Podcast about Next Generation games with Todd Howard

[yipsl]

The devs didn't think that there was anything wrong with it at all, and went so far as to say that the only people that don't love the graphics in Oblivion are just cant appreciate them as they don't own an HDTV and an Xbox360.

I love the graphics and I don't own an HDTV and an Xbox 360. I also love Daggerfall's graphics. I accept that graphics that match the tech out there is a given in every game development generation.

I'd love Daggerfall remade with Oblivion graphics, but Oblivion remade with Daggerfall graphics would be Battlespire in all but name. I never liked Battlespire as much as Daggerfall. Face it, Battlespire is what they want at Bethsoft. Regardless of who owns the company.

Did they make Arena and Daggerfall by mistake? They certainly spent enough time between Daggerfall and Morrowind pursuing the gamers of other genres.

I had always hoped that Howard was a cynical bastard who created Oblivion with the sole purpose of selling as many copies as possible, but he thinks that he is taking games in the right direction. Gameplay is irrelevant, the visceral experience is everything. It's too bad the majority of people seem to agree.

I don't see the two as contradictory. It's just that RPGs have never been as much about a visceral experience as they've been about an immersive experience. Arena and Daggerfall were immersive, but they were faulted for being empty worlds by non RPG gamers.

It's all about a balance of the elements in the game design. As the post about the Unreal Engine and Deus Ex showed, middleware is a mixed blessing, but they simply won't spend their time coming up with a home grown "Xngine 2" when using middleware makes the game look like every other FPS and RPG out there today.

Maybe they've learned Havok and Gamebryo enough such that they won't take the black box approach to TES V, or even Fallout 3.? Maybe I'm wearing rose coloured glasses, but Oblivion might be their learning curve for all this.

At any rate, it's still not as Battlespire First Person Hack, Slash and Magic oriented as Dark Messiah of Half Life Too will be. I sort of got another TES game with Oblivion. I won't get a Might and Magic 10 if I buy Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. That's a subtle difference. RPG Lite is better than FPS with an RPG feel.

There was nothing special about Dagerfall grafix. It was made from sprites (yes normal in 1996) but the point is that they are much cheap to make and there was not big difference in grafix beetween titles in that time (except for some 3d games). The % of resource that goes to grafix was much smaller buck then.

Do you know the relative cost of the 2 pixel sprites in Daggerfall's boobies ( paraphrased from a Todd Howard explanation of why there was no nudity in Morrowind)? Game development back then cost less than it does now, but programming those sprites might have taken up quite a bit of workstation time on the cards they had back then.

I still have the CGW January 1996 preview of Daggerfall, and a nearly $2,000 gaming rig is advertised on one of the pages. It has a 486DX2-66, a one meg PCI graphics card and a couple of SCSI drives with a CD-ROM. In many ways, the cost of the hardware has gone down over the years, but the cost of development has gone up; but I still don't think that doing consistently good sprite graphics was so easy that it wasn't a major focus of development for that generation.

There are many reasons why I dislike it. The increased linearity of the guild quests. The lack of lore. The poor dialogue. The lack of progress as a realistic fantasy world simulator. The handholding. The inhomogenous presentation (from GFX to RAI). And unlike MW it brings nothing new to the table that would capture me. The limited content makes the linearity stand out much more than in MW. There are things I like about it, but as a whole I found myself not feeling any motivation to roleplay the game.

I accept Oblivion for what it is. It's like if, God forbid, a loved one developed memory loss, they'd still be beautiful and still remind me of the way they once were, even if they couldn't remember themselves.

I thought long and hard about the MQ and the only parts I didn't like were the Oblivion gates. The pathos of interacting with the Blades ghosts and saving their spirits, plus the savage garden of Cameron's Paradise drew me in. The gauntlet to the Temple of the One was what would be expected from Mehrunes Dagon as well as Martin's sacrifice and the appearance of Akatosh's avatar.

What didn't work, besides the Diablo Twoish gate areas, was the fact that the fires never died in Kvatch, the rest of the Imperial City suffered no damage from Daedra all over the place and the fact that guards fought in Bruma to close gates without any magic support from anyone other than my character. At least Ocato fought in the Imperial City. One Battlemage whoopee, where the hell was the rest of the Mage Guild?

I accept that TES is as much a sandbox Sim as it is an RPG or a FPS. The whole idea of Conan being the head of the Mage Guild, or as the strategy guide states, you could have both a mage and a dark brotherhood assassin following you around if you're head of both factions, is a bit deprived of consequences.

Heck, even in Baldurs Gate, which I only mildly enjoyed, characters of opposing aligments had things to say to one another. We'll see what they do for commercial expansions, but they may not do any at all. Zenimax Productions has that MMORPG planned and the Zenimax website ZP link goes to Morrowind.com.

When the market changes back to wanting serious, in depth RPGs then we'll get them. When devs finally learn the middleware they use and don't switch each and every game, then we might get more features, but right now, it's either play what is at least one of the few single player commercial RPGs of this dwarf generation or go back and replay all the old ones.

I can see toughlove, but I can't see turning my back on the Elder Scrolls. I just bought one copy instead of two because Oblivion isn't exactly what I wanted. Still, it can be fun at times and the thieves guild quests are the best in the game so far.

Sometimes I think the Codex is the mirror of the official forums and that a middle ground might be warranted. Sort of like a gray area that acknowledges commercial realities while advocating what makes a genuinely good RPG. I love Daggerfall and wish that Elder Scrolls 4 was more balanced, but in my book the equation runs: ES4=Daggerfall 1 1/2 + Battlespire 2 1/2. It's still better than nothing.

Too much sand gets up your vagina.

But don't worry fellas, they'll find a way to justify wasteland grass, like something about radioactive fallout being the perfect fertilizer for a special kind of grass, one that we've never been able to grow, one that we've never even known about, and more importantly, one that has more individual blades and realistic swaying than evar before!

Honestly, the things they talk about, it's almost surreal. They all agree that graphics improve gameplay and should be a priority, and then they go off on a 15-minute tree and grass talking spree. I thought all the comments were just exaggerating, but man, it's truly horrible.

Yes, I think they spent too much time talking up soil erosion vs. gameplay. Anyways, I'm sure any grass in Fallout 3 will be a mutant radioactive crabgrass that will behave exactly like bloodgrass. We'll see if there are modified Dwemer towers there too.

Seriously, they do some things right, but they do other things wrong. As long as the sales are there, they don't care. I cared enough to buy one copy of the game, but I doubt my not buying a second copy hurt them.

As long as they can't get gamers to even like the graphics of Morrowind once Oblivion's out, then the only hope for Zenimax to release a genuine TES CRPG the equal of Daggerfall is for another company to be innovative and do it, thus taking the RPG market back to its roots. They're decent coders and probably nice guys, but they're followers. Most companies are these days, and now EA owns Dark Age of Camelot.

What I'd like to see is independent fan made RPGs get up to the graphics level of the commercial games. Eventually, it has to happen, graphics has to reach a level where not much more can be done and the cost will come down such that even modders will be able to buy their own game makers that matches commercial content.

Then the mainstream will get a chance to buy a fan made game via an online distribution system that bypasses big box retailers, and they might actually learn what a complex RPG is. After all, the big developers will go the online distribution route and we'll have to accept it, DRM or not. If it gets more of an equal status for independent games, then I'm all for it.

Now, despite my critique of Bethsoft and especially of Zenimax (Bank of Credit and Comedy anyone?), if Zenimax had not bought Bethsoft, then we'd not had Morrowind, inferior to Daggerfall as it is, and we'd not have Oblivion. Which is better, no TES game or another game from another company based on another franchise that has the same issues, but lacks the same memories? I still love The Elder Scrolls (loved heisting one of them too, and never killed a Moth Priest in either quest; love those Thieves Guild quests).

 

[Romanian_Dude2005]

Did they make Arena and Daggerfall by mistake? They certainly spent enough time between Daggerfall and Morrowind pursuing the gamers of other genres.

the delay was mostly because of financial issues, which ended when Zenimax bought Bethesda and continued the development of Redguard and Morrowind.

but atleast they sead Redguard and Battlespire were spinoffs