Rumor: Bethesda has been in turmoil since the death of their CEO

[Gerrard]

The very fact that the impossibility of finding Caius Cosades became a meme should already tell you that Morrowind was popular back in the day.

Also, at the time of Morrowind's release all gaming mags this side of potato made yuge comparisons/'showdowns' between it, NWN, IWD2 and Gothic 2 which were largely released around the same time. You are simply incorrect that Morrowind was supposed to be some kind of niche game, it was as 'AAA' for its time as it could get.

Popular among core gamers, not people who played games as a whole.

Who were these "people who played games as a whole" that weren't "core gamers" when Morrowind came out?

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

with MGSO

Did we just time skip back to 2012?

The Morrowind screenshots are mostly from 2015, so yes, near enough. Next time I replay Morrowind, I'll use a more advanced graphics overhaul.

In all fairness, TES is a pretty boring piece of fiction, it's one of the most popular examples of utterly generic high fantasy.

The more conventional provinces of Tamriel are firmly in the realm of pulp fantasy, where countries or regions are based on a historical equivalent to provide color and cultural depth, at the expense of not being terribly original. High Rock is Britain/France, Hammerfell is the Islamic Maghreb, Skyrim is Scandinavia, and Cyrodiil is Roman Italy. The three elven provinces are already highly weird and unconventional fantasy setting, as demonstrated in Morrowind with its insectoid fauna, mushroom flora, and distinctive, sui generis Dunmer culture; the lore on Summurset Isle and Valenwood (such as A Dance in Fire) indicates they are similarly strange. Black Marsh, home of the lizardmen Argonians, and Elsweyr, home of the catpeople Khajiits, are even further out there. And that's without getting into Michael Kirkbride's background lore for the setting, or the oddities provided for The Elder Scrolls Online by Lawrence Schick.

That was a cool little tale. If you were to name a handful of other TES scribblings in similar vein, what are some good ones you could name?

A sequel to A Dance in Fire appeared in Oblivion, but The Argonian Account was briefer and less well-written than the original. For writings even more bizarre than A Dance in Fire, you can refer to the 36 Lessons of Vivec or other writings by Michael Kirkbride such as the Dragon Break. Unfortunately, it's been a number of years since I've read through all of Morrowind's in-game books.

 

[Doktor Best]

(Altman took care of a lot of people, he was by all accounts a good dude)

This is the same guy who manipulated Bethesda's founder Christopher Weaver out of his own company, was intimately involved with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International scandal, and consequently was permanently barred from banking? Perhaps the sycophants at Bethesda sung only praises of their boss, but everything I'd ever learned of that guy gave me the impression that he was a major douchebag.

There are also stories about him threatening physical violence to devs for refusing to implement paid dlcs to Oblivion.

What a top bloke! God rest his soul.

 

[NecroLord]

If I became king of Microsoft tomorrow, I'd have Bethesda ditch the high fantasy altogether and buy them Funcom as a Christmas present. Then Todd A. Howard could finish what Robert E. Howard started.

You mean racism?

While making a game where each species act as different species and species don't intermix would be nice. They would have to prove theirs skills by making a totally xenophobic TES VI. Otherwise they would create a mild boring stuff similar to most games that were inspired by Howard that were released last few years.

No one gave a fuck about interspecies relations or breeding, hell, I remember in Arena and Daggerfall it was more of a joke (Khajiit and their barbed penises, for example).
This is not some degenerate modern D&D trash, where you have races with more pronouns than there are arcane and divine spells.
Each race has benefits and strengths.

 

[Roguey]

Oblivion didn't make radical changes "to get an even bigger audience". They wanted to make a better game, but really caught up with them. Oblivion is the result of that and Skyrim is the lesson learned from Oblivion, but less so because they aimed for it and more because they simply don't know how to do better anymore and Todd Howard wants to avoid the situation Bethesda was in when they were making Morrowind - so they go for a safe course now, rather than trying to revolutionize their games. This is doubly true after the Oblivion fiasco (I mean fiasco in terms of what it aimed for, not in terms of how popular it became).

Quest compass, free fast travel, level scaling, freedom to become the master of every guild, action-oriented combat, and ability to drink potions to your heart's content while paused in the inventory for those who aren't great at action-oriented combat (among other things I may not recall at this time) were all concessions for a wider audience.

Who were these "people who played games as a whole" that weren't "core gamers" when Morrowind came out?

Plenty of kids like this. Poked at whatever was most popular for a while, then moved on.

 

[NecroLord]

Quest compass, free fast travel, level scaling, freedom to become the master of every guild, action-oriented combat

Ugh...
The player being able to become guildmaster of every guild, just like that, is really shit. In the older games, you had to have invested in the skills associated with the respective guild, which makes sense. Quest compass is also shit. Level scaling is shit.

 

[Spectacle]

Oblivion didn't make radical changes "to get an even bigger audience". They wanted to make a better game, but really caught up with them. Oblivion is the result of that and Skyrim is the lesson learned from Oblivion, but less so because they aimed for it and more because they simply don't know how to do better anymore and Todd Howard wants to avoid the situation Bethesda was in when they were making Morrowind - so they go for a safe course now, rather than trying to revolutionize their games. This is doubly true after the Oblivion fiasco (I mean fiasco in terms of what it aimed for, not in terms of how popular it became).

Quest compass, free fast travel, level scaling, freedom to become the master of every guild, action-oriented combat, and ability to drink potions to your heart's content while paused in the inventory for those who aren't great at action-oriented combat (among other things I may not recall at this time) were all concessions for a wider audience.

Those aren't radical changes, each one is a pretty minor adjustment to the Morrowind formula. And all of them are changes made in response to what many gamers were struggling with in Morrowind.

The "wider audience" gamers were already playing Morrowind, which is why Bethesda made Oblivion to build further on that success.

 

[J1M]

1) Maybe if you are an MBA, working on Elder Scrolls is appealing. But if we are talking about IPs that game developers would switch teams for, it's not a premier one in Microsoft's library.

2) The extreme incompetence at 343 Studios and the Activision merger are probably distracting upper management from problems at Zenimax.

 

[unseeingeye]

The era they went bankrupt because nobody wanted Battlespire or Redguard?

That was, coincidentally, the beginning of the Todd era.

 

[GhostCow]

Did you people who didn't know about Morrowind not read PC Gamer back then? Were you all consolefags or something? Morrowind was incredibly hyped by the gaming press at the time.

 

[KateMicucci]

Quest compass, free fast travel, level scaling, freedom to become the master of every guild, action-oriented combat

Ugh...
The player being able to become guildmaster of every guild, just like that, is really shit. In the older games, you had to have invested in the skills associated with the respective guild, which makes sense. Quest compass is also shit. Level scaling is shit.

Todd said in the Starfield interview that he doesn't want the player to have to restart his games with new characters (and that's a good thing)

 

[Kruno]

The very fact that the impossibility of finding Caius Cosades became a meme should already tell you that Morrowind was popular back in the day.

I was even more surprised when I learned he was shirtless, and carried drugs.

 

[Harthwain]

Quest compass, free fast travel, level scaling, freedom to become the master of every guild, action-oriented combat, and ability to drink potions to your heart's content while paused in the inventory for those who aren't great at action-oriented combat (among other things I may not recall at this time) were all concessions for a wider audience.

1) Sure, it did take care of people who were confused with directions. At the same time it helped to free developers' from writing down (and checking) directions from NPCs and not have them come up with a sensible network for fast travel posts. You can see Bethesda going deeper into "AI can generate this for us!" route with each next game of theirs. And I would argue that "we don't have time for this shit!" was more important from developers' perspective than the reason you describe.

2) Level scaling was supposed to keep the challenge up, instead of having areas with enemies that were too weak or too strong that had to be hand-placed. In Skyrim they combined level scaling with game-generated quests that were supposed to "subsequently tailor content to your capabilities and experiences". The end result was boring, but it does show they tried to do something interesting with the idea in theory and failed at execution (mostly because it was left to the AI and AI is not great at creativity on its own).

3) You can join one Great House and all the Guilds (and gain their highest rank) in Morrowind. The only issue was the order in which you joined Thief and Fighter Guilds, but you could work around that, if you knew how. Otherwise the main obstacle was getting high enough skills that were relevant for any given Guild, but enough gold given to trainers solves this problem as well.

 

[Norfleet]

That's modded. Original Morrowind is predominantly brown. I think it probably suits the rural tone they wanted to give to the game. You are never in a proper city (which is something they definitely wanted to try with Oblivion).

Of course it was brown. That's what color the OUTSIDE normally is. What did you EXPECT the outside to look like? Purple? It's similarly no surprise that a bunch of pimply-faced pencil-necked dorks who have no interest in anything outside to find outside thus to be boring.

 

[NecroLord]

Todd said in the Starfield interview that he doesn't want the player to have to restart his games with new characters (and that's a good thing)

Honestly, that's another bad sign. Any self respecting RPG allows the player to experiment with different builds and characters.

 

[Norfleet]

Todd said in the Starfield interview that he doesn't want the player to have to restart his games with new characters (and that's a good thing)

Honestly, that's another bad sign. Any self respecting RPG allows the player to experiment with different builds and characters.

He didn't say you CAN'T restart with new characters. Just that you don't HAVE to.

 

[NecroLord]

Yeah, another one of his "You can play forever" shit pies.

 

[Modron]

Morrowind is shit, by the way.

Look at them trying to silence this man for telling the truth, absolutely shameful.

 

[Harthwain]

That's modded. Original Morrowind is predominantly brown. I think it probably suits the rural tone they wanted to give to the game. You are never in a proper city (which is something they definitely wanted to try with Oblivion).

Some areas are fairly green:

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

But this is in line with the map of Morrowind:

Spoiler

 

[Norfleet]

It's not easy being green.

 

[oblivionenjoyer]

That's modded. Original Morrowind is predominantly brown. I think it probably suits the rural tone they wanted to give to the game. You are never in a proper city (which is something they definitely wanted to try with Oblivion).

Some areas are fairly green:

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

But this is in line with the map of Morrowind:

Spoiler

I've never seen a more disgusting palette in my life honestly. If you want to suggest that Morrowind world design was a strategic mix of puke and diarrhoea, be my guest, but I wouldn't call it singing praise for the game.

 

[Serus]

People, can i ask one thing? Why do you even care about any big gaming studios (making crpgs) at this point?
Let them burn. Or make more shit for casuals. Look for good games elsewhere, they are there. I know, there aren't as many great ones being made as we would like to have. However waiting for all the Bethesdas of the industry - companies selling to (tens) of millions - to make good games is an exercise in futility. Or rather stupidity.
I'm wasting my time. Gamers, gamers never change...

 

[KateMicucci]

People, can i ask one thing? Why do you even care about any big gaming studios (making crpgs) at this point?
Let them burn. Or make more shit for casuals. Look for good games elsewhere, they are there. I know, there aren't as many great ones being made as we would like to have. However waiting for all the Bethesdas of the industry - companies selling to (tens) of millions - to make good games is an exercise in futility. Or rather stupidity.
I'm wasting my time. Gamers, gamers never change...

nobody except Bethesda makes this type of game

 

[Laz Sundays]

There are lessons to learn from observing Bethesda and their products. One of them is really important, although people skip over it or do not even notice the significance. I'm grateful for their existence

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Those aren't radical changes, each one is a pretty minor adjustment to the Morrowind formula. And all of them are changes made in response to what many gamers were struggling with in Morrowind.

The "wider audience" gamers were already playing Morrowind, which is why Bethesda made Oblivion to build further on that success.

A list of Oblivion's failings relative to Morrowind:

• Comprehensive creature-leveling such that all monsters and NPCs are set at the same level as the PC, with weaker types of monsters disappearing after the character gains enough levels, and stronger types of monsters not appearing when the character is low-level
• Comprehensive item-leveling whereby a high-level PC will not only encounter similarly high-level bandits but said bandits will have random pieces of extremely expensive armor and weapons, while a low-level PC will never find weapons/armor of such powerful material; or a weapon on display in a glass case in a castle will be a worthless replica if the PC is low-level but the real thing after the PC gains enough levels
• A clunky interface, which was clearly designed for consoles, in sharp contrast to Morrowind's sleek menus
• Reduction in the number of joinable guilds/factions offering many quests from 10 in Morrowind to 4 in Oblivion, keeping the more generic ones (Fighters/Mages/Thieves guilds)
• Factions now centered around quest lines, with 2 of the 4 (Fighters Guild and Mages Guild) being poorly written and boring
• Full voice-acting for dialogue, which necessitated a drastic reduction in the amount of dialogue per NPC, most of whom have one comment about themselves or their city to offer and nothing else
• Poor writing in general, with dialogue and books less interesting than in Morrowind
• Minigames for speechcraft and lockpicking
• Elimination of certain kinds of items, such as thrown weapons, crossbows, and spears
• Reduction in the number of skills to the point where axes are considered blunt weapons
• Regenerating magicka, which effectively means that all health can be easily regained after each combat, thus removing much of the logistics that existed previously
• Elimination of different physiques (and animations) for Argonians and Khajiits
• Both in-game and out-of-game world maps that offer far less information than their Morrowind equivalents
• Automatic fast-travel to any location that's already been visited
• A quest compass that points to your next destination, the use of which is made necessary by the combination of uninformative journal entries and an inability to ask directions
• A lack of aesthetics, especially compared to Morrowind's brilliant art direction
• A generic, medieval fantasy grab-bag setting, without even the coherence offered by Daggerfall's Iliac Bay region much less the spectacular sui generis setting of Morrowind
• A dull, poorly-plotted main quest, with the only plane of Oblivion featured in the base game (except at the very end) being a generic hellscape with little variation
• A half-baked action-oriented combat system so that success in combat depends greatly on the player's physical skill, yet is boring and tedious

A few of these are radical changes separately, and the combination of these changes generated a comprehensive casualization and dumbing-down of the formula established in Morrowind.