How is the Elder Scrolls series views by Codexers?

[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.

 

[BosanskiSeljak]

TES is the most overrated franchise/series in RPG history, both with casuals and codexers (oxymoron now that i think of it...), more than BG, more than Fallout.

 

[Butter]

TES is the most overrated franchise/series in RPG history, both with casuals and codexers (oxymoron now that i think of it...), more than BG, more than Fallout.

True, and ironically it's also a series that many of its most ardent fans have barely explored. You'll find more people who have only played Skyrim and are clamoring for "Skyrim 2" than you will find people who have played Arena and Daggerfall (let alone poor Battlespire and Redguard).

 

[the mole]

was good, now it's shit

 

[JarlFrank]

But it is that bad and I was in my 30s when I played it for far longer than I should have (hoping somehow it would get better). Even the pieces pointed out as "having merits" or "some faults" doesn't make it any better because even something like the graphics that are usually praised were crap because it turned the whole setting into another generic, bloom filled fantasy waste. Those memorable quests are also terrible because there are dumbed down mechanics and level-scaling shaping the whole generic game. In a cRPG I want/expect good quests backed up by a robust system to make the questing fun. If there are just good quest (which Oblivion had about as many as I have fingers*) with everything else failing to support it is empty & meaningless and I should just go play a good point & click adventure game. The entire game was so bad because many of us back then could see have much of a decline was happening and how this would affect cRPGs for decades to come (thus the prophesy).

I'm with you on that, brother, but I gotta admit Oblivion had some creative quest ideas.

I hate the game for essentially destroying all potential the Elder Scrolls series had after Morrowind, and for injecting lots of horrible trash into the game industry that keeps haunting us to this day (micro-DLC, quest compasses, etc), but its quirky quests suddenly glow in a favorable light when you compare them to the cookie cutter copypasta quest design of modern open world games, particularly the Ubisoft kind where every side quest follows a specific formula so if you played through one quest, you played through them all.

It truly is a sign of the times when probably the most detrimental game ever released suddenly looks not so bad compared to what's trendy right now.

 

[JarlFrank]

With TES it's even more bizarre given that Morrowind itself is already a huge step down from Daggerfall in so many ways, so the posturing some people (not necessarily anyone in this thread!) do about how Morrowind is Very Deep And A True Game For Monocled Gentlemen or w/e the fuck is dumb as hell.

Having spent a considerable amount of hours playing both Morrowind and Daggerfall (Morrowind more so, especially with the recent Tamriel Rebuilt releases), I have to contest these age-old claims that Morrowind was a significant dumbing down of Daggerfall.

Morrowind was a significant departure in design approach, yes. But dumbing down? Not really. Morrowind added about as many things as it removed, and a lot of the removed elements from Daggerfall aren't a great loss.

The one thing that is a genuine downgrade is character creation, because Daggerfall offered you some really cool character traits that could make the game harder or easier, and stacking good traits would slow your XP gain while stacking bad traits would quicken it. You could create utterly broken characters, like one that has full immunity to magic but also has spell absorption, meaning being hit by magic makes you recover mana. So you can just spam fireball at your feet, be hit by it, and recover the mana you spend casting it lmao.

This level of creative character creation is gone from Morrowind, where you only choose your birthsign, major and minor skills, and primary attributes.

But other than that? Morrowind removed a few skills... but most of them are the language skills, which were pretty much entirely useless in Daggerfall. All they did was make creatures not immediately attack you if your skill in their language was high enough. Battlespire actually did something interesting with language as you could talk to Daedra, but I can see why they were cut from Morrowind. It was an undercooked and underutilized series of skills that would only make sense if you'd encounter a lot of potentially friendly creatures who speak those languages. Daggerfall's dialog skills of etiquette and streetwise were simply combined into speechcraft, but considering how different Morrowind's dialog system is, I don't see how keeping them separate could have worked in Morrowind.

On the other hand, Morrowind added a few new weapon types and skills - most notably spears, and throwing weapons & crossbows as a ranged option where Daggerfall only had bows. Morrowind being a hand-made world compared to Daggerfall having pretty much 99% procedural content beyond the main quest makes it a vastly different game with a very different focus, but it's no less complex.

 

[Lemming42]

I wrote a post about this somewhere else, one sec:

- Skill system enormously reduced. Language skills reduced to "Speechcraft", Thaumaturgy lost, etc. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as "more" obviously doesn't equal "better", but:

- Massively reduced number of viable playstyles. In Daggerfall, you can reasonably succeed as a warrior, a thief, a pacifist, a healer, a ranger, etc. You can go for hours at a time without combat or dungeons, especially if you join the Thieves' Guild or a Temple, or simply do quests for merchants and tavern patrons (which are some of the most interesting in the game). MW, on the other hand, sets out the template Bethesda have used for all their games since - a comparatively small overworld you travel over while people and animals occasionally pop out to attack you, full of dungeons occupied by people who are waiting to kill you on sight, and quests that virtually always culminate in a fight. Combined with the reduced number of skills available, this further limits the amount of viable characters you can make; you'll never succeed as a Sneak/Speechcraft character in MW because the game doesn't give a shit about either skill, as it's a dungeon crawler where, in Douglas Goodall's words, Todd wanted you to smash things with a huge axe.

- NPC schedules removed, store opening and closing times removed. This is really bad. Storekeepers stand totally still at their counters 24 hours a day, every day. Again, this is because the game is a combat-focused dungeon crawler that doesn't give a shit about any other playstyle, as Daggerfall did. Burgling a store in Daggerfall wasn't super complex, but at least it had some gameplay involved - you had to wait until night, pick or break the store's lock without being caught, and get inside. In Morrowind, you have to walk upstairs in broad daylight, as nobody is able to follow you.

- Obvious one: the dungeons are nothing compared to Daggerfall's. Yes, Daggerfall's might have been too excessive, but Morrowind's pivot to very small, samey caves and ruins is not progress. Daggerfall offers a true dungeoneering experience where you'll have to make sure you're prepared in advance and even load yourself up with mark/recall shit to avoid becoming trapped forever. Morrowind offers a couple of rooms you can walk to the end of while fighting dipshit enemies who get stuck on rocks.

- Crime system comically gutted. In Daggerfall, you go to court for crimes, where you must pass skill checks to defend yourself or plead guilty to face a penalty. Even if you succeed in your own defence, your reputation in the local area will diminish. If your reputation becomes too low, there are material gameplay consequences - guards will arrest you for "Criminal Conspiracy" even when you've done nothing wrong, and you may even face banishment as a punishment, which really fucks up your plans. In Morrowind, you can go on a killing spree and then pay a bit of gold to a guard (who you'll likely have to approach yourself since the AI is so pitiful that they'll never apprehend you on their own unless you do it right in front of them), after which point it'll be like nothing ever happened.

- No faction reputations. Would have been very easy to keep this. They deliberately removed it, I assume.

- Total loss of timed quests. In Daggerfall, you were often up against the clock, and had to plan your travel accordingly. In Morrowind, nobody in the world other than you ever does anything, and quest situations are totally static until you choose to interact with them.

- Severely reduced number of NPC interactions, which removes detective/investigation elements from quests. In Daggerfall, you would often have to approach random NPCs for info, with your county reputation, class reputation, and etiquette/streetwise skills all determining your success. NPCs belonged to social classes, who would have opinions about you. Morrowind retains the same cookie-cutter NPCs with copypasted dialogue, but drastically reduces the interactions the player can have with them down to a handful of keywords, which are not typically used in quests. Speechcraft only comes up in specific instances where an NPC needs to be spammed with Admire until their dialogue changes.

- Linear questlines. Like the reduced number of skills, this is not bad in and of itself. What is bad is that the questlines are boring as fuck and almost every quest in the game is painfully linear and restrictive. In Daggerfall, you could choose to reject quests and you were given guild quests from a pool of ones suitable for someone of your rank. In Morrowind, you must follow each guild's storyline, which are almost all dogshit.

- Miscellanious lost mechanics - banking (and money having carry weight), being able to own property, different modes of transportation that affect both fast travel and overworld travel, the ability to climb walls, etc

And so on and so forth.

tl;dr: the world sim aspects are gone, playstyles other than combat are made unviable, the game's focus shifts to being a dungeon crawler rather than Daggerfall's more ambitious goals, several key systems are removed or enormously diminished for no good reason other than that the devs just didn't have the ambition to deal with them, and the quests suck nuts.

I was corrected on one point, the faction reputations (though they are, I believe, still more expansive and consequential in DF than in MW).

Basically there's a significant step down in most of the simulation aspects, which the series as a whole doesn't really seem to have been interested in after DF, barring Oblivion's infamous experiments with Radiant AI.

It's especially disappointing in retrospect for me because the smaller worldspace and shift to hand-made content could have allowed those elements to really flourish, but instead they replicated a lot of DF's problems (like copypasted NPCs), added new ones (total lack of NPC or world reactivity), removed a great deal of stuff, and didn't capitalise on the shift in focus at all IMO. With Vvardenfell being relatively small there were a lot of opportunities to expand on things like NPC routines (even basic day/night states), the crime and reputation systems, and generic NPC variety but they went in the opposite direction on all of them.

 

[Butter]

Morrowind was made under extreme pressure and a real threat of bankruptcy. It's a gigantic game and I can understand them having to cut features from Daggerfall in order to get the game made on time. Keep in mind also that they changed engines between DF and MW, meaning they couldn't reuse 80% of the systems as is now their SOP.

All of that said, there was no excuse after the success of Morrowind for them to not re-add things (like banking or climbing) when making Oblivion. They had the wiggle room at that point and they squandered it.

 

[Lemming42]

The realities of development could explain some of the missing/downgraded features but I think it's mostly a deliberate change in direction - Todd likes combat-heavy dungeon crawlers with lots of loot and isn't really interested in the roguelike or simulationist aspects of the older TES games.

You can see it in the direction that both TES and Fallout took under his creative leadership; I think Skyrim and Fallout 4 are probably closest to his ideal games, big open worlds where you can walk around and get attacked and pick places to peek inside and find better armour and weapons. I can't really complain since I like Morrowind and Skyrim quite a lot and I'm a fan of the type of game that Todd wants to make, but MW scrapping a lot of DF's systems and substantially reducing the mechanical scope is definitely by design rather than time or budget constraints.

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

Well, hard to say for me but i love The Elder Scrolls series. Sure they are seen as "empty shell for mods" but i must say i was excited by each release.

I started playing them since original Daggerfall and felt in love from the first sight. As for now, when we have games with better stories it is easy to judge them as mediocre.
But im sure, every rpg fan should play them at least once and try to feel magic of this universe.

Since i quit using Nexus Mods years ago due to lack of time, i think that games like Skyrim while vanilla are just too basic.
It's easily spot in Starfield, while it is good game, it starts to suck in the middle when you discover everything it has to offer.
I have more fun playing SKALD Against the Black Priory than Oblivion or Morrowind.

 

[MerchantKing]

TES 1 Good
TES 2 Great
TES 3 Great
TES 4 shit
TES 5 shit but redeemable with naked lady mods

It's a shame that there are no Gnomes in the series.

 

[anvi]

I first played them after playing EverQuest so they seemed extremely dumb, primitive, basic. Oblivion had pretty grass though.

 

[ShiningSoldier]

NPC schedules is one of the most overrated feature any game has. It adds absolutely nothing to gameplay, just makes everything tedious. Ok, I got it, I can't just talk to an NPC - I have to wait until dawn when they wake up. So what? It adds nothing good, because the player will either blindly follow the quest marker to find this specific NPC, or just press the "wait" button. And it doesn't even make game more "realistic" - on the contrary, the NPC in TES games are so stupid, the schedules only make them dumber.
There's only 2 games that made the NPC schedules correctly - Gothic 1 and 2. Because the schedules were extremely simple, but funny there.

 

[JarlFrank]

roguelike or simulationist aspects

Morrowind still has plenty of simulationism in its system, but yes, it removes the roguelike aspects and replaced it with handmade content, which makes for a superior game.

Daggerfall has some clearly superior systems (character creation is my favorite of them), but handmade content is so clearly superior to procedurally generated stuff, it's not even close.

 

[Haplo]

NPC schedules is one of the most overrated feature any game has. It adds absolutely nothing to gameplay, just makes everything tedious. Ok, I got it, I can't just talk to an NPC - I have to wait until dawn when they wake up. So what? It adds nothing good, because the player will either blindly follow the quest marker to find this specific NPC, or just press the "wait" button. And it doesn't even make game more "realistic" - on the contrary, the NPC in TES games are so stupid, the schedules only make them dumber.
There's only 2 games that made the NPC schedules correctly - Gothic 1 and 2. Because the schedules were extremely simple, but funny there.

I think Witcher 1 had decent schedules.

At least they felt realistic... and the town actually felt alive... a first for a computer game... sadly also a last.

 

[JarlFrank]

The Witcher? A first in making towns feel alive?

Gothic 1 and 2, as well as Ultima VII want to have a word with you.

 

[Haplo]

The Witcher? A first in making towns feel alive?

Gothic 1 and 2, as well as Ultima VII want to have a word with you.

I didn't play Gothic 1 or Ultima VII.

But Vizima felt WAY more alive then Khorinis.
Like an actual medieval town, in fact, rather then an NPC theme park, like in other 99,9% games.


Too bad further installements lost this magic. Novigrad city design sure is impressive and grand... but I guess having so many NPCs with schedules, reacting to weather and so on would be a bit much there...

 

[Beans00]

The Witcher? A first in making towns feel alive?

Gothic 1 and 2, as well as Ultima VII want to have a word with you.

I didn't play Gothic 1 or Ultima VII.

But Vizima felt WAY more alive then Khorinis.
Like an actual medieval town, in fact, rather then an NPC theme park, like in other 99,9% games.


Too bad further installements lost this magic. Novigrad city design sure is impressive and grand... but I guess having so many NPCs with schedules, reacting to weather and so on would be a bit much there...

Vizima is cordoned off by invisible walls and loading screens.


What shithole country/city do you live in, that actually has loading screens?

 

[Lemming42]

Morrowind still has plenty of simulationism in its system, but yes, it removes the roguelike aspects and replaced it with handmade content, which makes for a superior game.

Daggerfall has some clearly superior systems (character creation is my favorite of them), but handmade content is so clearly superior to procedurally generated stuff, it's not even close.

I'm not talking about procgen when I say "roguelike", I mean simulation-style systems that allow for emergent situations to take place.

Example in Daggerfall: you're convicted of a crime and your reputation plummets. You talk your way out of court but the guards decide to harass you anyway due to your low reputation. This means you're de facto banished from a county. However, you also have a timed quest in this county, and failing that will mean yet another a reputation drop with your chosen faction, which you can't allow because it'll mean a demotion. So you have to sneak back into the county and evade the guards in any way you can - invisibility, using your climbing skill and the game's large open maps to use parkour and take to the rooftops and avoid the streets, and so on. Everything that's happening here is arising based on the game's own systems which allow for the game to create consequences for your actions.

Morrowind never has anything like this that I can think of. Worse, its "handmade content" is usually not significantly better than Daggerfall's - MW's quests are still typically very basic and ultra-linear, the only difference from DF is that in MW you're always given the same quests in the same order at the same time, and there's not really any systems backing them up that allow for them to have consequences outside the specific contexts in which they occur (no timed quests, no substantial factional/criminal/demographical reputation gain/loss that can't be immediately reversed, etc). Morrowind's "handmade" NPCs are similarly walking wikipedia articles like DF's, except you can interact with them in fewer ways and their reactivity to the player is entirely superficial.

The clear advantages of MW's shift to handmade content are the overworld geometry (which is good) and the dungeons (which are typically bad IMO) as well as the occasional bit of handplaced loot, but there's no reason why this shift in focus should mean that so many mechanics and systems which allow for a much richer game should be gutted out. If anything, the shift in focus should have allowed for far greater use of complex simulation systems and the benefits of detailed, handmade quests, but Morrowind mostly just continues to make procgen-quality content only there's now much less of it, it has much less impact outside the immediate context it occurs in, and it's always presented to the player in the same way. I think this is disappointing given the obvious possibilities to have these concepts work in a much more detailed and cohesive way given the vastly smaller scope of MW.

 

[Harthwain]

The Witcher? A first in making towns feel alive?

Gothic 1 and 2, as well as Ultima VII want to have a word with you.

Gothic 1 was much better in this aspect than Gothic 2 (although Gothic 2 wasn't bad, just it was larger and as such the place felt less populated than the Colony in the first game).

 

[JarlFrank]

I'm not talking about procgen when I say "roguelike", I mean simulation-style systems that allow for emergent situations to take place.

What does simulationism have to do with roguelikes? A lot of them are highly abstract...

 

[Lemming42]

Basically what I wrote in the post; I'm using it to mean systems that cause gameplay situations to arise naturally from the player's actions, making every playthrough different as they allow for the game to react independently to the players' choices and character build. Including things such as giving the player premade content but having aspects of it governed randomly (eg quests having pre-written plots but picking different people, places, and time limits each time). We can come up with some term like "emergent systems" or w/e if "roguelike" is contentious.