TES is not a casual gamers game series........ at least Morrowind wasn't. Oblivion on the other hand was extremely trying to either A. pander to the crowd to gain a larger audience to get more money. or B. fix what little problems the past games had in a way that would again somewhat pander to casual gamer therefore making it more apealing and again getting them more money.

A few more guilds in Oblivion what have been preferred. But I'm going to be the odd one out and say that I actually like Oblivion more than Morrowind. Whatever Bethesda decide to do for Skyrim, I'm sure we will all enjoy it, and spend way too many hours in front of the computer

u aren't the only one dude OB is my alltime favorite game i got 600 plus hours on it which is just gross but i couldnt help it. morrowind did not get even close to attracting my attention as much as OB

Hopefully not. Morrowind was advanced enough, I don't think it was very "mainstream" at all. But yes, Oblivion was incredibly dumbed down in terms of pretty much everything when compared to Morrowind. Yeah, Oblivion had better graphics and a better AI but seriously, it lost one heck of a lot of content. And I mean A LOT.

No, because that's not what we (meaning those of us just simply prefer Morrowind) want. We'd just like a little more rock 'n roll, and a little less country is all, because we grew up liking rock more. Basically. We don't necessarily need to all-out hate Oblivion to prefer Morrowind's style.

For example, of a happy medium for me, take the level-scaling. In Morrowind, you could be Level 1 and find some Glass, Ebony, and Daedric pieces lying around if you either got lucky or knew exactly where they were. In Oblivion, Bethesda decides for you what you can get per level. In Morrowind, almost every single bandit/outlaw has crap equipment and low stats. Even some of the ones carrying legendary items, you have to wonder how they managed to acquire them as you send their souls to the great beyond with a couple of stabs from a Glass Frostsword. In Oblivion, if you're low level, your enemies are low level. You ascend to Level 50, your enemies upgrade with you.

There's plenty of room to work with in the grey area there. For example, in Skyrim, a player can get lucky and find a nice war axe, but it's not exactly uber, and it was basically luck. At Level 5, most enemies are fairly challenging, some are just down-right brutal (the dragons, most likely). At Level 50, many enemies aren't nearly as much of a threat, but some are still a problem (dragons, again), and others make their appearance for the first time (ancient lichs, maybe?). And some of them level with the player, just not all of them.

Basically, the idea is to create the feeling of progress. There's an area filled with all kinds of monsters, accessible at the start of them game, but the player either can't make the trip (too many hazards along the way), or can, but gets pwned when they do so. So they come back later and dish out some major pwnage of their own. Stuff like that.

I'm confident that Skyrim will not be a carbon copy of any game they're churned out before, and we'll all be better for it. My only real concern is whether I get to be a real hero or not this time around...

That's so true.. Whoever wrote that is legit.

Mainstream would seem to be market related more than anything else; (One could consider it short for "Mainstream tastes" and not be too far off). Vanilla ice cream is mainstream; spumoni, not quite as much. Everyone can eat vanilla and knows what to expect with vanilla. If there were only vanilla, most who want Ice cream would settle for it ~not everyone would like Vanilla-coffee flavored ice cream or cherry rhubarb ice cream; hence they are not so mainstream as vanilla.

You mainstream a product to appeal to as many divergent tastes as is feasible; except some folks tastes are polar opposite to others wanting the same product. Finding a balance or compromise is not always possible, or ideal ~or at all elegant (and with food, it can taste really bad too).

With RPGs for instance... Some like it totally by the numbers, while others like it totally under player control ~these styles greatly affect the design of the game, yet are mutually exclusive and cancel each other out. Does the exact middle ground please both? (never seemed so to me).

To me Mainstreaming is bad and leads to things like Chocolate covered vanilla pretzels, and game's with Ironsights that have attenuated accuracy :blink:.

Obsidian made Fallout New Vegas.

Okay so people are worried about Skyrim being more simple and dumbed down which I guess is reasonable. I have a friend who's a pretty casual gamer and writes off game like Dragon age because he doesn't like the combat. He doesn't really care about lore, or dialogue. But they can't only cater to the casual gamers wishes, I mean this IS an RPG and hopefully Bethesda keeps it that way, they shouldn't dumb it down any more. BUT, if you noticed FO:NV was fairly impressive so I have in faith in you Bethesda!

Agreed, what an awesome anology. I enjoyed both games, but played Oblivion more.

But, if that anology is anything to go by, I want Skyrim to be an Icecream Cake.

I'd want a layer cake.

Anybody else scraqe off the icing because it's too strong?

If we predict Bethesda's trend of fixing the previous games issues, but unfortunately creating lapses where previous games shone, we will have a very detailed world, with lots depth and atmosphere, coupled with a nice and detailed user interface - but severely lacking and uninteresting combat mechanics,which will feell very lackluster in the game.

Sadly, to adapt to the market, TES is going Mainstream. It worked for Fallout, and now they will do it for TES. I wish it wasn't but sadly TES is changing. Though I personally think adding more immersion, uniqueness and skills wouldn't make mainstream players like it less. If anything, I have had friends who are definetly mainstream say that Oblivion was boring, bland, but most of all they just hated the leveling. So I think if Bethesda wants Skyrim to be popular they should swing back towards Morrowind, because Oblivion became too generic and similar to other RPGs for mainstream players to like it and find it unique.

The problems simple, the cost of developing a game in the new market continues to go up, and the development team is getting larger and larger. Games with glitches and problems or without polish are quickly ripped to shreds which requires all features to be well developed enough to avoid most flaws. If you look into the elder-scrolls history, they had a lot of different choices and options, but they weren't often very well developed or fleshed out, further many of them were extraordinarily glitchy or exploitable. In the new game market things need to be fleshed out, not glitchy, and most exploits need to be removed. The occasional patchable problem is okay, but they can't be rampant.

Now what this means is because of the larger development team, and the skyrocketing development costs, the games MUST succeed, this introduces two real problems, one they must develop a game that will appeal to the majority so that it sells well enough that they can justify keeping the company opened and continuing the series, otherwise, this will be the last elder scrolls game. Two they have to make sure that it passes the critical review, which requires that waste not be evident or easily criticized and that the game have a reasonable level of polish. What this translates to is using what worked in the past, making the things that worked better and more streamlined, adding more features to the mainstream, but keeping risk taking endeavorers to a minimum. Now don't get me wrong, every games has its selling point, and Bethesda will always have a new system in every game that is unique and has never been rivaled or tried before. In Oblivion they used a well known physics engine, but went for graphical beauty and a new system that allowed near infinite draw distances on the macro scale, and speedtree to flesh out the world, they also introduced radiant AI, these were their innovative and risky choices for Oblivion, Radiant AI was a nice perk but didn't work as well as expected, but Oblivion did soar when it came to its graphics, so in spite of EVERYTHING ELSE in the game being completely unoriginal, because it was all so well developed and properly fleshed out the game was rated outstandingly.

The same can be expected from the next game... I admit I think that fact is sad... I'd rather have glitches, exploits, and a lot of options, even if a few weren't totally fleshed out or properly developed. It adds to the feel of actually role-playing to have a lot of options. However, in todays game market its too risky, and most developers simply don't have the courage to take that risk. Appealing to the majority while giving the long time fan base all the choices they desire, and miss from the old games, is possible, but only at the expense of time they could be spending making sure that the mainstream doesn't find problems with the systems they will be using, namely the combat engines, the main quest, voice acting, and progression. The rest comes secondary to these, and those occupy a lot of development time to make them glitch free so the majority don't whine...

god, I'm starving
can we use something less delicious as an anology?
I think I once heard morrowind described as a girlfriend
let me see if I can find it

I voted NO out of hope. I really don't want it to go down this path any farther. Morrowind did so much right that Oblivion didn't.

Still, look how much more complex it was compared to Fallout 3, and how well it sold.

Mainstream is nothing. All that matters is that the marketing department does their job.

I think any well made, well marketed game can sell well. That's not even counting the fact that having "Bethesda" slapped on the box makes it sell even better just through association.

That is actually quite true. NV was actually IGN's most wanted game of the year, thanks to the amount of things that Obsidian had done to the game and shown to everyone. It's a shame it was so buggy at release, but the amount of content that is in the game sure as hell makes up for it.

I'm kind of okay with Oblivion's main-streamness. The Imperials seem very main-stream. As in they're [censored]s. Morrowind was just a more exotic place in Tamriel, and Daggerfall's 2d ecosystems supported a very different variety of flora and fauna.

I completely agree, but has anyone noticed the obvious correlation between how buggy a game is and the number of features? None the less I think the majority of long time fans would agree that it doesn't matter, and content will always win over bugs, Morrowind is the perfect modern example, rated higher then Oblivion for its time in most cases ,and yet look at all the exploits, bugs and glitches it had. Unfortunately 50% of the development time is spent simplifying and polishing to prevent such bugs from popping up and as such we get a very clean but very simple game, almost more worthy of the Action Adventure category then the RPG...

I played both MW and Ob, but MW was my first exposure to TES. What was supposed to be so awesome about MW that made it so much better? It was a lot of walking around strange curved deserty rocky area. Vivec was confusing. I mean, I "got" it, but it didn't seem super special. oblivion at least I could understand the scenery and sort of imagine why I was doing what I was doing. Somebody explain it

You people don't understand. We don't WANT Morrowind "2.0". We just want a few things to return. To name a few, the variety in different items, no annoying levelled lists, a better bartering system, in depth lore and story, etc. I could go on here. However, I speaking as a Morrowind fan don't want the combat system to return, or the weird running and walking animations. There was just more stuff around in Morrowind, of course most of the dialogue was in text, but when it wasn't, each race had their own voice. Oblivion had one voice for every 2 or 3 races. All 3 elf races had the same voice.

Morrowind had Crossbows, Spears, Throwing equipment and a huge variety of different armour to choose from such as Bonemold, Indoril, Chitin, Netch Leather, Imperial Leather, Imperial Steel, etc. Oblivion had only a handful of that.

Morrowind had more skills to work on, including those "in between" skills such as Spear and Medium Armour. Oblivion went as far as cutting so much skills, Axes actually became "Blunt Weapons", Medium Armour went, taking with it a HUGE amount of different types of armour. Unarmoured went, so that meant that Mages had no protection whatsoever.

Morrowind had more quests in general, as well as a really long main quest. I personally completed Oblivion's main quest within a couple of days, whereas it took me weeks to complete Morrowind's. I still haven't completed all of Morrowind's side quests to this very day, but I have looked online and compared it to my Oblivion journal and I have completed every single quest there is, and I did that about 3 years ago.

Morrowind had a quicker, easier to use bartering system that allowed you to trade in a good amount of goods that helped you pay towards something you wanted that the trader/blacksmith/alchemist had. Oblivion's was slow, especially for PC users, with it's constant asking on whether I am sure if I want to sell something or not, which gets rather annoying after a while and to top it off, I've got cheesy lines telling me that I've "made a good bit of gold!" Or "that's more than he'd usually pay!" It was honestly nearly enough to make me scream. Thankfully, Fallout 3 took the Oblivion engine's bartering system back to the good old ways, so HOPEFULLY I shouldn't have to worry about a thing.

The waiting menu in Morrowind was also better. Probably not a huge deal to some people, but when I press the wait button in the games, I don't actually want to wait in real life. When I say that, I mean that in Morrowind you selected how much hours you wanted to wait or rest, and bam. There. Done. Oblivion takes ages to complete the wait, and don't even get me started about what it was like before the patch.

I don't need to go on about this, as I'm sure you get the picture... I just want Morrowind's content back, and some of the good things that the engine had, such as the barter and wait menus. Not the combat system, not the AI, not the animations, not the pre-made faces and certainly not the Cliff Racers.

I don't think that the graphics are at issue; Content, skill reductions, omissions and gameplay changes are. The scenery doesn't matter (except maybe that there was less of it.)

I've seen this before :laugh:
Everyone sees a post favoring Fallout 1, and they assume you want FO3/NV to be a 2D isometric.

Since this topic won't last much longer, because of size, let me just add one last post.

The question was is Skyrim going main stream? The answer is that we still don't know anything about the game and until we know more we all are just guessing and hoping. My hope is that Todd and his team has been reading this topic, read everything about Morrowind and about Oblivion and realize that Bethesda has a huge fan base who wants a more complex RPG. We are begging for a more complex RPG.

Keep us in mind when you making Skyrim and try to help us out.

WoW, you know I had no clue what would happen to TES if the casual gamers got a hold of it.

My friend was just over to borrow a game, and he said he wanted to play an RPG and that all he had was saints row 2. I looked at him and said "What? Saints row 2 definetly isn't a RPG!" and then I kind of laughed and he said "It is an RPG, you make your Character, you can do what you want and make some decisions". I told him the game was a sandbox and that the main story was linear, and there was no role-playing, no lore, no open world. He told me you get to choose whether or not to kill somebody and that was basically what you did in FO.

Frankly I was stunned. If Saints row 2 is considered an RPG by most gamers than please Bethesda don't EVER let them change the way you're making these games! PLEASE!

WE HAVE TO DEFEND TES:V!!! :toughninja:

Lol, But seriously I want TES to stay a actual RPG.

This happened and I had to share it.