DraQ
Arcane
- Adherence to preexisting lore isn't matter of personal taste.
- Location diversity isn't matter of personal taste and can be verified easily by for example showing players screenshots from different places to identify
- Bandits not wearing incredibly rare, high-level armors like daedric or glass because level scaling aren't matter of personal taste.
- Less overt scaling in general isn't matter of personal taste - Skyrim seems to adopt a mostly Daggerfallesque model
- Structured rather than unstructured gameworld isn't matter of personal taste:
- demographics - large minorities that are mostly segregated, with plausible reasons and to exist within gameworld - Thalmor, Reachmen, Dunmer refugees, Khajiit trading caravans, Argonian dock workers, stronghold Orcs.
- gear types that are mostly restricted to particular groups - like elven and glass to Thalmor
- landmarks and structured exteriors - fortified bandit camps, forsworn redoubts, ruins with extensive exteriors and sometimes multiple clustered dungeons/dungeon entrances
- distinct geographical features rather than large bowl with forest inside and lake in the middle
- Blackreach
- quests tend to tie into stuff rather than just float in the vacuum
- Combat system is shit in both, but Skyrim is less bloaty (IIRC) and features usable power attacks plus bashes in addition to having nice wielding system, so it's better.
- Skyrim features some actual choices rather than "do it" and "do it later", again, this isn't matter of personal taste regardless of impact of those choices.
- Art direction may be subject to personal taste, but Skyrim VS Oblivion is a rather clear cut case.
- Selectable perks, build divergence and elimination of degenerate character building are facts.
- Use of physics in gameplay is clear advantage over having physics engine but using it to a much lesser degree than Daggerfall.
- Exploration and presence of hidden, out of reach treasures beats lack of exploration, even if hidden stuff is mostly random (thanks to high level armors remaining rare).
- Random encounters beyond getting attacked by X and generic reactivity (having thugs sent after you if you cross someone, provoking infighting with loot, being challenged to a wizard duel once your magic skill is good enough, getting inheritance from a dead NPC that liked your character a lot, or thanks from an enemy of character you killed etc.) are better than lack of thereof.
- Having not just touch, self, projectile and AoE projectile spells, but also continuous streams, runes, walls and AoE around self, in addition to new effects such as detect dead or ward and more interesting necromancy beats spellmaker that has been already so nerfed it's impossible to make anything interesting in it.
No. Morrowind had attributes that did something. Daggerfall had attributes that did something. Oblivion had attributes that duplicated skill functionality. Cutting out the redundancy was overall an incline,
even though backtracking towards meaningful attributes would have (obviously) been vastly preferable.
It also didn't have cliffracers - best sequel ever.
It did, however, have oblivion gates popping out everywhere and leading player into the same seven dungeons over and over again.
Did it?
How are walkthrough popups at every step that you need to click away to continue, completely linear questlines forcing an idiot ball up your ass or absolutely inane dialogues
No, it had a nausea inducing oversaturated one, in addition to awful use of GFX gimmicks.
In purely technical sense at best:
Pot, kettle, black.
you're right with DAO. That makes me wonder - Was the actual vote manipulated by a bunch of Bioware fanboys or is the codex just populated by a good amount of hypocrites?
