Anyone addicted to Morrowind?

[Grauken]

this is the longest post I've seen in my life, it doesn't even fit on 2 screens

Time to buy a bigger monitor

 

[Harthwain]

If you've never completed the main quest, then you haven't really played Morrowind.

Once - sure. But I prefer to have a threat hanging over the land instead of resolving it, because it makes the world feel... empty. The fact that the finale itself was a rushed job doesn't help.

 

[Eirinjas]

The Morrowind main quest plot would make for a cool movie or series, but nevermind - everything is gay now.

 

[NecroLord]

The Morrowind main quest plot would make for a cool movie or series, but nevermind - everything is gay now.

Yeah, I don't want to see such a classic get the Netflix Adaptation or Amazon treatment...
Morrowind is an RPG. It needs to be played and experienced with your own character, not through a movie.

 

[Lemming42]

The game only feels empty if you haven't engaged with it. Yes, the NPCs don't move much, and many of them have identical canned wiki replies, but if you engage with the world, explore the wilderness and dungeons, join guilds and factions, play a role, read the in-game books, talk to the NPCs with bespoke dialogue, etc...there's just so much there.

What people tend to mean when they say the game is empty is that it's entirely static and everything the player does is almost entirely inconsequential. You can walk into town and start shooting fireballs at people and nobody gives a shit, you can run into town chased by five cliff racers and a scamp and everyone just continues to walk in their allocated three-meter space. Stores don't close at night and shopkeepers stand still while you steal their entire stock - in fact, there's no day/night cycle at all in terms of NPC behaviour and the passage of time impacts nothing. You can walk into slave farms and kill the slavers and the slaves won't care.

The whole world is frozen in time and nothing happens outside the player, and even the player has a very limited capacity to actually do anything. A lot of it comes down to the kind of developer laziness that characterises every Bethesda game, it wouldn't have been that hard to put some basic reactivity in (some mods have already done it) but they seemingly just couldn't be arsed. It's annoying because a lot of this could be governed by fairly simple overarching systems; Daggerfall already had class/region/criminal reputation and a day/night cycle, and Oblivion and Skyrim had simple AI that caused people to flee if the player started attacking people.

This matters because most of the open world elements start to suffer as a result - it's all well and good for there to be diagetic fast travel networks, but what's the point when there are no timed quests, time passing has no effect on anything, and nothing happens in the world? It ultimately doesn't matter whether you fast travel or not; all it does is eliminate the tedium of walking through ground you've already covered on which nothing has changed because everything's entirely frozen and unreactive.

I get that any given mechanic is basically shallow, but the multiple approaches are, for the time especially, but even for now, really pretty cool. For example, if you want to unlock a door, you can be a security/lockpicking build and lockpick it, or you can be a mage/alteration build and unlock it with magic, or you can be a mysticism build and detect key to find the key, or you can be a warrior build and just kill everyone and loot them for the key, or you can be an illusion and personality and speechcraft build and calm enemies and persuade them to get the key, or you can be anyone and just use a scroll of unhinging, etc...all of these are, mechanics-wise, just variations on pressing a button, but the roleplay, if you meet the game half-way in the theatre of the mind, is really great. With relatively low production values and dev fidelity, you can create such a wide variety of mechanics at lower cost, and I think that is how Morrowind has so much more roleplay variety than the later TES games.

I agree with this part and it's the one area where the game shines (other than art style and lore obviously). I really wish they'd designed the quests around this, like instead of "kill these people and report back" there were more quests of the type that ask you to achieve an objective that can be done organically by messing around with the various systems. It's a problem with every TES game, the game systems let you be almost anyone you want, but the instant you interact with any other person or take any quest, it can fall apart very quickly, and unless your character is "person who kills things for money" then you start to realise that the game isn't really accomodating you so much as just tolerating you.

 

[Harthwain]

you can run into town chased by five cliff racers and a scamp and everyone just continues to walk in their allocated three-meter space.

Wait, what? I recall NPCs helping me kill wildlife in Morrowind.

A lot of it comes down to the kind of developer laziness that characterises every Bethesda game, it wouldn't have been that hard to put some basic reactivity in (some mods have already done it) but they seemingly just couldn't be arsed.

In case of Morrowind it can be argued it was not the laziness, rather - Bethesda at that time had to do too many things to add even more things to the workload.

 

[JarlFrank]

Morrowind has the best classic memes.

 

[JarlFrank]

Oh and of course the BEST of them all:

 

[Lemming42]

Wait, what? I recall NPCs helping me kill wildlife in Morrowind.

Almost all townspeople and Ashlanders will stand totally still and do nothing while you get savaged before their eyes. There might be a couple people who can be attacked by wildlife and thus fight back (eg the pilgrim lady who wants to be escorted the mucksponge fields). Guards might attack creatures but I'm not sure.

In case of Morrowind it can be argued it was not the laziness, rather - Bethesda at that time had to do too many things to add even more things to the workload.

They somehow manage the same thing every time though. Their approach always seems to be to just shove random shit into the game without thinking it out or making it work, and you can almost pinpoint the exact part in each game where they basically give up, leave most of the game systems half-finished, and start filling with the world with copypasted dungeons and ultra half-assed quests. In Fallout 3 especially you can almost see the exact geographical point on the map where everything northwest of it was just slapped together at the last minute.

I feel like it'd be better off if they just didn't include things that weren't gonna work and weren't connected to the rest of the game - Starfield's procgen being perhaps the most spectacular example. Ideally there shouldn't be slaves stood there saying "I cannot be freed without the key" for whom there is no corresponding key (and even if there was, they'd stand on the plantation for eternity anyway).

 

[Harthwain]

Guards might attack creatures but I'm not sure.

Ah, that could be it.

They somehow manage the same thing every time though.

And each subsequent game gets worse, not better.

 

[The Jester]

TOEE is *SO* more linear then BG. At some stages of BG you are actually quite free to explore the wilderness or Baldur's Gate itself. It just has choke points where you have to do something in order to progress. It is at least as free as Arcanum, or PS:T, or U7:SI but not as free as U7 or Morrowind. Plus, you could easily have a fairly non-linear adventure game, so linear != adventure game.

OMG! I can wander around the city and then I can go anywhere in the city! The non-linearity unleashed!
Now, ToEE gives you several ways into the Temple, one is directly from the Moathouse, I think at least 5 ways to beat the game (one allows you to banish Zuggtmoy without fighting), different factions inside the temple, and as Spazmo pointed out variety of endings based on your actions.

Are you talking about the same BG where they practicaly say "You can't go in the city yet, come back in a later chapter"?

No it must be some other BG I didn't get, I got stuck with the linear one

Yeah, I think I got the linear one too. May be there was a special edition or something

Ugh I know right? If only the game would teleport my character from one quest to another so that I would be saved from all this "walking" and "linearity"...

 

[Lemming42]

Vault Dweller did nothing wrong.

 

[None]

Oh and of course the BEST of them all:

The forums must be broken, your link is all messed up. Pretty sure you meant this:

 

[None]

Yea I thought the morrowind main quest was great, except for the whole uniting the houses and tribes part. Felt very long-winded.

Really? I feel the opposite way. That act of the main quest feels far too short and underwhelming. Compare it to the journey you take going from a clueless newcomer, figuring out what the hell a Dagoth Ur and Nerevarine are, overcoming Corpus, to finding out that you are in fact the reincarnation of Nerevar. And then you very quickly go from Great House to tribe to sign your Nerevarine License and then you're off to fight Dagoth Ur. Should have been a little more involved, both in convincing the factions as well as them being involved in the climax.

 

[Zanzoken]

What people tend to mean when they say the game is empty is that it's entirely static and everything the player does is almost entirely inconsequential. You can walk into town and start shooting fireballs at people and nobody gives a shit, you can run into town chased by five cliff racers and a scamp and everyone just continues to walk in their allocated three-meter space. Stores don't close at night and shopkeepers stand still while you steal their entire stock - in fact, there's no day/night cycle at all in terms of NPC behaviour and the passage of time impacts nothing. You can walk into slave farms and kill the slavers and the slaves won't care.

The whole world is frozen in time and nothing happens outside the player, and even the player has a very limited capacity to actually do anything. A lot of it comes down to the kind of developer laziness that characterises every Bethesda game, it wouldn't have been that hard to put some basic reactivity in (some mods have already done it) but they seemingly just couldn't be arsed. It's annoying because a lot of this could be governed by fairly simple overarching systems; Daggerfall already had class/region/criminal reputation and a day/night cycle, and Oblivion and Skyrim had simple AI that caused people to flee if the player started attacking people.

This matters because most of the open world elements start to suffer as a result - it's all well and good for there to be diagetic fast travel networks, but what's the point when there are no timed quests, time passing has no effect on anything, and nothing happens in the world? It ultimately doesn't matter whether you fast travel or not; all it does is eliminate the tedium of walking through ground you've already covered on which nothing has changed because everything's entirely frozen and unreactive.

This is true and a legitimate criticism.

I love how Gothic handled this by using the chapter system to update the world state whenever major story events occur, so that you actually get to see changes over time. It seems like a really intelligent way to add reactivity without a heavy amount of complicated scripting.

 

[Konjad]

Oh and of course the BEST of them all:

The forums must be broken, your link is all messed up. Pretty sure you meant this:

Thanks for these. Now i realize it's not just modders who are insane but entire TES community

 

[Just Locus]

Now i realize it's not just modders who are insane but entire TES community

Took you this long?

 

[gabe1010]

What people tend to mean when they say the game is empty is that it's entirely static and everything the player does is almost entirely inconsequential. You can walk into town and start shooting fireballs at people and nobody gives a shit, you can run into town chased by five cliff racers and a scamp and everyone just continues to walk in their allocated three-meter space. Stores don't close at night and shopkeepers stand still while you steal their entire stock - in fact, there's no day/night cycle at all in terms of NPC behaviour and the passage of time impacts nothing. You can walk into slave farms and kill the slavers and the slaves won't care.

The whole world is frozen in time and nothing happens outside the player, and even the player has a very limited capacity to actually do anything. A lot of it comes down to the kind of developer laziness that characterises every Bethesda game, it wouldn't have been that hard to put some basic reactivity in (some mods have already done it) but they seemingly just couldn't be arsed. It's annoying because a lot of this could be governed by fairly simple overarching systems; Daggerfall already had class/region/criminal reputation and a day/night cycle, and Oblivion and Skyrim had simple AI that caused people to flee if the player started attacking people.

This matters because most of the open world elements start to suffer as a result - it's all well and good for there to be diagetic fast travel networks, but what's the point when there are no timed quests, time passing has no effect on anything, and nothing happens in the world? It ultimately doesn't matter whether you fast travel or not; all it does is eliminate the tedium of walking through ground you've already covered on which nothing has changed because everything's entirely frozen and unreactive.

This is true and a legitimate criticism.

I love how Gothic handled this by using the chapter system to update the world state whenever major story events occur, so that you actually get to see changes over time. It seems like a really intelligent way to add reactivity without a heavy amount of complicated scripting.

Yeah I agree that the world is not dynamic. There are some one-off small things like guards attacking creatures you drag into town, or everyone in a room attacking you if you kill their leader (e.g. a telvanni councillor), the end of the thieves and fighters guilds being mutually incompatible, people from your guild/house or race liking you more and from rival guilds liking you less, NPCs noting your nice clothing, etc...but it's not that much. One particularly egregious example of poor dynamics in the AI I ran into was this: in the house Redoran quest line you have to save a Redoran councilor's daughter from a kidnapping by the Telvanni. I travelled to Sadrith Mora where she was being held, went into tel whatever, looked around and found her, told her to follow me, got attacked, killed everybody, then ran out to the mage's guild in the castle nearby and teleported with her back to Ald'ruhn, brought her back to her father and talked to him, but he was still just like "woe is me where is my daughter" and the daughter was like "take me to the docks and I can get back home on my own," and I was like "jesus she doesn't know we're already standing here in her house next to her dad?" So, I had to teleport/walk all the way back to Sadrith Mora and lead her back to the docks lol. Obviously, that was terrible, although not a super common issue as most quests don't involve moving NPCs around.

However, to defend this a bit, in development you always want to keep a focus on what the central appeal of the game is, concentrate all in on that, and ruthlessly pare away anything that distracts from that main focus (and that can be both in the sense of things that distract the player ie design bloat, or that waste dev time on irrelevant stuff). In Morrowind's case, the appeal is the background, lore, physical exploration over a diverse and alien terrain, learning about factions and guilds and working through them, some dungeon crawling, roleplaying a class (including basic alchemy/blacksmithing/enchanting systems), and maybe some interesting events in the main quest. It's an open world, exploration, medieval fantasy immersion game. It's not The Sims, and a colony-sim-like town or home building game where everyone has jobs and schedules and beds and hobbies and friends/enemies and dynamic behavior and conversations all driven probably by some kind of GOAP system + Utility curves (like The Sims) is not really necessary for the core appeal of Morrowind, and for the most part such a system would only be noticeable in how buggy it likely would be. With a colony sim, or strategy game, or The Sims, or whatever GOAP-utilizing AI game, you have a bird's eye view of the AI behavior, and some kind of UI conveying their decision-making (basic flat interface, or in-world thought bubbles or desire curves or whatever), and so you can really appreciate watching the AI playout (like seeing them go get more wood on their own when they're out of wood, or bring pales of water to the well when there's a fire and such). In first person, in a game where you are concentrated more on questing, exploring and combat, you aren't that likely to just watch and follow NPCs around to make sure that they are really intelligent, and for players who do like that, a simple hard-coded schedule or scripted quest interactions would likely be sufficient to satisfy most of them. Asking for more than that is kind of like asking for Morrowind to be a different genre of game. The AI is mediocre for the same reason the combat is (still) mediocre: it's not the main appeal (and the combat should probably be improved before the AI tbh).

The lack of NPC dynamics is a simplifying assumption that presumably made almost every aspect of world design, interior level design, navigation, quest design, game balance and so on vastly easier. So, I think it's more a matter of priorities rather than laziness. One aspect of building complex software projects that's worth bringing up here, is that the more systems, especially dynamic systems, you add, the the higher the marginal cost is of implementing new systems, and expanding, managing, and maintaining existing systems, and it's not a linear relationship. There are so many individual (if often simple) systems in a Bethesda game, that I suspect they got to a point where they were barely holding things together as is, and adding some pervasive AI system that underlies and interacts with everything else would have been basically impossible on the budget of Morrowind. However, it is an obviously desirable feature (at least from a marketing and normie perspective), so much so that it was a priority and majorly marketed feature of their next installment, Oblivion.

Oblivion's so-called "Radiant AI" (which is just a rebranding of GOAP afaik) was impressive on paper, but that level of dynamic behaviors led to so many bizarre edge cases and catastrophic outcomes that they had to hobble it before launch to make the game playable. You'd get stuff like all merchants losing all goods/gold, or all the NPCs in an entire town killing each other, and so they spent an enormous amount of time creating a large number of exceptions and putting gates up around the dynamic behavior, and thus killed a lot of what made it interesting in the first place. I think they would have been better off with just simple, scripted behaviors/schedules/reactions, instead of an attempt at a massive, dynamic AI system. To explain a bit better, in GOAP (goal oriented action planning) an NPC can have a goal, like play an ambient animation, or walk home, or kill an enemy, and then they draw from a series of tasks they are allotted with different requirements and outputs and costs, and they use some kind of algorithm (typically a navigation algorithm like A*) to find the fastest permitted "path" from start to finish along those tasks to their goal, which are like nodes in a tree (not necessarily a literal path, but in the abstract sense of connecting nodes with given costs, the way that pathfinding and cost calculations across a navigation mesh works as well). Picking the goals themselves is often done with a Utility curve, balancing different desires against one another, like in The Sims, such that utility AI and GOAP are often spoken of in the same breath, but they don't have to be paired.

For example, say my goal is to play some ambient animation around my shop, and I choose (by whatever means, maybe randomly) to play a sweeping animation. The sweeping task requires that I have a broom as an input, but I do not have a broom, so part of my "path" becomes to acquire a broom. Some search or AI data system or whatever tells me that the other NPC next to me in the room has a broom, and one legitimate path for thus getting a broom quickly is to kill them, steal the broom, and then I can accomplish my goal of sweeping the floor...obviously this is not a desired outcome (although it was apparently pretty funny). You may say, well just gate that task with some exception where the path to the goal is not permitted to use force or whatever, and that might work, but imagine what an infinitude of exceptions like that you will have to make, and then realize that sometimes just scripting out a few behaviors for each NPC might actually be good enough, less work, and less buggy.

I will say that Morrowind should have added something simple like basic hard-coded (NOT dynamic) schedules, so that NPCs sleep at night, walk to work, and have a few ambient animations, so at the very least you can roleplay thievery and assassination a bit better, rather than living in a world of doll-house like animatronics bolted to the ground. A day night cycle with fewer people out, but maybe some thieves/assassins/vampires, at night would have been awesome. I also like what is described above in Gothic with the chapter system; That seems like a very good dynamic world result to low dev impact ratio.

I like the fast travel in Morrowind both for eliminating the tedium and time loss of treading the same ground over and over, and because it feels like an earned bit of power and extra world-building/immersion. Paying a toll to take a boat or silt-strider makes sense in-world, and is expensive early on, and you don't know where places are, and once you've gotten more money and experience and can get where you want, and even know where that is, it feels like progress, unlike being able to jet off almost anywhere from the menu from the beginning. It adds verisimilitude to the world that you take boats around coastal cities and the island cantons of vivec, but a fantasy flying bug-bus between land cities. It adds to the lore as you learn about say ancient dunmer strongholds and magical practices in acquiring the propylon indices. It also forces the level designers to think about navigation overland as they design, which pays huge dividends for worldbuilding, unlike later TES games, and most open world games, which are almost impossible to navigate without a GPS and fast travel because the LDs knew that fast travel was in there, so the forests or whatever are just endlessly repetitive and unremarkable foliage like Oblivion.

 

[Lemming42]

The lack of NPC dynamics is a simplifying assumption that presumably made almost every aspect of world design, interior level design, navigation, quest design, game balance and so on vastly easier. So, I think it's more a matter of priorities rather than laziness.

I'd suggest the AI and world in general being so unreactive actually jars with the apparent aims of the game and series. There's no point having a crime system when nobody remembers your crimes after you pay a bit of gold, there's no point having thief skills or being a vampire (as you mention) if nighttime and daytime are identical (in fact, there's no point in time passing at all if it doesn't affect anything), there's little mechanical reason to have different types of fast travel when there's no longer any time limits on quests, etc.

The annoying part is that most of these things were already achieved in games that existed prior to Morrowind (even Fallout has better world reactivity in terms of NPCs reacting to shit). Radiant AI was a hilarious mess (albeit a boldly-intentioned one) but it's far from the only way to handle a lot of this stuff.

Daggerfall had already sketched out how this could all work in the context of The Elder Scrolls six years earlier. People remember your crimes and if you're a repeat offender you end up getting harassed by guards and chased out of towns, shops close at night and the player can attempt to break in at the risk of being caught by guards, guards will spawn to apprehend the player if they attack a townsperson, and almost every quest is timed and forces the player to factor in travel (which obviously makes teleportation supremely powerful). All the systems were fairly simplistic (except the crime and court system which I honestly thought was pretty good) but Morrowind removed or gutted them without having anything much to replace them, while still keeping The Elder Scrolls' "open world where you can build any character you want" format, which leads to the weirdness of having a bunch of skills and builds that no longer really have any purpose and aren't serviced by what the game offers. A lot of stuff in Morrowind feels almost vestigial - day/night cycles, thief skills, the crime system, they're all there because they've been inherited, but they barely serve a purpose anymore.

If it's a case of priorities, then it comes back to the old Douglas Goodall quote about Todd's priorities for the game:

I disagreed with Todd a lot because Todd and I do not like the same kinds of games. This is not his fault or mine. Whether it is more fun to smash things with a huge axe or coax secrets from obfuscated texts is pure opinion. Whether it's better to play against dice or against an intelligent designer is pure opinion. Frankly, most gamers are more like Todd. It is in Bethesda's best interests to appeal to those gamers, instead of making a game that appeals to me. I selfishly didn't want to work on a game that didn't appeal to me, but that wasn't my job. My job was to work on Morrowind, regardless of whether I liked it or not.

I think that's the problem at the core - there's a lot of open world simulation stuff and interesting mechanics in the game, but the game itself generally doesn't make use of it, because it's mostly concerned with the player walking to dungeons and killing things. Fast travel exists but it doesn't really do anything other than apply a trivial tax to the player. Shops exist that can be stolen from, but there's no real viable stealth mechanics or skills attached to doing this, and anyone can thus successfully burgle any shop no matter what their character build is (or just kill the shopkeeper without consequence). You can get caught for crimes, but the system starts and ends with "pay money to a guard to reset everything back to normal". Time passes and it can become night or day, but these states mean nothing and the passage of time has no impact on anything. The world is full of NPCs, but they don't do anything. Roads connect towns, but nobody travels on them. Cities are loaded as part of the world rather than as separate cells, but leading enemies into cities does basically nothing, and the cities can't interact with the outside world in any way. Speechcraft builds are possible with calm spells and spamming Admire, but the game never actually expects you to do that and doesn't tie it into any of the many quests that expect you to engage in combat, and so on. It's the illusion of an open world but when you poke any part of it, it crumbles.

The obvious question is whether or not these mechanics are present just enough to make the game work as a LARPing simulator, which is sort of the main goal of Bethesda games anyway. To some degree it works, but I feel like the game has a bunch of annoying shit and systems so hollow that they even get in the way of a good LARP.

 

[gabe1010]

The lack of NPC dynamics is a simplifying assumption that presumably made almost every aspect of world design, interior level design, navigation, quest design, game balance and so on vastly easier. So, I think it's more a matter of priorities rather than laziness.

I'd suggest the AI and world in general being so unreactive actually jars with the apparent aims of the game and series. There's no point having a crime system when nobody remembers your crimes after you pay a bit of gold, there's no point having thief skills or being a vampire (as you mention) if nighttime and daytime are identical (in fact, there's no point in time passing at all if it doesn't affect anything), there's little mechanical reason to have different types of fast travel when there's no longer any time limits on quests, etc.

The annoying part is that most of these things were already achieved in games that existed prior to Morrowind (even Fallout has better world reactivity in terms of NPCs reacting to shit). Radiant AI was a hilarious mess (albeit a boldly-intentioned one) but it's far from the only way to handle a lot of this stuff.

Daggerfall had already sketched out how this could all work in the context of The Elder Scrolls six years earlier. People remember your crimes and if you're a repeat offender you end up getting harassed by guards and chased out of towns, shops close at night and the player can attempt to break in at the risk of being caught by guards, guards will spawn to apprehend the player if they attack a townsperson, and almost every quest is timed and forces the player to factor in travel (which obviously makes teleportation supremely powerful). All the systems were fairly simplistic (except the crime and court system which I honestly thought was pretty good) but Morrowind removed or gutted them without having anything much to replace them, while still keeping The Elder Scrolls' "open world where you can build any character you want" format, which leads to the weirdness of having a bunch of skills and builds that no longer really have any purpose and aren't serviced by what the game offers. A lot of stuff in Morrowind feels almost vestigial - day/night cycles, thief skills, the crime system, they're all there because they've been inherited, but they barely serve a purpose anymore.

I don't disagree with much of this. It is possible to commit enough crime in Morrowind that you get a "death warrant" and can no longer pay it off (they just kill you), but it would be much better if, like you say, your reputation for crime was (more like the faction relations) regional rather than everyone in the world knowing about you the notorious outlaw as soon as you steal a loaf of bread. Morrowind has jail, but it's balanced weird such that it's almost always better to pay or fight or reload. Committing crime should tie more into the appropriate guilds, the way murder in Oblivion + the dark brotherhood does. And, ofc I agree that day/night should exist as discussed, but as per my last paragraph, I do like the in-game fast travel even without timed quests, and I think it adds more to the game than just existing.

Time limits on some quests would be more immersive in many ways, but also perhaps quite frustrating, so I think the devil would be in the details with bringing that back into post-Daggerfall TES, but I'm open to the idea (would it be limited to only side quests, or only certain quest types?), but i'm not sure that the lack of it is a fatal blow to Morrowind's immersion. It feels a bit like something that jives better with proc gen and/or randomized/templatized quests like in Daggerfall (or like in Skyrim radiant quests for that matter), which I don't find very compelling. The thought that many of Morrowind's systems are vestigial seems correct though, and so later games just got rid of some of them to broaden the audience even more, and thus give up even the pretense of having Daggerfall's complexity, but they aren't all as vestigial as you seem to think. There is some meat on the fast travel etc... But, I agree that Morrowind + per-region/city crime rep, a criminal justice system in-game with courts/trials/jail fleshed out a bit more, a day night cycle (if even a very basic one) for town NPCs, and also maybe some scripted caravans, prowling vampires and NPC thieves at night would really round out a lot of the town-based dynamic NPC stuff without necessarily requiring anything like Radiant AI. Oblivion's Radiant AI, in terms of my player experience, just made it difficult to find someone to turn a quest into without making the NPC behavior much more immersive imo.

I will say though that I am more in the Ken Rolston school of top down, plot/lore driven rather than character driven, and pseudo-historical/historical metaphor rather than outlandish fantasy setting/aesthetic type writing and background. Goodall's preference expressed by the quote "I like to make a few interesting characters, put them together, and see where it leads" makes me think he would be really into BG3, which is fine, but I do prefer world-building-first over character-first story for an open world immersion medieval fantasy sim. I'm not sure what I think about NPC betrayal...I'd have to see some examples and think about it.

Yes, Morrowind is very combat focused, and I think especially thief/assassin play throughs are underexplored, as sneaking is broken, chameleon is weird, nighttime doesn't matter, and invisibility is OP and available to almost anyone. Charisma alone builds don't really exist, and it's more like an alternative to bribery for a few interactions, and the scamp merchant makes mercantile pretty irrelevant. The roleplay is in types of combat and combat adjacent stuff, like mage/marksmen/melee, heavy armor or high speed and moving in and out, how do you pick locks, do you swim and levitate to get around stuff, do you use invisibility for critical hits, etc...you can't really in any meaningful or fun sense be a full-time merchant or diplomat, that's true. I think it's concerned with exploring and killing things in general, but not as exclusively in dungeons as its successors. So, perhaps it's kind a medieval fantasy government agent (ie a "Blade"), but with an open ended skillset, simulator, rather than a general life sim. Go too far down the general life sim path though, and you are basically looking at a different audience for your game. What's demo the overlap between players of The Sims and the players of Mordhau? I'm just not sure what the ideal balance is there; should you be able to open a shop, or get a job as a diplomat and just talk to NPCs all day and never fight, or try to make it as a travelling merchant? What would be the dev impact to immersion bonus ratio there? How many of your players would bother with non-combat RP?

The obvious question is whether or not these mechanics are present just enough to make the game work as a LARPing simulator, which is sort of the main goal of Bethesda games anyway. To some degree it works, but I feel like the game has a bunch of annoying shit and systems so hollow that they even get in the way of a good LARP.

Yes, this is the most important question. It is ultimately just a video game, and a game will not encompass all, or most, or even a non-trivial percentage of the complexity of reality. So, the question is, does Morrowind contain enough complexity, mechanics, and their interactions + world/background to conjure up the illusion of a LARP to enjoy at some length? For me, yes, because I basically think of Morrowind as a dollhouse for adults that's fun to play with if you can meet it halfway, but that does mean that a lot of the RP plays out in the theatre of the mind. I will say though, that if you want an experience like Morrowind, you pretty much have to play Morrowind or maybe Daggerfall (Unity?) if you can get past the jank. Oblivion and onwards are basically dungeon-crawlers to me, and more modern open world games tend to be more on-rails and more third-person action focused. What I mean is, I ofc do not think that Morrowind is anywhere close to a perfect immersive open world medieval fantasy, but it's like 65% of the way there in a world of games that aren't even 10% of the way there.

I think that a AA (perhaps 20-30 person? Morrowind had about 33 people) team of talented people using a decent modern game engine that set out to make "Morrowind, but..." and just added the few things we've discussed would basically hit it out of the park, even if the graphics weren't updated much. It is strange that basically nobody emulates TES directly even though it's been more than a decade since the last one, which is one of the most popular games of all time, so we may be underestimating how difficult it is to do all of this, or maybe the industry just isn't interested in anything but MP looters and/or shooters, including Bethesda now...

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

There are a ton of systems in Morrowind, but they're all very superficial. It's a country of Potemkin villages. What holds it together is the strength of its world building. There was clearly a lot of passion put in every aspect of the game. It's full of things that didn't need to be there (underwater exploration, jumping/floating to weird places, taunting NPCs into attacking you, killing main quest NPCs, lore for everything) It's not like they were lazy, they just stretched themselves as thin as possible to realize, even if in a very limited way, their vision. Little did they know that that you just need to include some good modding tools in the package and people will spend decades fixing your game while praising it as a masterpiece. It makes me wonder if, say, the Ultima series could've turned out differently if they had been as generous with their tools.

 

[Lemming42]

So, perhaps it's kind a medieval fantasy government agent (ie a "Blade"), but with an open ended skillset, simulator, rather than a general life sim. Go too far down the general life sim path though, and you are basically looking at a different audience for your game. What's demo the overlap between players of The Sims and the players of Mordhau? I'm just not sure what the ideal balance is there; should you be able to open a shop, or get a job as a diplomat and just talk to NPCs all day and never fight, or try to make it as a travelling merchant? What would be the dev impact to immersion bonus ratio there? How many of your players would bother with non-combat RP?

I think the key is to integrate the systems that already exist into quest design (which I think is pretty much objectively a weak spot of all TES games).

The best example I can think of is in Oblivion. There's a quest where the player is on a boat that gets taken over by hijackers. The goal is to reach the cabin and either threaten or fight the leader. However, the player is forced to fight every one of the hijackers. It doesn't matter if you can sneak past them, it doesn't matter if you can pickpocket their keys, it doesn't matter if you can reach their leader by stealth or by illusion (which you can), the quest actually breaks and refuses to advance if you don't kill them. Bethesda put all the tools you need in the game to let you solve this quest your way, according to your build... then barred you from doing it, because the quest (and game in general) was designed to be played one way. It's emblematic of their approach to games design in general - give the player a wealth of tools and let them loose in a wide open world, but then restrict their use of those tools and make it so that the world funnels them into a much more linear experience.

I'm struggling to think of ways to make MW's quests more versatile in part because the majority of them are very straightforward and strictly linear, but, similar to your suggestions on how to increase the liveliness of the world, there could be fairly simple mechanics that don't require a lot of extra work. There's a mod called Bonk! out already which makes the entire game viable for stealth characters, as you can now sneak up on people and knock NPCs out, and then "tie them up" (which causes the game to register them as dead and thus advances any quest that requires them to be killed). It's an unbalanced and jury-rigged solution obviously which still needs work, but it ends up being surprisingly elegant and opens up a whole new style of gameplay, making stealth/thief builds vastly more viable than they originally were, in a way that also really adds to the game's appealing LARP qualities. It's not just about avoiding or redefining combat, of course - there's a lot of ways the game could integrate magic and social skills into quests and general game mechanics. I think there's a mod that adds a day/night cycle too (which just locks shop doors and teleports people around, which is more than suitable for what it's trying to do).

As for the other world sim aspects, there's a couple mods I can think of that add some interesting things. There's an old mod that lets you join the Twin Lamps, which requires you to learn the passphrase, which is done by freeing slaves around the map. It adds keys to all slaves in the game, makes slavers hostile if you free slaves while they're watching, and adds a new feature where you can escort freed slaves to a safehouse. So in one fell swoop, the mod adds some proper gameplay to previously-static locations, makes the NPCs reactive, gives quests with a broad goal (free slaves) that can be done in any way the player sees fit (charm/bribe the guards, steal the keys, kill everyone, etc) and also adds a tangible reason to go exploring, which is the kind of stuff I think vanilla MW lacks.

Time limits on some quests would be more immersive in many ways, but also perhaps quite frustrating, so I think the devil would be in the details with bringing that back into post-Daggerfall TES, but I'm open to the idea (would it be limited to only side quests, or only certain quest types?),

iirc Kingdom Come: Deliverance had some timed quests, but I might be misremembering. I seem to remember some quest that was a race against time to get an antidote to a poisoned village, which was exciting. Could be a blueprint of how to make timed quests work in an first person action RPG.

EDIT: I looked it up and KC:D does have timed quests. It would get old if it was every quest of course, but even just a few quests would suddenly make fast travel and teleportation utterly crucial. In the aforementioned poisoned village quest, the villagers start dying each day that the player fails to reach them with the cure, so something like that could work - occasional quests which have different endings based on how long the player took to resolve them, thus incentivising the use of silt striders and such and giving them a real in-game effect.

I think that a AA (perhaps 20-30 person? Morrowind had about 33 people) team of talented people using a decent modern game engine that set out to make "Morrowind, but..." and just added the few things we've discussed would basically hit it out of the park, even if the graphics weren't updated much. It is strange that basically nobody emulates TES directly even though it's been more than a decade since the last one, which is one of the most popular games of all time, so we may be underestimating how difficult it is to do all of this, or maybe the industry just isn't interested in anything but MP looters and/or shooters, including Bethesda now...

Yeah, I think these games are very difficult to make and that Bethesda (pre-Fo4 Bethesda, at least) don't tend to get enough credit. Even Oblivion, which I find very little to enjoy in, is attempting something pretty impressive. Skyrim doubles down on the dungeon crawling aspect and sheds most of the last vestiges of the world simulation stuff but I think even that is a pretty impressive game in terms of the freedom it gives the player and the sheer number of playstyles and approaches it offers (in open world exploration, if not in quests).

Minor tangential question: is there any downside at all to Invisibility in MW? I played Arena as a full illusionist character a while ago and was surprised to discover that Wraiths can see through it and will absolutely massacre an otherwise-invulnerable player. I don't remember any enemies seeing through it in MW/Oblivion/Skyrim, and I'm not sure they can in Daggerfall either.

 

[luj1]

double

 

[luj1]

I will say though that I am more in the Ken Rolston school of top down, plot/lore driven rather than character driven, and pseudo-historical/historical metaphor rather than outlandish fantasy setting/aesthetic type writing and background.

Absolutely

Its a shame we havent seen that approach since

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

Please tell me how Morrowind's systems aren't superficial, luj1.