.
and everytime graphics needed more work at the expense of rest of the game and also new generation of players had to be introduced to games, to which hard and already estabelished/complicated genres were not best ground, and so games had to be dumbed down, and we gamers suffered for it.

Myst!

I would like to see some Incredible Machine puzzels. Like you have to get a Ball from point A to B adn you cant touch it or pick it up, instead you have to build a machine or contraption that will do it for you, uising the physics in game (NOT the physics in Oblivion). HL2 touched on this with the gravity gun to build bridges and pathways to get from A to B.

@keeper, actually it was the other way around. The graphics of Xbox360 games was terrible when the console first came out (Such as oblivion) and now they are amazingly high quality (Crysis 2). Some games are fun and some games arnt. Thats just the way it is.

What do you mean? I loved pokemon :wub:

I didnt mean it like that. Graphics get better but their overall quality current hardware allows gets older.

for example before current gen, we had just polygons and textures over them with basic shaders and bump mapping and stuff, then came along games like oblivion and its first screens and everyones mind was blown away, new games are lot better in (technical quality) then games that first appeared in 2006ish years, but overall this "is not quite photorealistic" graphics get old. to me they look plain crappy already unless they are stylized.

So now the world is waiting and getting ready for next graphical revolution (well not only graphical, in fact graphics are least of thing that gets improved when next gen comes. but they are most easily noticeable ), better degree of photorealism, better motion capture, super AI or whatever it will be. and now ppl who didnt understand why we are all whining about dumbed downs will experience it firsthand when games will get even dumber and simple for a time.

Graphics have always been a part of video games, including TES series. It's not better graphics that are responsible for lower quality games, it's something else. Oblivion is just as much of an Elder Scrolls game as the others and it's just as good.

when i say graphics are responsible for lower quality games, I mean that developing games with higher quality graphics is more costly and time consuming.
They stay more costly and time consuming even at later stages of "its generation" but the budget and number of people working on game also expands.(publishers finely begin to understand that quality they are demanding requires more financing and resources) and this along with lesser need to dumbed down games supports the development of more complicated games, with more attention to detail and gameplay variety + harder and more intelligent story and puzzles etc.

Now I dont mean to say that ppl responsible for other parts of the game leave their jobs and start working on graphics, no. but higher quality graphics and tech advancements inevitably effect them. you just have to look at the development of games, look at games from different "eras" and make comparisons.

For example you can compare nwn2 to newer and older bioware games and you'll find lot of interesting things.
you can't realy see this on tes series, as almost every tes game appeared at the beginning of its "gen" as a new revolutionary and epic thing that defined the understanding of games, and what they can accomplish.

but even in oblivion you can see many things that were effected by graphics and tech advancements. for example terrible lack of dialogue. you can practically learn nothing from dialogue about lore, this looks very ridiculous in some places, like I could find almost no information about nine divines in any temple. there was no topic in temples about even the god temple was dedicated to. ( I don't remember if there is even a book, that explains who nine are. my lore knowledge about them came from morrowind)

so yes graphics alone is not the reason for reduced quality and reduced quantity of quality things, but as I said I used graphics as example because it is easiest to see and describe when talking about advancements in "next gen".


thats something we disagree on , I had to install mods to enjoy playing oblivion. ( I enjoyed playing vanilla morrowind and daggerfall, I didn't like arena much but I played it in 2004~5 I think so)

The series probably could do with a bit more problem solving. Yes, just going around, killing enemies and exploring dungeons is fun and all that, but this isn't a linear first person shooter, a game with as much content and freedom as the Elder Scrolls series promises should be able to include more than one type of challenge, especially since not every character players can create must be a warrior, so naturally, not every challenge should be targeted at combat classes. I would be nice to see if some locations in the game required you to complete puzzles rather than just killing enemies. This is something that recent Elder Scrolls games tend not to offer, in Morrowind, about the only major intellectual challenge I've ever faced is figuring out how to find a quest objective from at times vague directions, and in Oblivion, the addition of a compass that would tell you exactly where to go often took out even that.



I have to agree here, blaming all your complaints with games on graphics is far too simpleminded, and doesn't begin to adress things. There are a lot of factors that can effect individual aspects of a game, and in the case of Oblivion, or any other game, it's hard to say which ones are responsible. And what are people going to blame if a game has terrible graphics and still doesn't have everything they hope for in it?

Besides, it's not like developers are going to stop trying to improve the graphics in their games just because some claim that this effects the quality of their games, as long as new computer hardware is released, developers will continue to take advantage of its abilities, this is perfectly normal, and when all the competition keeps making the graphics better and better, individual developers would be foolish not to have at least a devent level of graphics quality as well. Of course, not every developer will go try to make games with cutting edge graphics, but you probably won't find many modern, professionally made games created by major companies that are intentionally made to have extremely dated graphics either. It doesn't matter how much content a game has, how deep the story is, or how much fun the game is, if the graphics are so hideous that the moment gamers see the screenshots they look away without actually bothering to find out how the game plays, it's all meaningless. Not to say that every player will do this, but I'm sure some will.

point of my post was not to complain or suggest using dated graphics, that would be lame at best. if fact I was not suggesting anything.

all I was suggesting is that "New Gen" always to this point has effected games, they became less complicated and in many cases less detailed. But at the end of this "Gen" games evolved. then it all began anew.