I'm not 100% sure what you're saying here, as the pausing and planning options in NwN2 (and I'm assuming from your frasing M&M7) are part of the core D&D framework from which the game was designed upon, gameplay wise at least. It's one of the things I loved alot about NwN2 and I'm relatively sure being based entirely on D&D makes it pretty "hardcoe rpg". I dunno' though.



Well I used to play text based browser rpgs, but I definitely haven't played rpgs since they first emerged, so if that's what being a hardcoe rpg gamer means then you have me beat by far.



I have!!! Awesome game, I liked Awakening too alot, especially building up your keep that rocked. I can't wait for number two, I hope they continue Morrigan's thing, although to be honest her DLC svcked lol.



I completely get you here, the level scaling and tons of magical gear was one of the very very few things I disliked about Oblivion. It's one of the good improvements they made to FO3 in F:NV in my oppinion



Yep, that is true, but when a game is so initially boring you just get frustrated I really don't want to waste my time wrangling with it.



This is where we disagree the most I think, I don't think the reason for the Morrowind/Oblivion split is because of the casual rpg and hardcoe rpg crowds. I do like alot of the hardcoe rpgs, that's (the hardcoe rpg features) not why I quit playing so fast.



Not really sure what qualifies as dumbing down to you, so I'm not sure how to respond to this :/



Like I said above, not sure how to respond to this. What do you mean by dumbing down?



Oblivion is my favourite RPG of all time, but I have the sneaking sensation Skyrim might take it's place, I'm so hyped!!!

Aw, I miss the House strongholds from Morrowind :spotted owl:

Wise life decision, and wise comment. Congratulations.

OK, maybe I misjudged you, or misread you, and you are not a casual RPG gamer, and hated and dropped Morrowind because of some unlucky incident, so sorry. :icecream:

As for dumping down, well, I can not know where to start:

How about being able to win the game in level 1, or being able to complete the quests without look up much from the compass, or without the need to listen to the instructions very much, or not being to experience your initial Morrowind experience at all, or having a lot less conflicting factions, guilds, quests, and their confronting actions and view points.

Being able to jump around the world at the beginning of the game without the need for exploration, no need to prepare yourself for anything beforehand, and no need to think of strategies to win a situation.

I can go on and on if I can get the time, but I have to bolt. Sorry...

Very well said.

Kind of hard to argue against a game being a little dumbed down when you can win it at level one, at least from a roleplaying game point of view So yeah, that's definitely not how I played the game, but it is a very real possibility so you win ^^



Not so sure about this one, I really like being able to just run around exploring everywhere and enjoying the scenery from the get go, it's why Bethesda games are so unique for me, but at the same time I get what you are talking about when you're saying it's so easy to do you don't need to take any precautions. Mixed bag I guess.



Have a nice time, wherever it is you are going :turned:

Edit:



Thanks!!!

I never could understand why people love first person fantasy rpg's.... I could never get into any of them until I played Oblivion and I would have enjoyed the overly simple combat and easily exploitable magic system just for the quests if it wasn't for the extreme scaling of enemies and loot. Random thugs being tougher than liches I fought a few levels ago made the game beyond absurd. I liked the side-quest designs and like I said... level scaling killed the game. I am not sure if I am casual or not, but I do enjoy most 3rd person perspective games. For some reason I expect a great, "action-oriented" combat system if a game is first person... maybe its from playing FPS games since the wolfenstein era. I would not mind them ironing out combat and reducing the exploration a bit while keeping quest originality and diversity. Those are my priorities though.

The cities in Oblivion don't get enough credit for the subtle yet realistic diversity. I think one reason why a lot of people were disappointed is that Imperial City was supposed to be more of clash of cultures and ended up being really homogeneous. I think there is a half-orc half-elf in the food shop.

I'm sure threads saying that were common after Morrowind's release. After all a game svcks if it isn't like the previous ones (critique about Oblivion and Fallout 3). It also svcks if it's like the previous one (critique about Starcraft 2) :shrug:

Are you saying Morrowind cannot be completed at lvl 1?



I could jump around the world in Baldur's Gate 1, 2 , fallout 1, 2, Daggerfall, are these games dumped down? And I don't recognize what you say about not needing to prepare yourself, I find Oblivion entirely more challenging that Morrowind.



It's funny you mention this, I encountered something similar, I remember I was constantly being told how morrowind didn't scale to your lvl and loot wasn't leveled, so I was really excited when I entered a daedric shrine far north of red mountain, I was a petty lvl 5, but I was a really powerful mage already, my agenda was to kill the Daedric Lord that summons when you steal from a shrine, because I wanted his daedric weapon. I killed him....and he didn't have a Daedric Weapon...He had a dwemer weapon....reloaded....Still Dwemer...reloaded...Dwemer, reloaded, dwemer, loaded, dwemer, loadwemerloadwemerFuuuuuUUU-!

Apparently Morrowind didn't feel I was ready to fight a daedric lord with a daedric weapon, even though I killed him without touching him at all.

Have you tried it?


When added to the fact that you are told exactly where to go and what to do for the quests, with map markers, compass markers and the lot, yes. You can not say that about those games.

In Morrowind you had to think about the quest and decide where you would start, then think about the routes and decide about the best route and then use the in-game travel facilities, to reach the destination, then look around for the signs and check your quest notes, and ask around and so on...

In Oblivion, you get to quest, then use fast travel and jump to the nearest map marker to the destination, then look at compass and start to follow it until you reach you target, and you are done.

You can not find this level of mindless ease of doing quests in any of the games you mentioned.

Edit:

Where did you hear that Morrowind was not level scaled? I wished it was, as I wised Oblivion was, as I hope Skyrim would.

And I have played and immensely enjoyed games with no level scaling at all.

You can do this in Morrowind. You can do it fairly easily, really. Hardly anything in the game actually has to be killed, the things that do are easy to kill even at level one unless your character build is terrible (especially if you've got the right equipment on hand), and absolutely no enemy in the entire game poses a serious threat thanks to the fact that backtracking and sidestepping automagically trumps literally every single opponent in the game.


This seems like a fair point until you consider the fact that Oblivion simplifies getting to quests and quest objectives. The quests themselves are actually more complex in Oblivion in terms of how they played and what their goals involved. I don't think it's fair to claim that they dumbed the whole game down because it's easier to find the target in an assassination quest when you're then left with multiple ways of killing that target and different rewards based on how you do it, or when it's far simpler to find your way to the things you're killing when Oblivion then has you kill them with a handful of troops fighting alongside you and pushing up the battlefield.


See what I already said about the quests. This applies to the guilds as well. There aren't as many, but they're far more differentiated in terms of quest content and the kind of gameplay you can expect from the quests that they offer. You're basically saying that it's dumbed down because the deeper content it provides doesn't give you as much fake variety as Morrowind's did - it's like people who claim that Daggerfall is deeper than Morrowind because it has more factions even though most of those factions are literal copy-paste jobs of each other.

It's not just these either - most everything in Oblivion that was cut back was cut back so that they could focus on adding more depth to the content they did include. Even the skills, the other thing people commonly complaint about being cut down on, are significantly more interesting on a skill-by-skill basis than they were in Morrowind, since they offer you unique abilities and advantages as you increase them.


There's absolutely no strategy involved in Morrowind aside from "walk backwards and charge attack, step forward and attack, step back before they attack back, walk backwards and charge attack, sidestep extremely slow projectile, repeat" regardless of your opponent or your character's level. That strategy takes no preparation either. Oblivion's not a giant leap forward, but at the very least enemies are capable of consistently moving forward while attacking and arrows move at a speed fast enough to catch something more than half a foot away so there's still some extra challenge there.

EDIT: Morrowind's level scaling isn't nearly as aggressive as Oblivion's. That doesn't mean that it doesn't happen - it certainly did, it was just done... well, I guess the best word for how Morrowind did it would be "properly", since most people don't even notice that it's there.

It was actually a rhetorical question, I haven't personally done it, but some guy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1IRxTN-_kU, in 7.30 minutes too.



In all quests you have to think and decide where you would start, the fact of the matter is that this is such a trivial thing that it's redundant, the only reason why it was time consuming in Morrowind was because they were so vague. We went from a perfectly adequate system in daggerfall where you can ask people where things are, and they would point in the general direction, and if they knew any better they would mark the location on the map, to a system where you get lengthy vague descriptions, that can't be discussed, by people who for some reason can't mark the location on your map even though they know the way there.



Then what do you do? you cannot find this level of mindless in Oblivion either, you are not "done" when you arrive, you are at the part where you can start dealing with the problem. The part where you actually do the quest.

Edit: University time, have to go.

This is, I think, probably the most important point you can make on the whole subject of Morrowind and Oblivion quests: almost none of Morrowind's quests actually consist of anything except going somewhere, picking something up, killing something, or some combination of those things. Usually just the first two, and with almost no exceptions no embellishments outside of dialog text. Not just that, but Morrowind actually uses the fact that you don't have a fast means of travel to pad the game length - there are quests that feel like they exist for no reason except to make the game longer by forcing the player to walk from A to B and back again multiple times. In fact, there are a lot of them.

Oblivion's sort of the opposite. Yes, you can get where you need to go pretty much immediately and without effort... but the result is that they have to rely on the actual content once you arrive to make the quests lengthier. They can't pad the game length by making you walk through miles of ashland because they can't make you walk through miles of ashland, so quests in Oblivion are designed so that it's what you do after the walk that takes up your time. The thing that people claim was dumbed down in Oblivion is exactly what made meatier and more complex quests necessary - if it had Morrowind's quests with that compass and the fast travel, the whole thing would probably take a few hours outside of dialogue.

I'm not saying that fast travel's a good idea. It's not a good or bad idea, and the way it was implemented in Oblivion (on a tiny map and with overly aggressive location tracking) wasn't very good. The same goes for the compass - it makes sense to know where some things are (and given that you just ended up checking your map repeatedly if you wanted to know where the nearby stores were in Morrowind, it cuts down on some tedium), but it's overly specific, telling you the locations of things you should be finding on your own and making it possible for the game to more or less steer itself when you're going from place to place. Still, Oblivion's quests are quite a bit more complex specifically because those things made traveling so completely trivial. They were bad additions because they weren't handled well, but to claim that they dumbed the game down isn't really true given that they ended up (probably unintentionally) doing the opposite.

Not without some heavy alchemy abuse.

Now that's something they did better in Oblivion, no more endless alcohol drinking to boost your strength to godly amounts.

I must say, I'm impressed, and I don't think the average RPG players can do the task, and I ask rabish12 to try it and show us the proof.

As some of the places that the main quest send the player is really hard for a normal level 1 player who have not started to develop his skills.


More complex quests means longer periods of following of the Map markers and quest markers, and I must agree that Dark Brotherhood quests were a bit more complex than others.

But by more complex and confronting guilds and factions, I meant just that. There are lots of guilds, factions, and great houses in Morrowind that have confronting view points, tasks, and rivalries that are sadly missing in Oblivion.

In oblivion you had to follow the fighter guild quests, for instance, to the last detail, and did not have the choice to do them in another way, but in Morrowind, if the given quest would conflict with thieves guild, and you did not want to offend them, them you could do the job another way or ignore the quest, and finish the fighter guild's quest line in some other way which was supplied as well.

This is what I meant in more complex and confronting.


Again they are a lot more strait forward in morality and point of view, and if you do not have unlimited man power and funds, if you want to fully voice act all the lines in the game, then you are placing such constraints on the development and QA team that you can not have the amount of quests and AI lines that you could if you did not voice act those lines.

And think about scenarios that you may decided to change the lines after that or edit some problematic parts, and repeat the process. Morrowind had no such constraints, and a proof is the LGNPC project.


Not just to focus as I have said in the last response.


There is a strategy that is called character development, and as I said Oblivion has moved from RPG toward Action RPG to get more audience. And I do not deny that the technology has improved, or you might want to inform me about the physic engine and Radiant AI as well? Hmm?


I wish there were no level scaling at all, because with a good design, you could not describe the sense of progression in such games.


Yes, Daggerfall was better in this area, but you can not deny that the Oblivion was really dumbed down in letting you know where exactly to go and you could just follow the arrow?


Yes, but you lost half the fun, and the other half was strait forward with black and white morality and you did not have to think about conflicting with other factions, and with level scaled areas, when you reached the area, you encountered the same repeated foes, and could easily finish the job.

You only really need to abuse it a couple of times (I think it's possible to do without ever abusing it, but then we're talking serious exploits), since Morrowind very rarely actually forces you to kill anyone.

Finding the Cavern of the incarnate was not 'fun' in the slightest. I was given some vague directions "oh it's down this way, but after that i'm not quite sure", I walked down those valley's poking my nose in all the (copy and pasted) nooks and crannies hoping that I would find it. Add to this the endless one hit cliff racers and NPC's that are just annoyances. I decided to open up a guide which didn't even help me, the author gave the same vague clues as to where it is, look for some big rocks, the biggest in the area -.-. When I eventually found the place my reaction wasn't that of I found that so much fun it was more along the lines of It's about [inset swear word here] time!

Although Morrowind is a Beautiful and Terrific game, the endless walking is not one of its more 'fun' features (the dungeon diving is good,not the walking) particularly if your quest is to deliver 20 bottles of Sujamma -.-

OK, I should have told half the fun IMHO.

And if you say, Morrowind's hand placed landscape was copy and paste, then I do not want to hear what you cal Oblivion's mostly computer generated landscape is.

Edit: When a game designer needs to give instructions and directions for all parts of all its quests, then there is no doubt that some parts of those instructions might not be on par, or might get forgotten, or not tested well, which would not be a problem with GPS markers, so I think this was one of the reasons that they decided to use that.

Look up any Morrowind speedrun. I'm near-positive that all of them end at level one. I'm certain that the fastest ones do. The game is loaded with exploits, the enemies are easy to avoid, and it almost never forces you to kill - all of that adds up, and the end result is that a win at the first level isn't impossible. Difficult, but not even as difficult as you make it out to be (the hardest part about it is not increasing your skills rather than trying to beat it with low skills).


It really doesn't. Like I was explaining in my last post, Oblivion is still a long game, and because they couldn't rely on traveling to pad that length they had to increase it through the actual content. The result is that quests, on the whole, are more complex and interesting. They almost always throw some sort of twist into things, and when they don't the quest ends too quickly for it to really matter that they didn't.


Right... but that's not really more complex. It has more complex writing to it - everything in Morrowind has more complex writing - but the actual quest and faction design is astoundingly shallow. Sure, it's cool having conflicting factions with differing ideals... but if you take the text away, what does that amount to? Not much, aside from only being able to do "go here and fetch this" quests for faction A but not for faction B. If you take away the writing in Morrowind, the factions are all similar to the point of often being indistinguishable and the quests themselves are far below standard quality even for an RPG in a lot of cases. In Oblivion, the opposite applies - yes, the writing is shallow, but the factions and quests themselves offer missions that are pretty significantly different even without pages of text explaining to you all the story behind why they're different, and they're often worth doing not because of the factions they flesh out but because... well, they're worth doing.

Morrowind has more complex writing. I'd never deny that. The problem is that Morrowind relies on that writing - the game is mostly shallow otherwise. Oblivion goes in the opposite direction.


This isn't actually true when a developer is as large and well-funded as Bethesda is. There are games with more (voiced) dialogue than Morrowind's (written) dialogue, so that's not the issue.


Nothing you've said actually applies to skills though. They cut out a few and then made gigantic improvements in the depth of each of the ones they kept in by making them more significant than just numbers on a screen. That is a gigantic leap in the opposite direction of "dumbed down".


I never had a need to focus on my character's development in Morrowind. Again, it's far too easy for that to be necessary at any point, especially if you actually follow the quests the way the game intends for you to. I'd actually argue that this is something Oblivion improves on as well - in Oblivion playing as a pure mage or a pure stealth character is actually viable, so that your character build can be a lot more important depending on how you play the game. In Morrowind... well, pure mages were extremely hard, and I feel extremely bad for anyone who tried to play a stealth character.

I'm not really referring to the landscapes, more the dungeons and Oblivion was atrocious in that regard as well but let's not touch on that subject

The only game with good dungeons in the entire series is Arena, to be honest (Arena doing something better than the other games - yeah, I'm pretty shocked too), so it's really not worth talking about. When it comes to dungeon designs, Morrowind and Oblivion are both pretty big losers (I almost want to give Oblivion an edge there just for the death traps, but... really, they're both so far below the line that I don't think it deserves the credit).

I Must get around to finishing Arena...

Of the Three modern BGS titles (Morrowind, Oblivion and FO3) I'd say FO3 did it the best although they were still copy and pasted they actually 'felt' the best. If Bethesda improve on this even more in Skyrim, i'll be quite happy

Yeah, I have a pretty bad tendency to forget about FO3 but it did do this quite a bit better than Morrowind and Oblivion. Still bad, but... well, they're getting better with each game.

And as for Arena, it really is worth seeing the different dungeons. Variation in them's sort of what you get in the Zelda games - each one has a theme with its own unique look, unique shape, usually a couple of unique features, and thematic enemies (which sort of made the game really easy for Nords, since arguably the hardest dungeon in the game was an ice dungeon and Nords are immune to absolutely everything in it, but it worked out well otherwise).

But I'm getting away from the topic a bit here.

Well, I did not think about abuses, and was thinking about strait role playing, and was comparing the two games when players wanted to actually role play, and develop his character and the lot, but if yo want to abuse a thing, then you can use the console code "tgm" and be done with it.


So, with this facts we reach the result that it is the other way around, and Oblivion is the game for hardcoe RPG players and Morrowind is the one that is actually dumbed down, and is for the casual players. Hmm I did not think it was so, and might have calculated it wrong, but what did I miss? If you insist a bit more, you might even convince me.


And quests are made from those written stories and information, lore, directions, suggestions, and the like, few of which were needed in Oblivion, because of the GPS directions.

I know, they were not needed and were omitted, because you did not have to read about those suggestions and directions, because you jumped to the destination and followed the arrow.


I do not say it without proving statistics, and you said yourself that Morrowind had a lot of written text.


I do not deny that adding perks was a good idea as you can look at my sig and follow the links about character development and perks, but this goes with time and newer content should always be better than older ones, but alas, this is not always the fact, but Oblivion did not use those perks in the right way and it could have been a lot better. And could have chosen better perks as well, as some of them near useless for me, IMHO, because I for the life of me could not perform power attacks other than the easiest form of it.

I did prefer Morrowind Character skill based game, than Oblivion's Player skill based game and I was one of the players that did not like Axe to be a blunt weapon, and the removal of a lot of skills.


Edit: sorry i did this part wrong, so Oblivion makes it easy to play mage, and I do not deny that, and Morrowind is not an easy game without exploits, and it is a fact, and players that are not prepared for it's harsh world are soon discouraged and go away.

Oblivion made it a lot easier for the player to fight, go around, do quests, be mages, and the lot, and it might make the game enjoyable for a lot of players, but it lost a lot of aspects in the process that would be enjoyable for what we cal hard core RPG gamers.