Kaanyrvhok
Arbiter
- Joined
- May 1, 2008
- Messages
- 1,096
It's just over the years, I've played so many better games, and I've watched the quality of level design, of gameplay design, of story design, of everything just slowly slip, and the more I think about it, the more I get angry. At the fuckers who want games to be considered an art form, but haven't grasped the fact that to be art, you need subtlety, skill, and message.
Compared to the other RPGs that sell 10+ million ie Pokemon and Final Fantasy Skyrim is pretty artsy. They nailed the environment. Subtlety, the game has in spades; certainly in ways Oblivion surely didnt.
In a game like Skyrim, I see everyone praising, oh it's such a good game. But it lacks elements that have been at the absolute core of the series. Character customization, dress up by combining different armor pieces, the ability to be an absolute power gamer if you want an easy game, or the ability to completely gimp your character if you want to have a hard time. Difficulty was scaled in the Elder Scrolls, scaled by by player knowledge as well as by a difficulty meter. The attributes system with each stat affecting large amounts of things. Random chance. Things that were pulled from PnP games. I don't think in my 28 or so hours of play, I ever encountered a disease
I was 10 hours in when I encountered my first disease. Skyrim's difficulty is a mixed bag. Its inconsitent and at the same time it does feel standard as if the level scaling is just slicker. In defense of Skyrim their new system is simpler on the surface only. As an RPG system its pretty strong. If D&D is the standard it has it beat. My main beef with Skyrim's RPG mechanics is shared by every TES game cept maybe Redguar Its the fast and ofteleveling. I'm more of a fan of RPGs with a small level range.
The fact that they are a company that has betrayed their origins, is what makes me so angry.
Every other company left, is either new, or has been doing it so long, that we've gotten dead to it. Or has been doing it since the origin of the company.
Bethesda has been doing it since oblivion which was only what 6 years ago.
The fact that them and Bioware are the only ones left producing RPGs despite the fact that they are the most casual of RPG developers. Bioware's likely going into the shithole after TOR goes bust, and then we'll be left with Bethesda as the lone old guard of RPG development.
Bethesda is doing what many others should have done a long time ago. Back on the Interplay forums as Goblinorgy I predicted that single player action RPGs would be huge when they moved to consoles. Most disagreed with me for several reasons. They werent anime, the Tolkien shit was too geeky for the hip hop gen, only TB RPGs sold on consoles, they were too buggy and you cant patch on consoles, they were too high brow, people would rather just have action games blah blah blah etc etc...
For all of its mainstream appeal Skyrim is still the geeks CRPG wrapped in its consoles package. Yes that is true I play Skyrim on the PC with a 360 controller. It plays like ass with a mouse. Its still a CRPG and still a hardcore game. Bethesda has 10 million people crafting, enchanting, surmising the largest perk tree Ive ever seen, playing a 100 hour game, fighting creatures that stupid mutha fuckers cant pronounce. This is good for the genre. Compare that to Daggerdale and Wizards of the Coast. The oweners of D&D are doing facebook games. Long live Bethesda.
Interplay's gone bust, several times over now. Origins been gone for who knows how long, Sir Tech, the majority of people nowadays haven't even HEARD of Sir Tech. Betheda's really the only people we got left, and that's what makes me angry. Bioware always marketed to the lowest common denominator, Bethesda, didn't used to be that way, they were one of the few heralds of, of, it's hard to describe, Politics making high fantasy. Games with heavy politically oriented storylines, but the storylines going towards making High Fantasy adventures more believable.
Haha!!! I agree there. Bethesda isnt smart. The rest are just dumblazy.
Why not set it in Summerset, where the factions are the empire, the elf faction in this game,
You know, this is another point, the game didn't even make me care about the politics it did show, I can't even recall the name of the political faction of high elves. I don't have to google to find out the names of the morrowind factions, despite the fact that I haven't played that in 2 years,
Based on Skyrim, a game in Summerset would come with a new fun cover shooting mechanic for forest bow fights. It might even have a perk that lets you go bullet time. That might be in Skyrim already for all I know. Skyrim was mainly about fighting dragons and they got that right. Action combat is usually shit and it is really derp city when fighting larger dragon size creatures. I have fun fighting Dragons in Skyrim. If the factions arent memorable then it maybe a product of two things. Skyrim has a simple plot. Compared to Daggerfall and Morrowind most games have really simple plots. Its better that Bethesda go with a simple story than botch something complex like they did with FO 3. Maybe Obsidian could do a Summerset game.
Anyway, the elf faction in this game, it's like the, you know what I'm going to have to google this, be right back, Thalmor, utterly generic elf faction name is generic.
True. At least they look the part this time around. Thats an upgrade from Oblivion.
When I can spend 3 minutes and ponder and write those up. I get angry that the writers there probably haven't even perused summaries of the events that happened in the previous games. Hell, setting it 200 years in the future is probably an attempt to get rid of any need to reference events of previous games. The entire game just strikes me as the low hanging fruit. And that's what gets me angry, when I'm entirely apathetic about a game, because it's so bland and stale and wreaking of marketing making most of decisions, I GET ANGRY AS FUCK, because I can recall when as a company they didn't go for the low hanging fruit. When Ken Rolsten was there, to balance Todd's DUDE, IT WILL BE AWESOME(Nuke in the first 4 hours of gameplay, mininuke launcher, dragon in the first 5 minutes, no stats, Patrick Stewart as the emprah, whatsisface with the awesome voice that makes me question all sense of morals and want to skull rape my dad(in game of course), etc.) With general good design, good world design, good art direction, etc.
If marketing is designing this game then they need to do a seminar for the rest of the industry. This is still the type of game that wasnt supposed to reach Halo, and CoD numbers. This is no Mass Effect. Bethesda sold into the theory that their style was mass marketable. I could understand if you were talking about the accessibility or mechanical changes made from Morrowind to Skyrim. You are talking about art, plot and writing. Skyrim has the art. The dialogue and voice acting is above the typical Xena warrior princess industry stuff. The only thing left to examine is the plot and how many games are going to have a better plot than Morrowind? You cant bust their chops for that.