Morrowind was massive decline and should be considered as such

[perfectslumbers]

Doesn't popamole specifically refer to cover shooters? What the hell does this mean?

Kind of like how I can say "I AM LITERALLY DYING OF LAUGHTER," to mean "I am figuratively dying of laughter," nowadays. For another example of words becoming meaningless over time, see: "fascism."

 

[Blutwurstritter]

Be creative, a human's bread is a vampire's

No vampire touches mans greatest creation under my watch !

 

[Funposter]

popamole hiking sims

user joins forum, makes various low quality shitposts in less than a year using buzzwords he doesn't understand. MANY SUCH CASES!

 

[grimer]

popamole hiking sims

user joins forum, makes various low quality shitposts in less than a year using buzzwords he doesn't understand. MANY SUCH CASES!

i find it telling how you would rather argue semantics than try to refute anything ive said regarding the hypocrisy of morrowind fanboys

 

[Funposter]

popamole hiking sims

user joins forum, makes various low quality shitposts in less than a year using buzzwords he doesn't understand. MANY SUCH CASES!

i find it telling how you would rather argue semantics than try to refute anything ive said regarding the hypocrisy of morrowind fanboys

i really can't be bothered reiterating my thoughts on the game. i'm one of its biggest fanboys on this forum. you can probably name search me + "morrowind" and find any of my 500 posts about the game which already refutes whatever your gay and retarded arguments are

 

[Curious_Tongue]

I don't even like Oblivion

I've never managed to play a TES game for longer than 20 hours

Then you've really played any of them.

 

[MWaser]

This thread for the last few pages has been a sincerely embarrassing example of "feeding the troll" insteaed of noticing the parody-tier trolling and ceasing.

 

[JarlFrank]

Levitation is still in. Open console and type tcl. Mark and recall is also still in. Every location you travel to is marked and you can cast recall from the map screen.

 

[JarlFrank]

Oblivion made the mistake of being successful. It made the grave mistake of being more successful than its predecessor despite doing some things worse.

Yes, it did some things worse... and as a result, it fucked over the genre for years to come. Its influence is a touch of pestilence upon the entirety of PC gaming, not just RPGs.

Let's take a look at the things Oblivion either pioneered or popularized:
- instant fast travel to any discovered location with no investment of either gold or mana, but also no risk of random encounters... basically free instant teleport
- quest markers and map markers that appear on your compass so you never have to ask "How do I find Caius Cosades??" Later games would go even further and place markers IN THE MIDDLE OF YOUR SCREEN rather than just in the compass; by now those have become absolute standard and barely any first person games come without them anymore
- Oblivion was the first game to feature mini-DLCs like horse armor, which has now become industry standard and even some indie games charge you extra for small content like that; this is the most perfect example of pure decline because for Morrowind, Bethesda released several mini-mods for free
- full voice acting for every NPC, each line spoken by an NPC at any point is voiced, leading to a much tighter word budget for the writers so NPCs will have fewer non-essential things to say unlike Morrowind where you could ask them anything if you wanted to

And this doesn't even mention the removal of my favorite Morrowind features (spellmaking, lots of equipment slots of mix-and-match armor dressup, levitation, etc), these are just the things Oblivion popularized in gaming to the detriment of pretty much every game made after it.

 

[Sykar]

Obligatory damicat:
https://sites.google.com/site/damicat/

 

[Harthwain]

- full voice acting for every NPC, each line spoken by an NPC at any point is voiced, leading to a much tighter word budget for the writers so NPCs will have fewer non-essential things to say unlike Morrowind where you could ask them anything if you wanted to

I could argue this isn't necessarily a bad thing.

1) Having tighter word budget encourages brevity over water treading.
2) You can still do minimal/no voice acting (or limit that to important NPCs) with a lot of text.

In Morrowind you aren't "asking them anything". You simply "type in" some wikipedia keywords and get desensitized text blurbs. Daggerfall did this much better in terms of form. There at least it looks like an actual conversation.

 

[Jaedar]

full voice acting for every NPC, each line spoken by an NPC at any point is voiced, leading to a much tighter word budget for the writers so NPCs will have fewer non-essential things to say unlike Morrowind where you could ask them anything if you wanted to

I don't think you can blame this on oblivion. Kotor did it a few years earlier (even if a lot of the voice lines were gibberish alien talk).

I could argue this isn't necessarily a bad thing.

1) Having tighter word budget encourages brevity over water treading.
2) You can still do minimal/no voice acting (or limit that to important NPCs) with a lot of text.

Remember that if you have 10 lines with C&C, this means the player will see maybe 5 lines. So while it does encourage brevity, it does it in a bad way. And afaik the biggest issue isn't even that, it's that the writing has to be done X months before release so you get get all the voice actors into a studio to finish their lines before the game ships. And once recorded, you can't really change stuff, so this effectively shortens the time the writers have to do their jobs. Bonus points because the developers might not be done, and might end up shuffling stuff around, leading to more trouble down the line.

 

[Harthwain]

Remember that if you have 10 lines with C&C, this means the player will see maybe 5 lines. So while it does encourage brevity, it does it in a bad way. And afaik the biggest issue isn't even that, it's that the writing has to be done X months before release so you get get all the voice actors into a studio to finish their lines before the game ships. And once recorded, you can't really change stuff, so this effectively shortens the time the writers have to do their jobs. Bonus points because the developers might not be done, and might end up shuffling stuff around, leading to more trouble down the line.

While true, there is a deeper problem with C&C: their meaninglessness, which stems directly from the fact that every interaction is hand-crafted. With the emergent design much more is possible with much less direct effort towards organizing specific outcomes and this is the kind of actual C&C that respects player's choices and actions more.

 

[Robotigan]

Yes, it did some things worse... and as a result, it fucked over the genre for years to come.

Oh please. No, it's just the first game you're aware of. Bioware was already pioneering full voice acting. The only reason it took so long for voice acting to make its way into RPGs to begin with was limited disc/cartridge space. You really think voice acting wasn't gonna make its way into a genre where most devs aim to be either simulational or cinematic? And it hasn't oppressed gaming, smaller budget projects still lean on text and audiences enjoy them. Hell some uber casual/popular franchises like Zelda, Animal Crossing, and Pokemon still use text.

Plenty of RPGs had tinkered with fast travel systems since the genre first originated. I'm pretty sure Final Fantasy had already done a point-to-point system years prior. It became more common as maps got bigger and longer to traverse. Most people do not find trudging back and forth through the same area several times over to be interesting gameplay; games like Metroidvanias were already being panned if they leaned on it too excessively. It hasn't taken over. Plenty of projects elect to handle things more restrictively. Bethesda themselves has even validated this playstyle with the introduction of Survival mode in both their major franchises. And overall it's the easiest thing to ignore if you really don't want to engage with it. Oblivion was one of my first RPGs and open world games and I didn't need anyone to tell me bumrushing through everything with fast travel would ruin the experience for myself.

I'm not even going to research when quest markers first emerged (probably some MMO), this is the easiest to explain as I think I have in this thread already. Not only are they a convenience feature but large scale games with hundreds of quests have to have them. They're a developer convenience as much a player convenience. If playtesting reveals that you should change the location of an object, that requires tracking down every reference to that object at rewriting/rerecording/redoing art assets for it. This becomes unmanageable at scale. If a quest marker is bound to the item location, devs can freely move things around without that worry. Not every game has copied them wholesale.

Microtransactions were 100% going to happen. And it was Valve who pioneered them way more so than Bethesda's single horse armor DLC. But anyway, it's just far too lucrative for the market to ignore. As far as I'm aware, it's hardly present in single player experiences this forum claims to exclusively play so I'm not sure what's gotten your panties twisted. The multiplayer and mobile gaming scene is basically a separate market at this point.

 

[Robotigan]

While true, there is a deeper problem with C&C: their meaninglessness, which stems directly from the fact that every interaction is hand-crafted. With the emergent design much more is possible with much less direct effort towards organizing specific outcomes and this is the kind of actual C&C that respects player's choices and actions more.

Oh boy, this forum really isn't ready for my take on why C&C is the poor man's systemic gameplay.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Let's take a look at the things Oblivion either pioneered or popularized:

none of this is true though

- instant fast travel to any discovered location with no investment of either gold or mana, but also no risk of random encounters... basically free instant teleport

Diablo 2

- quest markers and map markers that appear on your compass so you never have to ask "How do I find Caius Cosades??" Later games would go even further and place markers IN THE MIDDLE OF YOUR SCREEN rather than just in the compass; by now those have become absolute standard and barely any first person games come without them anymore

Have you ever heard of a little game called World of Warcraft?

- Oblivion was the first game to feature mini-DLCs like horse armor, which has now become industry standard and even some indie games charge you extra for small content like that; this is the most perfect example of pure decline because for Morrowind, Bethesda released several mini-mods for free

Not by a longshot. Obvious counterexample: The Sims. Do you have any idea just how much DLC The Sims 2 had?

- full voice acting for every NPC, each line spoken by an NPC at any point is voiced, leading to a much tighter word budget for the writers so NPCs will have fewer non-essential things to say unlike Morrowind where you could ask them anything if you wanted to

Again, nope. KOTOR predates oblivion by years. And maybe you've heard of a title called VTMB?
Then again, morrovirgins probably think morrowind has better writing than VTMB.

Oblivion did help popularize NPCs who actually interact with the world and live their own life though, so, that's cool.
Seems more like you've only played a handful of games and attribute things that were already standard by the time Oblivion was created to Oblivion. IDK what year you thought Oblivion came out at, but you might want to double check that.

 

[Raskens]

I'm not even going to research when quest markers first emerged (probably some MMO), this is the easiest to explain as I think I have in this thread already. Not only are they a convenience feature but large scale games with hundreds of quests have to have them.

This is false. Morrowind had more quests than Oblivion as far as I can see, and it handled it well without quest marks. In fact it seems MW had 483 (https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/45881/) quests, while Oblivion had a measly 204 quests (https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Quests_(Oblivion).

I also believe (if my friends are correct) that WoW originally had a journal instead of quest marks, and I would assume WoW had hundreds of quest at it early stages.

 

[perfectslumbers]

Have you ever heard of a little game called World of Warcraft?

Wow didn't have quest markers until 2009 actually

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I also believe (if my friends are correct) that WoW originally had a journal instead of quest marks, and I would assume WoW had hundreds of quest at it early stages.

WoW not only had quest markers, the thing that pioneered the "big arrow on the screen pointing you where to go" was a WoW mod.

And comparing some arbitrary "number of quests" is silly, might as well compare the total number of pixels.

 

[Raskens]

I also believe (if my friends are correct) that WoW originally had a journal instead of quest marks, and I would assume WoW had hundreds of quest at it early stages.

WoW not only had quest markers, the thing that pioneered the "big arrow on the screen pointing you where to go" was a WoW mod.

And comparing some arbitrary "number of quests" is silly, might as well compare the total number of pixels.

He wrote:

Not only are they a convenience feature but large scale games with hundreds of quests have to have them.

Hence me listing the number of quests in Morrowind and Oblivion.

 

[perfectslumbers]

WoW not only had quest markers, the thing that pioneered the "big arrow on the screen pointing you where to go" was a WoW mod.

That screenshot has a billion addons and the quest marker must be one of them, quest markers were added in patch 3.2 in wotlk

I'd like if games were designed to be able to be played with or without quest markers tbh. But it's a lot of effort for not many players

 

[rusty_shackleford]

WoW not only had quest markers, the thing that pioneered the "big arrow on the screen pointing you where to go" was a WoW mod.

That screenshot has a billion addons and the quest marker must be one of them, quest markers were added in patch 3.2 in wotlk

I'd like if games were designed to be able to be played with or without quest markers tbh. But it's a lot of effort for not many players

No, no they weren't. Quest turnin were always on the minimap. They appeared as open circles prior to 2.3(TBC), when they became the standard ?, and quest givers were also added as !
Here's someone discussing classic WoW who mentions exactly this feature:
https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/cx8zzf/minimap_markers/

Theres very small yellow dots on the minimap to show where to hand in quests.

And another person
https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/cyy3yj/the_quest_dot_isnt_showing_up_in_classic/

Are you talking about the turn-in marker? 'Cause there's no indicator (without an addon like Questie) to tell you where a pickup is.

The marker will fade significantly in colour on the minimap if the turn in target is indoors. Make sure to read your quests, they'll tell you who to go back to!

only a yellow dot on the minimap for your turn in location.

 

[Robotigan]

This is false. Morrowind had more quests than Oblivion as far as I can see, and it handled it well without quest marks. In fact it seems MW had 483

Hence me listing the number of quests in Morrowind and Oblivion.

There were already several quests with incorrect instructions. And don't even try to pull that "unreliable quest giver" excuse. If you suspect someone in real life has given you bad directions, you can confront them about it or get a second opinion from someone else. Morrowind's quest journal was panned at release. That's why subsequent titles reworked the system. Hell, that's why Tribunal tweaked it.

You guys act like every convenience feature ruins a game. No, you're just comfortable with the ones you grew up with. I could just as easily claim an in-game map "dumbs down" challenge and immersion for the sake of convenience. Maps were actually pretty rare and difficult to obtain in preindustrial societies

 

[Harthwain]

I could just as easily claim an in-game map "dumbs down" challenge and immersion for the sake of convenience. Maps were actually pretty rare and difficult to obtain in preindustrial societies

Gothic 1 did the in-game maps perfectly.

 

[perfectslumbers]

And another person

Oh you're talking about the minimap turn in, why? That's very different from quest markers