How is the Elder Scrolls series views by Codexers?

[Harthwain]

Ideally, videogames shouldn't waste your time at all. You're playing the wrong ones if you feel like you're having your time wasted. There's plenty of ways to make in-universe fast travel work and have it be meaningful (and St Proverbius' suggestion of switching to a map with a chance of a random encounter is a solid idea too).

I never felt like my time was wasted in Morrowind, even when I had to take a route through some areas I've visited already. Maybe that's because I liked Morrowind's open world and lack of fast travel beyond designated points was the norm for games back then. That said, I don't feel like addition of fast travel was any good, both for games that have it and for the players. Then again, I usually don't sit to play a game - any game - if all I have is 30 minutes or so...

All Elder Scrolls games have useless trap skills. Pick Speechcraft, Mercantile, and Sneak as your major skills in Morrowind and watch what happens. It's part of the series, and ideally, subsequent instalments should build on ways to make these skills useful (or just cut them if there's no viable way).

I don't consider these trap skills. More like underrated skills. Sure, you might think Mercantile is useless, because you can steal your way to riches and ultimately swim in money, but what if you don't? Speechcraft is useful for persuasion, taunting and it plays hand-in-hand with Mercantile. In fact, Speechcraft is pretty damn amazing if you decide to not have a magic-using character. Sneak is pretty useful in some quests for stealing items. Granted, I wasn't using it beyond that. If you want to name a trap skill then Pickpocket would be that, mainly because - if I recall correctly - it is actually broken in the sense it is not working properly.

Oblivion and Skyrim are a big step up in that regard in that there's now a whole mode of gameplay attached to stealth, which basically plays like a shitty version of Thief, a la Deus Ex. I don't see how that's controversial, it's literally just true.

I don't think anyone finds that controversial, only that what Oblivion does right doesn't really compensate for what it does wrong (and there is a plenty of that).

Ideally, the combat would be fun, not tedious but mercifully brief. This is especially important since the game places such a focus on it.

Yeah, I wish more games had high-stakes combat and a wound system that makes post-combat effect waaaay more meaningful that the act of combat itself. This was one of a few reasons why I enjoyed combat in NEO Scavenger so much: the combat itself could be a mess, it could be lethal and you had to deal with the lingering after-effects of it.

I also like Morrowind. I will praise various aspects of it. I just listed it as my top game of 2002 in my esteemed "Your Favourite Game From Each Year Of The 2000s" thread. I think it's fun overall, but that doesn't mean there's any reason to pretend it doesn't have enormous shortcomings and design choices that are just outright bad, and that it's also quite disappointing next to Daggerfall (which, again, itself has all kinds of flaws). I do not like Oblivion, meanwhile, and don't enjoy playing it, but similarly that's no reason to pretend it got absolutely nothing right and doesn't have any strengths or interesting ideas whatsoever.

OK, here is the deal:

1) Nobody (or nobody who is serious, to be precise) will say that Morrowind doesn't have shortcomings (enormous or otherwise). But I enjoyed playing it all the same.

2) Yes, Oblivion played with some interesting ideas that ultimately resulted in being an utter failure and it needed Skyrim to fix most of them. I still didn't enjoy playing Oblivion. At all. So I think it was shit. Because it was. Despite having some strengths or interesting ideas in it (besides also having outright stupid design decisions of its own, such as the art direction being awful, shitting on its own lore, etc.).

I just don't get this weird mindset some people have of "i like this game therefore everything about it is a roaring success, i don't like this other game therefore literally every aspect of it is bad", especially when both games in question are greatly flawed.

This. This right here. This is what you "don't get". While you could say that "both games in question are greatly flawed" in theory, the perception of these flaws will be different depending on the person. I don't see Morrowind's flaws to be greater (or even equal) to those of Oblivion and I appreciate its strong points more than I do Oblivion's. Had I thought otherwise, I wouldn't dislike Oblivion as much as I did.

 

[Lemming42]

I don't consider these trap skills. More like underrated skills. Sure, you might think Mercantile is useless, because you can steal your way to riches and ultimately swim in money, but what if you don't? Speechcraft is useful for persuasion, taunting and it plays hand-in-hand with Mercantile. In fact, Speechcraft is pretty damn amazing if you decide to not have a magic-using character. Sneak is pretty useful in some quests for stealing items.

The problem is that they're completely devalued when placed next to combat skills, as the focus of MW (and later TES games) was explicitly on combat and dungeon crawling (or "hitting things with an axe", as Douglas Goodall described Todd's vision for the game). A lot of them are just functionally useless; Mercantile is indeed a waste of time when you quickly get items worth more money than any merchant can afford to give you. Obviously you're never going to get a game where all skills are equal, but you'd at least expect groupings of skills to work well together to form builds (like Speech, Science and Repair in Fallout). Will you get far as a Speechcraft, Mercantile, Security, Sneak, Armorer character in MW? I don't know, but I do know it'll be boring because the systems underpinning these skills are all weak.

I don't think anyone finds that controversial

You'd be amazed.

1) Nobody (or nobody who is serious, to be precise) will say that Morrowind doesn't have shortcomings (enormous or otherwise). But I enjoyed playing it all the same.

So did I.

2) Yes, Oblivion played with some interesting ideas that ultimately resulted in being an utter failure and it needed Skyrim to fix most of them. I still didn't enjoy playing Oblivion.

Neither did I.

This. This right here. This is what you "don't get". While you could say that "both games in question are greatly flawed" in theory, the perception of these flaws will be different depending on the person. I don't see Morrowind's flaws to be greater (or even equal) to those of Oblivion and I appreciate its strong points more than I do Oblivion's. Had I thought otherwise, I wouldn't dislike Oblivion as much as I did.

It seems that things are getting confused here, because you're now saying it's subjective, despite that seemingly being the entire core of your disagreement with me. That's the point I was making right at the start when I said all the games are flawed, which is the one you took issue with: the TES games each have different weaknesses, different strengths, different interpretations of the setting, and different visions and ambitions for what the design focus should be. All of them are critically flawed and all of them also have something interesting going on, and people's favourites will obviously be the ones that most facilitate the type of gameplay they're interested in, and which feature their favourite version of the setting. In this thread, you'll find people who believe everything after Daggerfall is shit, people who believe everything after Morrowind is shit, people who believe Morrowind is the only good game, people who prefer Oblivion to Skyrim, and people who prefer Skyrim to Oblivion.

I think there's probably reasonable arguments to be made for all those positions, depending on what the person wants from the games. Daggerfall's impressive world simulation aspects and global reactivity won't matter to people who want to focus on crawling handmade dungeons, Skyrim's tighter mechanics won't matter to people who want the freedom of less-balanced but more powerful systems, Morrowind's freeform alchemy and spellmaker won't matter to people who value carefully designed challenge in games, Oblivion's greatly improved stealth systems will be of no interest to people who don't do stealth builds, and so on.

It's probably fair to judge the games by whether or not they meet their own goals and make the most of the systems that they do choose to include. Do any of them do that? Not really; they're all failed experiments to greater or lesser extents with half-baked ideas and a mix of inspired design decisions and utterly awful ones, but they're mostly still fun in spite of themselves, especially if the player brings a sizeable dose of their own imagination and a willingness to play in a way that makes up for the game's failings. TES is one of my favourite game series because of the scattershot nature of each game, where the devs just threw a ton of ideas in and tried to see what would work. And for me, Oblivion was the one game in which this approach led to more bad than good, and resulted in something I don't get much enjoyment out of playing. But I feel like saying Oblivion is shit by some objective metric is just a waste of time, especially if your point of comparison is Morrowind - a game which could also be reasonably characterised as severely dumbed-down compared to its predecessor, and which also features very poor core systems and might be argued to be emblematic of Bethesda's massive lack of ambition post-DF. It makes even less sense if you then describe Skyrim as an "upgrade", especially when one of your points was that Oblivion faltered in placing greater emphasis on player skill, which Skyrim goes much further with.

 

[TheKing01]

Daggerfall's procedural generation is solely why I'd place it below Skyrim and even Oblivion (which I find unbearable to play without specific mods).

Procedural generation has always been an enthusiasm killer for me, and probably always will be. Hated it in Bloodborne as well with it's Chalice Dungeons, and that's with over a decade of technological progression.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Procedural generation has always been an enthusiasm killer for me

Torchlight and Diablo have always done this right.

 

[Harthwain]

The problem is that they're completely devalued when placed next to combat skills, as the focus of MW (and later TES games) was explicitly on combat and dungeon crawling (or "hitting things with an axe", as Douglas Goodall described Todd's vision for the game). A lot of them are just functionally useless; Mercantile is indeed a waste of time when you quickly get items worth more money than any merchant can afford to give you.

Both facts (one - that combat skills outclass non-combat skills, two - that you tend to roll in money in most games after the beginning phase) can be applied to 99% of cRPGs.

Will you get far as a Speechcraft, Mercantile, Security, Sneak, Armorer character in MW? I don't know, but I do know it'll be boring because the systems underpinning these skills are all weak.

Speechcraft will be occasionally useful for certain quests. Security will be very useful, because the ability to pick locks is actually important. Sneak will be useful for a few quests (most for Thieves' Guild, obviously). Armorer will always be useful to keep your armour and weapon in top shape. Besides, Morrowind still lets you keep leveling up skills you don't "major" in. As for how far you will get... It will simply take you longer to get there but nothing is stopping you from using whatever skill you want or need at any given time.

It seems that things are getting confused here, because you're now saying it's subjective, despite that seemingly being the entire core of your disagreement with me. That's the point I was making right at the start when I said all the games are flawed, which is the one you took issue with: the TES games each have different weaknesses, different strengths, different interpretations of the setting, and different visions and ambitions for what the design focus should be. All of them are critically flawed and all of them also have something interesting going on, and people's favourites will obviously be the ones that most facilitate the type of gameplay they're interested in, and which feature their favourite version of the setting.

People are subjective beings, even when trying to be objective. That being said, to say "all of them are critically flawed" suggests they are all critically flawed in an equal measure, and I don't believe this to be true. Morrowind is flawed, but not critically so. Out of them all (Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim) I'd point out to Oblivion to being the critically flawed one. An opinion which is supported by you - of all people - because you did admit before that you didn't like it, nor did you enjoy playing it. This is pretty damning statement for a game.

But I feel like saying Oblivion is shit by some objective metric is just a waste of time, especially if your point of comparison is Morrowind - a game which could also be reasonably characterised as severely dumbed-down compared to its predecessor, and which also features very poor core systems and might be argued to be emblematic of Bethesda's massive lack of ambition post-DF.

"Massive lack of ambition"? I think Morrowind is plenty ambitious. So much so that it had to be cut down even more than it was originally intended (the game is called Morrowind, but all we got was Vvardenfell). It was a big seamless open world in 3D with impressive visuals for the time. That, too, was impressive in its own right. It is true that you could see the size of Morrowind to be a downgrade from Daggerfall, but Daggerfall was procedurally generated, whereas Morrowind was done by hand, which has to be taken into account. And the amount of work needed to flesh it out didn't stop there.

It makes even less sense if you then describe Skyrim as an "upgrade", especially when one of your points was that Oblivion faltered in placing greater emphasis on player skill, which Skyrim goes much further with.

It makes perfect sense if you think of Skyrim as Oblivon 2.0. Because relatively speaking it IS an upgrade. At the same time it is entirely possible to consider it a decline and a worse RPG than Morrowind.