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Arcanum and Morrowind are still unsurpassed

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Arcanum and Morrowind were the best RPGs of my early teens. They blew me away at the time with their wealth of options and intricate worlds. I have often wondered whether it's just nostalgia, because I was an impressionable kid back then - 12 when I first played Arcanum, 13 or 14 when I first played Morrowind. But it's not. I replayed both of them not too long ago and they still hold up well. And there still aren't any newer games that even try to do the things these two excelled at.

They are both heavily flawed games. I already noticed the flaws back when I first played them, but they are all the more apparent now that I replayed them. But at the same time, the things they excel at became more noticeable too: especially when you compare them against modern RPGs.

Arcanum has an interesting character system that may be utterly broken (harm spam lol), but nevertheless offers a lot of different character builds to try. And since it's classless, you can mix and match as you like. You can even mix tech and magic skills on the same character and keep the aptitude balanced at zero, which is a pretty damn useless character build... but you can do it and have fun with it as an experienced player who just wants to fool around. Same with Morrowind. Lots of skills to choose from, some of which are pretty useless, and you are allowed to gimp yourself on purpose: a friend of mine back in the day made an Argonian pearl diver whose major skills were athletics and acrobatics, a completely useless character. Both games offer a huge amount of freedom in character building, and allow you to fuck it up without artificially safeguarding you from bad choices.

Arcanum, moreover, has the world react to your character creation choices like no other game beside it. Some quests are only available to characters of a certain sex (like Madam Lil's brothel quests which can only be performed by a woman). Many NPCs will react to your race. If you play a half ogre everyone will treat you like shit. Setting your intelligence below a certain threshold will make your character a drooling retard, and every NPC in the game will change his dialogues towards you. Questgivers will try to exploit your dumb ass by offering you lower rewards, while some others will just completely refuse to talk to an idiot like you. There hasn't been any RPG since Arcanum that has NPCs react to your character's race/attributes/sex so consistently as Arcanum. Nowhere else do your character creation choices make such a clear difference as in Arcanum.

And it's not only your character, it's also his choices during gameplay. There are many quests with multiple solutions and outcomes. You can kill EVERY essential questgiver NPC in the game and there's always some alternative way to progress the main quest. Which doesn't mean it's a good idea to do so, but it's possible. Some quests have a huge range of possible outcomes, depending on several variables. There's an alchemist in Shrouded Hills who hates technology and wants you to destroy the local steam engine. If you do it, the simple-minded dwarf who tends to the engine will attack you. If you have any companions with you, they'll kill the dwarf in self-defense, but on my most recent playthrough I left Virgil outside, hit the dwarf until he ran away with broken morale, and left the building. And then I found a consequence I had never encountered before: if the dwarf is still alive, he will tell the constable about it, and the constable will refuse to talk to you ever again! Most players will never see that, because if you have companions with you when you destroy the steam engine, the dwarf will not survive. And yet the devs made sure to add an alternate outcome for when he survives. Fuck yeah. If he doesn't survive, the constable has no idea who destroyed the steam engine though... and will task the player with repairing it. If you do repair it, the alchemist who gave you the initial quest of destroying it won't talk to you ever again because he feels betrayed. Cool stuff. And that's not the only quest with several variables: there's a stolen painting quest in Tarant where the usual way of doing it is to talk to the woman it was stolen from, get the quest to find it, then search for it and return it. If you get it before talking to her and barge into her house to turn it in, she will think you're a scammer who stole it from her and now tries to sell it back, because why else would you both have the painting in your possession and know that she wants it back?

Which other game has such intricate condition-based differences in its quests? Arcanum does this aspect of RPG design perfectly. It even pays attention to the order in which you do things, and reacts accordingly. Everything can matter in an Arcanum quest: what other quests have you solved before? What is your character's race? What is your character's sex? In which order have you gone through the quest stages? Have you talked to anyone else before? Arcanum's quest design and reactivity in unsurpassed. Nobody else has even attempted to go anywhere near Arcanum's quality in this aspect.

And then there's the secrets. Arcanum has so much hidden content, that isn't impossible to find because there's enough hints for it, but it never holds your hand. Dialogue options that result from a high INT or CHA score aren't tagged as such! You have to realize that this is a smart thing to say by yourself! There's the option of getting an ultimate blessing from ancient gods, and there are some vague hints on how it works, but it's never marked as a quest and you have to figure out the sequence yourself based on cryptic hints. You can find the real tomb of Mannox but it's in an unmarked location and nobody ever explicitly tells you how to get there, or where it even is. And then there's the quest to find the Iron Clan. Lots of things that actually take some effort to discover and aren't presented to you on a silver platter.

Morrowind has the same great strength. There are unique artifacts hidden all over the place, and you find them by naturally exploring the landscape and delving into dungeons. The Imperial Cult questline even has some "oracle quests" where you are sent to retrieve artifacts, and their location is described to you in vague descriptions of the surrounding landscape. There are, of course, no quest markers for anything in this game. Only descriptions of how to get there: follow this road, take a right after the bridge, etc etc. You have to actually look at your surroundings to find your way, and the game allows you to get lost in the wilderness. Modern games don't allow you to get lost, they always put some markers into your interface to point the way. When I replayed Morrowind years after last playing it, it felt so incredibly refreshing to just be lost with only a vague idea on how to get where I wanted to be.

Morrowind's equipment system is awesome, too, and apart from very few exceptions I can count on half a hand (Kingdom Come Deliverance, Neo Scavenger) no other RPG has ever implemented anything like it. Armor is split into different parts and can be layered with clothing. There are 16 individiual equipment slots in this game. 16. Helmet, cuirass, left pauldron, right pauldron, left gauntlet, right gauntlet, greaves, boots, shirt, pants, skirt, robe, belt, left ring, right ring, amulet. Not even modern AAA RPGs that claim to offer a lot of customization in the appearance of your character offer such detailed mix-and-match equipment systems. And it's not only fun for playing dressup, it also makes hunting down a full set of armor more difficult and rewarding. Daedric armor is the best armor in the game, and for most parts of the armor, there is only ONE piece in the entire game. Finally tracking down a full set feels like an accomplishment, because you don't just have to find armor + boots + helmet, but... cuirass, boots, helmet, greaves, left pauldron, right pauldron, left gauntlet, right gauntlet. It's a real fucking journey to find all of these. And of course, the game allows you to enchant every single type of equipment piece there is. Magic pants. Magic skirt. Magic robe. Magic belt. Everything magic. You can even enchant items by yourself, but are limited by the item's capacity for magic (higher quality = more capacity).

Morrowind's exotic but believable world also plays a huge role in its immersion. The world is full of weird shit, but it all makes sense. And while there's a lot of massive lore text dumps, you don't even need to read them to understand how this world works. There is enough top quality non-verbal world design: you know exactly what these people eat and where it comes from, as you can walk through farmland and visit egg mines. Different towns have different architectural styles to set them apart. Guards of great houses wear different styles of armor, made of the same material but with different stylistic elements. It feels like a real place populated by real people, despite the staticness of the NPCs.

One of my favorite memories from Morrowind is how I screwed up a main quest for myself back on my first playthrough as a teenager. I stole a couple of expensive books from Jobasha's Rare Books, a bookstore in Vivec. They had a high monetary value, so I stole them and sold them elsewhere (because vendors realize when you try to sell them their own stolen wares). Later in the game there's a main quest where you have to find a rare book. There are only two copies of it. One is in a heavily guarded temple library, the other is... for sale at Jobasha's Rare Books. Yep, I had stolen that book earlier and sold it to some random merchant in some peasant village I didn't even remember anymore. And my sneak skill was nowhere near good enough to get my hands on the copy in the temple library. So I screwed myself out of the main quest without even knowing. The game allows you to screw yourself and make major mistakes like that! It's awesome.

And since then, no other RPG has attempted to do the things Arcanum and Morrowind do. Some games have taken single elements from them, sure, but nobody has ever tried to make a coherent spiritual successor to this style of game design. The only upcoming game I can think of that tries to go for Arcanum's approach to quest design is Space Wreck. Maybe Colony Ship too, but Age of Decadence had a much more guided way of presenting its C&C than Arcanum, so I dunno.

These two games have been sitting on their throne for twenty years, and in all that time nobody has even attempted to dethrone them. Pretty much every RPG released since offers less than these two games, rather than more.

Will there ever be something to surpass them? Or are we doomed to live in a world where such greatness will never be seen again?
 

Falksi

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I've not played Arcanum enough yet to comment, but think that's a great summary of Morrowind.

We all know about the items, the world, and all that other brilliance. But something which goes under the radar more is how it evolves around you and in ways that set you up to fail, like with the books in your case JarlFrank . I myself ended up in an accidental scrap with the Ordinators, and the next thing you know the whole game takes on a different dynamic. I've gone from being a do-gooder trying to help save the world, to pissed off at ungrateful masses for trying to persecute me for wearing a bit of armour, and deciding to wipe the ungrateful cunts out instead.

We can only but hope for another. It certainly won't come from Bethestard though.
 
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Those 2 games aren't very good, objectively speaking.

Arcanum had an interesting lore and very good writing, some excellent quests. But the shitty combat system (one of the worst ever), broken character development, dull world design (tiny points of interests outside major cities), etc distilled the good stuff until what is left is too flawed to be really considered special.

And Morrowind was even worse. Another terrible combat system, boring dialogues and NPCs, dead-feeling world, exploration that should've been good due to what the OP described, but actually was far worse because of location copy-pasta.
 

gurugeorge

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Those 2 games aren't very good, objectively speaking.

Arcanum had an interesting lore and very good writing, some excellent quests. But the shitty combat system (one of the worst ever), broken character development, dull world design (tiny points of interests outside major cities), etc distilled the good stuff until what is left is too flawed to be really considered special.

And Morrowind was even worse. Another terrible combat system, boring dialogues and NPCs, dead-feeling world, exploration that should've been good due to what the OP described, but actually was far worse because of location copy-pasta.

Are you sure you didn't just mean to write, "All games are shit?"

I mean, for heaven's sake, if you can't say that Arcanum and Morrowind are great games then what is the standard, other than some ideal you have in your mind? Where is the magical game out there that's soooo much better than these two? (Lots of people would probably have 3 or 4, maybe half a dozen games to add to those two, I'm not saying they're exclusively the best ever, but you get the point.)
 

0sacred

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Those 2 games aren't very good, objectively speaking.

Arcanum had an interesting lore and very good writing, some excellent quests. But the shitty combat system (one of the worst ever), broken character development, dull world design (tiny points of interests outside major cities), etc distilled the good stuff until what is left is too flawed to be really considered special.

You have to put it into perspective though. If the parts are greater than the sum of them, you're dealing with nostalgia (i.e. remember the good and disregard the rest). I'd agree with JarlFrank that the great freedom of character building and dialogue carry Arcanum over the dry stretches in its gameplay.

I recently tried to replay Wake of the Ravager and the huge amount of good writing in it gripped me like it did back then. But it gets buried under the huge amounts of hilarious shit combat that usually can't be avoided or circumvented like you can in Arcanum.
 

SharkClub

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Remember back when Fallout 3 came out and in the following years all of the 12 year olds were rabid and would go ham on people for "nostalgia goggles", saying that liking Fallout 1 & 2 is just nostalgia and nothing else, and that they are worthless games compared to Fallout 3. Fast forward to today and anyone who even still remembers playing Fallout 3, of which there aren't many, are completely blinded by nostalgia goggles for it themselves and will defend it until their last breath, coming up with all sorts of mental gymnastics reasons as to why "it's better than New Vegas", all because it was their first RPG ever they played when they were 12. Meanwhile Fallout 1 & 2 are effortless in their prestigiousness, there's no mental gymnastics over nostalgia goggles, just good, superior games. Funny how that ended up.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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I can 100% agree with JarlFrank when it comes to arcanum.
This doesn't change the fact that arcanum is grossly overrated on codex.
encounter design,world design,combat, you must save the world from the ancient evil story...
All deep flaws.
7-8/10 sure, 10/10 like codexian hivemind believe? LOL NO
I have no intension to play beth turd so no comment on morrowind.

Yes, I mentioned in my OP that both games are heavily flawed. They're nowhere near perfect. I can imagine dozens of ways to improve them.
But in the aspects I described in my post, neither game has ever been surpassed.

They excel at very specific elements (that just happen to be core RPG elements which make the genre what it is), and those elements have never been surpassed by anything that came after. Worse, barely anyone is even trying to surpass them at those elements.

Show me one modern RPG that has something comparable to the Ren'ar Siamese Twins quest, or the Iron Clan quest, or the inter-connected quests in Shrouded Hills. Just one that comes even close to that.
There are none.
 

Falksi

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Aye. Folk aren't slagging the Mona Lisa off because modern art & photography looks far more realistic for a reason.

Nothing yet captures that sense of mystery which the Mona Lisa does, and regardless of combat mechanics or other such flaws, for exploring a world which feels genuine, fantastic and handcrafted Morrowind still tops the shop for me.
 

Tim the Bore

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There is a reason why Troika is no longer around and why Bethesda ditched pretty much everything that made Morrowind great in the first place. The better the game is, the more specific it gets. Those games are good for the specific audience. It won't sell very well to the mass market. Back in the days gamers themselves were pretty specific group, so creativity could be awarded. Now it's the opposite. Now games are mainstream.

I think what both Arcanum and Morrowind had in common is that they were really trying to allow the player to do whatever he wanted - but also they understood that the real joy can be taken from things that you achieved, not the ones that were handed to you on a silver plate. What's more, their difficuly didn't lie in the way you could utilize their mechanics, but in understanding them in the first place - it's not difficult for seasoned players to broke both of those games through specific build, but you have to first understand how those mechanics even work. Morrowind magic system allows you to be GOD, but you have to untangle it's, err, "originality".

But mass market hates challenge, and especially - it hates "not-understanding" things. It's almost offensive to that abstract person. Having game that's difficult to understand (and e.g. Morrowind is so alien, it's rather challenging) is pretty much a death sentence. Sure, it can happen, but you can not predict that. In the same time, you can release an easy, uncomplicated game that will sell very well. And since making games is expensive and you ant money, well - this isn't much of a choice. You can maybe have a difficult and challenging games - e.g. Dark Souls - but they can't be difficult to understand. Because then it's about not being "smart" enough to win.

And I'm not saying that good games are always complicated or that games should be complicated just for the sake of being comlicated - but good cRPGs should be complex. Which is always challenging, especially if you whole you life you played only Assassin's Creed or Skyrim.

Games like Morrowind or Arcanum won't happen again anytime soon, unless by an accident. They require too much resources and manpower for the audience that's just too specific, and therefore - too small. Those games requires effort to understand them; good RPGs will always allow you to create useless builds - because that's where the challenge lies, that's what makes good build rewarding and that's when C&C is fun. But what's mainstream audience hate is to be "questioned" on its mental skills. If someone forced me to play racing game I'd be pissed, 'cause I'm bad at them and don't even like them. But cRPGs need to be sold to everyone, because they are, in principle, more complex - so tougher to sell.
 

gurugeorge

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There is a reason why Troika is no longer around and why Bethesda ditched pretty much everything that made Morrowind great in the first place. The better the game is, the more specific it gets. Those games are good for the specific audience. It won't sell very well to the mass market. Back in the days gamers themselves were pretty specific group, so creativity could be awarded. Now it's the opposite. Now games are mainstream.

Yeah that's about the size of it. Early home computer and PC games were by and for nerds. As soon as the suits (both in PC/console manufacture and games) saw an opportunity, games became not for nerds any more, so they had to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Which means that nerds might still like them a bit (and still be somewhat chained to playing them), but not as much as the older games that were made specifically for them.

Which is what leads to the special kind of purgatory we have here :)
 

luj1

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Arcanum and Morrowind were the best RPGs of my early teens.

Same. Blew me away. But I played Arcanum after Morrowind somehow. Anyway I agree with everything you said. These were the kind of games you think about for days after playing them.
 

Grampy_Bone

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it's a game I should like but I always get so bored with it.

It's too transitory. It lacks the casual power fantasy appeal of Skyrim, and doesn't have the depth of Daggerfall, and is full of annoying design decisions. Combat consists of missing cliff racers for 20 hours, dialogue is like reading a phonebook, dungeons are two rooms long, quests are *completely* unrewarding, and fast travel is tedious so you spend half the game lost in the fog or dust.

But oh man talking to Dagoth Ur man the LOOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRRRRRREEEEEEE
 

Beans00

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I didn't like morrowind at all. Completely bland sterile world with a population of roughly 14. Terrible hyperskilling system. Terrible combat
 
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Morrowind was never complicated or difficult to begin with. Neither was Arcanum. There were some quests in both that were (e.g. finding the dwarf thingamajig in the lost city in Morrowind, or doing that meta-quest in Arcanum) but those were the exceptions to the rule. Yeah, these games didn't have quest markers and directions for everything, but guess what, back then, no game did. WoW introduced that shit in mid 2000s, and then Bethesda and others spread it through single player RPGs.

I get that people really like certain aspects of Morrowind or Arcanum, in some cases I do as well, but at the end of the day, a game is the sum total of its parts, and there was so much shit in Morrowind and Arcanum, that you gotta temper your praise quite a bit.
 

luj1

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Games like Morrowind or Arcanum won't happen again anytime soon, unless by an accident. They require too much resources and manpower

Not really. Morrowind was made by 30 malnourished people. Many of those weren't full time, so just several key people. At a time when Bethesda was on the brink of bankrupcy.

The reason Morrowind is awesome was centrally authored content by 2-3 educated talented leads. Kirkbride and Rolston made Morrowind, with support from unsung guys like Noah Berry and Mark Bullock.
 

Demo.Graph

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Games like Morrowind or Arcanum won't happen again anytime soon, unless by an accident. They require too much resources and manpower
...
The reason Morrowind is awesome was centrally authored content by 2-3 educated talented leads. Kirkbride and Rolston made Morrowind, with support from unsung guys like Noah Berry and Mark Bullock.
And the result of all the efforts of teams that made Subnautica, Disco Elysium or Fallout 3+ (or didn't made Spire of Sorcery) speaks for itself. They had enough resources for a prolonged development process.
 

Falksi

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it's a game I should like but I always get so bored with it.

It's too transitory. It lacks the casual power fantasy appeal of Skyrim, and doesn't have the depth of Daggerfall, and is full of annoying design decisions. Combat consists of missing cliff racers for 20 hours, dialogue is like reading a phonebook, dungeons are two rooms long, quests are *completely* unrewarding, and fast travel is tedious so you spend half the game lost in the fog or dust.

But oh man talking to Dagoth Ur man the LOOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRRRRRREEEEEEE

Which again has nothing to do with it's stunningly absorbing and unique world.

You start Skyrim able to do most things which you can when you end it, with odd gimmicky perks adjusting that slightly. Probably the most noteable the bullet-time archery perk, but that doesn't really influence how your player plays, nor how you interact with the world.

You start Morrowind barely able to move or jump, and after investing enough hours you can fly and run around the world at lightening speed like a demi-god. The evolution getting there is very rewarding & satisfying.

As for lore, I didn't even touch the lore until my third playthrough as I was just enjoying taking in the sights, finding all the undiscovered stuff, and experimenting with different character builds & faction allegiances. Which make a huge difference to how the game pans out.
 
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Butter

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The early 00s was a perfect storm. Computer technology was still advancing rapidly enough that you'd see massive improvements in presentation every 2-3 years. The gaming market wasn't yet overrun by normies, so it was profitable for Sierra to finance what would today be considered an ultra-niche game. And all the giants of the industry who started with PnP were still crazy and ambitious enough to make things that had never been seen before.

That set of circumstances will never come again.
 
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You are missing the point Falksi. Yeah, you can run and fly and cast powerful spells... against brain dead AI in a world filled with Cliff Racers and other similar crap. You are a demi-god in a special ed class. Most people would prefer to be a hobo in a real seeming world, ie Gothic.
 

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