» Sat May 28, 2011 5:48 pm
Morrowind's armor pieces worked well in that game because the game also had enchantment limits on items, and many of the extra items could only fit minor enchantments. It could be abused, but you really had to work at it to do so.
Oblivion's radically simplified enchanting system, where all items were equally enchantable, made it impossible to "balance" with the same number of pieces as in MW, and difficult to prevent players from stacking enchantments to gain complete invulnerability. It still had balance issues.
With Skyrim, there's no balance problem as long as the system is designed from the start to be compatible with the other aspects of the game, and "stacking" is prevented or limited. For example, if there are multiple enchantments or potions of the same effect type, only have the most powerful one currently active have any effect. The problem with the other games was that, even when they tried to limit stacking, they only disallowed effects of the exact same parameters: same strength, same duration, same area, and same target. In MW, if you made one that did 5 points for 30 seconds and another that did 5 points for 31 seconds, they were considered "different", and both active, giving you 10 points total. I forget OB's limiting mechanisms, but they weren't much of an improvement, and you could still "stack" certain effects.
It's not that I want "MW 2", far from it, but there were a number of gameplay aspects that I thought were well done, or at least good in concept but needing a bit more polish. OB scrapped them in favor of several things that I felt didn't work nearly as well, or totally removed them from the game and left NOTHING in their place. Of course, OB added a bunch of new ideas and systems, like poisoning weapons, NPC schedules, and physics (which was a GREAT idea, but poorly implemented, which according to the precedent set by OB would be grounds for removing it from Skyrim). Overall, though, I didn't feel that the things that were lost (levitation, integral "realistic" transportation systems as well as magical teleportation, chance of failure, do-it-yourself-enchanting, several types of weapons and armor, clothing and armor combinations, a massive collection of dialog options, and much more) were adequately compensated for by what was gained. I didn't want "another MW", I wanted something "better" than MW, instead of something "simpler".
I played FO3, and while it was "a good game", it didn't impress me as much as TES in a number of respects. A lot of what the old FO fanbase was complaining about sounded strangely similar to what I felt was the difference between MW and OB, so I bought and played the original FO. To my surprise, I LIKED the original game a lot more in terms of gameplay (despite the funky one-piece suits plus helmet limitation), although I have to admit that it didn't age nearly as well as MW has, it was probably more "brutal" in terms of sudden outmatched encounters and reloads than most modern gamers could stand, and that Bethesda added a lot of positive things to the series. The clunky old interface felt like more of a struggle at times than the encounters, and drastically needed updating. In this case, FO3 may have been "good" as a stand-alone title, but was a poor excuse for "an FO game", because the underlying gameplay was totally different; sort of like if TES V turns out to be a virtual pinball game, but a little less extreme than that.
I'd like to see some of the "feel" of MW return, only updated and improved, rather than a game even further "stripped down" and "simplified" from OB, and armor diversity and intermixing is only one example of that.
