The decline of the Elder Scrolls series

[Kitako]

Can't wait to see all the TES furry mods fanbase interacting together.

 

[Sceptic]

When I did a LP of Daggerfall, I had to draw a chart to keep up with the political complexities of the game, and my position with various factions in the storyline. This is what it looked like:

Your chart has some glaring mistakes. Gortworg is most definitely NOT co-conspirator with Woodborne, he even tries to warn Lysandus of the plot against him. Then again the fact it's so hard to get all the relations right is another testament to the political plot's complexity.

I'm pretty sure that Daggerfall builds a large number of dungeons upon the start of a New Game. So two people playing Daggerfall on their computers will have to run through completely different dungeons, aside from several quest-specific ones that are always fixed.

All the dungeons are fixed actually, it's just that because there are so many of them, it's pretty much impossible to ever see all of them, and even on your Nth playthrough you'll encounter a dungeon you've never seen before.

Oh, but it is.

I actually had to check on Google that this wasn't copy/pasta. Awesome post Glyph

 

[Murk]

Atrokkus Metalix... fucking stalker.

 

[villain of the story]

It really depends on what you can stomach in terms of art and graphics after all these years, and what you're expecting. If you're okay with a world that is literally random-generated (before they polished it up), or even like the idea, it's great fun. Rather than try to critique it normally, I'll just cite some of my favorite things about it that stand out compared to the later games, and let you decide if it gets you interested.

Game world isn't randomly generated. It isn't even "generated". They are all templates and they are all the same every time you play. Even the dungeons, so often mistaken as procedurally/randomly generated, are templates. There a dozen or so patterns and once you memorize them, you can navigate them blind.

Quests have multiple, randomly-allocated endings. This happens on many quests, but there's one in particular I always remember where you're investigating someone who is allegedly possessed by a spirit of some sort. The church sends you to investigate. There's an ending where the possessed kid turns out to be faking it for the attention & possibly money, which I at first thought was just the normal, linear ending of the quest. The second time I did the quest, however, the kid turned out to be actually possessed by a demon. This does a *lot* to punch up the otherwise randomly-generated identikit world, because quests also have random locations, so the "same" quest in town B may not end the same as it did in Town A.

The fuck? Is this the same Daggerfall you are talking about? Maybe you played it with mods?

It's got that mid-90's DOS vibe of "We Don't Give a Fuck, ESRB hasn't even been invented yet." (I'm probably wrong on the ESRB bit.) The topless characters in churches for no reason in an otherwise completely asexual game kind of ooze this feeling. The awesomeness of the books reinforce this (a lot of the best books from later iterations of the series are direct copies or rewrites of these ones).

There is actually a parental lock in the options that censors a great many things.

It is a pre-Todd-Howard-era Bethesda

Not exactly. He was a designer on Daggerfall. Not in a leading role but in a considerable role nonetheless. But we the bro few among bros like to entertain the idea that he was the janitor at the time for shit and giggles. Which he was, of course.

 

[villain of the story]

What was in Arena that wasn't in Daggerfall? Very curious, I haven't played Arena as much.

I don't know the exact differences, IIRC, remove wall/floor and the spellmaker allowed effects to be per level which made the spells more powerful as you leveled up. I was more referring to the spell effects like polymorph, transfer attribute and detect, which did not work so rather than fix them they were removed. I think this design philosophy of cutting things rather than making them work properly continued onto the other games in the series, that is why you see a steady decline of the number of skills/magic and stats.

They didn't remove them. Those spells were bugged and simply didn't work. They are still in the game. In fact, transfer attribute might occasionally be working but I don't remember any more.

 

[villain of the story]

The topless characters in churches for no reason

The topless wenches in temples are apparently sex slaves for high priest Daedra summoner.

Or possibly one of the people sacrificed to daedric princes as offerings.

Or maybe they were there as symbols of the sin that the daedric princes heartily encouraged.

I always noticed that the naked ladies (they weren't merely topless) had a nasty attitude - "Me? Talk to you? AHAHAHAAHA!"

Whore/Priestesses were common around Mesopotamia.

I am not sure about "whore/priestess". More like nudity wasn't an issue for higher classes whereas prostitutes had to wear concealing clothing in public. And maybe priestesses had sexual rituals but I wouldn't equate that to being a whore. I might of course be wrong but that's how I remember my ancient Mesopotamia.

 

[Manjuice Nutella]

The Elder Scrolls

Howard's first development credit for The Elder Scrolls came in the form of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, released in 1996. He was also the project leader and designer of The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard released in 1998.
Howard would then become the project leader and designer of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and for the downloadable content that followed. He led the creation of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and all of its downloadable content.
After taking a break from The Elder Scrolls and developing Fallout 3, he returned to the series to lead the fifth installment, Skyrim. It was released in 2011. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim received universal acclaim from critics.

[edit]​

Fallout

He was Game Director and Executive Producer of Fallout 3.

This made me lol as fuck.

 

[Regvard]

things

I'm no expert but I'm pretty sure there were priestesses who had sex in temples in the name of their gods or whatever. If that's not prostitution, currency being the god coins, I don't know what is.

You know the head scarves Mudslime women wear? Let me introduce you to this woman, she is a true bro:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muazzez_İlmiye_Çığ


"... how her research into the history of the headscarf revealed that it did not originate in the Muslim world, but was worn five thousand years ago by Sumerian priestesses who initiated young men into sex..."

 

[Luzur]

Keep at it for a week, and this is what your character will look like:

If you know where to look, you can steal daedric armour and weapons at level 1 with the basic Open spell.

3 of the taverns in Anticlere got them, along with hundreds of other taverns in Daggerfall.

 

[Luzur]

Not exactly. He was a designer on Daggerfall. Not in a leading role but in a considerable role nonetheless. But we the bro few among bros like to entertain the idea that he was the janitor at the time for shit and giggles. Which he was, of course.

didnt he design quests or something like that? i know i read it somewhere a long time ago.

 

[octavius]

I thought Todd did the VA for the Bosmers?

 

[Zeriel]

You also have to consider that people's personalities are important. You can have someone who works fine under good direction but is total aids if put in charge of things, the type of person who will do anything to please the higher-ups and follow the market.

 

[abnaxus]

things

I'm no expert but I'm pretty sure there were priestesses who had sex in temples in the name of their gods or whatever. If that's not prostitution, currency being the god coins, I don't know what is.

Priestesses of Rahja, sure, but that's Dark Eye setting.

 

[Wyrmlord]

Keep at it for a week, and this is what your character will look like:

If you know where to look, you can steal daedric armour and weapons at level 1 with the basic Open spell.

3 of the taverns in Anticlere got them, along with hundreds of other taverns in Daggerfall.

That cheap tavern trick helps find daedric weapons, but not armour.

 

[Kahlis]

The day people no longer realize what they truly want in RPGs and just buy into the escapist LARPing and ego masturbation is the day the series can never recover. I like how he cites the game as being for intellectuals and tabletop gamers, when he clearly does not realize that tabletop gaming is as close as one can get to a system where any idea or action you take can be properly reciprocated and have a 1-to-1 impact on the world. In Skyrim, you realize nothing really matters and the game's pacing is completely mongoloid and soulless, any efforts to play your character a certain way and with a certain dignity are completely fruitless. But who cares? We can just pretend that there's a compelling game under there.

Also I hate that stiltedly "intellectual" writing style where one embellishes every other statement with imagery. "Wrought by a craftsmen [sic]", "looking for a canvas." This isn't 8th grade English class, your assumptions and dismissive attitude towards people who think the game is shit are no more eloquent nor rational than those of the average 12 year old YouTube commenter.

Not exactly. He was a designer on Daggerfall. Not in a leading role but in a considerable role nonetheless. But we the bro few among bros like to entertain the idea that he was the janitor at the time for shit and giggles. Which he was, of course.

Actually-actually, I believe he joined near the end of the development of the CD version of Arena and did some minor programming/Q&A stuff then. I like to joke that he was the only one there at the time who knew how to use a CD burner, and that's why they kept him onboard.

 

[Broseph]

Also I hate that stiltedly "intellectual" writing style where one embellishes every other statement with imagery. "Wrought by a craftsmen [sic]", "looking for a canvas." This isn't 8th grade English class, your assumptions and dismissive attitude towards people who think the game is shit are no more eloquent nor rational than those of the average 12 year old YouTube commenter.
.

People like that are the status quo on ESF. Writing your posts in an intelligent style doesn't make your point valid, FFS.

 

[Manjuice Nutella]

Maybe wrong place, but

BROS I need help.

I've applied for betatesting of new version of Skyrim Redone. Unfortunately, to get that running, I need to load "Plugins.txt" file in the patcher, which, as I've found out, is absent from, shall we say, non-Steam versions.

If anyone has a legit Skyrim installed, please hook me up with that textfile for me to prepare. Thanks in advance.

 

[eric__s]

I like the class generator in Daggerfall, it was a really cool idea and I've spent hours in it, but I think it came at the expense of truly unique classes. In Arena, there were classes that had completely unique abilities - rangers could travel faster and gained 1 damage every level, knights repaired weapons over time, assassins gained 3% chance to get critical hits every level, acrobats got special bonuses to dodging. These abilities gave very real distinctions to classes that would otherwise be pretty similar. Daggerfall replaced this system with modular character traits, sort of like a pool of lego bricks that all characters could draw from. What it meant was that in the end, every character had 3x spell points, wore daedric plate, had 30 HP per level and took 30% of the experience to level up their skills. Moreover, the unique abilities that made classes in Arena truly powerful were gone. Every character could do everything, but they couldn't reach the same potential that characters from a more restrictive system could reach.

What's the point of having character classes if you've got a system where every character can do everything? That's the conclusion they ultimately reached in Skyrim and it came from design choices made in Daggerfall.

Arena also had better wilderness than Daggerfall and depending on what you like about them, also better dungeons. That said, Daggerfall is one of the best games ever. It's a game with more flaws than Arena, but also more depth and ambition.

and fuck anyone who calls them bosmer and altmer or whatever they're called now.

 

[Zeriel]

I like the class generator in Daggerfall, it was a really cool idea and I've spent hours in it, but I think it came at the expense of truly unique classes. In Arena, there were classes that had completely unique abilities - rangers could travel faster and gained 1 damage every level, knights repaired weapons over time, assassins gained 3% chance to get critical hits every level, acrobats got special bonuses to dodging. These abilities gave very real distinctions to classes that would otherwise be pretty similar. Daggerfall replaced this system with modular character traits, sort of like a pool of lego bricks that all characters could draw from. What it meant was that in the end, every character had 3x spell points, wore daedric plate, had 30 HP per level and took 30% of the experience to level up their skills. Moreover, the unique abilities that made classes in Arena truly powerful were gone. Every character could do everything, but they couldn't reach the same potential that characters from a more restrictive system could reach.

What's the point of having character classes if you've got a system where every character can do everything? That's the conclusion they ultimately reached in Skyrim and it came from design choices made in Daggerfall.

Arena also had better wilderness than Daggerfall and depending on what you like about them, also better dungeons. That said, Daggerfall is one of the best games ever. It's a game with more flaws than Arena, but also more depth and ambition.

and fuck anyone who calls them bosmer and altmer or whatever they're called now.

What you're describing with Daggerfall is gaming the system. It's just as bad in strict class systems--people just find the best class (and there is always a best class, even if the degree of difference is small) and play that more than the others. This is only really strongly illustrated in multiplayer class-based games where there is a competitive advantage, but it definitely can happen in singleplayer games too (for example, the Mage/Sorceror is clearly the best class in Baldur's Gate 2).

 

[eric__s]

It was a system built around being gamed. Why choose a pre-made class with dumb, arbitrary limitations and no advantages when you could make your own with as many advantages as you want? It would have been a good system if the pre-made classes had maintained the things that made them unique from the previous game, but they were just names on a list to scroll by on the way to the class maker. This is a case where the game pushed you into min-maxing (or at the very least, creating a class that was infinitely better than any of the pre-made classes) by making all of the pre-made classes comparatively very bad.

This is clearly the predominant approach to class creation because Bethesda dropped classes all together in Skyrim. This is what most people were doing in Daggerfall and all the games that came after it and it's something they themselves encouraged through bad decisions.

 

[Manjuice Nutella]

It wasn't their intention to make useless/inferior skills, though.

 

[eric__s]

Well that changes everything.

 

[Wyrmlord]

I like the class generator in Daggerfall, it was a really cool idea and I've spent hours in it, but I think it came at the expense of truly unique classes. In Arena, there were classes that had completely unique abilities - rangers could travel faster and gained 1 damage every level, knights repaired weapons over time, assassins gained 3% chance to get critical hits every level, acrobats got special bonuses to dodging. These abilities gave very real distinctions to classes that would otherwise be pretty similar. Daggerfall replaced this system with modular character traits, sort of like a pool of lego bricks that all characters could draw from. What it meant was that in the end, every character had 3x spell points, wore daedric plate, had 30 HP per level and took 30% of the experience to level up their skills. Moreover, the unique abilities that made classes in Arena truly powerful were gone. Every character could do everything, but they couldn't reach the same potential that characters from a more restrictive system could reach.

What's the point of having character classes if you've got a system where every character can do everything? That's the conclusion they ultimately reached in Skyrim and it came from design choices made in Daggerfall.

Arena also had better wilderness than Daggerfall and depending on what you like about them, also better dungeons. That said, Daggerfall is one of the best games ever. It's a game with more flaws than Arena, but also more depth and ambition.

and fuck anyone who calls them bosmer and altmer or whatever they're called now.

Yeah, having played a lot of ID2 lately and a lot of DF in the past, here is what I feel.

I was wondering if the D&D 3ed classes in ID2 could be broken up into a set of traits that could comprise a custom class creation system. Then I realized it was unfeasible. In D&D 3ed, classes are more than just the sum of various advantages and disadvantages. A Paladin isn't just a fighting and divine spell-casting class that can add Charisma to saving throws. This much we could emulate in a custom class creator. A Paladin is also someone who always reacts to acts of evil happening in front of him, who refuses less than morally scrupulous choices, and who gets access to special options and items not available to others. Similarly, a Dreadmaster of Bane isn't just a cleric whose Will-save-negating spells require a higher Will to resist. He is cruel, manipulative, and simply incapable of showing much charity other than for personal gain.

I suppose we could emulate these things in a way. You could make a custom class, join a knightly or clerical order, and then gain the peculiar traits of such orders. You could make an arcane spellcasting custom character, but he can become a part of a paladin order if he fits certain requirements.

Then there is also the trouble of having level-based abilities. In Daggerfall, most advantages are complete and instantaneous. Immunity to Magic means Immunity to Magic, for a Level 1 or Level 30 character. But having your Monk gradually raise his spell resistance from 24 at level 13 to 41 at level 30 also gives that incentive to keep gaining more levels and augment his existing advantages. The closest thing we have is Spell Absorption, which works best with 100 INT and 100 WIL but once you do get those stats, your level won't make a difference to that ability.

 

[Kitako]

TLDR: "Skyrim is 2Deep4U"

Also, in which way tabletop players are tied to the TrueSkyrimXPERIENCE™? Do they roll a dice for every slider in the face creation menu?

 

[Kem0sabe]

I would love a mix of the fallout gameplay (realy enjoyed the latest New Vegas game) with the Elder Scrolls series. I think Bethesda is great at building worlds, but not at populating them with content.

In a perfect world every rpg would have dialogue skill checks, tactical combat and incredible characters/quests.