Looking at evidence of the other games in the elder scrolls series it seems ok to suggest that the TES series is becoming more and more simplistic (mainstream) for example in daggerfall we had dynamics such as boats and a banking system and alot of factions. Then in morrowind we lost the banking system and some factions as well plus a smaller map. I have to confirm it but i think we also lost the ability to buy horses in morrowind as well i dont remember. Then came oblivion, i great game in my opinion but even more main stream. we lost all factions except for four, creativness in cities, various spells were gone such as slow fall and levitation and other aspects. following this pattern one can only assume that skyrim will be even more simplistic and mainstream please place your counter arguments below because i dont want this to be right

Oblivion was already pretty mainstream, but I agree TES does seem to be headed in a "dumbed down" direction.

edit: Also, you're right, their weren't player owned houses in Morrowind

Morrowind had a smaller, but more detailed map (a side-step). I'd definitely say Oblivion was the most main-stream, and I really hope it doesn't get any more.

Erm, admittedly my repitoire is limited, but I'd find it hard to be more mainstram than OB :shrug:

That certainly seems to be the case. To Oblivion's credit, they added some things that weren't in MW, such as horses, legitimately owned houses, etc. However, no mounted combat, no more building strongholds (ala MW). OB also did improve the main "action" systems, combat, magick, and stealth are almost universally praised as improvement (if you ignore the loss of some weapons and spells)

However, I HOPE it was simply "experimentation" on Bethesda's part, just trying something a little slimmed down, not as a strategy or pattern but as a foray into untrod territory. I ALSO hope that they recognized the feedback that they got and will re-implement some of the ideas lost from previous games.

This + I hope not, but I fear it'll be.

looks for counter-arguments

None there. :confused:

I hope Bethesda breaks the trend though.

Bethesda said they watched the forums...
If they actually did they would never dare making anything else than Morrowind 2.0...
So it won't be more mainstream. :chaos:

Morrowind 2.0? Tell me another. Skyrim will be its own game, in its own right. And I'm pretty sure they're not going to sacrifice profit to please a few fanatic fans who have somehow managed to take over the official boards.

i do agree on the combat thing in morrowind to oblivion i hated in morrowind where it was like that mis hit thing where only some of the hits like actually count or whatever it was wierd and OB greatly improved on that system but there was like so much detail in morrowind and frankly a rediculous amount of stuff in daggerfall like more factions. ( i never played it just read about it i can't find anyone that sells it for a 360 ) i have never waited longer for a game than skyrim and i hope they bring back alot of stuff cuz thats gonna be my life for 6 months

The classic feel of The Elder Scrolls will be reborn.

Believe it or not, most good developers (I mean that less in a moral sense and more in a quality-of-games sense) don't purposefully redesign games to maximize appeal to the widest audience. They simply focus on making a good game. With features that make sense for that particular game and the timetable involved in its production.

Because if you make something you, yourself would want to play; if you make a good game, then profits will eventually follow anyway. (I can think of a few exceptions in which critically well received games didn't sell as well as they should have, but sometimes that's an issue of simply getting the word out there in the first place that it's good.) And even disregarding that, in Bethesda's position, as long as they release a quality product at this point, it will sell, because their level of exposure is sufficiently high that they can make whatever they want to make.

I feel that this is the pervading attitude among Bethesda as a studio. I mean, look at Skyrim's announcement trailer. It wasn't some special effects laden, summer Hollywood blockbuster affair, like you'd expect from a more marketing-and-mainstream approach. It was typical, cryptic stuff focused on an unusual subject (stela that comes to life) in the truest Elder Scrolls style.

I don't think there's anything to worry about here.

Daggerfall is actually not available for Xbox, maybe you could get it on one with a LOT of modification. It is however available for free download, you just have to install DOSBox to emulate the original operating system.

And while Oblivion's combat was better, it had it's own problems. What was cool about Morrowind was that when you hit, you did damage. In OB, you never miss, so the damage is zilch.

actually i didnt think about that in oblivion it was pretty easy to cheat because you can just run around them when they are blocking and they die pretty fast

Well, I think it will be less mainstream than Oblivion since all of the feedback(hatemail) we gave back to them.

Plus, most of the changes are about quality over quantity.

I think i can explain this alarming trend
you see simplistic minded people complain about the graphic detail in the game
so instead of making better gamplay and variaty they make it more detailed andthen thegame svcks.......but hey at least it looks pretty
understand a game is should not be based on graphics but on the content

Daggerfall didn't really have boats. You could buy a ship... which was basically just a house shaped like a big boat. That's about it. The banking system was nice but really added nothing to the game (money's as trivial in Daggerfall as it is in all the rest, so being able to take loans and deposit cash really doesn't matter). And as for having a lot of factions... no, not really. Not at all. Daggerfall has a pretty small handful of factions that were copy-pasted with very slightly different names several times.


Already covered the banks and factions. The map was smaller, but on Daggerfall's map very, very little was unique or distinguishable (we're talking maybe a few landmarks in a few of the largest cities and pretty much nothing else). Morrowind's map being smaller isn't necessarily a bad thing given that it's not just a bunch of square buildings and some bumpy terrain with absolutely no roads or other details (aside from trees and a puddle or two) whatsoever.


Once again, you need to consider what came along with those changes. Oblivion has fewer factions, but they're all far, far more interesting and diverse than they were in Morrowind as far as the quests that they offer, and quests in Oblivion in general tend to be considerably deeper than Morrowind's "go here, kill this, get this, go here". Not that Oblivion doesn't have those quests, but it'll throw twists in here and there - you'll be doing the killing with a group of men or you get to choose how to kill the target and get a bonus for killing them a certain way, the thing or person you need to find is in another dimension entirely, that sort of thing. You can criticize it as mainstream for having less, but it's pretty obvious that the drop in quantity of content was done for the sake of increasing the gameplay value of that content. Slow fall and levitate, on the other hand, were removed specifically because they wanted to actually have cities - Oblivion's engine simply isn't very good and couldn't handle large crowded outdoor areas like that on the overall map, so they had to handle them as fully separated cells. That meant they had to remove spells that you'd be able to exploit to float over the walls of those cells, since... well, there's not really anything over those walls. And as for creativeness... well, that's not really a backstep from Morrowind, just a step back towards the norm for the series. Arena and Daggerfall were both pretty standard high fantasy for the most part, and Morrowind's a variation from the norm more than an indication of the standard.

All that said... Bethesda has pretty much always aimed for the "mainstream" with their RPGs. Arena came out in a time when fairly simplistic D&D-style dungeon crawls were very popular and when FPSes were on the rise, and it tries to provide a blend of those two. Daggerfall arrived when, for RPGs, the expectation was for something believable, and that's what they tried to do. Morrowind came along when the focus was on providing a focused experience within a relatively unique fantasy world and that's what that game gave us, and Oblivion... well, I'd go as far as to say that the classic RPG died before Oblivion, and Oblivion is a pretty clear reflection of that.

Bethesda's games have been niche, but don't fool yourself into believing that "niche" is what Bethesda's ever been aiming to be. They've aimed for what were fairly large markets with each entry in this series, and with varying degrees of success. I'd imagine they'll do the same with Skyrim, but I really don't have a problem with that.

Agreed. It reminds me of people over at the FNV forum who think that complaining about the game on a message board is going to hurt Bethesda's sales.

Remember that only a small population of gamers care enough to come to this message board. Just because several people agree that Morrowind 2.0 is the way to go doesn't mean that you have enough pull to sway game development.

Yea me and my friend had this conversation after oblivion came out. Don't get me wrong, I loved oblvion and spent 100s of hours on it, but that game was no Morrowind. Quest were easy be default with map markers for everything. Even quest where it had you investigating something, it would simply give you a map marker (On a side note: PLEASE GIVE ME AN OPTION TO TURN OFF MAP MARKERS). Fast travel was goofy (On a side note: PLEASE GIVE ME AN OPTION TO TURN OFF FAST TRAVEL). But overall the game felt more streamlined and easier.


But with that being said, so what. Bethesda has blown up rightfully as they are one of the best game developers out there and they deserve to have their games marketed towards everyone. I cannot blame them. But we have to realize that being more streamlined and more "mainstream" does not equal a less fun game. The game can still be deep, huge, and amazing. Now what would be nice would be to have options such as letting me simply turn off fast travel and markers at the beginning of the game. O and give me a hardcoe mode like New Vegas.




One last thing to say is the older elder scrolls games are classics (morrowind is close to my heart). But sometimes we think of classics better than they were. No matter how good oblivion was going to be, I don't think i would have liked it as much as morrowind. Morrowind was ugly in its own beautiful way and it had horrible combat. And worst off all, it kinda was clunky and it wouldn't have heart it to be a bit more "mainstream".

Skyrim is going to rule, end of discussion.

We can't just look at the Elder Scrolls titles like they're in a vacuum either, though. We have to look at Fallout 3 as well, which was a marked increase in sophistication and complexity when compared to Oblivion (As far as its gameplay systems go. The scale was rather smaller than an Elder Scrolls game, but Bethesda repeatedly said in interviews during its development that such was intentional and that it really wasn't meant to be scaled like a TES game), and it's really the last title that Bethesda Game Studio has released. And despite being more complex, it sold very well.

Oh boy it's the word "mainstream" being thrown out. Alright people, lets start from the basics. Games that are not mainstream usually don't make $$$ or becomes GOTY. Morrowind became mainstream first.

There's two things that's true with gaming right now.

1. TES 5 can't be more simple than Oblivion

and

2. No other game can have as buggy and flawed an MP experience than GoW 2.

Morrowind was awesome, but it's not so great that Skyrim must be Morrowind 2.0. Oblivion did many things better. For the most part Oblivion had more cool bells and wistles than Morrowind had. The combat was also better. What Morrowind had over Oblivion was atmosphere. Between the music and the otherworldliness of the setting, Morrowind felt far from generic. Morrowind was a really unique experience that drew you into another world.

But Oblivion did go more mainstream with the console UI.

i guess that is what tonyabdo was talking about how things get more simplistic but are better with detail and stuff. good point and i wasnt hating on oblivion i love that game in fact( alot of people are gonna be mad at me) oblivion was my favorite one of the elder scrolls. 2 more things how do you snip? cuz this long quote is just gonna take up space and i feel bad do u just delete everything and write snip or somthing.. srry i am new and bad with computers. lastly i found out something very interesting daggerfall came out in august of 1996.. morrowind came out in june 2002.. oblivion came out in march of 2006 so that is 5 years and 11 months in between daggerfall and morrowind..4 months and change in-between morrowind and OB and this game will be 5 years and 8 months after OB. maybe this will be detailed and packed with gameplay and go back to the morrowind style. you might need to check my math and i knwo they are working on other games in-between the TES games but im still hoping.

when everyone says mainstream they mean simplistic.. srry it was my post and a bad choice of words on my part