Daggerfall dialog was awesome
And...I dont agree with some here.I think skyrim feels more like morrowind then oblivion.love skyrim,one of the best games i have played

I miss my boots of blinding speed!!

I could tell you played WoW from your original post, actually, because you cited it as a potential avenue for true roleplaying. I took your meaning, but it seemed you had your sense of what "proper gamers" do and considered anything else not simply a difference of opinion, but outright stupid. You criticize others who call players like you a noob for attempting to figure out the strategy on your own—and, indeed, those people deserve the criticism. But then you turn around and do that very thing to the other side. Never mind that people play WoW for different reasons: some for intellectual challenge, some for social interaction, some for the competition, some for easy downtime. I say as long as you have a guild of like-minded folks, do your thing and let others be. It sounded like you were setting out to bend others to your brand of gaming by insulting those who differ. My point was simply that that mindset can be counter-productive to discussion. Given your reply, I can restate my point thus: you should strive not to become the thing you hate.

You said you dislike replying to posts such as mine, so I won't trouble you further. Have a pleasant day.

Mega Man is a great game.

Wow. So there are really others out there? I wonder if I still have the maps around that I drew out I loved BT series back in those days, but I think Realms of Arkania was better wrt party based CRPGs. I haven't tried any new ones, as 1st person is the only way to go for me now. But I have to say that wrt content, nothing yet beats Skyrim. The poor fact is, it doesn't really have any competitors either (1st person is an absolute must).

My list:
1. Elite 2 Frontier Not an RPG in the traditional sense, requiring a lot of brains to play it like one. But it had flat out the biggest area to explore of any games I ever played, including Daggerfall which is tiny in comparison
2. Realms of Arkania. Just take a look at the rule sets and skills. It's amazing what could be done when you don't have to provide content for it.
3. OFP and Arma. I know, milsim shooter, not an RPG at all. But I still like to "roleplay" in it Most played modern game. As like BGS games have no competition in the RPG department for my kind of gaming, BIS games have no competition in the "shooter" area.
4. Daggerfall. Even bigger than Realms of Arkania, but only because everything was in true 3D. If I disregard everything that was wrong with it (a lot, like exploits and bugs and poorly thought out rule sets), what remained was a master piece. Bunch of randomness too it, perfectly suitable for those of us who doesn't need to rush through a game (even if somewhat repetitive at times), and a rather complex MQ and way it was told. High feel of middle ages, which I like, to the point of having rather massive cities.
5. Skyrim. It gets this high only because of the amount of content. Not even done with the main quest yet, which so far have a really cool story. I just wish it was told better with more twists and turns like in Daggerfall.
6. Fallout New Vegas.
7. Bard Tale I guess.
8. Fallout 3. Sorry, never played 1 and 2.
9. Oblivion. It's biggest problem was lack of land mass to support the much content it had (which wasn't very varied).
10. Morrowind. I really don't understand what made this game so popular. Too high fantasy/alien for me, so I couldn't relate at all to anything. Kinda nice story, but only if you grasped everything that was not handed to you on a silver platter. It was linear as hell MQ wise, and have been since.

Oh yeah, and I'm past 40 as well.

[quote name='KorVegor' timestamp='1323365676' post='19696039']
I really disagree with a few points you make OP.

First of all, Oblivion's UI was horrible. Especially the inventory, which showed a grand total of 6 items at a time. Yeah, 6. That's completely insane for a TES game with the amount of items you can carry with you at any given time.



I'll deal with this as it is raised quite a bit in the thread. Of course it was all subjective, hence the subtitle, but of the three games named it had the easiest for a PC user to shortcut into whilst still being on top of WASD and the mouse. The latest patch seems to have cleared the "laggy" feel that it had to some extent and I'm sure it'll continue. The number of times I overkilled someone I was just trying to get to give up...

Changing the subject- it was interesting to see the Ultima series mentioned. Ultima 9 gave you RPG choices where you could kill the 'bad' guy or redeem him/her. The game world warped around these choices. I also liked the tarot card way of establishing the user's personality right at the start (I was ever so humble- and ended up with a weapon that was anything but!). The puzzles needed some thought and skill- remember the phase spider prison? In and out of phase until you worked out how to leave enough doors open to escape. Fiendishly simple and yet also engaging. How old is that game now?

Of course, the only extreme role-play experience available has traditionally been through PBM- but since Hungerford when Michael Ryan hunted 'Terrans' down for real I've never been able to stomach cyber-punk or even modern scenarios- hence my obsession with the more distant lands of past worlds. Role play is about taking on another role- but never let the monster thus created control the person!


But I digress. Let's be positive and look forward to games with engaging scenarios, excellent graphics, deep, authentic cultures, the chance of failure and the whiff of challenge and satisfaction at having found a way around it. I love Skyrim- I just lament that all that care and attention has been let down, for me, by thin quest lines and lack of options. Non-Nords joining the Stormcloaks? The opportunities for such plots were potentially endless...

I choose Skyrim. I played Morrowind and all the earlier RPGs. But Skyrim just blew everything away.

A few comments here: Your "perfect RPG' isn't realistic from a marketing standpoint. Games need to generate money, and to generate money from video games they need to make games that appeal to (most) ages. Make a game overly complicated, and you're shutting out a good percentage of your potential market. I do agree that Skyrim could have gone for a little bit more complexity and strategy, but on the whole I think they did a fantastic job. Also, as a WoW player, I'm going to hammer away at your arrogant comments as they appear. WoW is, by any standard, a ridiculously steep learning curve for a new player and totally overwhelming. If you're actually suggesting that the Elder Scrolls are more complicated than WoW, then... well... "wow." Raid bosses in WoW were actually hard, needing an entire team of players who were forced to interact in order to bring it down. I can tell you've never played WoW and you're hanging on to obscure stereotypes you've read online.


This sounds like a throw back to the Baldur's Gate / D&D days where you actually choose your alignment. If you think about it, you're simply asking for restriction on the player here which is the opposite of what TES games stand for. If feel like you should work out your evil side before you become a sellsword, then by all means do it. I play my rouge as a "chaotic neutral" character, and I'm careful to make decisions spur of the moment and not based on any greater good or greater evil. If you need restrictions, restrict yourself.


Here we're in almost total agreement. The economy in the game is insane, there WAY too much gold to be had from simple dungeon crawling. I think there should be copper, silver, and gold (WoW-esque). I like the idea of clearing a tower and claiming it, but this would be a whole lot more complicated in it's implementation than you think (if you actually wanted any depth to owning that tower-- such as defending from bandit raids, and so on and so forth).


Again, this idea could be an entire game in and of itself. A fantastic idea, but it's asking a lot from a developer. Maybe in the next installation...


I have no idea what this means.

(I'm editing my comment. It's a little too acidic.)
The modding community possesses the passion to polish the final product. Developers may have the same passion, but they are constrained by budgets and deadlines, and that's the reality of capitalism.

First, you can turn off quest markers alltogether...., puzzles are never exciting when a player cant complete it. quests have always been like that no matter what game it is, you are performing a quest for someone else so to follow an NPCs orders is not somthing i havent seen before, the real question is how important is planting somthing something going to affect thw world as a whole, and thats somthing skyrim does better than the other 2 TES games


from a dev standpoint those are really hard to intergrate into the game, it would take more than 3 years to make every NPC and class to have different outcomes and situations based on their own morality, while not even thinking about the actual quest guidlines.


game wealth has never been complex. nor will it be. again having choices for these things would also be involved with morality, what if your evil and nobody wants to purchase your goods? what if your poor and people dont wanna give you any money? is a concept better left untouched


you can hire mercenaries to join you. the other things are too complex to intergrate without having the gameplay focus on them directly.


After playing WoW for 5 1/2 years, both WoW and TES are nowhere near perfect "10s" because they dont create a game where the contents of the game force you to play how the game wants, you can play any style you want, freedom is the real word here, giving players freedom is more than a 10 in my books. TES have come along way and i think they are going in the right direction.

Ever play BG2? Nuff said.

I hated melee combat in Morrowind. That is all.

You're right, that's why it's so hard to judge current games vs past. Nostalgia always makes it hard. Sadly for gamers, past games will always be the best games they've ever played - or that's how it is for me anyhow. How often do you hear a gamer say about a current game, "It's the best game i've EVER played." It does happen, but not very often. I can't even recall the last time I said that.

I don't think i'll ever have more fun playing an RPG than I did in Ultima 8. Or Age of Empires 2 for RTS. Or TFC for a FPS. Etc. I really wish I could, but Nostalgia always gets in the way. Maybe it's not just that though, maybe i've changed as a person. I spent years on each of those games. Was it the community? Am I just less obsessive now over video games? It's all so hard to judge . It does seem to me that I enjoyed games more in my teens though, and I guess that isn't so surprising (i'm 28 now).

Lol 10/10 for Oblivion interface.


Remember the "I can only see 6 items" menus?

Dear OP, understand that what you ask for is a video game for open-minded people with brains; and most of current TES players don't fit that bill.

skyrim has a believable world all the way down to ants crawling around and characters with actually interesting stories like Sapphire and it has great combat even better than oblivion so for me skyrim wins

I think the loss that the op was talking about was the loss of fame and imfamy and the like bar you used in oblivion and morrowind. If both of these features had been kept it may have made skyrim a much better game overall. My opinion is that they keep the like/dislike bar but keep it hidden so the player doesn't know. To keep with this there would need to be far more dialogue options and the options to bribe or taunt/goad enemies to sway their opinions of the character.

Of course this is all unnecessary, the real problem with skyrim is people's need to try and max out a character or abuse the skill system. Play anything long enough or min/max and you're going to eventually get bored of the game.

It's the year 2002.

Game A hits the shelves. Some other developement team releases game B simultaneously. You never heard of any of the developers and both games are labeled "RPG" so you buy both of them.

In both games you can choose a race for your character. Depending on which race you choose, your character

- will have certain advantages/disadvantages. ( A )
- will have certain advantages ( B )

after choosing what your character should look like, you are able to

- name your character and create a background. Proficiencies, birthsign and a personal history ( A )
- name your character ( B )

Now, after a short introduction, you are free to do whatever you want.

You are sent to an island with odd creatures. Giant insects which you can ride on, mushrooms as big as trees, buildings built out of the skeletons of enormous crab-like creatures, fungus-towers that grow out of the earth and wind up into the sky - accessible only through magic, which enables you to fly through the air, walk on water, reflect spells, cast magic shields and shoot fireballs. You are able to manipulate every single aspect of the gameplay. ( A )

You find yourself in a nordic environment. Mountains, giants, mammoths, wolves, bears, dragons. You can shoot fireballs in this game, too. ( B )


You explore both worlds, complete quests and learn about the political and social situation. You can tell the world reacts to you because


- the people's disposition towards you is dependent on many factors. Quests and trading are dependent on disposition ( A )
- people will adress you according to your race. Disposition has no effect on the gameplay ( B )


You advance in both games. Taking a look at your character you realise

- that your character has become stronger and faster. Arrows hit more often, the chance of successfully casting a fireball increased and you are able to pick medium locks with some effort. You have become much more eloquent and people don't hate you that much anymore.( A )

- that you deal more damage. ( B )



Would anyone really prefer game B over game A?

and game B has no disadvantages? sneaking with heavy armor is harder, cant block arrows unless you have a sheild, not increasing combat skills and increasing smithing and enchanting etc will make enemies harder when using combat. all while game A has an advantage with major skills and forces you to stick to those skills.


actually game A only lets you choose a birthsign and/or a limited choice background. while game B had stones you have to find to earn the extra bonus, and you can create any background if you choose. But since this is all irrelevent theres no arguemenet here


lol so biased on game A, flying/walking on water/ are in no way usefull to combat or gameplay. and enviroment wise, game B has huge mountains with whirling winds and swaying trees, snowy plains and colorfull skies.


because everyone in game A has to reflect you personally at all times making the player feel important? nah world in game B feels more realistic a fluid



id rather have a game where "arrows" depend on me actually hitting my enemy or missing than having a system where i miss even though i hit him because a "skill" is too low, or no mater how high the lock lvl is if im good at picking locks i can pick it


Very bad comparison

I don't see why "hard" quests done right would necessarily turn off the modern gamer. By demographics, we're about 28 or so now, it isn't like in the old NES days where you had to assume your audience was 6 years old and couldn't noodle for more than 5 minutes without looking for the game guide. Also speaking of the existance of said game guides -- that removes yet another reason for simplifying quests -- we have been able to read the answers in a book for at least the last 15 years. Yet, there are more difficult bosses and puzzles in RPGs on the nintendo (the original Nintendo or at worst super-nintendo) than on the XBOX360. Go play Zelda 3 and then play Skyrim -- SNES Zelda has harder puzzles, and was aimed at 8-year-olds. The best "bard quest" I've found so far is Celes' opera house in FF6 again, SNES aimed at young kids.

I don't mean that the game should be hard to learn the rules for. I think you should be able to learn the rules of any game in ten minutes. What I mean is that you should be able to learn the system and devise new and better strategies over time. A 8 year old can play chess, but won't really get the full flavor until he's played for years, and will likely still have new interesting games of chess at 75. The strategies are infinite, the gambits you can use are deep, but you can ignore that until you understand how these strategies work. You might even accidentally win the game using something you didn't understand. That's how a good game is made -- you understand the basics right off, but must learn how to recombine strategies to get better. Maybe early puzzles should be easy, but you'd have to combine what you've learned to get truely good stuff. At the very least, don't make it stupidly easy to find the answers to the easy puzzles. It should follow a logic of sorts, melting an ice block requires fire, etc.

I don't really think "Is this 'true art?'" is the kind of question that video game designers need to be asking themselves while developing software. The purpose of Skyrim is entertainment. Whether any game is "true art" is completely subjective.


How many times can you save Tamriel from getting destroyed? How many guilds can you become master without ever doing any actual leadership?


At least it was verbose.

Pretending the first two are significant and that the last one wasn't present since Game A anyway.


Except you don't have to stick with anything at all. Just don't expect to level, and even if you want to level, its terribly easy to use your new skills to make leveling up your old skills go faster. And in the case of magic, completely negate having to do much work to train them anyway.


If the game is going to punt all character development into the users imagination then I'd rather save the $150 I paid and just create my own story without the game.


So generic snow land > Unique island that has its own personality and believe-ability. Lol.


Yes a game where everyone only just barely acknowledges your existence (while at the same time fast-tracking you to being massively and ridiculously important) is better than one where people actually acknowledge your existence and what you've done and don't make you the center of attention within a few short meaningless quests.


Don't presume that because you don't like games that emphasize character skill that that makes character skill a bad system.



Video games have moved well beyond the point where they were "just" entertainment. No other art medium can come close to conveying what its really like to go on an epic quest to save the maiden fare and all the world over or to participate in a war or to take down a dragon or any of the other things video games can do nearly as well as a video game can. No art medium can provide for the user (and not just the creator) to weave a story of their own making, rather than just reading a story or watching one. Roleplaying games especially are a perfect fit for what video games would be perfect at doing.

So when said art medium (and especially the most fitting genre for it) ends up being mostly composed of trashy yet flashy examples that only play to instant gratification and gross pandering to people who won't even care if X game exists or not it proves to be a real problem.

Nothing in "Game A" forced you to use either your Major skills, or your Minor, or Miscellaneous, other than the rate of success or failure at low skill levels. You could self-train most of them, and paid training was available in the others. The world, being only partially levelled and almost totally unscaled, allowed you to handle it at your own pace, and didn't severely "punish" you for doing non-combat tasks. "Game B" punished non-combat play by forcing you to level up, thereby making the world around you harder. In short, it was all about combat or things that enhanced combat, whether you wanted it to be or not. If combat became difficult and you attempted to avoid it, the problem only got worse.

"Game B" had a few character advantages/disadvantages, but nowhere near as many as "Game A". When a couple of Perks in "Game B" negate just about every disadvantage, there's no long-term reason to do anything but the obvious "best" choice. When each choice has both its positives and its negatives, your choices become meaningful.

Not only did "Game A" allow you a choice of Birthsign, Race, and a "Class", with a combination of Skills and underlying Attributes affected by them, it allowed you the option to either tailor that class extensively, or just choose a pre-made one for simplicity. "Game B" had magic stones that you could find, which was probably in order to allow you to gain every benefit without any of the drawbacks (I don't know for certain, since I can't play it due to the Steam requirement). Otherwise, it also had Skills, and Perks that were partly redundant with Skills, did a small part of what Attributes used to do, and fortunately gave at least a few unique "specializations" which it should have been limited to in the first place,

In "Game B", there was nothing in the game to require, or even have any practical use for, Levitation or Waterwalking. "Game A" made extensive use of that "third dimension", and it opened up a host of possibilities and ideas for the player. For a magic-based character, it was game-changing. For a ground-bound fighter, not so big a deal.

I can see "huge mountains with whirling winds and swaying trees, snowy plains and colorfull skies" about an hour's drive away, at least occasionally this time of year. Seeing an exotic island with giant mushroom flora and dwellings, as well as massive insectoidal creatures and "semi-dinosaurs" is something that I can't do without a video game, or by abusing some sort of recreational chemistry.

When everyone (except for obvious "enemies") automatically likes you in Game B because you're "special", that's hardly believable. When the NPCs' reactions toward you in Game A are influenced by numerous factors, including your race, your faction affiliations, and even your clothing to some degree, that's a bit better.

"Game A" was about the character, while "Game B" was about the player. If the character's skills in Game A were absolutely pathetic, no amount of skill on the part of the player was going to compensate for it, although there were generally other solutions to be found. If the player's own dexterity skills in Game B were poor, or his/her reflexes slow, no amount of skill on the part of the character was going to compensate for it, and you were simply stuck. In other words, a skilled Thief could pick locks in Game A, and Skilled Fighter could hit opponents, a skilled Mage could cast spells. In Game B, a Master Thief might not be able to pick an Average lock, or a Novice Thief might be able to easily pick Master locks, all because the player's own skills are good or bad. One game is a character-based RPG, the other is a player-based Action/Adventure game. This is not an "A or B is better" aspect, it's a recognition that the fundamental nature of the games are different, and appeal to different market segments, with a bit of inevitable overlap. Unfortunately, while there are at least a dozen fairly recent Action/Adventure games, there have been no new character-based RPGs to hit the market in almost a decade, so for the fans of that genre, this series was the last of the line, and now it's been taken away.

Of all the things Skyrim annoyed me about, the lack of Umbra had to be the biggest issue I had with the game lol.