A few days ago I was in the process of responding to a thread, only to find it locked by the time I composed my post. Summer gave me permission to create a thread once a few days had passed making my post the foundation of a new thread.

I really think it should be said, that Bethesda is an awesome developer. They have vision, something that doesn't always align with every gamer's expectations. I'm sorry if something is not present in this game that you were hoping for. Really I am. I have points I would contest as well. But after weighing everything over the past month I am really excited to see what Bethesda is going to do with Skyrim. They are re-imagining TES for probably the last time on current generation consoles, and Aside from my own expectations I hope for the best.

I think this post does a good job of pinning down what is going on with Skyrim, and why changes are happening.

I wouldn't say they are re-imagining every TES game. Bethesda takes what works in previous games and keeps or adds to it, but at the same time tries to see what new features they can add, and what features were bad for the game and how to replace/improve them. Call of Duty found a good formula and stuck with it, but thats all they did, is stick with it, changing almost nothing between games. What makes TES different is that they each have their own set of features that separates them from the others, and is why people tend to like 1 particular TES game more then others. I personally found daggerfall better then others in terms of story, and oblivion in terms of gameplay, but honestly skyrim is looking like it may dethrone those two, at least in the gameplay department, Daggerfall really did have a very excellent story

I can't say I like the simplification that is going on, Beth tried to re invent the wheel with Oblivion and failed spectacularly, and instead of taking a step back they decided to re invent it yet again... And I don't think they have the knowledge and experience to do it. For all the glorification Bethesda has not enough people who worked on classical, or even near classical RPGs in their midst, their experience is limited to games of different genres and TES, so before making an RPG they need to actually understand what RPG is, form what I heard so far mister Ho9ward for example woun't know a distention of RPG if it bites him. So they are stuck making action/adventure games with open map for now.
I do plan to enjoy Skyrim btw, I can appreciate a good adventure, but I don't' expect anything much better than Oblivion in the north with some adjustments and more primitive character generation system.

Streamling means they make things work better. Instead of doing that they removed things and replaced them with crap from Fallout 3.

I haven't lost faith in Bethesda, I have lost faith in Todd and the current dev team.

I love polls where people vote based off of an assumption, rather than any tangible evidence or experience. :yawn:



Yeah, the money they made from the sales sure proved that! (I do agree with your post however)

touche'

its nice to have genuine feedback on a topic like this.

Honestly I wouldn't know an R.P.G. if it bit me either from your description of what I would need to experience and absorb to know one is. For me TES=RPG, simply because of the amount of game-play elements it had over titles like "of might and magic".

But I too found oblivion, a frustrating watered down rendition of Morrowind. I just don't think that Bethesda was aware of just how far we as fans would take that game... Within a week, I had loop holed, unlimited daedric armor before I hit level 10, over-leveled with training to the point where i trapped the soul of a god, and made a weapon that destroyed an entire city... Did everyone? No. But how far you could push that game broke the balance and mechanic Bethesda intended. I specifically understood every change/limitation Oblivion had vs Morrowind because I specifically had employed the tactics that caused them to implement them.

And at the time of Oblivions release I was pissed as heck. I just didn't appreciate how important exploitation vs Balance was in a game. I've grown as a gamer, and I think see Bethesda doing the same, Oblivion wasnt as good as it should have been

I think reinventing the wheel is an exact description of what Bethesda does sometimes
That said it can work
DF was a decent game, most things about it worked, but Bethesda reinvented the wheel
Great for me and my fellow MW fans, not so good for people who thought DF worked
Then came Oblivion, won't descibe my reaction to it although I've calmed down since but it worked for a lot of people
Same thing is about to happen again

Streamlining is just PR talk for dumbing down. If you are actually improving somthing, youd say that you were improving it, no need for PR talk like "streamlining". If Ob, or Morrow was too complicated for some, then maybe its not, and shouldnt be for them.

Last part of the poll be nice to have "Too an extent" option because if they make it like Gothic 4 they have no right to do that to the series and would be the COD of RPG games

I would agree with most of that statement, if it weren't for how I have grown view Morrowind. Don,t get me wrong I loved the level of depth the stat based leveling scheme and design the game employed.

But having grown through multiple generations of hardware I see that specifically, the level of depth Morrowind had, and where that depth was employed and how, was a result of the hardware of that time.

Suspended belief... I've heard it said many times, by Todd and others. And the best way to accomplish that in Morrowind was through an in depth character development interface. But current tech means suspending a players belief through an interactive dynamic open world not an in game menu where you are considering what action to take. Time spent in a menu is now considered down time, time that should be spent interacting with, and exploring the world at large. I'm not sure how that pattern of thought will pan out. But from the hands on footage I have seen it looks promising.

poll updated. honestly thats what should have always been in the previous option "Who cares?"

thanks for the input

Ugh, polls like this. What's wrong with making as few assumptions about a person's opinion as possible?

Do you believe in Bethesda game studio?
Yes
No
Undecided/Maybe

Is that so hard? It's better to have unspecific options than a bunch of specific ones that risk leaving out several people's feelings.

Do I believe in Bethesda? Absolutely I do. I'm not going to support some decision to put everyone on the Wii only though, nor would I support tons of things if they did so, but I've supported them so far and I will continue to do so. Skyrim has only improved my feelings toward them tenfold. It has also, however, caused my to have huge disapproval of a lot of the fanbase here on the forums.

Is Skyrim going to be the best TES game? I doubt it. Morrowind has a very special place in my heart and it speaks to me in many ways. It's a damn tall order to fill Morrowind's shoes, let alone surpass it. I have no expectations of Skyrim being better than Morrowind in my eyes, and it's unfair to expect that. I'd like to think Skyrim will be as good as if not better than Oblivion though, and I did, in many ways, see Oblivion as a big improvement over Morrowind. I think things are looking very good for Skyrim, and I won't deny the possibility that it still has potential to end up my favorite TES game.

Do I believe Skyrim has the right to re-imagine TES with every installment in the series? By what do you mean "re-imagine"? Does that mean what they've been doing with every new game? Making a whole new stand-alone game? If so, then absolutely 100%. Not only do they have the right, but I encourage it greatly, as it's only served to improve the series in my eyes and it keeps things fresh and new, as opposed to spitting out the same game over and over with a mildly new story.
But if by "re-imagine" as in completely changing the series into something totally different...then absolutely 100%. Bethesda owns TES. They created TES. They have every right to anything and everything they want to the series. Obviously completely betraying the fanbase will result in a huge loss of income for all of them, but they have the right.

I approve of nearly everything I've seen and heard about Skyrim. I am skeptical about some things, but I'm keeping an open-mind and keeping my expectations at a nice mid-range. I'm also not coming to this forum looking for excuses to be unhappy and upset and pretend that everything was better in the past and refusing to give something new a chance.

At this point I firmly believe that the reason why we are seeing so many terrible cuts and omissions in the game world and character development is that they suffer from a lack of leadership, don't have the right mix of intelligence on staff, there is just a crap load in the game that they have not released details on, or.....they have been misleading about released details...

Ad for "re-imagining TES"....pffft! That is BS. The following is a lift of a previous post of mine:

This is about ruining and altering the defined world the game is set in. Change to improve...change to make better is awesome. Altering the game world and taking choices away is regression. This is backwards and this is why so many are unhappy over things we are hearing. Unfortunately, there are so many here that do not understand this or don't care and this is where the [problems start].

If Beth wants to scrap the defined game world....fine....quit making a buck off the TES name and recreate a new world where you won't be saddled with the parts you don't understand or cannot figure out...

Streamlining for me means making the game accessible to all those people who couldn't find the bus to Balmora , call me an elitist if you like but this kind of gamers shouldn't bother playing RPGs at all .
RPGs shouldn't be accessible to everyone in the same spirit that strategy games are not for those who like mindless hacking.
Removing things that work is dumbing down whatever you call it.



You have to give Spellbound/Jowood a point for setting a new low for RPGs that will take some time to break .

I loved Oblivion. It wasn't for the stats or the skills. It was the world. It was the lore.

If Skyrim can become a better world where I can be immersed and become the character I want to be, then I will love Skyrim even more.

We need to stop looking at what was removed and look at the great stuff that was added.

1. Professions/Crafting (Something I felt Oblivion really needed. Who here would see tools laying around in Oblivion and wanted to use them?)
2. Better wildlife (More things other than deer that don't want to kill you...Predators like wolves that won't necessarily attack you depending on what they are doing at the time.
3. Marriage (Really adds to the roleplaying element, allowing us to roleplay an adventuring husband or wife.)
4. Non-lethal tavern brawls
5. More life and more purpose to taverns
6. More unique dungeons
7. Radiant story
8. Random encounters
9. Dragons (I for one am really impressed with the AI in these creatures, and all the possible things they can do. They're A LOT better than Two Worlds dragons - did not fly and pretty much used one type of attack...they certainly could not attack you anywhere in the world)
10. More complex alchemy system and many more ingredients
11. Better bows
12. Insects

...AND MUCH MORE TO BE EXCITED ABOUT

So, let us stop complaining about what has been removed and 'count our blessings' that Betheseda is not like most companies who keep the same formula in their games. It's still an RPG, and I don't think they will ever remove what makes TES an RPG.

Indirectly, but on topic - I think that the point at which Beth went wrong was scrapping the Elder Scrolls Adventures series after Redguard. I think that, in the long run, they would've been much better off to have continued that series (and put Todd Howard in charge of it), and use that for their "streamlined" product, then to have put someone else entirely in charge of the Elder Scrolls RPG series, and loaded it down with every single roleplaying feature anyone could ever want.

That way, they could've tailored two different products to two different (but overlapping, certainly) markets, and given each something much closer to what they actually want, rather than trying to combine everything in a single product and coming up at least a bit short pretty much everywhere.

And there is where your post entered the oblivious gate....

I don't think streamlining is dumbing down nor do I think that anyone thought Morrowind was too complicated.

Rather I think it something to move more smoothly and be less clunky.

I think you are right. I wonder if that was another casualty of the Beth "It's Redundant! Maybe! It must die!" mindset...

Honestly, as someone who's been around these forums since before Oblivion's announcement, I can't help but believe in Bethesda. Mainly because the things that everyone on these forums complain about are generally fixed (or at least attempted) in the next game.

People complained about no Horses in Morrowind -> Oblivion had horses
People complained about the often confusing directions of Morrowind -> Oblivion had the compass
People complained about the super easy difficulty of Morrowind -> Oblivion had powerful level scaling
People complained about the compass making things too easy in Oblivion -> It was scaled back in Fallout 3
People complained about the crazy level scaling in Oblivion -> It was scaled back in Fallout 3
People complained about the lack of crafting in Morrowind and Oblivion -> Crafting appeared in Fallout 3

I could really go on and on, but I think people can get the picture.

The problem is that scaled back doesn't solve the problem of the compass. The GPS compass looks the same in the videos I've seen of Skyrim as that of Oblivion. The compass works in Fallout 3 because that game is in an era where it's possible to have it. Having it in a world of horses, armor and swords just seems stupid to me. The GPS compass needs to be removed COMPLETLY and replace with actual directions that people can follow.

I guess that the removal of classes and attributes was due to people complaining about those as well?

Yeah, the problem with actual directions is in fact a fully voiced game. You can't rerecord stuff every time a location changes, and as people saw in Morrowind, spending 30-45 minutes looking for a yurt in the ashlands doesn't add much to the game.

I never said every change was due to complains, and to be honest, I am very interested in seeing how the character system plays out. I want to play it before I judge it.

i thought the debate was about removing stuff and making the game more simple not about changing game mechanics

its their game and their story

only way I can influence them is by giving my silly opinions on these forums and by actually buying their games

and yes I think Skyrim will be better than MW and OB combined

What picture? That Beth sometimes manages to deal with things that people complain about?

I don't think anybody's denying that. But I'm not sure what that has to do with the topic at hand, unless you're prepared to claim that people complained that there were too many skills or too many attributes or too many armor slots or too many non-aesthetic differences between races or any of the other things that they've removed in their attempt to "streamline" the game.

Personally, I don't recall anybody ever demanding that any of those things be removed.