Retardo Does anyone know what this thread is about?

[Lilura]

I'm tempted to call you one dumb fucker, but that's stating the obvious for any srs Skyrim "gamer", isn't it.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

So the character who isn't a blank slate is not a blank slate? Wow. Thank you wise one

The point was that there's not much difference between starting characters in both systems, because they're novices who aren't particularly good at anything. Fucking aspies.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

Fast travelling from one point to another is making you miss on a lot of stuff.

So don't fast travel then?

And I don't understand your complaint, maybe I played Gothic 1 too long ago, but I don't remeber ever feeling that the game is slow or makes me walk too much.

It takes roughly about 8 minutes to go from New Camp to Swamp Camp, I clocked it today (though I got distracted twice, so don't quote me on that). That is running through completely empty virtual space. And I did that several times a day for the last few days. Eight minutes does not sound too long but I dare anyone to load an old save and run for about four to six times between the two camps and then come back and tell me that is his idea of fun.

The good thing is that I can just WASD with the left hand while drinking beer with the right hand, so shit could be worse. I also got a teleport stone and a teleport scroll today, so things are apparently getting better.

 

[Lilura]

Fucking 2009 noobs, srsly. A level 1 D&D warrior can choose Weapon Focus: Whatever, Power Attack and Cleave feats. In combat, that is a huge difference over a nobody who picks up a stick. Not to mention potentially many skills (INT-dependent).

 

[Lhynn]

Character creation is fun, class based or not.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

child

noobs

noooo stop doubting my Gamer Cred™! I'm hardcore, I swear

 

[mondblut]

I thought only my girlfriend has enjoyed pointlessly walking and walking and walking and walking and walking and walking and walking and walking and walking among giant mushrooms. I was more entertained watching paint dry than walking across Morrowind. I'd have fast travel over this crap any day.

 

[thesheeep]

I agree, walking somewhere in Morrowind was very nice for the first time, but boring after that.

There has to be a point to walking long distances if there is no quick travel, something you have to do (like having to gather food & water or constantly being on the watch for attacks, avoiding tough enemies, etc.).
In Prototype, for example, going from A to B was actually fun, as it A) looked pretty awesome and B) gave you something more to do than just hitting W and go into standby mode. In RPGs, a lack of quick travel usually leads to the feeling of wasted time.

What I don't like is quick travel without any consequence. When you would usually run into some enemies, a quest, have to avoid monsters, etc. quick travel in most cases just comes at no risk at all. That always destroys immersion for me, which is why I never use it.
What happened to good old random encounters after the RoA games?

All in all, I prefer well made travel points (taxi / carriage) over just clicking somewhere on a map.

 

[Mastermind]

Morrowind's travel system is perfect. Early on slowly walking around is still refreshing as you find new things. By the time you've seen everything (assuming you're not a retard) you should have mastered the character system, which brins a new form of enjoymen: fast travel through your own knowledge and your character's abilities. Skyrim's travel options are severely restricted. You can fast travel anywhere but from there you have to walk. Whereas in morrowind you can't fast travel but since there are a ton of ways to make your character faster you can get to most points much quicker than you can in skyrim, and it wasn't handed to you on a silver platter, you earned it through playing the game reading walkthroughs. Not to mention that it feels infinitely more badass to jump across half the island or fly with the speed of a supersonic jet, leaving cliff racers dazed in your wake. Morrowind may have been coded by autistic paraplegics, but no other game does a better job of faithfully replicating the experience of rising from a homeless bum who gets eaten by rats to an immortal human meteorite better than it.

Fuck, now I'm raging really hard thinking about how badly Bethesda declined this series.

 

[mondblut]

Yep, Morrowind's travel system is perfect because you can craft and quaff a sequence of +Int potions until your Int swaps into negative trillions, then make a million potions of +9999999999999 to Jumping to fast travel anywhere, amirite?

 

[Lilura]

no other game does a better job of faithfully replicating the experience of rising from a homeless bum who gets eaten by rats to an immortal human meteorite better than it.

Oh please, the amount of Morrowind love on the Codex is an utter disgrace.

Fuck, now I'm raging really hard thinking about how badly Bethesda declined this series.

Morrowind was already major decline.

 

[Mastermind]

Oh please, the amount of Morrowind love on the Codex is an utter disgrace.

Morrowind is the best RPG ever made and sadly it looks like it'll never be topped.

 

[Mastermind]

Yep, Morrowind's travel system is perfect because you can craft and quaff a sequence of +Int potions until your Int swaps into negative trillions, then make a million potions of +9999999999999 to Jumping to fast travel anywhere, amirite?

I never used alchemy in morrowind, so I wouldn't know. That sounds really inaccurate though, it's better to memorize stilt strider/teleporter locations to get close, do a smaller jump in the general direction then fly the rest of the way with blade of heaven/boots of blinding speed. Though scrolls of windform are always fun.

 

[Transfiguring Roar]

Very apt new title thread!

 

[JarlFrank]

So the character who isn't a blank slate is not a blank slate? Wow. Thank you wise one

The point was that there's not much difference between starting characters in both systems, because they're novices who aren't particularly good at anything. Fucking aspies.

The path of a D&D character is p. much set.
That of a Skyrim character isn't, and can even change mid-game.
Also choice of class in D&D defines what kind of shit you can even do, yes also at level 1, level 1 cleric gets level 1 cleric spells, level 1 wizard gets level 1 wizard spells, level 1 fighter can use all weapons and armours without requiring a special feat for them unlike wizards or rogues, level 1 bards can alrady do bardic shit like singing and instruments which buff the party.

Each D&D class has features that are exclusive to that class. Starting from level 1. Not to mention each class has different basic stats, like saving throws, BAB, hit points and skill points per level.

 

[Night Goat]

Fucking 2009 noobs, srsly. A level 1 D&D warrior can choose Weapon Focus: Whatever, Power Attack and Cleave feats. In combat, that is a huge difference over a nobody who picks up a stick. Not to mention potentially many skills (INT-dependent).

Weapon focus improves your chance to hit with that weapon by 5%. Power attack lets you take 5% off your chance to hit to add one or two points of damage. Cleave is situationally useful. I wouldn't call that a huge difference. Also you don't have many skills because INT is a dump stat for you, and your class skills all suck anyway. Fighters just don't get nice things.

 

[the_shadow]

And you don't see any problem with your character being a blank slate? No problem with not having any sort of real choice on what you are when you start the game beyond the purely cosmetic "Am I a furry or a giant lizard"? Much .

Nope, I don't see any problem with that. Gothic 1 and 2 both had your character start as a blank slate, and you only made a choice on whether you were going to be a warrior/mage/ranger at the end of Chapter 1, and the Codex consensus is that both of those games are decent. In Skyrim, you still have a choice on how your develop your character, it's just done more throughout the game, rather than mostly at the beginning. Yes, the character race you choose does bias you towards certain builds, but there is nothing stopping you creating a Redguard mage, or a Khajit warrior.

Too much. If Skyrim would actually place an emphasis on careful leveling after character creation I'd be more inclined to give it a pass but the game is pretty easy and many of the skills are utterly useless (need anything beyond a functioning pair of eyes in order to pick locks? No? There you are then).

If you invest in lockpicking skill, it's easier to pick locks. However, any person with patience and a lot of lockpicks can pick even master locks. Yeah, that reduces the value of lockpicking skill, but so what? For comparison, in Deus Ex a character with no skill points invested in rifles can still hit targets with rifles, it's just harder because of additional recoil.

 

[Fowyr]

What does this look like? A list of classes that are given multiple strengths without the same penalties!

Welcome to the riveting world of D&D 3rd and following editions. D&D, because it's no more worthy "A" in its name.

 

[laclongquan]

The only way walking back and forth in Morrowind, Skyrim, and any other walking simulator is a nice plump ass moving on the screen, Nude mod for the win, fuck yeah!

Gothic? Fuck that. I dont do pointless walking without a visual distraction right in front.

 

[Crevice tab]

Well, unless you're playing an adventure/module where you start at a high level, characters won't feel terribly different in D&D right from the beginning either. You'll build on your class' strengths as you play the game. A level 1 "warrior" is as much of a blank slate as a level 1 classless character that decided to pick up a sword. You're right on the second point, though. It's a waste of the huge open world to let you level up so quickly.

It's all about the background. A level 1 warrior should have minor boosts in a couple of warrior related skills etc. I'm actually against having a rigid class system- Morrowind's pick whatever skills you like seems best because it has a very organic haphazard feeling- which is pretty much what you'd expect of the training of a no name chump like the early game PC is.

Nope, I don't see any problem with that. Gothic 1 and 2 both had your character start as a blank slate, and you only made a choice on whether you were going to be a warrior/mage/ranger at the end of Chapter 1, and the Codex consensus is that both of those games are decent. In Skyrim, you still have a choice on how your develop your character, it's just done more throughout the game, rather than mostly at the beginning. Yes, the character race you choose does bias you towards certain builds, but there is nothing stopping you creating a Redguard mage, or a Khajit warrior.

If you invest in lockpicking skill, it's easier to pick locks. However, any person with patience and a lot of lockpicks can pick even master locks. Yeah, that reduces the value of lockpicking skill, but so what? For comparison, in Deus Ex a character with no skill points invested in rifles can still hit targets with rifles, it's just harder because of additional recoil.

Gothic 1 and 2 had a lot of emphasis on careful leveling- choosing your class affects you far more than any class related choice in any TES. After making that choice you were pretty much locked with it and had to play the rest of the game according to what you chose. Gothic may actually be a bit too rigid for my taste but less flexibility is a thousand times more preferable than making character development meaningless. If Skyrim actually placed more focus on developing the PC's skills and making those skills meaningful then I'd be ok with a classless start.

As for the lockpicking/rifle skill- action popamole has no place in RPGs. Yes you can occasionally hit targets with a gun even if you have no training. However if you knew absolutely anything about guns then you'd know that someone with training hits the target a lot more often than someone without training. And by 'a lot' I mean whole orders of magnitude. Master lockpicks should be hard to pick even for a trained thief in the same way a very distant target that's blending in with the environment is a hard shot even for top military snipers- the sort of shot newbies just aren't going to succeed. Instead any lock can be easily opened in a couple of tries if you aren't an imbecile.

Edit: I'm not saying that a game has to be hard to be good but if you want to have a RPG then those stats need to count for something. If you can just randomly choose what you advance at leveling and then not only win the game but also complete all the side quests then there's a problem somewhere.

 

[Lhynn]

Yep, Morrowind's travel system is perfect because you can craft and quaff a sequence of +Int potions until your Int swaps into negative trillions, then make a million potions of +9999999999999 to Jumping to fast travel anywhere, amirite?

why the "amirite"? thats arguably the single best part of morrowind.

 

[mondblut]

why the "amirite"? thats arguably the single best part of morrowind.

For all my love for breaking and raping games, that one is just too silly. Monty Python kind of silly. Breaking games is supposed to be a honest hard work, not an "awesome" button the morrowind alchemy is. It is supposed to require skill.

An RPG that is legitimately and piss-easily winnable in 15 fucking minutes is a travesty, period.

 

[set]

I'm going to ramble about a game 99.9998% of the gaming population has never even heard of, nevermind will ever play. Even among codexers, I'd be surprised if 1/100 have played or will ever play this game.

It's a MUD, and it's run by fucking assholes, and parts of it are disgustingly bad, but that won't stop me from gushing about what the game does right. It's called Hellmoo, but really, the engine is called HellCore, so I'll just refer to it as that, there are other servers... if they could ever just get off the ground.

In hellcore, movement is stratified and it makes so much sense. If you took hellcore's mechanics and put it to a AAA engine we'd be singing praises to Roguey because the end of the world would be here.

Movement has risks and rewards, more or less is the gist of my blathering - it's why games today suck shit. There are few risks and bland rewards. Everything is +10% to X, oh no you died better reload that checkpoint mate!

Anyway, here's what it does right:

Fall damage is potent. This means, you can't just jump down 30 ft and giggle like a schoolgirl; falling is deadly and it means you need to be careful where you step. This gives weight to your travel options.

On one hand, the game offers air travel. You can:

1) hire an air taxi (gyrocopter); this is public transportation and it has limited travel destinations - but there are airports all over the world map, so it's pretty handy. You need to wait for a taxi to arrive, so it's not that convenient, and it's expensive. It's also a little dangerous - it's public transport, so another player could be riding in it and kill you if they're a dick (some assholes carry a bunch of explosives on them and suicide bomb taxis for the fun of it). That's pretty rare though. It's safe, because an NPC is driving it, so you won't accidentally run out of gas and plummet to your death or something stupid like that, and it's available to anyone at any level. It's limited, but it allows you to go wherever you want, as soon as you start the game. Taxis potentially let people play the game however they want from the onset of the game. They can stay in the starter areas or right away fly somewhere dangerous, at a farmable monetary cost.
2) buy/build an air vehicle (gyrocopter/zeppelin/freight ships); this option is awesome - you can fly wherever you want, but only to an extent. Normal areas are safe for air traffic, but dangerous high level areas are guarded by sky pirates or worse, anti-aircraft guns on the ground. You can only bypass those by acquiring stealth radio frequencies to fly through them, or by destroying them... or by trying to run past them (pretty much suicide or will do expensive damage to your ship). If your ship is destroyed, not only do you plummet to your death, but any items you were carrying will be strewn all over the area below you - this makes air travel fast, freeing, but also at a great cost. You need to fly careful, you need to purchase fuel and not try to fly on empty, and you need to be aware of what obstacles can prevent you from flying somewhere ahead of time. Zeppelins are also house-ships, so you also have the option of relocating wherever you want in the world, potentially. This option is only for players who have accumulated wealth and power and knowledge about the game, but it's rewarding because it takes time to get here and lets you do a lot of cool stuff once you've mastered parts of the game. The goal of reaching this stage in the game is what drives many players to keep exploring, to find more parts to build "that ship" or that thing that lets them advance closer to this stage.
3) Fucking fly. In Hellcore, players advance their characters by picking certain "mutation powers" - one of which lets you just fly yourself. This means you don't need to buy and maintain an expensive air vehicle and you're not quite as restricted in where you can fly (a helipad isn't required to land somewhere). This means you can take off to escape enemy players or mosnters you can't handle, without having to "lift off" or run back to a ship. It also means you're much harder to kill in the air - if your ship blows up, you can always bail out and fly around instead of plummetting to your death (you can even potentially become a sky pirate yourself, barging into people's idle air vehicles in the sky if you're skilled enough). On the other hand, flying with your fleshy body is pretty dangerous. It's super cold in the air, so you need to bundle up or you'll freeze to death (this restricts your armor options). There are also airborne enemies that don't attack ships but attack flying players... uhh chupacabras. Pretty obnoxious. This kind of mobility is more personal and lets people who really like exploring in the sky do so.

On the other hand, you have land travel:

1) Walking. Everyone can walk. The problem with walking is the game has a survival system - you need food and drink. Walking makes your thirsty, so you need to carry water around. Water is heavy. Finding fresh water in a dangerous toxic place isn't usually easy. Walking is probably the "safest" travelling option, but it's also hugely limited and slow. Also, temperature matters. If you walk somewhere freezing you might actually freeze to death if you don't prepare before hand. If you walk somewhere super hot, you can die from heat exhaustion. You can't walk around mountains trivally like in Skyrim...
2) Climbing. Yes, in Hellcore, climbing actually is a skill you need to level up. If you try to climb a mountain with no concept of grappling rocks you will fall. Falling from more than 10 ft is going to do impact damage to your character. Falling more than 50 ft is probably going to kill you. Falling can falling can cripple you. If you fall you can and often do break your legs or arms. One of the most crazy fun times I had was climbing down a horrible mountain with one broken arm. Not only that, but I was a Vampire, meaning, I needed to get off the fucking mountain before sunrise or I was toast. I barely made it and it was an adventure.

Some people would cite some of this as "tedium" but the whole point of a good RPG is to go on an adventure. The climbing mechanic - the fact you need to scale mountains or cliffs or super tall ladders and ropes - is integral. It adds height to travelling. There's no "walking alongside the side of a mountain" - you actually need to climb it. Good exploration is more than "you can climb that mountain" it's more like, "Climbing that mountain is tough, but if you do it... You'll have an adventure." In Skyrim, you will spend an hour or so glitching around a mountain only to realize you didn't really run into anything interesting, lol. At the top of most of the dangerous climbs in Hellcore, is at least something novel - if not some well-deserved experience or a new mutation or rare item used in crafting or something...

And you can also bypass climbing, one mutation lets you "leap" high, letting you skip this mechanic if you hate it. You can also mutate your character to significantly reduce falling damage, at a cost of becoming heavy and bulky (less carry weight).

3) Ground vehicles. This is of lesser use, but still improves the tedium of walking. Ground vehicles can get you in "car accidents" and cost some money or need to be crafted... and they take fuel... But they offer a quick alternative to foot travel.

4) Clairvoyance. This is definitely one of my favorite mechanics. As a clairvoyant, you can astrally project yourself anywhere. You can't "physically" go everywhere, but you can move through doors like a ghost, see horribly dangerous places (or just locked places that need keys you don't know how to get yet) and obstacles from super far away. As long as it's not coated in foil, you can really explore anywhere. It's a great mechanic, because if you want to walk to that place, it may have changed since you last astrally projected so there's still risk (and you need to lie down to project, which makes you vulnerable too). It's a great trade-off of letting you quickly determine if it's a waste of time to do adventure A, because yeah, there's nothing on the top of that mountain worth getting right now. Of course, you have to give up the option of flight or teleportation to obtain this power - so it's really letting players decide how they want to operate in a mobile sense - do you want flight on demand, or knowledge about areas you want to visit on demand?

5) Blink. Basically, teleportation. You can memorize a location and then travel back to it whenever you want. This is extremely powerful, as it allows for quick escapes - but it can also backfire. It has the biggest "investment" - you need to have a specially focused character to do this (kind of like a mage), if you fuck up and fail your roll, you can gib yourself with a botched teleport, or you can teleport somewhere (horribly) unexpeceted. Like clairvoyance and flight, it's mutually exclusive.

6) Other shit, I mean, vampires can turn into mist, there's a subterranean race mutation that lets you use sewer systems for speedy movment, and you can set up remote camera systems and tether them to your wristpad to monitor areas you want to control (letting you be in multiple places at once, essentially).

Did I mention there's also water travel?

Swimming is also of lesser note. Boats are nice places to store your loot, since they're mobile and hard for other players to locate on the vast "sea".

All in all, what I think I'm trying to describe here, is a multi-faceted system which lets players choose what kind of risks they want to take when they go on an adventure. They can skip tedium by taking risks (risks that involve dying and/or losing the items you're carrying) or by paying fines (fuel/taxi cost) or by being "forced" (you probably enjoy it anyway) to build a certain way to get advanced movement powers. But most of all, what makes it all work is each method promotes an adventure. No method is 100% safe or 100% "free", each presenting its own obstacle. And what this accomplishes is that each time you want to go somewhere, there's a good chance you'll actaully get there in a reasonable amount of time (or just survive the journey at all)... and there's also a pretty good chance you'll be thrown into a new experience - some monster you didn't see coming, or maybe you broke your arm on the top of the tallest mountain and now you're going to starve up there or die... It's just great. Clairvoyance is especially fun, many times I recall saying, "Fuck, so glad I didn't try walking into that room, I would have been murdered instantly."

The problem with Skyrim is that walking vs fast travel is pretty much the same thing. Only, walking just eats up your day. The main issue with Skyrim is... aside for some preplaced static one-time events at each location, there's nothing to experience. Nothing is dynamic. There's nothing even that dangerous. Nothing could possibly excite you. Hellcore is a MUD, so it's helped by the random events generated by players, but even there, there's so much dangerous stuff that can happen while travelling -- that it's exciting. It's also exciting because travelling is rewarding - you find shit and you take it back home. In Skyrim, was there any one item you were glad you "found" and made some adventure "worthwhile"? Fuck no, you'd go back to some questgiver and sigh because the tedium was over and you did that thing not that the thing itself was at all worthwihle.

So essentially, yeah, it all boils down to Skyrim being a bad fucking game. Nothing special. Big surprise.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Well, the lack of "risk" is not so much a Skyrim problem but of singleplayer games with the option to save/reload anywhere (basically godmode)

 

[thesheeep]

Well, the lack of "risk" is not so much a Skyrim problem but of singleplayer games with the option to save/reload anywhere (basically godmode)

You realize you are not forced to reload, right?
Blaming the game for offering a possibility to you is just silly.
There is no lack of risk. The risk is on some occasions too big / the punishment too severe.

However, I realized in my last discussion about this that some players seem to blame the game for their lack of willpower and/or their desire not too repeat the last X minutes of gameplay.
The second one is quite understandable. Anyway, many put the blame on the game. That is a fact which should be well known to developers.
Which makes me wonder why so many games do not implement different save modes to pick from when starting the game. Solves the problem and it would be really easy to implement. If you already have "save everywhere", reducing it to "do not save everywhere" is trivial...
Call it a "saving difficulty" or something like that, to appease the people claiming it changes the difficulty of anything.

Then again, I agree that it would lead to a different gameplay experience in some aspects.
I doubt that anyone would ever pick pockets in Skyrim without having a reload point close to the occasion.

If it had different saving modes, it should have been implemented in a manner that does not make you the prime target for the whole city on failure. What about just making the failed target impossible to pickpocket for the next X hours, because it is now "aware"? Similar to how people notice you slowly when sneaking. Or what about guaranteeing success for some items to steal, and the better you get at it, the "better" items you can get with 100% certainty? All other items could still have that normal chance. There are many solutions that would all improve the gameplay experience and lower the pressure on people that feel they must constantly save and reload.

The punishment for failing a dice roll is just too harsh for some skill checks in many games. It is in some cases something you will never want to happen, and then it is a punishment for something that appears very minor to you, like stealing a small dagger and then being faced with something that is almost as harsh as dying - or even more harsh as it wastes a lot of time.
Any player will think: "Who cares, really? Go into jail for that? Fight the whole city? Naaaaahhhh. *reload*".

However, this does not hold true for combat. If you save before every single enemy in a dungeon, it really is just you constantly failing your willpower and/or lazyness check and not the game being easy.

Hint:
Do not bind quick save / quick load to any button. It helps, trust me.
I am quite open about my lack of willpower concerning save games. I am too lazy to constantly go into menus to save the game, and I have no quick save / quick load buttons. I could still wait for 1 hour constantly to get an autosave (which is ridiculous, should be sleeping in beds only), but thankfully, that would break my immersion so I do not do it.
So what I end up with is pretty much auto saves on entering a new area. Works really well.