This is a question all gamers have to ask. Graphics, and appearance are becoming increasingly important in the gaming industry, and a lot of gamers demand that and no less. However, the RPG community does stand separate to at least some degree, and there are strong indications that devout RPG gamers are willing to deal with slightly less quality visually, and even in terms of glitches and bugs so long as they get a rich and detailed gaming world to play in with lots of options and freedoms. The real question is, where does the majority of the TES community stand?

Beyond shadow of doubt Bethesda is going to spend a great deal of time devoted to making their game look good up front to maximize sales. What this poll is really about is the behind the scenes finish. There are games that spend years in play-testing and were cut short in additional game development just to insure they were glitch free, further many gaming industries go out of their way to deliver outstanding voice acting and graphics at the expense of a long detailed rich and deep plot that engages the player and gives them a lot of options. Not to mention the fact that some developers are getting to the point where they're afraid to even test groundbreaking concepts just because of the technical difficulties they pose.

What the community needs to decide is would they rather face the obvious faults that will occur with a massive rich complex and detailed game they couldn't possibly test or completely debug, at the expense of that polish, or do we demand that the game maintain the new standard polish ,even if it means continuing to simplify and streamline the series we love so much. I frankly will be very forgiving to Bethesda if they try to return to a more detailed and rich game like Morrowind and step away from the direction they are going, I'd rather see them test their limits and try new things, and really go for immersive gameplay even if it doesn't look as great as every other game being released at the time. I really hope you're all with me.

Ideally, we all want complexity and polish, but if I have to choose, complexity > polish, hands down.

What about an option for the complexity of Morrowind but beta tested enough so the bugs are killed?

I agree, its easier to complete the game with greater complexity and add polish through patches than vise versa, however in the ideal world it would be both upon release.

The bugs didn't really bother me too much in Morrowind. But this was back before I was spoiled.

Same here. Tho I never became spoiled, nor I had many bugs in Morrowind to be honest.


I definitively don't want it to be More Streamlined, it was linear enough in Oblivion already.

Bugs and the like can be fixed/worked around/patched/ modded. Complexity it is.

Why can't we have both complexity and polish?

Strictly speaking I'm not saying we can't... But you have to admit if you were to make a judgement call based on the direction Bethesda is going in developing their games, it certainly seems like its difficult to do, or they're not trying to maintain that complexity very much.

Pretty much this.

And it's not like we can't fix the bugs that could come with such complexity.

That's all the thoughts I have on this matter at the moment.