Are you so sure that they're sticking to their vision and not just doing what publishers ask them?

I have a sneaking suspicion you'll be singing a different tune when TESV is finally on the shelves. But for that I guess we'll have to wait and see.

I was gonna say "Me".

---

Either way, I really didn't expect this thread to take off like this. I posted this last night thinking 'Okay, somebody's gonna just be like "Yeah, sure, whatever."' and it'd be done. I'm also shocked that no big arguments have broken out or anything, which I originally put in my post before my power turned off.

But yes, it was the RPG Codex. I searched "Michael Kirkbride" and that's what came up, and I saw somebody complaining about Morrowind and I was like:

When I saw their complaints that look eerily similar to the ones I've seen here about Oblivion, I couldn't help but laugh and post this...

I'm really hoping TES:V will be better in terms of roleplaying, skills, etc. They've shown a lot of promise with Fallout 3, and they said that system's been worked on so now the next game will have an even better system than Fallout 3. It really could be anything. After reading what people had to say over there and linking it back to here I realize when playing the new game I am going to have to make sure to see it for what it is and not for what I was expecting. The first game we've all played was our first introduction to the series. Many of us weren't expecting a huge open RPG world, or if we were it wasn't nearly what we expected. Now that new games are (and have been) coming out we start to think on terms of what we'd like to be in the new game, and what Bethesda's capable of, and then we are highly disappointed when it isn't a "revamp" of the last game, it's a new game entirely.

I think what happens is that people grow very familiar with games and attach themselves to that being the ideal form of the game, as with anything we highly enjoy we'll admit it has some flaws, but to those of us who like [insert game here] those flaws are worth it. Then Bethesda comes by and mixes everything up and people go: "Wait a minute, where'd "X" go and why is "Y" in the game now?!". And for them, the game is "wrecked" and disappointing because it isn't like they expected, and what made the game they started with the game they started with will not be and will never be what makes the next game what the next game is. It isn't that Bethesda is making the games more "main-streamed" it's that Bethesda is making games different each and every time. Daggerfall wasn't Arena 2.0, Morrowind wasn't Daggerfall 2.0, and Oblivion wasn't Morrowind 2.0.

And TES:V isn't gonna be Oblivion 2.0, it's going to feel entirely different. It's the way the game series has progressed since day 1 and yet people still argue and make the same complaints of the next game "being a let-down". These "the game is good" vs "the game is awful" arguments among fans have been going on for 9 years, if not longer. I don't know about you guys, but I'm going to not expect the next game to be anything like any of the others besides being an Open World RPG and taking place in Tamriel.

I'll admit that Oblivion is a great stand-alone game and the main reason I was disappointed was because I was expecting Morrowind, plus a bunch of stuff. It turned out to be Morrowind, minus a bunch of stuff, and plus manual blocking.

Which, again, really makes me wonder about Todd Howard's "plus one sequel" theory.

And the main thing to point out is that, each time, it's mostly a new group of people arguing because a lot of the original fans are totally fed-up or are just over video games in general.

The pruning was well deserved in Morrowind, if you ask me. I enjoy both the overwhelmingly open world of Daggerfall and the intricate, hand-crafted one of Morrowind. Bethesda knew since they started work on Redguard that smaller, more detailed worlds would be a welcome alternative to the procedural worlds of their previous games, and they pursued Morrowind's world with gusto. I consider the scrapping of skills to have been a fair exchange for creating Morrowind's world, one of unparalleled detail.

Oblivion's world could be argued to be just as magical, but we lost even more skills and all we really got in exchange were better stealth, buggy physics, and NPC schedules. I don't know. :shrug:

Sure TES3 was full of disappointments. Number of factions was cut by ~50%. Skills were cut by ~25%. Landmass was cut by ~99.999%. svcky birthsigns displaced the great dis/advantage system. Fame/infamy system is no good compared to social groups. You don't sink in water and gold has no weight. No banks or buyable houses or ships. Non-lethal diseases. Tiny caves. Liches that are unable to pwn you in a matter of seconds. Can't be demoted in guilds. The beginning gets repetitive. No random quests.

But the added, good things make it equal to TES2 in my book. Trading items is possible, alchemy is kinda better, even if it's way too easy. Repairing is alo fun, but also too easy. Light sources you can move around. Spears and crossbows.

Still, I never forget the first time I walked from Seyda Neen to Blamora. There was this silt strider, but I wanted to see the lands between. I thought it would take me some time to get there, but actually it was an arrowshot away, just a hill to go around. Same with every town I travelled to. After TES2 that felt terrible. Huge number of caves to keep you occupied during the trips felt good in the beginning, but got annoying when they, too, were too packed up. TES4 still suffers from the same fault: too tiny to feel believable.

Truth. Just ask Edgar Allen Poe.

:)

But look where they've gone since then, they've gone up and beyond Oblivion. NPCs run and duck behind cover when you're firing a gun, they tell you not to swing that melee weapon so close to them, they run from grenades and actually notice if you miss a shot. There are a few destructible items like exploding cars, you can leave traps places and have enemies walk into them, NPCs can have different voices even if they are the same race. Males and Females have different head configurations instead of being based off of "complexion", Schedules are more complex and NPCs can lean on walls, put their hands over a fire, and there can be custom animations (And not just one) for getting into chairs and other things. They also added children, and they aren't just strewn about everywhere, they're in places that make sense. They added custom actions like taking slaves, doing drugs (Skooma! Skooma!), talking to a giant tree, having unique effects and shaders for different enemies. They added hallucinations, flashbacks, the ability to drink water, they made it so your feet move when you walk up a hill. They made more content and story for each and every individual area and they added some very interesting NPCs (although since it's a nuclear wasteland, there aren't many). You can make your own weapons, repair armor using other armor pieces, talk to some animals and tell them to do things, have custom cinematics, have NPCs make poses and gestures when you're talking to them, have "speech-checks" in dialogue, they added random NPC encounters and some very interesting quests, they also added many more skills.

TES:V will have even more than that jump from Oblivion. We have to keep that in mind.

They needed to take those "steps-backwards" to make a huge leap forward.

it's not so much that people think morrowind is the best game ever "now." It has more to do with what there first game in the elder scrolls series was. For a lot of us it was morrowind. And as stated yes, there will be a lot of people comparing oblivion to the next elder scrolls and treating it the same way many have done so with Oblivion.

There was no tradeoff. Seriously, how much space can a single skill take? How much space does it take t make my character able to hold onto a wall? How much spae does it take to add a few spears? The list goes on, I'm certain the reason for everything was simplicity or laziness.

Well, the wall-climbing is tricky. They don't have any ladders for a reason. They haven't been able to figure it out yet.

But you are forgetting time.Developers only have a limited amount of time before they can release their game so if they were to busy focusing on the lanscapes in morrowind then they might not have had enough time to add climbing before release day,so time is very important.

Gold not having weight was a plus IMO
Anything can "pwn" you depending on your level
By "random" do you mean when I talk to a dark brotherhood member and he wants me to retrieve his child from the dark brotherhood??

Nothing that makes no sense to me is plus imo.
Well, usually the liches pwned themselves with their fireballs, but you got the point: Vampire Ancients etc were truly frightening, partly cause of the bug that made them able to cast all their spell in a split second which cause you to die. I've never feared an enemy in TES3 or 4. Well... Daedroth in TES3 were badasses.
Yes, random almost like that. I'm sick of Fargoth's Ring over and over again, same quests in same order over and over again... Why not have an infinite source of side quests, but not only those?

If you decide to sneak through kagoruhn at level 5, you really fear those fire atronachs.

Some random quests would have been nice, but other than that, you don't have to take the seyda neen quests each time, and depending on where your character spends his/her time, you can have totally different quests in all sorts of orders for 3 or 4 different playthroughs in Morrowind. There really was variety if you looked for it.

I really wish gold had weight though. I remember thinking that while playing Morrowind, the other day.

I didn't know making spears playable took up gratuitous amounts of developer time.

It takes time because they have to come up with a separate animation. Any animation for the other weapons would look awkward.

I was playing Fallout 3 and I noticed that I put my lead pipe away as if I was sheathing a longsword. Looked pretty ridiculous.

On the other hand, spears are totally worth it. And I would have gladly sacrificed a number of the more useless things in Oblivion (horses, physics, etc.) to see spears.

On the subject though.... why medium armor? whyy?????

I know, thats why I said gratuitous. It wouldn't take very long for a big development company to put in a few animations.

I will say that Daggerfall is REALLY hard compared to Morrowind, and they are vastly different. Morrowind and Oblivion are more similar than different if you compare the jumps... and Arena and Daggerfall while very different are more similar that their descendants. It took me forever to even get past the cave I was in when I played Daggerfall. I put it down and picked it back up to play the same thing over and over again because it was so flippin' hard! Morrowind allowed me to leisurely step off a boat and take a safe walk to Balmora... Oblivion let me safely out of the sewers to the safe falls of the Imperial City... I prefer the less aggravating start for sure!

This is something I think they keep taking steps backwards on. I want to be able to find a Storm Atronaut at level 1 if I've wandered into the wrong place. High level enemies that could easily kill me make them frightening. Scary enemies make the game feel more atmospheric. Making the game feel more atmospheric makes the game more immersive. Making the game more immersive makes the game better. A better games sells more!

My skills need to be more important, too. If I'm a armourless thief that knows only about bows, I should be avoiding enemies at ALL costs. If I get into a fight, the chances are, I'll die. I'll NEED to pick off my enemies from a distance with bows. I also want my mages to have to resort to defensive magic. It's pretty ridiculous that I can play as a standard mage without ever using a shield spell. All I need to know how to do is spam destruction spells and summon daedra.

Basically, I want to have a stealthy experience as a stealthy character, and a magical experience as a mage.

It's a game with lizard and cat people??????? And constantly becoming encumbered and having to drop items because of gold was a huge pain in the ass.

:thumbsup:

I would rather have it that there is no level scaling except for things like bosses & companions. So that way the world won't be entirely conquerable. Nobody likes that feeling of "Yup... I kill things in 1 hit now.", applied everywhere. It gets very dull.


:thumbsup: x2

Oblivion was terrible and still is terrible. This doesn't change my opinions on it.

I'm proud to say I'm a fan of Morrowind who started off with Fallout 3, then played Oblivion, then played Morrowind. I prefer Morrowind over Oblivion and nostalgia has absolutely nothing to do with it. And as someone who isn't in the least bit blinded by nostalgia, I've been able able to judge all 3 games by the games they really are. I feel that while Oblivion definitely had it's fair share of improvements, too much was lost from Morrowind. I don't know what TES V will be like but by the looks of Fallout 3, I have a good feeling it will be more like Morrowind. Fallout 3, if you look at it as a TES game, is even more "dumbed down" than Oblivion was. But if you look at it as simply another Bethesda game and only consider the improvements made from Oblivion, you can see that TES V could be really good.

On the topic at hand, I've never played it myself, but from what I've seen people say, I have absolutely no idea how someone could say it was more generic fantasy than Daggerfall was. It just makes no sense to me. Morrowind is so completely alien in comparison to Oblivion that I just don't see how people thought Daggerfall was even more alien. Perhaps being able to compare it to Oblivion is an advantage Daggerfall fans didn't have at the time. :shrug:

But, to be honest, I can see why Daggerfall fans complained the way they did. Cities are much, much smaller in Morrowind. The main quest is much more linear. The world is much smaller. The skills are more streamlined and many were dropped. And oddly enough, the same is said by Morrowind fans about Oblivion, with the exception of the smaller cities complaint. Morrowind fans say that in Oblivion, the main quest is much more linear, the world feels much smaller, and the skills are more streamlined and many were dropped. I think that really just shows that while the complaints may be valid, we TES fans are just terrible at adapting to the changes between each game.

It's not surprising. However, I don't honestly feel I'll have a hard time leaving Cyrodiil. I think the thing for me is that I didn't particularly "fall in love" with Cyrodiil for very long. I liked it for a few months, but then I got bored. The issue for me is that Morrowind is far too old now for me to enjoy without staring at everything and being reminded that it's all
Infernal City Spoiler

It makes everything kinda pointless when you know everything's
Infernal City Spoiler

I like the games, and I agree that Morrowind has much more content than Oblivion, but I never really had a problem with Oblivion, could be because I started off with it and wasn't used to Morrowind, or just 'cause I'm one of those people that generally look past those sorts of things. I just sit back,mod, roleplay, and wait now. That's actually why I started modding, waiting for TES:V. I still like Oblivion and I'm not going to downplay it, it's a very good game.

Personally, even knowing that, I still enjoy playing it. There's no reason to not play an entire game because you know every bit of land you step on will be covered in ash in a few years. It's still an amazing game and the actual game will never disappear. Though I do get a little sad every time I pass by a cute and cuddly Scrib and think about their inevitable doom.