i dont know if you guys/girls wanted to continue this thread. but if you want just continue the Debate and please lets be Civil

There really isn't much sense in further debating this, clearly everybody has their own opinion on how TES should be and no amount of arguing is going to change that.

Edit: Well but just for the sake of discussion...
I'm still pretty upset about the reduced armor slots. I'm the type of player who enjoys creating a unique character, and merged armor pieces are undoubtedly "dumbing down" the game, there is really no other reason for it.

I'm with Dankus.

I can easily see that in some parts of the game it was Dumbed down, no doubt.
But I don't have any fear of this continuing after Skyrim, I believe Bethesda realized by now that people did value a lot of the things they got rid of, and I'll thank the people complaining for giving bigger notice to the Issue, if you could call it that

Things I have gripe with:

Melee combat is better that in previous titles, but still far from perfect.

Perks that give you +25% damage are lame, I like perks because they give you unique abilities, damage should be governed by other means(skill+attributes).

New magic effects(wall, ray, etc) are great, but.. you know what many want - advanced Spellmaking. And more effects, in the meaning of spell effects(Levitation, Jump, Unlock).

Writing and Quests that too heavily rely on Quest Markers. No directions or verbal explanations, just magical marker to the most precise location of an item/NPC. Playing without markers is confusing, since my character should not know where to look for this or that cave, no one told it to him. I don't buy the argument that all the NPCs mark stuff on your map, since many times they should not even know it.

Too many Radiant Quests. I almost always avoid them because they have almost zero writer's work, and I don't like playing too obvious game-governed random objectives. Maybe Radiant System is not good enough yet to conceal this fact and hold believability. I for one, never buy it, it's too strikingly obvious for me. "Kill Bandit Leader" or "get the item from master chest at the end of given dungeon" "steal specifically placed items which don't exist without this quest".

World revolves around the player, it is built obviosly specifically for the player: Master chests with treasures everywhere, too much gold and artifacts are thrown at the player. Everyone praises the player, as if he had some sort of insecurity, and they needed to say good things to him all the time. And for some reason player is made to be the smartest (or should I say everyone else in Skyrim is dumb) person in the world, he solves "problems" for NPCs that only a five-year old will have difficulties with.

Bad dialogues, both in writing and in player interaction. Speech is almost useless, because we rarely have more than two "yes me help you/no i kill you" responses. Some responses are completely out of character, leading to...

Too much having to play-pretend roleplaying, too little in-game tools and features for roleplayers(who should be the core audience of the game).

I won't discuss it with anybody, just said it, and done with it.

Well, from a gameplay standpoint, we only lost 2 slots from oblivion. But it you look at it from a technical standpoint, there are more slots then morrowind 2 times over. So the ability for modders at least, to make a more complex armor system then morrowind is entirely possible.

Personally I don't care about the "dumbing down". From what I see is just a few people with strong opinions trying to change the way Bethesda think.

The best games and I feel are the better selling and better received are Skyrim, Fable 2, Witcher 2 and open world action adventure like Zelda and Assassin Creed.

I much prefer effort being put into storyline, graphics and gameplay than over complicated character classing. Provided I can choose a path of specialisation without having to own a manual to get it right and provided I can customise the look of my character then I am more than happy. What is more important to me is the ambience and detail of the world I am questing in.

Moral of the story: people have *gasp* opinions!

I'm absolutely loving all these new slots Skyrim has. My current character is wearing 7 ear rings, 2 lip rings and 1 nose ring: that's 11 slots for accessories with no fuss. At the same time I can equip backpacks, scarves, cloaks and any other thing a modder can create. None of it conflicts and I still have something like 20+ unused slots left. This was totally impossible in Morrowind and Oblivion. I used to dream of someday having this many body slots to play around with. It's wonderful.

I agree, seeing how many things people safely add to the game, although Bethesda should've also used these slots in vanilla. Maybe they didn't have much time left for that.

They didn't use them because the more armor slots that are used, the less detail each armor piece can be given, and each armor piece lessens the total number of NPCs that can be on the screen.

https://www.gamesas.com/topic/1207390-skyrim-fan-interview/


Furthermore, with the dual enchanting system, we have the exact same number of enchantment slots as Morrowind did, so nothing was lost from Morrowind -> in terms of how many enchants/powers you can have.

The number of enchantment slots was never a big deal to me. In Morrowind, you could wear clothing under armor, and robes over it, giving you the ability to have shirt and pants visible in the joints or other uncovered areas (such as bracers with the rest of the arm uncovered), or to create a "half-armored" look. I never needed more than a fraction of that for enchanting purposes, even with my "professional enchanter" character. In MW, you could mix and match armor styles (even different size left and right pauldrons, etc.), or if you didn't want the armored look, just throw a robe over the top and hide everything. It was great. Now, they've given us the slots back, without the customization. Again, it offers the Action/Adventure benefits while taking away the RPG aspects, and some posters say "see, it's just as good as it was"......but only to their way of playing and thinking.

The techincal limitations could have been worked around by having half of the armor sets with a cuirass that overlaps the groin and hips, and the other half with seperate upper and lower sections. They did the one-piece thing in Morrowind for Ordinator armor, where it made sense for the design, and I have no problem with that. The frame-rate hit shouldn't be that significant for one extra slot. It's still not that big of a deal, though, compared to the removal of layered clothing/armor/robes.

Well, you can't just make two entirely different armor systems in one game, where half the armors are merged, and the other half are not, it wouldn't work with the perk system, "matching set - get an armor bonus if you wear 4 pieces of matching armor, unless you are wearing a 5 piece armor set, then it takes 5", It would just be weird, and totally inconsistent, and the base game's armor have to be consistent.


In all my time of playing Morrowind, the only time I can recall wearing layers of armor/clothes/robes, was when they were all enchanted. What's the point of wearing clothes under your armor, unless they are enchanted, if all they do is get covered up by the armor?

And wearing robes over armor makes little to no sense to begin with, armor is bulky as hell, robes magically just growing to fit over armor makes little sense. I could understand robes over clothes, but not robes over armor, and even then, since robes cover up clothes, what's the point of wearing the clothes if you can't see them, and they don't do anything via enchants?

And actually, what they did benefits the RPG aspect more then it does the action adventure aspect. If we went back to Morrowind's armor system the entire concept of armor perks, and matching set bonuses simply wouldn't work, because of the sheer number of pieces needed to get a matching set. By lowering the total number of armor pieces, they gave us a deeper armor system via perks, and with the dual enchanting system they gave us the same number of enchants as Morrowind had, thus equaling out the number of enchants loss from lowering the total number of armor pieces.

If they had removed armor pieces, not offered dual enchanting, and not added in perks, that would have been a lean to a more action-adventure game, like Zelda, where having things like stats, and enchants, and upgrading your character via perks, is not what the game is about.


What you are thinking of with the robes/armor/clothes actually benefits a simulation game, like the sims, not an RPG. RPGs are not about how much you can play dress-up with your character, they are about using stats/perks/attributes/skill and similar things to overcome obstacles, and make decisions in a game world.

It doesn't occur to you that the Perk is flawed? What kind of sense does it make to have a "bonus" for wearing matching armor? I've seen that silliness in other games, and it didn't make any sense there either. All it does is limit dress-up roleplay opportunities.


Roleplay.


Presumably you never heard of a "surcoat," which was a robe-like garment worn over medieval armor. It was also common to wear various types of robes over chainmail. Armor protects you from damage, but doesn't protect you from the weather very well.

Again, we're talking about roleplay, obviously. Not everything in a roleplaying game is about game-winning advantage.


If that were the case, nobody would need more than one kind of armor, and there would be no point in making it removable. Just Perk it up as your character levels, and never mind what anything looks like.

I'm assuming that you're hoping to grow up to be a lawyer, since you seem to prefer debating the nitpicking details and putting words in other people's mouths rather than discussing the issue in a constructive manner.

Oblivion had armor covering several slots.

And perks wouldn't be the problem. They'd just check the slots. Orcish armor on head slot? Yes. Orcish armor on chest slot? Yes. Orcish armor on boot slot? No. No perk bonus for you.

And may I say that I don't like this "similar types of armor" perks stuff at all? It forces my character to wear a certain style of armor to get better results, even if I want to go for a different look, like a hood instead of a helmet.


Take a look at the Redoran guards. They wear a ful set of bonemold armor, but you can see their red shirts through the gaps at the joints. And they wear a skirt over their greaves. It gives them a unique appearance and sets them apart from other bonemold wearers.

It's all about style, individualizing your character and making him fit a certain role you'd like him to fit. Why not have one arm heavily armored to while the other is almost bare for faster weapon movement? In Morrowind, you could do this with all kind sof armor styles, in Skyrim you'd have to hope for a specific armor to have that looks (there isn't any, btw).


What's the point of wearing socks when they are covered by shoes and trousers anyway?

Again, style and character customization.


RPGs are about playing a role. Role Playing Game, in case you hadn't noticed. And clothing is just as much part of creating and customizing your own character as is which skills you progress, which quests you take, which factions you join, which skills you have used prior to the game (open classes ), which moral choices you make etc.

Skyrim was a huge step forward after Oblivion's gigantic, gigantic step backwards from Morrowind. I didn't pay much attention to the previous thread, since the video the thread was based on nauseates me horribly, but I think the focus here is getting missed, and simply comes down to how each side fundamentally views how the games should play and function. Personally, I wish the series was much more like Morrowind, in fact, I wish it were even more Morrowind than Morrowind, and that is why I use the Requiem mod. That said, I fail to see how the game is being "dumbed down". If "dumbing down" means the gameplay being fundamentally changed, nor for the better or worse, then, yes, the series is being "dumbed down". But I imagine that is not what it means, and so I have to say that change does not necessarily mean something has been "dumbed down". It may be something you dislike, or perhaps even hate, though. Using a buzzword to (inaccurately) describe your negative outlook on something does not make it so.


No, RPGs are not about playing dress-up, but they are also not solely about leveling and stats. They're about both. Remove one element and you don't have an RPG, you have an action-adventure game (Dark Souls) or an exploration sandbox (Minecraft).

Like I said in the last thread, there are two competing types of gamers here, RPG fans and Action/Adventure fans (This is a scale of reference, so there will be people that fit all along the spectrum). What RPG fans find to be challenging is completely different from what Action/Adventure fans find to be challenging, primarily because RPGs and Action games are about the only genres in all of gaming that exist as true "opposites" which is what makes a hybrid game like TES such a difficult thing to develop.

As RPG elements are removed from the series, the RPG fans use the term "Dumbing Down" because the things they find challenging are being removed. From their perspective, they are using the correct term. From the Action/Adventure perspective the game is not being dumbed down though because more Action/Adventure challenges are being added. Because there is a fundamental divide between these two groups, both of them believe themselves to be correct and both of them ARE correct. The Elder Scrolls ARE being dumbed down while at the same time they ARE NOT being dumbed down. One might comment on how this kind of duality is present in both our world and in the lore of TES...

RPG fans = Dumbing down = Bad
Action/Adventure fans = Streamlining = Good

I still say that video is utter nonsense and only watched a little of it.

Dress up opportunities are not part of RPGs, and from an RPG standpoint, yes, it does make sense.

Again, that has nothing to do with roleplay, that's something you do in a simulation game.

-No I haven't heard of a surcoat
-chainmail is relatively flat, most armors, like Daedric or Dragon armor are several times more bulky
-and again, you are confusing the concepts of an RPG with that of a simulation game.

False, because different types of armor offer different types of protection, and when combined with smithing, enchanting, and perks, what armor you take varies wildly.

Your statement would be true if smithing, enchanting, perks, stats, and everything that makes the game an RPG didn't exist.


You seem to not know the difference between a RPG, like BG, Fallout, NWN, and Skyrim, and a simulation game like the sims, and seem to think that they are the same.

Being able to dress up in different layered clothes has absolutely nothing to do with an RPG, just like getting married, having a farm, and raising kids, are not what RPGs are about, those are features of a life simulation game, like the sims.

RPGs are about using stats, skills, perks, and weapons/armor, to defend yourself from enemies, while overcoming obstacles in ways based on the skills you have.


The removal of armor slots did nothing to the RPG aspect of the game, it lessened the life simulation part of it, but not the RPg part of it.

What part of ROLEPLAY, as in PLAYING a ROLE don't you understand?

The stats and skills, perks and equips are there to describe the character in a world that can only think in numbers (computers) and to simplify concetps to make them calculatable (a system as complex as reality is impossible to emulate with today's technology, and interactign with such a system woudl require far more than just mouse and keyboard)

The quintessential part of an RPG is you taking control of a character and live his life. Of course a battle-torn fantasy world is more interesting than an everyday life setting. Of course RPGs are actionified and grimdark. But the vital thing is to take a character and live through him.

That is what RPGs are, everything else is pure mechanics to make the roleplay work.

Because the way in which you are using the term RPG is directly countered by literally every single RPG from D&D, to BG, to NWN, to Fallout, and pretty much every game that is called a RPG, sans Elder Scrolls? When every "RPG" works different then TES, then what's more likely, that all of those games are not RPGs, or that Es is NOT?


The simple FACT of the matter is, playing dress up, being able to start a family/raise kid, building homes, is NOT what an RPG is about, that is a SIMULATION game.

RPGs can be linear, have chapters that prevent quests from the previous chapter from being done once you pass the chapter mark, and only allow you to talk to NPCs to trade things, or to use a speech check to get past a quest, and have one piece armors, and still be MORe of an RPG then a game that allows for 10 piece armors, because number of armor slots has LITERALLY NOTHING to do with it being an RPG, that has to do with how much of a simulation game you can make it.


There is a fundamental difference between simulation games, and RPG, and while both allow you to play a role, and live out lives, like the sims games do, stuff like total number of clothing slots has nothing to do with the game's depth as an RPG, only the depth to which you can play simulated dress up.

And its this constant false assertion that simulation games are RPG that is brain-wracking, literally, the only people I have ever seen this claim be made with is the most die-hard of TES fans.

As I have observed a number of times, in various conversations, you appear to meta-game these games, rather than roleplaying them. I'm not saying you're wrong to play the games as you like, but you're clearly missing the concept of playing from the character's point of view, with the character's skills, feelings, and view of the world.


One could argue that your version of roleplay is what people do in an action game. In many ways, TES games are simulation games, though. They provide the opportunity to do in-depth role-play of a character's life, to the point of allowing eating, sleeping, manipulating "clutter" objects, robbing and killing NPCs who have nothing to do with quests, and, yes, dressing in various types of clothing. This is all part of the Bethesda philosophy of "do what you want, go where you want" in these games.


You've heard of it now. It's worn over armor.

And I'm not confusing anything. It rains and snows in Tamriel. Are you suggesting that we're supposed to ignore the weather, because it's an "RPG" and not a "simulation game"? My character doesn't need to wear a hood when it rains, because it's not a "simulation game"? Why do the developers even bother to put weather in the game, if we're not supposed to take note of it?


I play those games (except for Skyrim.) They are all different from one another in this regard. Fallout just has "armor"; one slot. (FO3 adds slots, but "armor" is still all one piece, except for the helmet.) BG has like seven different equipment slots, including a cloak that can be worn over armor.


Very odd logic at work here. The main characteristic of a roleplay game that distinguishes it from other genres is the playing of a role. The more choices presented to the player, the more tools the player has to play that role. In playing a role, you are effectively "stepping into" a character, and acting out the part that the character plays in the world.

Without the "life simulation" stuff, you're just operating an automaton. What you've basically described above, regarding "defending yourself from enemies" and "overcoming obstacles," is a pretty good description of a hack-n-slash action game, but it almost completely eliminates the character, the whole point of roleplaying, from the picture (except as a repository of "stats.")

It is. Any video that tries to be educational and informative and then shows a picture of two children (probably not even ten years old) whenever "casual" is mentioned... well, that video is not a good one.

Have you seen how many clothing mods there are for TES.