Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

I'm genuinely amazed it's easier to miss Elder Scrolls games than to replay them

Makabb

Arcane
Shitposter Bethestard
Joined
Sep 19, 2014
Messages
11,753
. It was an absolute chore, the slow, scripted sequences having to wait for the very slow royal group to make its way through boring assassin fights, l

Because games are not movies....... a movie can be worse than previous version...... but every next game is usualy an evolution of the previous one with ease of life enhancements that make it hard to go back to previous games
 

plakia

Novice
Joined
Apr 28, 2015
Messages
6
I've tried starting Skyrim several times. Folks are crazy about Skyrim so I thought I'd give it a try. I even have the HD edition or whatever. As boring as Oblivion was, Skyrim somehow made things duller. Once you get past the graphics, the game feels barren. At least Oblivion had those those Daedra statues, some (semi-) original quests in tone and approach (the guy stuck in the painting, the guy stuck in a dream), and "Halt! Criminal Scum!" Other than "FUS RUH DAH", I can't think of anything memorable about Skyrim.

It requires different approach, no expectations. More of a roguelike/Diablo dungeon crawler with some nice overworld. Most of quests are designed in a way that lets you quickly pick it up, have a journey to some dungeon with a couple of random encounters on the way, hack and slash, get your big treasure chest and fast travel back. When you're experience you get several quests in a row and plan your travel so that you can visit several marks on a map before you get back to town. All the systems work for this purpoise: in older TES and many other RPGs your weight limit defines how much heavy gear you can use, in Skyrim it defines how many dungeons you can raid before you go back to town. It should be compared to Borderlands or Far Cry, not RPGs.

And in itself it isn't bad. There was more memorable stuff than you imply, art direction and some dungeons were pretty fine.
Roguelikes and Wizardy clones are my love in life. Diablo 1 was one of my first rpgs and I honestly loved it(oddly not a fan of Diablo 2). I completely fucking hate Skyrim. I don't know how you could argue it was a good rpg on any level. It has none of the tension you'd find in a roguelike or other dungeon crawler. Maybe this is why I'd consider Arena a superior title? Arena had some heart poured into it. It was broken and buggy as shit, but I saw some vision. Arena's dungeons were fucking fantastic. Maybe Skyrim was an okay adventure game, but I'd rather spend my time replaying point-and-click 90s shit and old Zelda games. Skyrim dungeons were a corridor with some leveled loot at the end. I don't know why I would give a shit. There is more joy to be found with FF/DQ clones. Even with all the mods in the world the flawed core vision of the game really ruins it for me. I really tried harder than any other game to like Skyrim and I just couldn't. Maybe it did something of value that will rub off on future devs, but all I can see is watered down and simplified systems that were implemented in a superior form more than a decade earlier.
 

ilitarist

Learned
Illiterate Village Idiot
Joined
Oct 17, 2016
Messages
857
Roguelikes and Wizardy clones are my love in life. Diablo 1 was one of my first rpgs and I honestly loved it(oddly not a fan of Diablo 2). I completely fucking hate Skyrim. I don't know how you could argue it was a good rpg on any level. It has none of the tension you'd find in a roguelike or other dungeon crawler. Maybe this is why I'd consider Arena a superior title? Arena had some heart poured into it. It was broken and buggy as shit, but I saw some vision. Arena's dungeons were fucking fantastic. Maybe Skyrim was an okay adventure game, but I'd rather spend my time replaying point-and-click 90s shit and old Zelda games. Skyrim dungeons were a corridor with some leveled loot at the end. I don't know why I would give a shit. There is more joy to be found with FF/DQ clones. Even with all the mods in the world the flawed core vision of the game really ruins it for me. I really tried harder than any other game to like Skyrim and I just couldn't. Maybe it did something of value that will rub off on future devs, but all I can see is watered down and simplified systems that were implemented in a superior form more than a decade earlier.

I'm not saying it's a good RPG. Maybe it was wrong choice of words but still it's a good, even great adventure exploration game like Borderlands or Far Cry 3. It's great aesthetically and presents its lore in a good way - even if you're very casual player you can notice there's a lot behind boring quests presented with a couple of voice lines. Even if a casual player doesn't read books in the game he can see those books and knows there's a lot of info in them, the very knowledge of background lore gives the world depth (meanwhile most of gamedevs would see that only 2% of players read at least half of books and therefore decide books are not worth it, a big mistake). You see it as a very shallow RPG while for most players who tried it it's a deepest action adventure game ever. When you talk about superior mechanics you probably mean another style of game where one of the tasks was finding the right way of progress - in Morrowind you could make a bad character so creating a good one felt great; in Skyrim your 1 level character can already do everything in a game to some extent and it's very hard to make ineffective build. This is a deliberate decision of a different kind of character progression, not an inferior system.

Surely you can see that it doesn't mean that the game is bad. I too can appreciate Wizardry style games but they can be criticized as lacking dialogues, choice and consequence or other RPG tropes. And they're certainly harder to get into for great many people. I'm not saying you should play Skyrim or any other of those pseudo-RPGs you can play on your sofa with a beer can nearby. I just don't like that notion of "dumb masses like shit" mentality. Dumb masses still prefer well done dumb stuff and there's a certain mastery and lots of effort put into dumb summer blockbusters that earn hundreds of millions. There's still hope that you get an equivalent of Christopher Nolan in all of those big budget projects. Well, this hope is very weak after Fallout 4 and Mass Effect Andromeda - but still, maybe one day.
 

commie

The Last Marxist
Patron
Joined
May 12, 2010
Messages
1,865,249
Location
Where one can weep in peace
Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Divinity: Original Sin 2
YES!!! It's about time someone posted something negative on Oblivion! Ok, good, I'm ready!!!!!!!!! I've been saving this joke for 6 years since it came out:

The best part of the game is uninstall.com!!!!!!


6 years of waiting and you still fucked up the uninstall.exe punchline?

Seems that you truly are the target demographic for this game!


Bunch of apologist crap justification for a total and utter turd.

Fuck off Todd....
 
Joined
May 6, 2009
Messages
1,875,971
Location
Glass Fields, Ruins of Old Iran
Horse ARMOR!! ARGH! What is this world coming to? People paid for that stuff! I paid $5.99 and it barely worked!!! Think they patched it later, so I guess in the end it was $6 well spent!

Actually it fucks up Shadowmere's programming so she won't wander back to her usual location if you lose/abandon her. And since she was an immortal horse to begin with, armoring her wasn't even necessary...:M
 

YES!

Hi, I'm Roqua
Dumbfuck
Joined
Feb 26, 2017
Messages
2,088
Bethesda games may be what they are, but they sure do give lasting memories of fun emergent gameplay or just amusing quests/worldbuilding, especially if you were younger when you played them.

So naturally, I felt like installing and playing Oblivion again. It was an absolute chore, the slow, scripted sequences having to wait for the very slow royal group to make its way through boring assassin fights, loading zones, a terrible dungeon with constant pop-ups teaching you how to cast a fireball or do exciting stuff like eat a carrot you found in a well.

Even when you make it out of the sewer, you're finally thrown into the overworld but then the reward level scaling makes it so that you can't get that hilariously OP spell right off the bat through a quest, because if you did, it would be useful for killing goblins but you can pretty much forget about it past a certain level. Thanks Todd.

I'd say the best way to remember Oblivion, is simply to listen to the soundtrack .No combat music of course, it would actually make me remember all those great times when some invisible fish was stuck under the ground and following me everywhere through the game, making it impossible to do basic things like sleeping or would make all NPCs even more hilariously stupid than they usually are.

Good times.

I disagree 100%. Other than character development in Daggerfall, and the decent character building in it, the rest of the games released by them are pure shit for monkeys. Installing mods for them is far more fun than playing them.

Please define emergent gameplay and how you feel it relates to any Bethesda game.
 

jungl

Augur
Joined
Mar 30, 2016
Messages
1,420
Its generally more fun playing old games with mods then vanilla. Morrowind get those graphic overhauls and change the leveling system around. Infinity engine games get a bunch of custom soundboards. I played baldurs gate 2 with conan the barbarian soundboard. Dope as hell hearing thulsa doom say THAT.. is POWER whenever a crit lands and a enemy explodes in pieces.
 
Self-Ejected

RNGsus

Self-Ejected
Joined
Apr 29, 2011
Messages
8,106
Its generally more fun playing old games with mods then vanilla. Morrowind get those graphic overhauls and change the leveling system around. Infinity engine games get a bunch of custom soundboards. I played baldurs gate 2 with conan the barbarian soundboard. Dope as hell hearing thulsa doom say THAT.. is POWER whenever a crit lands and a enemy explodes in pieces.
Graphic overhauls always ruined the immersion for me. Half the fun of exploration was returning to the game after a couple years, setting fov to about 20 yards, and walking up to shit I couldn't see. Most texture packs looked too gamey to me, so I had no reason to use any of the overhauls. I can't stress enough how immersive mid-low fov makes the gameplay, it feels otherworldly with the right music playing.
 

Sykar

Arcane
Joined
Dec 2, 2014
Messages
11,297
Location
Turn right after Alpha Centauri
Bought it during a Steam sale, never finished it. On every occasion the game is brought up I repeat a mantra: 'That Nehrim play through made it worth the money spent.' At the very least I'm not lying to myself about something important.

It is just a bad game.

I bought it on first day at full price without checking it out beforehand. :negative:
I played it until Kvatch where these dolts of "companions" died repeatedly by running into my line of fire, me playing as a mage.
Then I hit the uninstall.exe and buried Oblividerp somewhere deep and far away. Worst mistake of my gaming life together with Restricted Area but I got that one at least for 5 bucks.
 
Self-Ejected

buru5

Very Grumpy Dragon
Patron
Joined
Apr 9, 2017
Messages
2,048
I bought it on first day at full price without checking it out beforehand. :negative:
I played it until Kvatch where these dolts of "companions" died repeatedly by running into my line of fire, me playing as a mage.
Then I hit the uninstall.exe and buried Oblividerp somewhere deep and far away. Worst mistake of my gaming life together with Restricted Area but I got that one at least for 5 bucks.

That's just the radiant AI working as intended.
 

Haplo

Prophet
Patron
Joined
Sep 14, 2016
Messages
6,138
Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
Bought it during a Steam sale, never finished it. On every occasion the game is brought up I repeat a mantra: 'That Nehrim play through made it worth the money spent.' At the very least I'm not lying to myself about something important.

I was seriously dissapointed with Nehrim after all the praise I've heard. It felt very dull, barren and uninspired. Plus instead of level-scaling, we got those nice separate fenced areas with signposts telling: level 5 characters -> This way; Level 10 characters -> That way and so on.

Honestly, my biggest beef with Oblivion were the dungeons. They made like 5 types of them, if that, and all of them were just combinations of pre-made set pieces. Once you've played the game for a bit, you know immediately what the next dungeon will be like, so you start to hate them. Unlike the level scaling which can be easily fixed with mods, this design decision is too fundemental to really do anything about.

But then I played Skyrim and its dungeons were just straight up hurr durr derpity derp, just one single corridor that loops together at the exit. The fuck...

Yes, the terrible dungeon design was another massive flaw of Oblivion that is less commonly mentioned, while very important. That and trash loot / unrewarding exploration. Just level up and kill some bandits for the ultimate loot. Level scaling, including loot, IS a huge problem. Mods to fix it were not necessarily available on release. And the issue is simply fundamental. Oblivion gates were the pinnacle of the dull level design, but it's present everywhere. Best to skip all those POIs to avoid disappointment. Better yet, uninstall.exe.

But I'm frankly baffled about the Skyrim comparison. In my opinion level design in Skyrim is a massive improvement over Oblivion. Sure it's usually all a bit too convenient, with dungeon end wrapping neatly to the beginning in 90% of the areas. But they are decently varied, with varying level of complexity and length and quite a bit of environmental storytelling going on.
Some are quite large and impressive. Blackreach being the obvious highlight, but there were quite a few others that were decent.
It's almost hard to believe the same company designed the dungeons in Oblivion and Skyrim.
 
Unwanted

Wonderdog

Neckbeard Shitlord's alt
Joined
May 2, 2017
Messages
1,477
No, just watch the video. That is the best way to remember Oblivion. And if you haven't played it, now you can skip it.

 

octavius

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Aug 4, 2007
Messages
19,182
Location
Bjørgvin
I bought it on first day at full price without checking it out beforehand. :negative:
I played it until Kvatch where these dolts of "companions" died repeatedly by running into my line of fire, me playing as a mage.
Then I hit the uninstall.exe and buried Oblividerp somewhere deep and far away. Worst mistake of my gaming life together with Restricted Area but I got that one at least for 5 bucks.

That's just the radiant AI working as intended.

That's not Radiant AI, just general retarded companion AI, where they absoutely insist on getting between you and whatever enemy you are engaging.
 

vonAchdorf

Arcane
Joined
Sep 20, 2014
Messages
13,465
I was seriously dissapointed with Nehrim after all the praise I've heard. It felt very dull, barren and uninspired. Plus instead of level-scaling, we got those nice separate fenced areas with signposts telling: level 5 characters -> This way; Level 10 characters -> That way and so on.

I didn't like Nehrim at all, but I stopped playing relatively early. It felt like on rails.
 

Sigourn

uooh afficionado
Joined
Feb 6, 2016
Messages
5,623
I'd say the best way to remember Oblivion, is simply to listen to the soundtrack .No combat music of course, it would actually make me remember all those great times when some invisible fish was stuck under the ground and following me everywhere through the game, making it impossible to do basic things like sleeping or would make all NPCs even more hilariously stupid than they usually are.

Good times.

Isn't this the best way to remember anything, really? I find that I have much more nostalgia based on soundtracks that on the game itself. Take Final Fantasy, probably the franchise I'm the most nostalgic about thanks to its incredible music, but whose gameplay is fairly mediocre. It's no coincidence that the games I'm not nostalgic about are games that didn't have a memorable soundtrack.
 

Zarniwoop

TESTOSTERONIC As Fuck™
Patron
Joined
Nov 29, 2010
Messages
18,650
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
That's not Radiant AI, just general retarded companion AI, where they absoutely insist on getting between you and whatever enemy you are engaging.
Yeah the RADIANT ai = I saw a mudcrab the other day. Horrible creatures, I avoid them whenever I can.

At least in Skyrimjob they "upgraded" to the arrow in the knee schtick.
You being serious here?

That's right. The radiant shit refers to the 5 different character models walking around and talking to each other, supposedly going about their daily lives. Not combat AI.
 

octavius

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Aug 4, 2007
Messages
19,182
Location
Bjørgvin

Sigourn

uooh afficionado
Joined
Feb 6, 2016
Messages
5,623
Even the term "radiant AI" is such bullshit when you know the AI works through packages and written and spoken lines.
 

Jacob

Pronouns: Nick/Her
Patron
Joined
Dec 24, 2015
Messages
3,336
Location
Hatington
Grab the Codex by the pussy
it's embarrassing how people actually care about the correct marketing jargon used by the beths
 

Alkarl

Learned
Joined
Oct 9, 2016
Messages
472
There are only two schools of thought on The Elder Scrolls series.

1. They are all shit rpgs

and

2. Morrowind was the only good one.

Every other opinion is just varying degrees of stockholme syndrome and mental retardation.

With exception paid to Skyrim 2's (HD rerelease or wtf ever) water textures, cause I mean those really need to be seen to be believed, every other piece of technology used by Ol Beth in TES is done better by other games, many predating the series as a whole.

Also, if you REALLY wanna critique this shit storm of a series (minus, possibly Morrowind, like I said) you should go back and play Daggerfall to story completion at least once.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom