The Outer Worlds Pre-Release Thread [GO TO NEW THREAD]

[U-8D8]

Skyrim is one of the best games ever made.

No.

The three pillars of Skyrim's gameplay, stealth, magic, and combat are some of the most uninspired implementations I have seen in gaming. The melee combat has all the complexity of two parties standing in place and taking turns slapping each other in the face. The magic is objectively dumbed down from previous entries, with the removal of spellmaking and the gutting of magical effects in the service of the gimmicky thu'um. And stealth is essentially squatting and skirting around NPCs, with keen eyes to match those of this woman.

Spoiler

Any of these elements would be considered the weak link in another game, but in Skyrim they come together to make an at best mediocre game, built specifically to appease larpers such as yourself.

Even japanese faggots try to copy it, even Shigeru fucking Miyamoto tried to copy it with Zelda. Even Hideo Kojima with MGSV... Everyone was mesmerized by Skyrim because it was fucking briliant. Even CDPR made Witcher 3 the way it was, despite it being a storyfag game, just because they adored Skyrim...

Your parents ever ask you if you'd jump off a cliff if it was the popular thing to do? I'm guessing no.

 

[HarveyBirdman]

Also, kill yourself for liking Skyrim. Just because you like that game makes you a prime candidate for gene pool removal.

Skyrim is a good game you insufferable faggot.

 

[MajorMace]

But why is it so hard to express in simple words what makes skyrim a good game then ?

I mean i'm open-minded but discussions over skyrim never get anywhere. I tried to talk about it with shillav hamon and his brain bugged over the hundreds of hours of radiant quest gimmick.
Why are people unable to express themselves properly ? Just tell us what you find good/great/amazing for fuck's sake.

Here's an example of something I like in Skyrim : the scenery is - in most of the open world - done great. From the opening of the game, which lets the player walk down a road, with that big ass sepulcher on the mountain ahead.
The nice little crevasse leading to the south east from the Edoras-like city.

But besides that, which doesn't last long, there's nothing I remember as any good, really.

 

[HarveyBirdman]

- The world is exceedingly well-crafted. Vast, but not overwhelming; filled with content, but not oversaturated; directs you to cool features, but keeps secret locations special; varied biomes and architecture to match it; environmental storytelling is well-done.
- The Daedric quests are fun, lore-filled rides.
- The main quest's lore was gimped, but remains intact if you dig for it -- and it's deep.
- Nordic lore was also gimped, but remains intact if you dig for it -- and it's also deep.
- Combat is pretty fun.
- Vanilla has lots of options, and mods allow you to make it into virtually any RPG you want.
- Solid crafting system that isn't tedious.
- Dawnguard and Dragonborn are excellent DLC's.

Lots of flaws. Not my favorite in the franchise, but definitely a labor of love. I wish they delayed it to put in all the features they had planned or only implemented partially. Mods, I guess.

It's a good game.

 

[MajorMace]

I only agree with your first point.
Daedric quests have nothing particular going for them, besides the fact they're given by demons. Whoo oo...
The "get out of jail" quest from the western city is tenfolds more interesting than any daedric quest. And a bright exception to the regular fetch quest and bland dungeon clean quest.

I care little for deep lore if it's delivered in a meaningless way, and even less if it's disjointed from the actual gameplay. Whether the game contains dozens of books about the forsworn doesn't change the fact they're naked barbarians with whom it's absolutely impossible to do anything but fight. From there, their background is completely irrelevant.
Combat is a spamfest of healing potions with no regard to anything but whacking your target with any kind of weapon or elemental damage. It gets old very, very quickly. Magic has some funny tidbits though - but since they're completely unnecessary and quit being fun after the third use, you'll just spam fireballs all the time.
The crafting is the very definition of tedium. It's, on top of that, utterly pointless since you'll get level-scaled gear after your level-scaled adventure is done.

So yeah, you don't convince me at all. I think you're also either biased or somehow extremely forgiving with the game design here.
Note that you haven't mentioned itemisation, dungeon design, encounter design or character development.
For a single-character hack n slash which revolves around dungeon dwelling.
Dude.

Edit : mind you, I'm only adressing your points.
I could start a list of things I think suck ass big time but I haven't played the game in a long time so it wouldn't be either exhaustive or representative.
One thing I perfectly remember however is that unique items - artefacts, daedric stuff etc - are level-scaled.
This alone was enough to make me quit this nonsense.

 

[HarveyBirdman]

Azura
- azura gives quest to return her star from a mage who is defiling it by effectively obtaining immortality after trapping his soul inside of it and feeding upon the souls of sacrifices
- option 1: get your soul partially trapped inside the star and kill him, then report to the daedric prince to curry her favor and claim the star
- option 2: get your soul partially trapped inside the star and kill him, then turn against the daedric prince, corrupting the star into an infinite use black soul gem

Boethia
- orders you to sacrifice a follower to gain his favor
- turns our you were the sacrifice all along -- tells the cultists to kill you if they can after you present your own sacrifice
- once you win, he's still not happy -- you gotta go kill the old champion in a dungeon in order to become the new champion and claim your reward

Clavicus vile
- meet dog on the road. it asks for help. accept or deny, doesn't matter. purely a roleplaying choice.
- make way to shrine eventually. vampires attack you. kill them all.
- turns out all the vampires were cultists protecting the shrine, because they were begging for a cure. clavicus vile says you were the cure. and then he has the gall to negotiate a new task for you.
- person had daughter who turned into werewolf. person asked for cure for his daughter. prince gave him an axe. person killed daughter, became disgusted with self. never returned the axe. you're to go kill him and get the axe back.
- do it. vile tells you to use the axe to kill the dog now, because the dog contains half his power and he wants that power back. dog freaks out and tries to negotiate.
- either kill the dog, lose the axe, and gain the masque OR turn agains the prince, keep the dog alive, and keep the axe, but never get the masque

Hermaeus mora
- wizard champion wants to get into box because prince told him it has heart of lorkhan (which is impossible, because it was destroyed)
- help him by collecting blood of all elf races
- help him by getting special key deep in ruin
- goes to open the box, only a book inside. existential crisis; he sacrificed decades of his life and his sanity for a lie. realizes he was betrayed all along.
- prince tells you to kill the wizard, become the new champion
- and then the events of dragonborn

Hircine
- guy is in jail for murder. killed a little girl
- guy hates himself for it. didn't mean to. is a werewolf cursed by hircine because of a ring.
- take the ring for yourself and receive his curse that randomly turns you into a werewolf
- could stop here and keep the cursed ring, or continue. continue by hunting a spectral aspect of the prince
- prince orders you to join other worshippers in hunting down and killing the previously cursed guy
- track him down. asks you to help him kill the hunters.
- kill him: hircine rewards you with savior's hide -- the hide of the man you killed with enchantments
- help him kill the worshippers: hircine commends you for turning the hunt around on his worshippers, providing him amusement. removes curse, gives you cool ring allowing you to transform into werewolf at will.
- and also the events of the Companions

I could go on. This is alphabetical order. Every one of the daedric quests are great. Level-specific stuff is stupid, I agree. Good thing we have console commands. A lot of bad balancing choices in the game. I would overhaul a lot of it. Mods help quite a bit though.

As to lore, I would have preferred that you could interact with it more intimately, but I'm a huge fan of it beeng hidden behind a veil. The lore are the greatest secrets of the game that nobody fully understands, just like real life religions. I don't want to have it all laid out before me -- I want to have to search high and low to uncover the mysteries.

As to combat, I won't argue that it's deep or paradigm shifting... but it's pretty fun. Granted, the best combat is pure archery. I would overhaul the whole system from the ground up were I king of Bethesda, but it's fun enough for a massive open world RPG.

As to crafting, it's not tedious at all. Just go to trainers. It's purpose is for late-game roleplaying purposes. Want to play as a companion who only uses skyforge steel and wolf armor? Great. Upgrade your equipment so you don't get crushed out there. Want to play as an overpowered badass running around in armor made from the crystalized blood of an aedra and twisted by master forging techniques to also house the soul of an enslaved daedra that you have also personally tweaked to become even more legendary than others of its same variety? You can do that too. And once again, I would probably change the way this system works, but it works pretty well.

What games do you even like? Skyrim is seriously flawed, but saying it's not a good game is just ridiculous.

 

[MajorMace]

What games do you even like? Skyrim is seriously flawed, but saying it's not a good game is just ridiculous.

I won't adress your dissection of these quests - which indeed have several steps and different routes !!! - and directly answer you there.

I like a ton of games, crpgs or not. In the crpg category I like a lot of m&m games (mostly the tile-based ones, including MMX (the madman !)), the IE games (never played IWD2 though), the original Fallout (Fallout 2 not so much) and FNV, Kotor 2, The witcher 1&2 (3 not so much - are they rpgs ? I don't know, discuss !), ... and more or less related to rpgs, like Dark Souls games or Deus Ex. From the top of my head, these are the games I'd give. I think there's no doubt most of them are popular and/or triple A.

Just so you know I'm perfectly fine with these, as long as they're good. I legit find Skyrim mediocre despite its good outdoor scenery. FYI I also think Daggerfall and Morrowind are pretty bad as well, i'm not in a "bethesda has declined" situation. I think they always made mediocre stuff (as long as i'm concerned) with fun gimmicks like open world or infinite quests. I don't consider these good design elements - bethesda or not.
These quests you dissected aren't as good as the get out of jail one I mentioned. Some of them are even basic fetch quests with some choice at some point.
Reminder that we're talking about a game designed around the quest compass, and which becomes unplayable without it, so these quests steps never involve any sort of investigation or reflection. They're always straight-forwardly directional. You can enter the "lore details" as much as you want, but they're pretty much all bland and uninteresting. (Unless, yeah, the player likes the elder scrolls lore. But I don't particularly like it, so...)

All I remember from my last skyrim session is finishing the thieves guild quest, becoming a special agent of the lord of shadow or something, and be given a level-scaled bow and leather armor. I perfectly remember how cruelly linear this last quest was, and how I was supposed to feel immersed or concerned, but it just didn't work. I also remember how quickly this legendary gear of legend became subpar compared to the next dungeon loot.

 

[HarveyBirdman]

(Unless, yeah, the player likes the elder scrolls lore. But I don't particularly like it, so...)

Well sheeeit mein nigger. That's all you needed to say. The lore is the substance of the entire series.

 

[MajorMace]

Maybe you should have said so right away then.

What makes skyrim a good game in simple words ?

The lore.

As simple as it gets, really.
You're the one who talked about quest design and gameplay after all.

 

[HarveyBirdman]

Well, that's a stupid thing to say. The lore is a fundamental part of the game you can't ignore. Everything builds off it.

What if you hated Fallout's lore? Imagine if it were some lame steampunk trash. Would it be possible to love Fallout? Ceteris paribus, it'd be tough for me.

 

[MajorMace]

I already told you I can't get into a game's lore if it's poorly delivered and disjointed from the game itself. IE. It's not that I don't like tes lore, it's that I have no fucking clue how thick it can be, and am absolutely not interested in knowing more. That's not on me, that's on the designer. I tried to read a book from Skyrim, and it was something I already read in Morrowind. From there I just quit trying because, hey, you're never asked to look for information in said books or investigate the story of the land to progress in anything. You only need to hack things and follow the quest marker.
There's nothing stupid here, it's common sense.

All I say is the discussion would have been over much sooner if you just said knowledge of the lore is fundamental to larping in this shallow region called Skyrim.
I admit I don't see how any sort of lore could make linear & repetitive dungeons any better, or make me forget that everything is level-scaled and therefore quite mundane, or how every npc is a shallow puppet whose generic and industrial voice acting turns their interaction with the player into a painfully script-fiesta. Nothing feels hand-crafted, besides as we already noted the landscapes and scenery.

There was nothing malicious in my question, I sincerely asked for something I would have missed about Skyrim which would tickle my curiosity, and I didn't find anything in your answer.
We've gone full circle, have a good night.

I care little for deep lore if it's delivered in a meaningless way, and even less if it's disjointed from the actual gameplay. Whether the game contains dozens of books about the forsworn doesn't change the fact they're naked barbarians with whom it's absolutely impossible to do anything but fight. From there, their background is completely irrelevant.

Basically.

 

[Hellion]

Perhaps any further discussion on what makes Skyrim a good LARP should be reserved to the jRPG or Prosperium subfora so as not to distract from the prestigious TOW RPG talk.

 

[HarveyBirdman]

I already told you I can't get into a game's lore if it's poorly delivered and disjointed from the game itself. IE. It's not that I don't like tes lore, it's that I have no fucking clue how thick it can be, and am absolutely not interested in knowing more. That's not on me, that's on the designer.

No that's 100% on you, but that's alright. Different strokes for different folks. I love that the lore is purposefully obfuscated. It makes the world seem much more real to me; where in real life can you find some info kiosk that gives you the definitive answer on the meaning of universe?

I tried to read a book from Skyrim, and it was something I already read in Morrowind. From there I just quit trying because, hey, you're never asked to look for information in said books or investigate the story of the land to progress in anything. You only need to hack things and follow the quest marker.

That's why it's called a roleplaying game.

The Dragonborn doesn't need to be a scholar -- he can run around mad off power doing whatever his dragon buddy paarthurnax thinks is right, because hey, he seems pretty smart. OR, if you want, you can try to understand what's happening. I don't need or want the game to spoonfeed me. Apparently you want more direction in the lore department. And for the record, that desire for handholding is very much at odds with your criticism of quest markers (criticism we share).

And like I've said, the lore was gimped and I would have liked to interact with it more. It frustrates me quite a bit. But the actual discovery of that lore -- the part that would come before interacting with it -- I don't have a problem with. Though, I do fervently wish Todd didn't cut Kirkbride's content.

Re: dungeon design -- one of my biggest complaints. Lazy, lazy, lazy. I don't equate world design and dungeon design. Different animals. On that note, I could continue to criticize Skyrim for days. There are tons of things I would change drastically. But it's still a good game.

I'm not surprised you don't like it. We very well may share a lot of the same mechanical and design flaw criticisms, but I am at least absorbed in the lore. We play the game for different reasons, and so the weight of those criticisms we share probably measures out differently.

 

[MajorMace]

No that's 100% on you

No.

 

[HarveyBirdman]

The massive hardcore TES fanbase tends to disagree with you on that one. It's okay if it's not your taste. No need to get pissy about it.

 

[MajorMace]

Come on, you can't say it's 100% on me. Let's meet halfway.
I'm 50% responsible on that, at most.

 

[HarveyBirdman]

Fiddy it is.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Shit, if the most compelling thing about a game is reading the (often garbage tier) books and notes found all over the place, it’s not a good game.

 

[HarveyBirdman]

Do you even RPG bruh?

 

[Rivmusique]

Guess it's finally happened.

 

[Quillon]

What?

 

[Drax]

The basis on which the lore is built (you don't know shit, and all you get is people's subjective ideas and theories about wtf is going on) is pretty sound. And by now we've got a shitton of content, from the metaphysical to the mundane, to draw from. Skyrim's faults are 80% on the gameplay systems and mechanics, 10% on linear dialogs, and 10% on having 3 voice actors for 6 gazillion NPCs.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Ban everyone who likes Skyrim. No use talking to them.

 

[Volrath]

The massive hardcore TES fanbase tends to disagree with you on that one. It's okay if it's not your taste. No need to get pissy about it.

The only thing that's massive are the braindead larping retards like Templar.

 

[Big Wrangle]

Even the Obsidian rock cannot escape the shadow of Bethesda.
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