It kind of blows my mind that someone can spend years working on a project like this and fail to see how crucially intertwined exploration, progression, and overall challenge is. If you fail to provide challenge, the exploration and progression fall apart, becoming meaningless superficialities. It illegitimatizes this as a game, and turns it into an interactive art piece. How can you not see this after spending so much time making something?
I read an interview with one of the developers where he said it was intended as a walking sim first and foremost, can't find it now though, might have been scrubbed but who knows with how search engines are these days. I did find this from another interview where he says they are just not trying to compete with anything combat oriented:
I’ve been focusing on exploration and narrative, because those are the areas where I feel we can compete with the bigger games. Whereas there’s never going to be a point where we can really compete with other games in terms of combat. We’re going to keep developing the combat to make it as good as it can be, but the focus of the game is still going to be the story and exploring this world.
then we can start building a posse and petition the authorities to remove the mention of Morrowind from the thread title
I'm one of few people here who is aware of how right you are about other things. This being a walking simulator narrative-first kind of game put together by a transsexual jewish autogynophiliac developer, and I don't see how anyone could refute that with the collar straining against the adam's apple in the pic below, or the developer explicitly stating their intent.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that the local tranny chasers, fantadomat and Jenkem, are into this game. Quite the catch you guys got there.
But I do think you're wrong about this not being like Morrowind. Wasn't that game a slow paced walking sim with broken and simplistic mechanics too? With occasional interruptions by cliff racers. A game with giant mushrooms and where you got propositioned by cat people when you weren't reading about Vivec's "spear". Arena, Daggerfall and Battlespire were primarily about dungeon crawling, with the overworld in the first two providing a sense of scope and context for the dungeon diving. Morrowind had trivial dungeons and very broken combat and character building, it was much more about the uncomfortably slow hike through slightly more exotic landscapes than it was about challenging and meaningful encounters, or even skillchecks for that matter. It was what would become the essential Todd Howard take on the series going forward.
It's the revealed preference of the Codex lefty seen updooting Hag's review that they want mechanically shallow walking games with mild VN elements, probably because they don't touch grass very often and don't talk to people. Video games were always about selling you the fantasy of what you don't get to do or can't have, they're the essential surrogate activity. That's what Morrowind always was though? A trekking game with the occiasional exposition dump, not heroic combat or deep system interactions.
