Decline is gaming officially over

[Saerain]

Yeah. I've mostly been trying to create games rather than play any for the last 9 years or so. Rimworld was a'ight.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Morrowind had a very solid engine with many open world, simulation-type features that have never been replicated to this day. It also had the most retarded and generic NPC interaction that was designed like wikipedia pages, and people despised it when it came out.

I had of course expected that Oblivion would build on the strengths and add solid NPC interactions and athmosphere. Which is what they tried to get across during development. But when it came out they had not only removed the strenghts, created a wikipedia interface for everything, added ugly graphics and models, butt ugly huge fonts that take up half the screen and on top of it the worst disease in gaming: bloom. As to the story I can't say much because I could never bear to look at this mess after the first day.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Coming from Daggerfall - it is almost comical how many things regressed in Morrowind - removed horse riding, levitation and tons of other skills, really small world with tiny dungeons, terrible faces, stiff animations, almost non-existing game balance, small bestiary, obvious real world references (imperial soldiers wore Roman armor, Bretons had French names), retconning existing lore, terrible Dragonbreaks idea, short non-dynamic soundtrack ...

I was sure that other companies will take advantage of Bethesda downfall, correct Morrowind mistakes and create infinitely better games.

It took some time, but I've heard that ex - Black Isle guys are taking a shot at creating game in similar style - Awoved, Avowed or something like that. Finally someone will show Bethesda hacks how it should be done.

Levitation wasn't removed from the Elder Scrolls series until Oblivion; it still existed in Morrowind as a spell and magical effect. In regard to the number of skills, Daggerfall had two language skills(streetwise and etiquette) that were non-functional, replaced in Morrowind with the correctly-operating speechcraft skill, and another nine language skills (centaurian, daedric, dragonish, giantish, harpy, impish, nymph, orcish, spriggan) that were virtually worthless; since the total number of skills fell only from 35 to 27, this means that the number of non-language skills actually increased by 2 from Daggerfall to Morrowind. Most of your other complaints merely relate to the shift from a game based around vast, procedurally-generated dungeons --- with a procedurally-generated overworld so enormous that it might as well not have existed --- to a fully-3D Open World game where the focus is more on overland exploration than dungeon-crawling (although there were a few large, well-done dungeons involved with the main quest).

 

[Morenatsu.]

Daggerfall sounds cool on paper, but the actual game is like a half-finished prototype, and the environments are somehow even less interesting than Arena's. At least the soundtrack is good?

 

[gurugeorge]

I am going to play the devils advocate on this one. The regression that took place between Daggerfall -> Morrowind -> Oblivion was inevitable. Going from a pseudo 3D engine where actors are just a couple of sprites with only rudimentary collision detection to a fully 3D engine with fully animated actors has to take it toll somewhere.

I thought that at one time, then I read some things that talked about how the amount of investment, energy and time spent on better graphics vs. gameplay as a proportion, has always been about the same. IOW, those early graphics might look janky now, but they were bleeding edge back in the day, and absorbed a lot of the time and energy of the people making the games.

I think maybe it's true that more animation and detailed models, etc., is a factor, but that's easily farmed off to dedicated teams who wouldn't be involved in core gameplay design, so it's not part of the core game development in that sense. (On the other hand, there's rusty's point that the bigger the team the more difficult co-ordination is, so that might be part of the problem there. The models, environments and animations, while they can be done by non-core people, do have to be co-ordinated with the level design and gameplay.)

But on that decline point, it's worth pointing out that a lot of early games apparently had systems out the wazoo, but a fair proportion of all those lovely, intricate-looking options (e.g. in Daggerfall or Fallout) didn't actually do anything, and effective builds were often still funneled down to a few choices.

 

[Azdul]

this means that the number of non-language skills actually increased by 2 from Daggerfall to Morrowind.

You're right about levitation - I've got it mixed up with climbing.

However, Morrowind was pretty much Todd Howard game - which had several long lasting consequences.

Soon after Morrowind release, one of Bethesda animators (Gary Noonan aka WormGod) - released his take on game balance ('Morrowind Advanced') - it actually made the game playable. Everyone became aware that Todd games can be fixed. Unfortunately for the next game Bethesda hired Morrowind modder Gavin Carter - who was a little too obsessed with 'balance' - which resulted in infamous Oblivion level scaling. For subsequent game Bethesda hired Oblivion modder Oscuro of OOO fame - and got rid of Gavin.

Todd decision to remove nudity and ban efforts to bring it back - inspired creation of shrine of free artistic expression outside Bethesda's corporate control - Lovers Lab.

Decision to remove most of Morrowind province from the game called 'Morrowind' inspired Tamriel Rebuilt project. Some people from original Tamriel Rebuit are now working on Beyond Skyrim, while others are still adding missing chunks of the province to TES 3.

Morrowind was the first case of 'we've removed it - but you can add it back' approach to game design. Which is still preferable to more modern 'we've removed it - but you can buy it back' approach.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

Daggerfall was the oblivion of morrowinds.

Content all proc gen, generic and meaningless. It had 5000000000000000000000000000 miles of drab terrain that was indistinguishable from the rest of the drab terrain, a silly mouse wiggling combat style that sounded better while they were passing the joint around than in practice. Oh boy there were language skills you could use to have meaningless conversations about the exact same topics with unimportant proc gen NPCs if you wanted.

Daggerfall is a game with all the features that sounds so big when you describe it, but in practice it's just a mess. Morrowind is someone sitting down and actually doing the work to make a game.

 

[Lemming42]

Morrowind is more focused than Daggerfall but it's all for nothing because the combat is somehow even more dreadful than Daggerfall's spaz-attack frantic slashing. Plus the bulk of Morrowind's quests are as boring as Daggerfall's procgen quests. Complaining about "meaningless conversations about the exact same topics with unimportant proc gen NPCs" doesn't make much sense if you then go on to praise Morrowind, which was meaningless conversations about the exact same topics with unimportant Wikipedia NPCs.

Most people here will hate to admit it, but the strength of both games is in being immersed in a fictional world - seeing things, exploring, meeting characters, reading books, all that. Everything people like about Morrowind lies in the lore and setting*. Both games absolutely fuck everything sideways in terms of gameplay/combat and both have really dull quests, though Daggerfall's main quest at least gives you a bit more flexibility than Morrowind's, and culminates in the pretty cool segment where the big factions either send messengers or assassins depending on how much you pissed them off over the course of the game.

*and perhaps the dungeon/overworld exploration, the former of which Daggerfall also excels at if you like properly insane hours-long dungeon adventures

This is also why it's embarrassing when people performatively praise Morrowind while also shitting on Skyrim: they're the same game. They're both about exploring a nice-looking world of paper-thin NPCs and boring "go there and kill everyone" quests, occasionally broken up by unfun combat. Both games are at their best when you're either reading in-game books, or ignoring the quests and going off to look around dungeons on your own. Skyrim's perk-based streamlining of the skill system doesn't really matter because skill advancement was never well done in the TES games anyway - you're a shitty idiot who can't hit a mudcrab right in front of you for the first two hours of the game, then from that point on you're an unstoppable demigod who will blast through the rest of the game without incident, as you also gain the ability to jump over buildings. The only major step down in Skyrim gameplay-wise is the removal of the spellmaker.

Daggerfall's arguably the best of the bunch because you can see what it's trying to do even if it doesn't really come off.

Oblivion's the standout black sheep in that the gameplay sucks but they also botched the setting to a truly incomprehensible degree, stripping away the one thing that makes Elder Scrolls games exciting.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

Actually, Morrowind and Skyrim are not, in fact, the same game. Speaking of performative praise...

Whether a game is good or bad or somewhere in between depends on what the game actually did do. It's interesting to note what it tried to do, but if all you need for a good game is that it tried to do cool stuff, I suggest you play Fable and Star Citizen and don't bother with any other games, because why would you need to? Those two did everything!

Yeah morrowind's dialogue wasn't really an improvement from Daggerfalls, but it wasn't really a step back either.

It sounds to me that perhaps you just don't like elder scrolls games. That and you have bad opinions that are wrong.

If you like fictional worlds, well at least Morrowind had one. Daggerfall had no world, because again, it was all proc gen. Morrowind had hand placed assets. Oblivion had a lot of proc gen, and its one of the reasons the world feels so boring. Skyrim went back to a lot of hand made assets, and the dungeons were better than most of morrowinds and all of oblivions, but the dumbing down of the other game systems took a toll...

Morrowind's combat sucked but it was a billion times better than daggerfall's pretend motion control garbage.

 

[Lemming42]

I love the TES games (even Redguard!) but I think all of them are a mess in one way or another and it's helpful to acknowledge that and identify where each game's strengths and weaknesses lie. The only one that's outright bad is Oblivion, all the others have strengths enough to make them worthwhile, even derpy Arena.

Daggerfall does have a world, which the player mostly experiences through the court politics and the tensions between the city states of Daggerfall, Wayrest, and Sentinel. There's plenty of characters to meet like Elysana (who is trying to kill you), Aub-Ki (who is trying to kill you), Gortwog (who might try to kill you), Akorithi (who might try to kill you or might not), Mynisera (who is, in a rare twist, NOT trying to kill you), Nulfaga, etc. The whole confusion with the Emperor's letter is a nice way to start the plot, and the truth about the Battle of Cryngraine Field and Lysandus' death/assassination is interesting enough to be worth uncovering. Plus the Aetherius stuff at the end. There's many books to read to flesh out the world too, as in Morrowind and Skyrim, and some of the premises for quests are pretty good. It's a good story and setting for a videogame.

The procgen towns and cities often give you a good impression of what High Rock is like - mostly rolling fields filled with market towns, the occasional witch coven, family tomb, or temple town. The desert towns of Hammerfell and the weird jungle area between the two nations also have different prefabs for the procgen to play with so they end up with distinct layouts, like the curved buildings in Sentinel. You often find strange things out of the way if you go looking, too - the Temples of Dibella where everyone's got their tits and cocks out, the witches who transform themselves into different forms, the Deadric summoners where you somehow get thrown into outer space and see the galaxy from afar with Hermaeus Mora talking at you, stuff like that.

I used to argue that DF was more of an experimental sandbox than a game but recent playthroughs on DF Unity have changed my mind, I think it's a really solid game and the world it portrays is compelling, and the procgen is part of that. The devs overshot to some extent, but better to have high aspirations and miss than have low aspirations and hit them, IMO.

Morrowind isn't really a step down but it's a step sideways rather than a step up. Most of the handmade/handwritten content is as boring as procgen content only now there's less of it and it's taking place in a smaller worldpsace. Morrowind definitely kicks the shit out of Daggerfall when it comes to conveying the lore visually through the world though.

 

[Azdul]

Daggerfall's arguably the best of the bunch because you can see what it's trying to do even if it doesn't really come off.

Oblivion's the standout black sheep in that the gameplay sucks but they also botched the setting to a truly incomprehensible degree, stripping away the one thing that makes Elder Scrolls games exciting.

I've recently tried all five. With a bunch of mods - to make roleplaying a vagabond seeking fame and fortune somewhat realistic. And with some engine / renderer remakes - because Bethesda engines age like fine milk.

1. Arena - OpenTESArena is making good progress - should be playable around 2027.
2. Daggerfall - DF Unity is in the last stages of beta - and some big mod releases are waiting for things to stabilize. Seems promising for 2022.
4. Morrowind - Rebirth can be made compatible with Tomb of the Snow Prince - but is 'incompatible' when it comes to game balance with Tamriel Rebuilt. BTBisation is '93% ready'. Upcoming OpenMW 0.48 should allow for some of the obligatory MWSE mods to be ported over. So - Morrowind seems promising for for 2023. On the other hand - Tamriel Rebuilt is aiming for project completion around 2030 - and without it - some parts of Morrowind province are really just a decoration ...
5. Oblivion - Maskars works fine with Oscuro, Waalx, Oblivion Character Overhaul and Northern UI - and Oblivion EGL performance mode seems to be stable enough. It is the only one that is playable right now. Except you cannot really use big quest / landmass mods with that configuration - and they will probably never get updated. On the other hand - most of them were kind of amateurish in the first place ...
6. Skyrim - Anniversary Edition messed up few things and Requiem still does not have 64-bit version. Beyond Skyrim - Cyrodill seems like a sure bet for late 2023 / early 2024, but it won't run on 32-bit Legendary Edition.

In short - being a black sheep has its advantages. It's the only one that is in playable right now - albeit within a really small world.

I see all other games as being in 'early access' - when you can see the potential - but there are tons of rough spots and missing content that needs few more years of polishing up.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

this means that the number of non-language skills actually increased by 2 from Daggerfall to Morrowind.

You're right about levitation - I've got it mixed up with climbing.

However, Morrowind was pretty much Todd Howard game - which had several long lasting consequences.

Soon after Morrowind release, one of Bethesda animators (Gary Noonan aka WormGod) - released his take on game balance ('Morrowind Advanced') - it actually made the game playable. Everyone became aware that Todd games can be fixed. Unfortunately for the next game Bethesda hired Morrowind modder Gavin Carter - who was a little too obsessed with 'balance' - which resulted in infamous Oblivion level scaling. For subsequent game Bethesda hired Oblivion modder Oscuro of OOO fame - and got rid of Gavin.

Todd decision to remove nudity and ban efforts to bring it back - inspired creation of shrine of free artistic expression outside Bethesda's corporate control - Lovers Lab.

Decision to remove most of Morrowind province from the game called 'Morrowind' inspired Tamriel Rebuilt project. Some people from original Tamriel Rebuit are now working on Beyond Skyrim, while others are still adding missing chunks of the province to TES 3.

Morrowind was the first case of 'we've removed it - but you can add it back' approach to game design. Which is still preferable to more modern 'we've removed it - but you can buy it back' approach.

Bethesda helpfully included a free Construction Set for use with Morrowind that provided modders with an excellent set of tools and led to the creation of a vibrant modding community, which only expanded for later games based on the Morrowind engine (i.e. Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Skyrim). This is one of the greatest accomplishment of Morrowind.

During development of Morrowind, the geography became limited to Vvardenfell (plus smaller islands) due to the sheer scope of a more hand-crafted project, unlike Daggerfall's 1:1 procedural generation of a territory covering tens of thousands of square miles. Even with a scaled-down environment covering only a portion of the province, Morrowind still contains enough content to satisfy three full-length playthroughs where the player would largely experience different quests and dungeons (outside of the main quest, of course) in each playthrough and yet not have fully exhausted all the content. To incorporate the entire province would have blown Bethesda's budget and time for developing the game, unless Bethesda excessively scaled down the environment so that the entirety of Morrowind fit into more or less the same area as Vvardenfell in the released game. This again relates to the transition from a dungeon-crawling game with Arena and Daggerfall to an Open World overland-exploration game with Morrowind. For the latter type of game, the key in world design is to scale down the overworld enough to fit within project scope and permit the player to traverse the environment in a reasonable amount of time, but to limit the scaling-down enough that the game conveys an impression of being larger than it really is and instills the player with the sense of truly being in the environment depicted.

In defending Morrowind, my intent was not to diminish Daggerfall, which was a successful game understood on its own merits. Arena and Daggerfall are successors to Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, in the subgenre of 3D first-person dungeon-crawlers. Daggerfall greatly expanded on the formula with its vast, intricate, procedurally-generated dungeons, on top of which was added a procedurally-generated world (although only the towns are usable; the overland itself is not) and a new character creation system that might be the best ever in any CRPG.

 

[Wyatt_Derp]

Oblivion's the standout black sheep in that the gameplay sucks but they also botched the setting to a truly incomprehensible degree, stripping away the one thing that makes Elder Scrolls games exciting.

I just uninstalled Oblivion again the other day. It must be the 126th time, give or take a dozen. I played it once through to the end during its first run in 2006. In the years since I've tried time and time again to find something meaningful that will keep me going through for a second playthru, but never can make it. It's just so fucking bland and boring. The most fun anyone gets out of Oblivion is the wacky, play-doh face character creation part at the beginning. It's all downhill from there.

 

[Nano]

Every thread on the Codex is a Bethesda thread.

 

[samuraigaiden]

FPS games with RPG elements like Daggerfall and Borderlands 2 are all the rage with kids these days

 

[Nifft Batuff]

I am still not able to put Daggerfall and Borderlands 2 in the same category.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

Oblivion's the standout black sheep in that the gameplay sucks but they also botched the setting to a truly incomprehensible degree, stripping away the one thing that makes Elder Scrolls games exciting.

I just uninstalled Oblivion again the other day. It must be the 126th time, give or take a dozen. I played it once through to the end during its first run in 2006. In the years since I've tried time and time again to find something meaningful that will keep me going through for a second playthru, but never can make it. It's just so fucking bland and boring. The most fun anyone gets out of Oblivion is the wacky, play-doh face character creation part at the beginning. It's all downhill from there.

I had the same experience with Oblivion until recently, where I tried a few mods to smooth over the most obnoxious parts. The most important mod being "Natural Leveling" or something like that. The way it works is that you no longer have a level up menu or have to sleep on level up. Levelling up does still happen, in basically the same way, but just over time due to skills increasing.

However the important part is that your stats just naturally increase as your skills do. So you can make your primary skills the ones you actually want to use, then just play the game, with the knowledge that you won't screw up your character by taking "bad levels". Not having to play the idiotic games around levelling up is a big deal.

The secondary effect of this is that the worst parts of the level scaling are blunted. Because you don't have "bad level ups" you don't run into the issue where you get weaker relative to the enemies over time.

The one thing oblivion did better than the other TES games, in my opinion, is how spellcasting works. Unlike every other TES game, you don't equip a spell like a weapon, instead there's a separate key to cast spells. So you can actually smoothly use spells during combat.

For a fun time in oblivion, I recommend getting the natural levelling mod, and playing as a magic user. Get access to the spellmaker, and make yourself a "Drain 100 health for 1 second" spell. Later, make yourself a "Weakness to magicka 100% for 1 second" spell. Proceed to touch bad guys and watch them fall over dead as if their soul had been sucked out of their body. If they have too much health, whack them several times with the weakness spell (It stacks) then suck their soul out. Seriously, it's a lot of fun.

 

[samuraigaiden]

How about we go back to talking about Capitalism and Communism? I want to forget the horrors of Bethesda

 

[The Dopamine Cleric]

cummunism is real and it can hurt you

No It's not real, and there is no me for it to hurt either.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

How about we go back to talking about Capitalism and Communism? I want to forget the horrors of Bethesda

Capitalism is human economics. Communism is a theoretical set of rigid rules for economics that would supposedly lead to a better outcome. That is to say, communism is capitalism with more bureaucrats, rules, and inefficiencies.

The problem is, nobody really understands economics, it's a chaotic semi-natural process. So when people try to fully control it, bad things tend to happen, like food not being available, or electricity going out during the winter, or a state run nuclear plant melting down.

Capitalism is not the opposite of communism. Communists still engage in capitalism. But such an administrative state requires a lot more bureaucrats, so even before corruption you have a top heavy setup. Of course, corruption exists, and under communism the corrupt bureaucrats control wealth, so this makes their corruption quite powerful and beneficial to them, enough that it creates a perverse incentive.

You can have an economic system that is not communism. However there is no economic system that is not capitalism. Capitalism is the name of the emergent behavior of human wealth and labor. Nobody implemented capitalism, they merely described what was already happening.

 

[samuraigaiden]

there is no economic system that is not capitalism

I think you are mistaking capitalism for commerce. Capitalism does not exist in all economic systems. Commerce does.

This form of naturalization of capitalism, trying to argue that all forms of human economic activity are capitalism, is real fucking stupid

 

[Xelocix]

Fortnite just added Dwayne Douglas "The Rock" Johnson into the game as a new skin so I beg to differ.

 

[Morenatsu.]

isms are for fags. real men only care about whether society is retarded or not

 

[Ash]

I just uninstalled Oblivion again the other day. It must be the 126th time, give or take a dozen.

Here I was thinking you were a respectable, perhaps even prestigious poster. Did you not learn the first time? Second? What is wrong with your brain that it decides 126 attempts at Oblivion was a good series of ideas? One hundred and twenty six times your brain did this. I hereby confiscate your monocle. If I were mod I'd ban you for a week so you can self-reflect on the error of your ways.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

God bless Todd Howard for making Skyrim so we'd have Enderal.