I know you're sending the elderscrolls series mainstream, you "must" market and target it to kids in order to bring inn the big bucks.
But all these people are superficial stimulation junkies, conditioned by MTV and always shouting for "Moar". Their hunger will never end, this beast will never go away.

Please, I beg of you developers!! Bring back all the depth, variety and freedom which Morrowind had and Oblivion was missing. Make us invest in the game, dont distract us with "shiney's" ....

Who watches MTV anymore anyway? Seriously, there's barely even music there now, MTV is pretty old news.

I don't think you'll be dissapointed by Skyrim, it's looking really good

That's what they said about oblivion

Believe me, I was one of the people who were severly disappointed in Oblivion, and I'm almost sure that Skyrim will deliver.

BGS wont fail us again.

Yes, that's right. They're all mindless creatures and you're the only sane one. Everybody... Even Bethesda... Are against you.



And this is why you'll be severely disappointed, yet again. No matter what, no game can truly live up to the expectations of a gamer when they really get on board of the hype train. I learnt this with many games before so now I see a gameplay trailer or lots of information, get all excited, and then just say "meh" and try not to get my hopes too high before release. Oblivion was a good, even great game. It just couldn't have lived up to the hype after Morrowind wow'd everybody.

Wow, it's great when people generalize that much!

Yes, TES is turning completely mainstream (tell me why) and everybody who liked Oblivion are casuals!

Pertinent facts potentially indicative of anything but a lack of depth:

• The first publicity for the game included an ancient wall depicting a lore-steeped prophecy, and a unique language created for the game, complete with its own script, that we had to decypher in order to understand the lyrics to the game's new theme song, spoken in the language of the Dragons.
  
• 100 selectable perks (180 additional rank perks.)
  
• Every Nord clan is said to have its own culture and esthetic.
  
• We can now impact the economies of towns and cities by damaging resources such as mills.

Pertinent quote from the podcast:



I'm not worried about depth or atmosphere, personally.

UGH.

Oblivion had just as much depth as Morrowind. If you don't believe me, look closer. See, Oblivion works on two levels. It works on the surface level, which makes it fun and accessible to new people so they can just pop the game in, start playing, and have a good time and be done with it because they don't care about lore. But it also works on a very deep level with really deep and involved lore added that drives every single thing that happens in the game. The past 3 games were all setup for the events of Oblivion and the Oblivion Crisis and the end of the Fourth Era.

If you think it's just "mainstream" and not deep, maybe that's because you're a bit of a "mainstream" fan that didn't bother to take the time to look deeply enough to see just how deep Oblivion goes.

Skyrim is already deeply rooted in the lore from the past games and is expanding on it and making it better and more detailed. Your worries are unfounded.

I gotta agree with Velorien, Oblivion had plenty of depth. I mean, Sancre Tor, that dungeon you go into to get the armor of Tiber septim? IT was the FREAKING WOMB from which Reman Cyrodiil was born with the chim-el adabal embedded in his forehead. And where did we find that out? The Remanada, a book that first appeared in Oblivion.

this is a perfect summarization.

I am cautiously optimistic. I don't expect the aesthetic masterpiece Morrowind was but I am believe Skyrim will be a great game overall. I am especially looking forward to see what they did with Radiant Story and the new AI implementation. My only worry is the main quest and main antagonist - Alduin sounds a bit like just another "absolute evil" that wants to "destroy the world" (whatever that means...), which is frankly, quite boring and shallow. Here's hoping it turns out alright and that their writers prove me wrong.

Well, if you ask me, Alduin isn't exactly like that. A dragon god that the Empire has venered for centuries and now wants to finish the cycle of time because mortals are killing each other is... quite interesting. Regarding the "absolutely evil" antagonist of Oblivion (yes, he was like that), he is the Daedric Prince of Destruction... and he was taking his vengeance for the events of Battlemage.

My favourite was Mankar Camoran speeches then you was making your way through his paradise, Nirm being an Oblivion plane was the most shocking, yes he was biased and probably lying but it was serious cool and spooky.

Main effect in Morrowind was the different houses, tribes even the cities had different origin and setting who made sense and felt logical, this made Morrowind world setting felt more real.

Yep, Camoran was supposed to play the "villain with depth" in Oblivion but he was basically an underachiever. Alduin can be made interesting of course, there is so much lore and so many conflicting stories and so much mystery about the whole thing. But generally supremely powerful beings tend to degenerate into predictably boring platitudes in RPGs for various reasons. For sure, such a being should have nearly - incomprehensible motives and "character", and that is something most game usually get wrong. More importantly, characters in general, and obviously villains as well, are made more interesting by their weaknesses and their internal struggles. God-like beings rarely have such intricate features, they are usually portrayed as much more "black or white". If you think of most memorable RPG villains like The Master or Irenicus or even Dagoth Ur to some extent (he should have had much more dialogue and there should have been an option to join the 6th house), were interesting because of their internal struggles and their weaknesses.

Again, I am not saying it can't be done - I hope it will but it is one thing in Skyrim that I am not optimistic about.

Good to hear. .


In morrowind every single character had thier own custom written script, in oblivion however a significant ammount of the people were just hollow shells.

Dont get me wrong. I devoured Oblivion too.. Just not in the same way I went through entire Morrowind, every last bit of information.
I lived and breathed Morrowind. Even when I'd done all there was to do I got into 3d design and animation just to make more stuff for Morrowind.
Oblivion hasn't inspired me to make a single one.
Mostly because I didn't think it deserved the effort.

A lot of the Oblivion quests were almost direct copies of WoW quests. "Collect 100 nirn roots" or what it was... Same thing as assassin's creed's "Collect 100 feathers"

The entire living, breating environment of the Morrowind game world captured you and drew you inn.. You ran across the country to convince ashlanders, you didn't simply throw up the map, click a place you wanted to go and "Whoop i'm here"...

And azura... The moon and star. Gah

From the Great Houses you could join, the guilds, brotherhood, temple even the morag tong.. I'd like to see all that in skyrim... Remember the Vampire clans?..

Oblivion's Dark Brotherhood didn't really seem to impact the world at all. And when you were finished the characters that were left were hollow.



Amen



Vivec was an interresting "villan" in my mind.

Im wondering exactly what you mean by "depth" and "shinys".

Edit: Saw your post just above mine.

I agree about story depth, although there is a lot of it in Oblivion if you know where to look. Oblivion doesnt really draw you into the world and lore like Morrowind does but I think thats a byproduct of using voice instead of written text. You just get used to the short one-liners that you never bother to pickup a book or read quest logs. Morrowinds main story has got to be one of the best Ive played by far in an RPG in terms of atmosphere.

But Morrowind NPCs were more lifelike than Oblivion, seriously? As far as some character dialog sure theres definitely more personality to some Morrowind NPCs but if you really think Oblivions RAI system was worse than Morrowinds... Standing around in one spot with NO script, Im at a loss to try and explain that one.

I think Oblvion was better than Morrowind and Skyrim is shaping up to be better than both of them. Therefore i must be a casual, mainstream, 12 year old gamer who watches MTV and plays Wii fit all day. Thank you for helping me realise this. :facepalm:

I would say that the most dramatic improvement in Oblivion from Morrowind are the quests... in Morrowind... well, the courier quests (and there were a lot) weren't very interesnting, for me. And the kind of quest that you say were an absolute minority, in Oblivion.

In morrowind, characters were useless encyclopedias. Their statements on any particular topic were based on their race, faction, class and gender. Numerous characters of similar dispostion said the exact same things about the same topics. Only a few npcs had unique dialogue.


I've played WoW, and that's just [censored]. Fetch quests are a staple of the entire gaming [censored] industry. It's got nothing to do with WoW. And secondly, that was one quest. Most quests in Oblivion were not that type of fetch quest.


That was the worst series of quests in the entire game! IT was horribly boring and took forever.

Obviously you are one of those people that didn't pay attention when you played Oblivion. The only deeper thing Morrowind had was the main quest. The side quests and the world Oblivion had was far deeper than Morrowind. They didn't make Oblivion to market to kids, they changed the game to make it where it wasn't so easy like Morrowind and then level scaling was just a bit much. It's called trying to bring the series to a better place and they tried a way to do it and it wasn't quite right. Can you give them a break? You will never know if something is good or not if you don't try. Morrowind had terrible combat and you had no challenge as long as you did the main quest first and then went exploring. Your just angry because Oblivion wasn't Morrowind 2.0 so you just claim BGS was "dumbing down" the game when actually Oblivion took more skill to play than Morrowind. Hell, Daggerfall and Arena took more skill as well. Seems like you love the one game in the series that could be geared more toward kids.

In Morrowind, however, you'd find that many of those same "insignificant" characters had text-scripts which repeated over and over again, just like their fully-voiced counterparts in Oblivion. It's something of an urban myth nowadays that each individual Morrowind NPC supposedly had these elaborate, ornate lives in the game, when in reality, most of them had about as much to say as your average Legion guard on the streets of the Imperial City.

Replay some of those sections; you might be surprised.

Though, as for the general notion of "Watered-down Oblivion"? Hardly.

I remember the old days, back whenever a new Ultima was released for PC, for example, and you'd get the exact same "issues" from the RPG "purist" minority-minority, despite each sequel being MORE complex than its predecessor.

I can't wait until Skyrim finally drops, when we'll be seeing complaints that it possesses all the complexity of a late-'80s GameBoy RPG. It will all come full-circle, people.

Sorry to disappoint you, npc in Morrowind got all their responses from a database, most had the same dialoges but they had far more because of no voice acting, but it was mainly a big hyperlinked database of common topics.
One serious problem with mods was that it was quite easy to screw up the filtering and remove critical topics like the main quest from all npc in the game and store this in the savegame ruin your game.

But yes lots of npc had unique or rare dialogues and again because of no voice acting they could put in lots more information. My favourite was an netch herder who want to tell me far more about netches than I wanted to know as anybody who love their work and I miss that in Oblivion.

+1 to everything you just said, especially the last part. Every time I get to the part of the main quest in Morrowind where I have to be named Hortator and Nerevarine, I always groan. It's right after the part where I'M convinced that I'm the Nerevarine, but then I have to convince everyone else for some arbitrary reason and the sake of some bogus prophecies that don't actually require me to fulfill them at all. It's just busy work.

Yes I know, I used the CS.



This is what I ment to say, I'm not very good at formulating my thoughts.
Thank you .

It's the abundance of information and the way everything is built up in a very synergestic envitonment that helps you immerse youself into the gameworld.



Exactly, it makes you INVEST in the game. Makes the entire thing even better

Honestly, that entire segment of the game should have been replaced with a military style campaign to assault red mountain. Would have been much more interesting.

@Alkrodion, there's investing in a game, and then there is padding. that entire segment was just padding. Making an investment in a game is waitng 48-hours for my M2 (destroyer-class) Osaka to get built at my headquarters. (after I procured millions in credits and enough components to earn me another million) Making an investment is learning all the combos in a fighting game. Having to complete a series of quests that take a huge amount of time simply because you have to travel all over the place and stumble around like an idiot, lost, for hours is not an investment. It's grinding. It's about on the level of PvE combat in WoW's main worldspace areas.