Well I remember them talking about the hardware things and running out of memory and the first time around the 360 was not the perfect platform to program on. So part of it was hardware and I think the other part is evolution.

Realize it or not games have to change. If they stayed the same and it was just daggerfall but with pretty graphics I would have dropped Elder Scrolls years ago. If you want the game to stay the same as daggerfall and morrowind then go play those games. They still run go have fun.

If games never change and only appealed to hardcoe the gaming industry would go broke. I am not saying go full mainstream, but it is a hard thing to balance the hardcoe player while appealing to new players. I trust Bethesda that I feel they will do a fine job they have a new engine and have been working on this game for a long time. Just pray that the game does not crash in the first half hour.

I want Oblivions user interfaces and combat sytem combined with the variety of items and side quests,factions,weapons,armor and fantasy feeling that was in Morrowind. I miss levitation,crossbows,spears.I hate having my miscellaneous inventory cluttered with keys, a subdiectory or keyring would be nice. I do not mind map markers for quests,fast travelling from one city to another. I would still walk the routes when I did have the free time to do so. The greatest part of the TES games is the wide open world to explore at your leisure. It is obvious that scaled levelling is history in Skyrim. For people like myself with a PC we had mods to fix many of the things we did not enjoy in Oblivion.My greatest fear and the one thing that would make me quit playing Elder Scrolls games would be the selling of DLC ingame like DAO.

It kinda was a launch title but it did get GOTY that year. In my opinion Oblivion was great and was well done. The only thing I would change is I would tweak the Level Scaling a bit. Other then that the game was great and I totally expect Skyrim to blow it out of the water in comparasion.

this is a skyrim discussion thread isn't it..... y talk aobut oblivoin. did they move this one yet?

GOTY is meaningless every review site and magazine has one, its not one award, oblivion was not the only "game of the year" that year.

The gaming media is the worst, most unprofessional of all entertainment media, the thirst for exclusives and the fear of being blacklisted and advertising revenue pulled means the reviews are worth nothing and the awards empty platitudes

People will complain even what they're given what they've asked for. I'm happy that Bethesda even makes games for us to enjoy, and I'm thankful for what they provide. As if any of us could do a better job (of course everyone thinks they're going to be able to due a "better" job, but "better" is subjective. The majority of people off of this very biased forum think Oblivion was an incredible game, as was Morrowind.)

And not the fast travel thing again. Are people still complaining about the presence of an OPTIONAL feature??? If you don't want to fast travel, then don't fast travel. Its that simple. Is it tempting for you to use it or something? Please don't take your lack of discipline out on those of us who actually don't enjoy walking the same damn route 100 times over.

IMHO your wrong, with the sells of Morrowind ported to Console they bet all in this kind of public. So TES morphed from a PC games title to a console ported to PC game title with all the aggravations this bring.
From less mature content, less tought and consistent content due to please kid still affected by short attention span syndrome, and regular no brain content console game. (regular does mean mainstream not all) Also a trend each more present in the western game companies.

Thats the main and decisive factor behind Oblivion fan base revolt that lead to something slightly more consistant in SI.

And by the way, no matter how good loook a console its way behind a PC safe for few period when console launches more modern hardware that usually is PC old tech anyway.

In relation to the thread topic: it has nothing to do with hardware limitations. Oblivion's issues were pretty much universally issues with design - using a terrible minigame that doesn't even vaguely resemble interacting with human beings to handle persuasion takes more power than using simple dice rolls, not less, so if they were bound by limitations they would have done what they did with Morrowind rather than something else entirely. That's not to say Oblivion is worse than Morrowind, just that you can't blame the differences between the two games on the limitations of the new hardware, and you DEFINITELY can't blame it on any sort of learning curve with developing for the 360 (it's a very similar platform to the PC as far as game development is concerned and it's probably the easiest one for a developer like Bethesda to work with right now).


It's kind of silly to say "as if any of us could do a better job" when none of us have the kind of funding or assets that Bethesda has and none of us are a development studio with a very large number of employees. Whether or not we could do a better job individually doesn't matter much, and doesn't make it any less valid for people to criticize the game - it'd be more valid if you figured no actual development studio could do a better job (but, quite frankly, that's probably not the case).


Two problems with that:

1) I've said this countless times on this forum, but optional features still have an impact on the overall tone and feel of a game, whether or not you use them. If Oblivion had started you with a laser-guided missile launcher then I'm pretty sure nobody here would claim that it was anything but a poor decision on Bethesda's part, despite it being optional. If you like fast travel then that's fine, but it being optional isn't a good defense for its inclusion.

2) It's not actually optional. Oblivion's quests are designed under the assumption that the player will have fast travel available to them and will use it and its game world is designed with the knowledge that you have something in your pause menu that can teleport you wherever you want to go, so getting around without it is horribly impractical and generally takes ages to do. The game simply wasn't designed to be playable, or at least playable without a huge amount of tedium, for those who ignore the fast travel function.

Long reply, sorry...



Sorry, but not that easy. It has to be made and tested, and may probably have modifiers in many tables to keep things balanced for both modes.
City visibility depends on what you're supposed to know about the world when the game starts. So I disagree on this one actually.
Fast travel is like leveling, it's a nice thought to simplify travel, but it is badly implemented since you can ignore threats and spell durations. I presented an alternative with a box similar to Daggerfall where you set a few travel options, where todays fast travel is one of the options (walking, riding, camping, travel and teleport services, explore or beeline, fight or avoid, usage of inns etc), and EVERY option presents its own pros and cons - it becomes a choice. Sick of being assaulted when you walk your fast travel? Pay up and use services, but they may take longer but at least you'll be safe. A hardcoe toggle here (we don't get fast travel options, but have to do it manually) doesn't change any rules, unlike convenient fast travel and no travel systems at all. A good game developer knows how to blend these things and end up with a solid product that works for all, rather than try to implement switches to please all kinds of crowds with the potential of breaking the game (time limited quests would not appear the same i.e, and be super easy with insta fast travel).



No I don't think anyone forgot. Daggerfall is humongous - try playing without fast travel there and let us know when you reach your first town ;) Try Daggerfall -> Wayrest, now that's a trip But notice how fast travel works - fast or slow, boat or by foot, use inns or not (not sure).

Yeah, as a launch title it rocked especially for the console. I still enjoy it today, on the PC. But some of the interface designs didn't really pan out very well on the PC, not that I was a very big fan of the Morrowind system either. Read a book automatically centers mouse, and you have to move pointer and click. Lockpick minigame have some weird delay until you get to control mouse, very annoying and inefficient. Drop item to ground... Just, yuck...



They went for the medieval look, and I think they succeeded pretty good (for the time), at least with some basic mods in (high res textures etc). What you call bland because you prefer the alien world, I call excellence because I prefer the earthy look, so it's just a matter of opinion, and I happened to not like MW. Btw, I also never went for SI because of what I had seen, it just wasn't _me_.



The streamlining of mechanics seems to be a result of wanting to eliminate i.e. number of skills to fit a console screen estate. They've gone from fair (DF) to decent (MW) to poor (OB). So my characters end up generalized instead of specialized. We have athletics and acrobatics instead of running, swimming, climbing, jumping etc. So we need either more skills (maybe so many we can't show them all), or a skill tree system where I focus athletics into running and swimming, but can't be master of both. Maybe a fixed set of skillpoints to distribute ourselves.

Agree with the quest marker, but Sidonzo's solution was so simple and elegant I'm ashamed I never thought of it myself, lol. So that one already exists as an option, which I'll use from now on until I'm truly stuck (unlikely now though, lol).

@orcbait:
Fully agree with everything you say. If people want a shallow game, there are plenty to choose from. But please, let us have one deep game, it's the only one there is...



The way I proposed it (by setting options), everything becomes a tradeoff of your own choosing. Manual travel will be the most efficient wrt game time, but not your own time, and requires more work to do. Automatic travel by walking may be dangerous and may stop for the occasional fight along the way, but it will be quite fast in game and your time. Automatic travel by services (depending on which services are available for any given day) can be quite slow in game time, extremely fast in your time, but can be more expensive to use. It makes sense in timed quests that the fast traveler and the manual traveler gets to enjoy exactly the same consequences for taking the wrong actions. I sincerely think this is the only way to go without possibly impaling gameplay (preventing certain things to *be* in the game, such as limited time quests). And there is no alienating anyone - fast travel still exist for those who wants it, but with options that affects the travel time and safety and cost. I've also seen responses like "but I don't want to pay". If OB had fast travel the way it did, it doesn't mean it was the right way to implement it. Then again, there is also the staff limitations to consider...



Why can't we have a single game that has depth AND looks modern? There are plenty of streamlined games out there for the rest of you to choose from. As I already stated, MW was not my cup of tea with its alien look. But you are right, there is this one nasty issue called economics... Which is kinda sad if you ask me.



But I (and I assume everyone else) DO want to have and/or use fast travel. Except in a way that actually makes sense - read above. Want to travel fastest method possible? Fast travel with horse but can be dangerous. Want to fast travel safer? You can, at the cost of taking longer game time and money. And we can have Mark/Recall which in OB is completely redundant (no, there is no spell cost, really).

These certainly weren't my complaints.

1. I liked being invincible at a certain point, because it felt like I had really worked to get to that point and had been rewarded for it. Plus, they added content that was more challenging for high level players in the expansion packs, and that felt very natural.

2. Morrowind was anything but the same, and the alien nature of the landscape made it both fascinating and beautiful. The generic fantasy setting for Oblivion was inspired more by devs drawing from the LOTR movies and other fantasy settings.

3. Did anyone really complain about the factions? Anyone saying there were too many of them or that they felt the same clearly never played Morrowind. The factions, vampire clans, great houses, etc all were rich and diverse, and it was lazy developers and the transition to speech based dialogue that made oblivion so simplistic by comparison.

4. The sheer amount of items in Morrowind really added to the flavor of the game, and the prices some of the rare and exotic weapons were valued at made them feel worth their attributes. While I agree with Todd Howard when he says the compulsive kleptomaniac behavior he saw in many Morrowind players was not a good thing, gamesas did much more in oblivion than simply give clutter a value of 0 septims. gamesas cut the amount of unique items and weapons in the game severely, and item level scaling made quest rewards useless. In addition, the economy completely svcked. I liked that you could get filthy rich by stealing and looting in Morrowind, whereas in Oblivion nothing seemed to have any value.

5. The combat in Morrowind was only lacking one thing: proper animations. The actual dice rolls and numbers behind the combat were fine, because they were based on character skill and not player twitch skill. I think it made the player really feel like his character was weak at early levels, which was a good thing. They just needed proper miss animations and sound effects to demonstrate that.