Botching skills may not be the best way to go about redesigning, but good design is all about looking at a problem and trying to solve it.

I think the minimalization of skills down to hitty and magicky are a mild exaggeration, don't you think?

I am no way praising oblivion the leveling system was the worst one in elder scrolls I was just simply critiquing a popular game in the franchise which the OP think that all forthcoming elder scrolls games have gone "downhill" and simply stated every TES has it's flaws for one morrowind and oblivion bland and uninspired combat a plethora of useless skills this was more apparent in morrowind where most of these skills lock picking,speechcraft,sneak etc which were blatantly useless because there use was limited or the outclass by a particularly better skill in example alteration outclass sneak and in general basically outclassed the lock picking skill while illusion outclass speech-craft and sneak Beth didn't seem to want these skills to have a particular usage like for example shortblade they move faster but the slight speed advantage is nearly static without any mods like Disarmed zero by fliggy or special scripts that gives the short blade a damage multiplyer which it lack in vanilla morrowind unarmored and medium armor was severely outclass by Light and heavy armor due to the fact that they have no redeeming armor options and one of them don't even work for vanilla,hand2hand is useless because you can walk to an NPC house steal there gear and the only penalty is loosing a few fatigue points 5 useless skills, and marksman did low damage and missed constantly due to evasion mechanics and bad targeting system which took the morrowind code patch to fix so six skills that didn't work out as planned and had no purpose being in the game.



what interaction kill sjoring hard heart murder the telvanni counselors you know what these quest have in common other that they were all optiona? they were all simple kill quest how original.

I didn't feel it lost anything the only thing I missed was spears which I completely got over like the time I heard there was going to be no flails in morrowind some stuff had to be remove that were unnecessary like enchanting which made no apparent sense you can't make spells yourself so why you should be able to make something infinitely better?


Funny you should say that it took http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=7904 just for me to replay morrowind over again still it didn't solve the horrible combat system,awful character animations, bland side quest,stability problems despite it having a kick ass script extender it just solve some flawed game-play mechanics while oblivion have two awesome combat mods a great overhaul mod which you just mention it is also more stable (Barely) and less demanding on your CPU, maybe I am just tired of 780 hours of morrowind but ever since I lost my oblivion installation disc I guess i am missing it more which is shocking because I used to be a chronic oblivion basher.

Wouldn't you agree that it's more of a case of poor spell balancing rather than useless skills?
I mean, once Open Lock has a reasonable cost (as in much much higher), lock picking isn't such a fancy skill choice anymore. The same can be said for the other spells/skills.

Concerning the combat system, it seems to be a major con for your game experience. Did you have a look at some of the combat overhauls like http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=8355 or http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1161892-relzwipz-realistic-combat/ ? I never felt the need to change the combat in Morrowind, but maybe those could improve your enjoyment of the game.

I consider Oblivion's "bland and uninspired combat" a lateral step from Morrowind's "bland and uninspired combat", NOT an improvement except visually. The difference was that MW nerfed your ability to hit based on weapon skill, whereas OB nerfed the damage you did based on it. The net result was the same, and Morrowind's made a bit more sense from a realistic perspective, despite the lack of animations to make it "look" reasonable. Morrowind's combat was also more "direct", and when you unleashed a strike, the attack was all but instantaneous. In Oblivion, once I pressed the "attack" button, I felt like control was taken away from me until the animation played itself out. In Morrowind, you could spam the attack button for a series of weak hits or else hold and "charge" the attack from minimum damage anywhere up to full rated damage, it was under your complete control. Using an enchanted dagger's greater speed and decent minimum damage to "spam" enchantments was a totally different way to fight than winding up with a 2-handed sword or a Warhammer and going for staggers and knockdowns at maximum damage. You could also execute 3 different forms of attack (sadly, the game really didn't take proper advantage of this feature, but it was there). In OB, your only choices at first were to make a "normal" attack or hold the button for a "power attack", which took even longer before you regained control. Eventually, "arcade" style "perks" were added automatically (whether they made any sense for your character or not), which finally gave you other options than "block, counterattack, block, counterattack....."

A few spell options may have outclassed particular skills (which is a valid complaint about balance, not a reason to remove the skills), but my "silver-tongued devil" character who cast NO magic from his own magicka (and didn't go overboard on potions or enchantments either) had no problems using those very skills (Speechcraft and Lockpicking, along with a bit of fancy swordsmanship) to excellent effect. As for Marksman having "no purpose being in the game", my most powerful MW character was a combat archer. Firing from ambush (combining Sneak with Marksman) could be incredibly effective in MW. As hitpoints of scaled opponents went through the roof in OB, Marksman became a useless skill, because you couldn't possibly hit the opponent with enough arrows to prevent them from closing with you. The possibility of poisoning weapons was a nice "plus" that I'll give OB, but didnt' compensate for the loss of other ranged weapons, or the "dumbing down" of Alchemy in other ways (I HATE "can't fail" game mechanics!).

Enchanting was difficult to start out with in MW, but had enormous potential if you worked at it, even without exploiting alchemy or enchantment stacking (which I felt should have been "limited" but not removed completely). Compare that to OB, where any Nord barbarian with the IQ of a garden slug could enchant items with Sigil stones just as well as a trained Enchanter. The skill was VERY viable in MW, once you figured it out, but rendered totally pointless in OB. Somehow, I look at the characters I played in MW and come to almost the opposite conclusions about the game as you, which makes me wonder if perhaps there aren't two totally different games called "Morrowind"?

1. The problem with that is The mechanic is still flawed have you notice a particular trend in my arguments I never praise oblivion on game play mechanics only on content I praised, quite frankly they svcked I was trying to form an counter argument to the OP post anyways don't argue with a bad gameplay mechanics they could of made acrobatics particularly useful by adding a few animations and gave them to NPC's which could be easily done on blender or they could took the lazy route and made the enemies actually jump back when they were about to get hit there no excuse for it they had the resources and a skilled team but instead we got cheap pen and paper rpg mechanics which is no different from turn based rpg from fallout 2 in fact http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Fallout_combat instead of hacking and slashing.
2.you could do that in oblivion hold the attack button longer you get a more powerful charge attack with guess what 3 animations and add with perks that is more combat animations then(still bad combat should of gotten more animation) .
3.The idea was sick in the fallout series but sadly didn't transfer well to oblivion I am not going to argue to you about that.


1.again I never was stating oblivion was better in fact I prefer morrowind to a certain extent the problem to me is that the game is pretty dated noone made decent combat mod despite having a kickass Script extender and character models svck so I will have to wait for Westley new head pack or when I stop being lazy and get the decency to make my own combat mod with MWSE (but it seems like Casey Tucker mods is really promising I kinda routing for that dude!) basically I am trying to say morrowind doesn't hold up to the rest of the games in my library thus I am waiting till my next paycheck to buy oblivion Goty since it has argumentatively better mods and Better Modding community until then morrowind is lackluster for me I drained my 780+ hours out of the game.
2.Me too! I hate in the fallout section o the forums when people argue about it's unfair for the game to be uncompletable for characters with low intelligence like fallout 2
quite frankly if your character is [censored] you shouldn't be able to beat the game, I also hate unkillable essential NPC's in both fallout and oblivion thanks to their fail gamebryo engine.

1. yes it was viable but it had low success rates making at really low levels when your characters don't have so much money you can hardly count it was pretty much useless without exploiting that's a good thing heck it should off been even harder to do my problem is it's broken and Beth knew yet they did little to fix it.
2.I am a pretty diverse gamer I don't stick to one franchise or genre for that matter and thus my conclusion is morrowind isn't as good to me because I find other games much funner to play (especially Indy Games) I never typed The Elder Scrolls Morrowind is the worst game in the history of the universe. I just type it's dated to the point where it's hardly fun no more which is strange since fallout 2 came in a earlier year and had much worse graphics and I praise the game like a god.

Ah, what the hell... I'll throw my hat into this ring.


I love Morrowind. I love Oblivion. I love Fallout 3. I love Fallout: New Vegas.


What do all these games have in common? Simple... they have aspects of their inherent game design which, upon seeing, I instantaneously cringe so hard that blood vessels in my eyes burst. It's a true story. It happened at least twelve times today, while I was playing Morrowind. There's really nothing to be done about it, since... after all... they're parts of the game design. Mods can sometimes compensate. Some expansions, like Shivering Isles, entertained me for hours and hours.

But at the end of the day... when I come away from any one of these games... I don't sit back and say: Wow, that really svcked. I shouldn't play it anymore.

What would be the point in that?


Morrowind has, in my very personal and not-at-all-universally-accepted opinion, the perfect balance of complexity-over-streamlining of skills and weapons and items and armors available to date. All comments on level-scaling aside, the fact of the matter is that there are significantly fewer weapons and spells to choose from when playing Oblivion. You can argue the fact however you like. Go ahead and tell me again how Morrowind is all numbers, and Oblivion is all flash, and how Skyrim is going to have PROPERTIES.

I'll have a good laugh and remind you that it's -all- numbers. It's all stats. It's all properties.

Given the right scripting, I could -easily- create a spell which summoned forth a wall of fire... even in Morrowind. It wouldn't be nearly as dynamic or 'pretty' as it would in Oblivion, nor would it be as well-designed as I'm sure it shall in Skyrim... but the fact of the matter remains that it could be done. That it hasn't isn't due to inability. It's due to a lack of anyone willing to invest that kind of time or effort into such a thing.

Who knows, maybe in the time I've been off playing Fallout now, it actually -has- been done!?

Has anyone made an epic new collection of spells with scripted effects for Morrowind? I'd definitely have to get that, if they have.


Anyways. They didn't only remove spears. They took out -all- the spear-classed weapons. Why? Because someone said they weren't popular. What kind of a joke is that? I haven't seen a single day go by that an overwhelming collective of people aren't bickering and arguing over why they should or shouldn't have their spears. Much less why they couldn't just compress all the spear-class weapons into a two-handed group of "Polearms" like any other decent RPG would do in this situation.

To mis-use and mis-quote an old saying: "They cut of the nose to spite the face."

Because there were issues which couldn't be easily remedied... they simply "amputated" (thanks to whoever used that word first... amputate is exactly how I would describe what has been done) the troublesome skills and items rather than putting forth the time it would have taken to make them functional. So, instead of getting spears... we get endless topics on forums all over the internet about why they removed spears from the game. And instead of getting crossbows and throwing stars, we get a list of excuses for why these things didn't make it into Oblivion.

And whenever someone steps up and points out that, at the end of the day, people STILL haven't stopped clamoring for spears to be fixed... that they've only instead been rioting to get their spears BACK at all for the last five years... another sarcastic know-it-all comes through and begins his little rant about how someone used the term "casual gamer" wrong, and how "complexity" is just another word for "too much work". Rather than providing any kind of useful information to the topic, you can always count on the issues to devolve into a never-ending slug-fest between those who -want- their options back, and those who think that all these options folks want are a waste of time.

It's all a waste of time. That's what games are. It's what they're for.

When I have to shovel out 60+ dollars of my hard-earned Christmas money to waste my time, you had better damn-well believe that I'm going to formulate some opinions about HOW I've been wasting it. And that doesn't just go for me, it goes for all of us! We're all going to have our own opinions. It's only natural that we're not going to agree. And being that this is a FORUM, which as you might know has been synonymous with "Place to argue and bicker for hours, and then go back to pretending to be friends later" since the Roman Empire, there will no doubt be such back and forth arguments going on almost continuously.

And so I argue with -all- of you!

The OP is both right and wrong. There is a trend. But it is far more insidious than he/she seems to realize. It isn't just about over-simplification. It's a complete re-prioritization of game developers in regards to what is important in the games they make. To whoever said that games these days are style-over-substance... you're absolutely right! And you can ASK anyone in the game industry, they'll tell you that its true flat out. People WANT flash. People WANT pretty. Right now, those things are the important things... and so things like complexity and proper balancing, they're all playing in the backfield.

If a problem is so large, that the time it would take to fix it might infringe upon time otherwise spent making the game look amazing... there's a good chance that feature will get cut. If there are skills, quests, or characters which the designers want to implement... but they don't have the time to do so because they're too busy getting the voice-work for one of the main quest characters done... that feature stands a good chance of getting chopped.

Designing a game is big business. It's millions upon millions of dollars invested. It's paychecks. It's health insurance. It's stocks, and corporate trade. It's all kinds of crazy going on... and if you want to keep designing games... you have to make the games that will sell. You have to be willing to pick your battles. Some things will need to be sacrificed in order to get the game out the doors and onto the shelves. You have to know where the priorities of the industry are.

Right now, they're not on deep... complex games. They're not on innovation.

They're on flash and presentation. And as much as it svcks... we're not going to see another Morrowind or god-forbid Daggerfall until the time comes when the process of beautification and voice-acting are not so prohibitively time/cost consumptive so as to preclude those chopped features. Right now, the people who WANT those features are in the minority. We're still money, to the developer, so we don't get entirely written off... but we're not the big bucks. The big bucks are in all those flashy, pretty features which cost so much money to design and make... and in buying up those big-ticket voices to lure in fans of Patrick Stewart or Felicia Day or Michael Dorn (Fallout 2's 'Marcus' and 'Frank Horrigan' could have sold me the game, alone. Talk about a badass voice... and an excellent voice actor!). Hell. I like big-name voices. The Halo games have lots of them.

But it means you're limited to what you have. You can't just whip something up once all your voice-actors have gone home... call them back... and say: "Here, do this for me!"

Most of those voice-actors are local talent... people who have other jobs, and lives. If game development companies kept an entire in-house staff of voice actors... one diverse enough to actually remove the issues of lame, choppy, hammy, or just downright awful voice acting... then I would believe that 'Voice-Acting' doesn't limit you. Writing is something anyone with a pencil/pen or paper can do. It's something you can do in Word, or the equivalent. As far as skills go, it is one that a far greater percentage of the human population is capable of becoming proficient in than... or say... voice acting. When your dialogue is written, a team of four guys with decent writing skills and a good imagination can do everything.

Voice Acting is a -far- more specialized skill. It takes a certain TONE of voice, and you have to be able to speak with certain emphases and inflections. If the same person voices ALL your characters, a la OBLIVION, people notice... so you need more than three or four people to handle the dialogue. Since you're not writing it, but instead -reading- it... you have to be able to make someone else's words your own. It's harder, MUCH harder, than being a talented writer.

And for what we've gotten out of it, as far as sand-box RPG's like The Elder Scrolls are concerned? I've not been at all impressed. Fallout fell into the same trap, and it was only marginally improved upon in New Vegas. The writing was better... but some of the actors made me want to cry.

But you're all entitled to feel however you like.

Don't let me stop you from hating this, or loving that... I don't rightly care. I'm just sharing my experiences in learning about how the game industry works... and my feelings on why things are the way they are for games like The Elder Scrolls, or Fallout.

While it's not going to go away any time soon... when it finally does... what we will be left with are games with both UN-MATCHED style -and- substance.

We're just trapped in this transitional period right now. This too shall pass, and then... we'll bask in the glory of the new Golden Age of Gaming. It's around the corner... so don't go writing off all your favorites just yet. Some of them are bound to survive until then, and find rebirth.

Replies in bold. :deal:

Haha! Awesome. I'm off to go check out them spells!


As for Spears... the attack animations weren't at -all- wrong for them. They were lame, like all the OTHER animations in morrowind... but the animations for attacking were about as close to pole-arm like attacks as you can get. You had a wide pole-arm swing, ideal for the halberds and pole-axe type weapons. You had the skull-crushing HEAD CHOP swing thing. And then you had the spear-head thrust.

Where, in there, was there an animation that didn't apply to pole-arms, exactly?

After all, HALBERDS were classified as a spear-type weapon, in Morrowind. So obviously, it wasn't really just SPEARS. It was Pole-Arms of all varieties. Which are, in fact, a -damn- popular class of weapons.


Anyways...

What was wrong were the animations for HOLDING the weapons. For some reason, you carried them way higher than you reasonably would in real life... the same way they had you carry staffs. Oblivion didn't fix staffs, either, but you didn't see them write -those- off. Actually, you kind've did... since they took away the ability to use them to bash in someone's face. That's fine for the magical sort, since that's all Oblivion had... but they completely did away with the COMBAT staff altogether.

Bah!

Irritation!

I think I'mma go play with my spells, now. Later later.

My bad. I should have been more specific in my post. What I meant is that spears would have looked silly with the animations used in Oblivion, not Morrowind. Plus I actually agree that spears/polearms are quite popular.

There is no connection between the Gamebryo engine and essential NPCs. We have essential NPCs for the same reason we have quest markers: quest-giving NPCs can wander all over Cyrodiil.

yes they are actually unkillable essential NPC's and clothes that merge to your body parts are some of the features of the engine since those two games are coincidentally similar concept gamebryo could work perfectly with both without breaking game play style so some of the annoying features you witness in also another feature gamebryo have is radiant AI which is executed poorly in both games.

Wait a minute, you mean to tell me that you spent 780+ hours playing a game that you describe as 'lackluster'? I'm interested in knowing how much time you invest in games that you really like. :tongue:

On a completely unrelated note; I really don't mean to act like I'm an officer of the grammar police, but could you please, for the love of The Nine, use a bit more punctuation in your sentences? I'm very interested in reading what you have to say, but it is very difficult to sift through all of the stream-of-conscious-thought sentences within your rather lengthy posts. :bonk:

on street fighter I have spent over 500 dollars and 10000 hours of my life so yes I am extreme.