Kraszu said:
Why suspend you disbelief all? Just play a video game to play a freaking video game, not to pretend that it is something else.
"a freaking videogame" not pretending to be anything else wouldn't feature 3D models or sprites pretending to be people, effects pretending to be fire or shaders aping water surface. They wouldn't have massive fictional backdrop stories for their settings or dialogues and descriptions meaning to set up certain characters as real people and evoke certain emotions in player.
Given that most games tend to have some of such features, I'm inclined to believe they are meant to be played with suspension of disbelief, which in turn makes me inclined to believe that you're a moron.
Of course, there are abstract games, like Go, that don't have the aforementioned trappings, don't aspire to immersiveness and playing them immersively would indeed indicate that player's brain is behaving in a somewhat loopy manner and he might, in fact, benefit from professional attention before he descends into stark raving madness and starts writing roleplaying articles on UESPWiki, at which point punching his clock would be a merciful deed.
Which leads us smoothly to
gothemasticator said:
The most immersive game I ever play is chess. I suppose this maps onto your "intellectual immersion" type, but whatever. The thing is, chess is totally engrossing. My ass can fall asleep and I don't notice because I'm busy, so busy as to forget everything else. That's what I call immersion.
No no no.
That isn't what you call, or at least should call immersion.
While without doubt engaging, engrossing and intellectually stimulating, chess lacks the necessary qualities to really put you 'in' the gameworld, as sad gameworld has much less things in common with the reality as we know it than even the most alien and bizarre setting to be ever devised by a fiction writer. There is simply nothing to hook the immersion on in chess, so while engaging it can't be really seen as an immersive game.
Droog White Smile said:
Mattresses said:
I can literally not think of a single thing oblivion does better than morrowind.
OK, I've thought about this too, so here's my take on it.
- The most obvious improvement is, of course, the combat. Morrowind's combat was completely ridiculous, it's like somebody took it straight from a classic turn-based RPG and forgot to adapt it to real-time. Two characters stand in front of each other poking swords at each other. *whoosh* *whoosh* *thump* *whoosh* *whoosh*. Oblivion, OTOH, has probably the best first-person real-time melee combat that I've ever seen. It has combos, power attacks, manual blocking, etc.
Droog, if there were ever any doubts regarding you being an idiot, or a troll, this should dispel it.
I am aware that feeble minded creatures like typical console kids could be lured into thinking that combat was good in Oblivion, but any relatively sapient being (this usually includes apes, corvids, dolphins and elephants as well as humans) should really know better.
Not only is Oblivion's combat bad, it's bad compared to Morrowind's one, which in itself should be alarming enough, as referring to Morrowind's combat as a clunky clusterfuck of a Frankensteinian hybrid consisting of a typical RPGish mechanics grafted on top of an FPS engine would not only be faithful to reality but somewhat charitable as well.
But, to the point.
Where Morrowind simply sticks a not particularly interactive RPG combat mechanics on an FPS engine, with little effort to hide the stitches, Oblivion opts to take some horrible hybrid, that combines all the undesirable traits of RPG and action combat, with none of their plusses.
First thing first, Morrowind didn't support locational damage or any way to aim for particular body parts, nevertheless it did randomize the hit locations and use the AR of that particular body part for damage reduction. In Oblivion, despite what it's more actiony nature would imply, the locational hits are completely nonexistant - not only it makes absolutely no difference whether you hit your opponent in the face, chest, left middle finger or right ball, but the AR of individual armour pieces simply adds up and is distributed evenly across the whole body, which means that character's boots protect their head as much as feet, while their helm takes equal part in preventing their family jewels for getting bruised, as it does in protecting their noggin.
Second, when it comes to AR and damage reduction, Oblivion used idiotically simple formula - character's summed up AR was simply percentage of damage absorbed and it capped at 85. Obviously, such a system was rather inflexible, making skill boosts or shield spells effectively pointless in the long run, as well as not differentiating between multiple weak hits and a single strong one. Morrowind's system, on the other hand, while not exactly something we could have seen in Fallout, was using a nonlinear formula:
Code:
(Damage * Damage) / (Damage + Opponent Armor Rating)
which allowed for unlimited AR scale and made single powerful hits pass through the armour much more easily than repeated weak ones.
Third, while missing in Morrowind was annoying, the only thing this game actually missed there was appropriate dodge/miss/lack of penetration animations. Can't say the same about Oblivion and it's deterministic system that, in conjunction with embarrassingly retarded combat AI, made combat extremely repetitive by taking out the random element. To add insult to injury, to artificially prolong the combat in "always hit" system the characters could take numerous hits to the unarmoured vital parts and keep going. This was especially visible with bows and low skill, where an enemy NPC with multiple arrows piercing (with unerring precision) their chest could retain almost all their health and vigour to keep fighting, though slamming someone's bare head with a huge warhammer was also a highlight.
Fourth, the different attacks were unlockable perks in Oblivion, which meant no stabbing with daggers unless you maxed out the blades skill.
The status effects of power attacks were completely arbitrary and in no way related to the attacks themselves, while both the effects and animations were shared between ddifferent classes of weapons, so mastery perk with maces was the same thrusting attack as with daggers, with exact same status effect. Thrilling. At least Morrowind allowed me to figure out how to stab people with a dagger before becoming the ultimate master of all swordsmanship. It also made thrusting attacks with maces as ineffective as one would expect, so points to Morrowind again.
Fifth, the variety of weapons. Morrowind had more skills, more weapon types, polearms, staves, crossbows, throwing knives, while Oblivion had daggers grouped with claymores. Morrowind also didn't limit enchants according to weapon types, so you could very well have a CE or cast-when-used sword. No contest here.
Sixth, blocking. Manual blocking might come off as an improvement, but I wouldn't consider it that if the price was removing the skill aspect from it's success. Nevertheless, this is debatable. Damage inexplicably leaking through the shield, however, is not. It makes no sense and is therefore shit.
Seventh, ranged combat, allegedly improved so hard they had to take out crossbows and thrown weapons just sucks. Even not accounting for people and creatures flung around with ridiculous ragdoll physics (which also happens in melee), it basically shoehorned player into "backpedal and keep shooting" tactics. In Morrowind arrows and bolts fucking killed things. Also, notice "and bolts" part. Again, no point arguing here.
Eight, Morrowind had a lot of random, yet stat, weapon power and weapon weight dependant staggering and knock downs. Those spiced up the combat a great deal and usually decided the outcome of a battle. Coincidentally they were also completely nerfed in Oblivion.
As for the combos, I have no idea where you have seen them - did your parents played with you by throwing you up but kept forgetting to catch you on your way down when you were a baby?
- Dialogs no longer look like wikipedia articles. Self-explanatory.
They look as if written by Andhaira instead. Probably voiced too. Self-explanatory.
I prefer occasionally yawn-inducing infodumps to one-liners full of cringe-inducing inanity coupled with hilariously bad delivery.
The fact that you could actually ask about most of stuff (like where the hell can I find %NPCName) in Morrowind, instead of following the pizza slice doesn't help Oblivion either.
Neither does the massive decrease in the volume of dialogues nor decline in quality and quantity of voiced greetings.
Ventriloquist beggars are just the icing on the cake.
The rumor system. It tracks a LOT of stuff, and is pretty impressive at times. I've found many quests by overhearing what NPCs are talking about or asking an NPC for rumors.
The rumor system is exactly the same as in Morrowind (or Daggerfall for that matter). Oh, wait, there is a difference - in neither of the past games it does change beggars' voices for no reason, so sorry. You're just being dumb again.
Several improvements with spell casting (e.g. you can now cast spells while holding a weapon)
It might have been an improvement if it depended on the weapon held - for example either one handed weapon or a shield would reduce the effectiveness of casting, but could be used normally while casting, two handed weapon would have to be held with one hand for the period of casting, and thus be useless for attacking and blocking, while "sword and board" would preclude all casting whatsoever. Speaking of efficiency, there is no such thing as casting chance, which effectively reduces magic skill development to five distinct tiers where the first tier spells are perfectly castable by even the dumbest of barbarians. There is also plenty of evidence of excessive rape of magic system, especially evident in the number of effects and removal of the potentially most interesting ones, nerfing of the summons, and making the effects simultaneous, rather than sequential which removed most of the fun from creative spellmaking.
So, again, sorry, you're dumb, spellcasting and magic in general sucked in OB.
- Radiant AI. Yes. It's much more immersive when NPCs lead their own lives. NPCs go to sleep at night, go to taverns, pray at chapels, work in the field, go hunting, travel from one city to another, etc.
Ok, character schedules did improve the believeability slightly. Very slightly compared with the hit it took from the incredibly retarded and gamey NPC dialogues "it wud b awesum if every1 no secruity becuz we wudnt ned to cary teh keys all de taim hepr derp!1", as well as the retarded NPC behaviour:
-imperial foresters shooting each others because they were programmed to collect venison, and after killing a deer and collecting the meat one of them had venison the other seeked
-thieves trying novel in-your-face pickpocket tactics, then getting slaughtered after trying to punch well armed guards
-bandits not getting alarmed by dead bodies of their comrades and attributing arrows in their own butts to the wind
-guards running up to a body of someone
they had recently slain then checking the pulsde and exclaiming that there must be a killeron the loose
-etc.
Having non-immersive NPCs is vastly preferable to having them actively wreck the immersion on every step.
- The graphical improvements should be obvious. The most important are facegen, grass, trees, normal mapping and HDR.
Sorry, I prefer characters' faces in a dark room, illuminated by a single candle to not resemble nuclear fireballs. Similarily I prefer character faces in general having some actual cultural and racial characteristics rather than being misshapen, vaguely humanoid potatoes differing mostly in colour and somewhat in their degree of monstrousness. Lastly, here, where I live some rocks aren't being waxed and polished on daily basis.
- Physics. Physics based traps are p. cool.
If they are of some consequence (other than losing several HPs and having to take a longer route), aren't blatantly conspicuous, offer some diversity and actually use the physical engine in a way that couldn't be trivialy replicated with simple scripted events. If none of those are true, then the Morrowind has the slight advantage of having the security skill that wasn't useless and traps that did stuff.
Finally I suggest you take your "nostalgia goggles" and stick them up your ass, where your head currently resides.
I don't think nostalgia has ever affected my judgement regarding a computer game. I jumped into Morrowind for the first time not so long after it's release and it was awesome. I tried Baldur's Gate back when it was new and found it uninspired. I played PS:T when it was already a respected classic and an old game and it was awesome. Oblivion, while still new, turned out to be atrocious, yet both Daggerfall and Frontier: Elite 2 gave me a sound nerdgasm when I first played them after playing Oblivion. Nevertheless, I don't think I'm suffering some very codexian phobia of everything that's new, as I thoroughly enjoyed Witcher when it was new.
In other words - your theory predictably falls apart.
