Bahamut
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2008
- Messages
- 1,196
And Obsidian(somedude) liked Fallout 3
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Skyrim is worse than Oblivion in every way
- Thread starter baronjohn
- Start date
And Obsidian(somedude) liked Fallout 3
Necroscope
Arcane
Well, it would be in a bad manner for them to say they didn't, considering the fact that they used it as a resource base for FONV.
Stereotypical Villain
Arcane
... and then he put a bucket on his head and proceeded to tell you how much he loathed crabs of the muddy variety.
After or before getting FNV commission from Bethpizda? And who will criticise the products of studio you hope to work for some day? It's like people on TV saying they like multiculti and faggotery, of course they do
. Andoran will make Skyrim existance justified same way the Nehrim did for Oblibion.
DraQ
Arcane
It depends.
If you enjoyed *anything* about oblivious or expansion (any single thing in actual game, not just flinging shit at it on the 'dex or trolling bethtards about this easteregg with Akatosh that only appears when you delete all your saves and throw yourself from Dive Rock) then you can safely buy a legit copy, because it's overall much better game.
Other than that it can't hurt demoing it. Unlike oblivion it isn't a bad game and it doesn't look like an attempt to market bland PJ's LoTR ripoff as a TES game.
+Visuals are a definite plus - unlike oblivious they are actually attractive, rather than merely trying to impress with raw quantity of shaders - faces look like a rather successful attempt to re-create Morrowind design of TES races using modern tech, environments look nice, conceptual art clearly wasn't limited to stills from LoTR and some doodles of one of the devs' 6y.o. offspring. The engine itself actually seems quite dated and character bodies are rather blocky - this is inversion of how it was in oblivious, where visuals were fairly strong technically, but pain to actually look at.
+The land feels more designed and structured - you have distinct groups of people inhabiting Skyrim rather than generic denizens of multikult happyland inhabiting Cyrodiil - you have Orcish strongholds, native Breton majority (some of it militant) in the reach, Dunmer refugees, Khajiit traders and so on. The landscape itself resembles Morrowind more than Oblivious in that it isn't just a featureless stretch of terrain that can be traversed freely at almost any point, it's also littered with minor landmarks and otherwise distinct stuff. The dungeons are quite distinct from each other, at least in terms of flavour.
+There is some backstory to the gameworld, it doesn't all just hang in vacuum as it did in oblivious.
+Perks are a nice addition to the character development - beth clearly doesn't have it all worked out, but they are making some progress. Also, you level up based on all skill increases.
+wielding system has some bad flaws (that could be solved by making block automatic and working up from there thanks to freeing some controls) but it's generally quite robust and intuitive
+level scaling has been toned down, you can now meet enemies on verious levels and high end equipment remains at least somewhat rare.
+random scripted events help make the world feel alive
+many hostiles, like giants, wildlife and even hostile NPCs try to threaten before attacking, they flee more too.
+there are some nice addition to the magic system, like wards, runes or having to actually raise corpses as undead instead of summoning them.
Still, this explanation didn't really work in your guildhall/stronghold/or Caius' house.
More so. Unlike Oblivious Skyrim is playable as it is and Andoran is, at least, a TES TC rather than something completely different.
+storyline isn't a cringe-fest as it was in oblivion.
+you can have follower.
+Thu'um gives some neat opportunities, throwing people off high places with FUS-RO-DAH! being the most obvious.
Now, for the minuses:
--------THE INTERFACE! OH GOD THE INTERFACE! The interface is bloody murder. Seriously, it should be considered a crime against humanity, a one roughly on par with holocaust too. You will soon start yearning something convenient and intuitive, like for example vi and I only wish I were joking.
-level scaling is still in and still causes problems - at least the bethesda seems to try to tweak it to be acceptable, so maybe they will eventually give it up at some point.
-magic system has been brutally castrated - no spellmaker, many effects removed.
-character development has been butchered - yes, there are some nice new things, but there are no attributes, less skills, and no build on chargen.
-dragons are pretty dumb in terms of AI and they are effectively Cliffracers 2.0 - not as frequent, obviously, but you will often have to fight one when just travelling to a location.
-there is very little unique loot to be found by exploring.
-dungeons are pretty, but very constrained and usually highly linear.
-writing is still speckled with derp.
-still no spears or thrown weapons, HtH not particularly viable.
-despite the rediscovery of quest randomization beth still has to learn why random guild quests only really work if there are guild requirements
-poor diversity of loot and shitty quest rewards
-shit enchant system
-many abusable loopholes
Writting is shit except General Tulius lines and most of the lore books, but unlike Oblibion game is playable even from the box, Try her out but Marry one worthy like Twicher 2. 
DraQ
Arcane
I haven't played Nehrim due to "mod unrelated" and getting completely disinterested with oblivious by the time I learned of it so I can't compare.
I know I'm having considerable amount fun (albeit punctuated by rage and semi-rare facepalms) with Skyrim (to the point of actually shelling out actual cash for it rather fast) while I effectively didn't have any with Oblivious (so bethesda got none from me - problem, todd?).
It's not Morrowind or Daggerfall, obviously, but Beth seems to have tried to placate Morrowind fans somewhat with that game and it does feel as a proper, if dumbed down sequel to MW and DF, rather than "game unrelated" or at best sequel to Arena as it was the case with oblivious.
And yeah, you need SkyUI.
I thought Witcher 2 had horrible UI, but I would gladly put up with all games ever having Witcher 2's UI if it would guarantee none of them having Skyrim's.
General Maxson
Arcane
I just can't understand why they have raped character leveling so? What's wrong with an elder scrolls game having stats? Endurance, Magic, Health...
Stereotypical Villain
Arcane
This.
It's a god damned shame that you still have to mod the shit out of Bethesduh's games in order to make them playable, but... meh. At least Skyrim didn't take the odd 2-5 gigs worth of mods required to make Oblivion playable. (Though god knows why I even tried to fix that game with mods in the first place...)
DraQ
Arcane
Yeah, this was moronic and it reflects beth's idiotic approach:I just can't understand why they have raped character leveling so? What's wrong with an elder scrolls game having stats? Endurance, Magic, Health...
1. Simplify to the point of stuff getting redundant.
2. Notice redundancy.
3. Get rid of redundancy by cutting redundant stuff.
4.
.5. GOTO 1.
This way you can reduce any system to a single stat that doesn't work.
General Maxson
Arcane
Yeah, this was moronic and it reflects beth's idiotic approach:I just can't understand why they have raped character leveling so? What's wrong with an elder scrolls game having stats? Endurance, Magic, Health...
1. Simplify to the point of stuff getting redundant.
2. Notice redundancy.
3. Get rid of redundancy by cutting redundant stuff.
4.
5. GOTO 1.
This way you can reduce any system to a single stat that doesn't work.
But the thing is, it was interesting and in no way redundant. For example you increase speed in Morrowind and your character moves faster etc. It was very interesting and should be built upon, not simplified. I think that even morons would appreciate interesting options that you can have while building your character and really don't understand the enormous need to dumb everything down until it turns into an first person action game with items (like it already isn't). What can we expect from TES 6 then? No character development (well except the extremely important character face and body customization
). I can bet they're gonna do that even with the next fallout. Although they implemented stats shitty even in 3. They could have used some good things from old TES and incorporated them even in Fallout. But they just keep simplifying things and seems people don't mind it.
And yes, you explained they developer philosophy perfectly.
What should be done by people who actually understand game design in a way of "let's improve/change/fix this stuff till it works!" is different from what Bethesda with their "if it doesn't work, remove it!" philosophy do.
The best example of that philosophy are the rationalizations behind some of the design decisions of Oblivion. "We reduced the amount of equipment slots and we also removed the enchanting skill because in Morrowind players could enchant all their clothes and armor and become overpowered, so in order to fix this, we just remove both the features that enabled players to become overpowered."
Instead of fixing what's broken, they just remove what's broken, which is much worse than just leaving it in in its broken state because most of these removed features were a lot of fun.
The best example of that philosophy are the rationalizations behind some of the design decisions of Oblivion. "We reduced the amount of equipment slots and we also removed the enchanting skill because in Morrowind players could enchant all their clothes and armor and become overpowered, so in order to fix this, we just remove both the features that enabled players to become overpowered."
Instead of fixing what's broken, they just remove what's broken, which is much worse than just leaving it in in its broken state because most of these removed features were a lot of fun.
General Maxson
Arcane
The sad thing is, of all the AAA game developers, they actually HAVE potential to make good games, even rpgs (IMHO), and they squander it by dumbing down and removing features.
DraQ
Arcane
...Agility affected your to-hit and dodge, while also increasing knockdown resistance, Strength increased physical (both melee and ranged) damage while also increasing carry capacity, willpower casting chance and resistance to some effects and blah blah.
The thing is that once you reduce knockdowns to make them less frustrating and irrelevant to combat, remove to-hit and dodging chances, remove casting chance and so on, while nonsensically making bow damage depend on agility to avoid it becoming foreveralone stat, you end up with strength doing the same thing as melee weapon skills,
agility the same as marksman skill, while willpower nothing in particular. Then you cut all of them out, while also removing speed, because having stat that makes travel more tedious when you don't invest into it is bad (as if you couldn't make it only affect running and make it cost stamina, forcing walking or riding at longer distances).
And you end up with Skyrim.
Of course. I, for example would merge and then split Agility and Speed as Dexterity (manual agility affecting attack rate, accuracy, blocking, lockpicking and criticals) and Agility (affecting running, jumping, dodging and stagger/knockdown recovery), leave Strength as it was, attach more stuff to intelligence, couple Willpower with pain resistance among other stuff, and so on, but if you have already simplified shit down to the ground all those stats seem redundant.
I actually think they will try to do more with perks, and perks are actually a decent idea. Maybe they will rediscover stats eventually.I think that even morons would appreciate interesting options that you can have while building your character and really don't understand the enormous need to dumb everything down until it turns into an first person action game with items (like it already isn't). What can we expect from TES 6 then? No character development (well except the extremely important character face and body customization
TBH I no longer see bethesda's development as cynical and malicious simplification for masses as I did after oblivious, I think they are genuinely stumbling around in the dark.
They are just too obsessed with neat symmetry of their stat system and too dumb to notice their repeating cycle of derp and harm it brings.
General Maxson
Arcane
...Agility affected your to-hit and dodge, while also increasing knockdown resistance, Strength increased physical (both melee and ranged) damage while also increasing carry capacity, willpower casting chance and resistance to some effects and blah blah.
The thing is that once you reduce knockdowns to make them less frustrating and irrelevant to combat, remove to-hit and dodging chances, remove casting chance and so on, while nonsensically making bow damage depend on agility to avoid it becoming foreveralone stat, you end up with strength doing the same thing as melee weapon skills,
agility the same as marksman skill, while willpower nothing in particular. Then you cut all of them out, while also removing speed, because having stat that makes travel more tedious when you don't invest into it is bad (as if you couldn't make it only affect running and make it cost stamina, forcing walking or riding at longer distances).
And you end up with Skyrim.
Of course. I, for example would merge and then split Agility and Speed as Dexterity (manual agility affecting attack rate, accuracy, blocking, lockpicking and criticals) and Agility (affecting running, jumping, dodging and stagger/knockdown recovery), leave Strength as it was, attach more stuff to intelligence, couple Willpower with pain resistance among other stuff, and so on, but if you have already simplified shit down to the ground all those stats seem redundant.
I actually think they will try to do more with perks, and perks are actually a decent idea. Maybe they will rediscover stats eventually.I think that even morons would appreciate interesting options that you can have while building your character and really don't understand the enormous need to dumb everything down until it turns into an first person action game with items (like it already isn't). What can we expect from TES 6 then? No character development (well except the extremely important character face and body customization
TBH I no longer see bethesda's development as cynical and malicious simplification for masses as I did after oblivious, I think they are genuinely stumbling around in the dark.
They are just too obsessed with neat symmetry of their stat system and too dumb to notice their repeating cycle of derp and harm it brings.
That's why I said that Bethesda has potential of all the AAA devs. Too bad their fans are mostly rabid morons and don't actually care that much about rpg elements, but only care about sex mods, houses, and immershun - and therefore Bethesda doesn't have the incentive to try better at rpg elements since most fans are satisfied with whatever simplification they get. There are few real TES fans. If people like you could somehow be a majority on TES forums, maybe they would finally head in the right direction with such constructive criticism.
Yes, perks are a good idea, but somehow, without stats they feel empty and too simplified to me. Now if they added back stats, with all the improvements from perks, that would be something. And if they stopped killing one of the most interesting magic systems ever by dumbing it down too.
I think their problem is that they often try to add "balance" into their games. Which was also one of their main arguments defending their decisions of cutting out stuff in Oblivion. "It wouldn't be balanced."
Thing is, it's pointless to try and balance a single player RPG with an open world. You will always have players who discover how to break the balance. Also, what's the point of the neatest balance if the most fun features are taken out for its sake?
They should just forget about trying to balance anything and just focus on making the game fun. Balance is utterly irrelevant (well, not utterly, you should "balance" the game by having a proper difficulty curve and different areas for low and high level chars) in a game like this.
Thing is, it's pointless to try and balance a single player RPG with an open world. You will always have players who discover how to break the balance. Also, what's the point of the neatest balance if the most fun features are taken out for its sake?
They should just forget about trying to balance anything and just focus on making the game fun. Balance is utterly irrelevant (well, not utterly, you should "balance" the game by having a proper difficulty curve and different areas for low and high level chars) in a game like this.
General Maxson
Arcane
Which is exactly my point - by actively trying to balance an open world single player game, they botch many things up. They should rather design their games more "naturally" - create the world map, then place dungeons, then place enemies of high levels in areas that are supposed to be dangerous, valuable treasures in areas where there actually are such within the setting, etc etc.
Balancing is cool when you're making a multiplayer shooter or strategy game (and even then it's not entirely necessary), but in a game like TES it's virtually impossible and should be only a very low priority, if at all.
Balancing is cool when you're making a multiplayer shooter or strategy game (and even then it's not entirely necessary), but in a game like TES it's virtually impossible and should be only a very low priority, if at all.
General Maxson
Arcane
Yeah, too bad Bethesda devs probably never frequent Codex. Some ideas and suggestion here are really good.
Kahlis
Cipher
- Joined
- Jun 23, 2012
- Messages
- 408
Todd insisted it was because people didn't RTFM (or the tooltips for that matter) and would rage 5 hours into the game when they realized their character build was horrible. He'd use the anecdote that you only increased intelligence to improve your magicka as an example of how redundant the attributes were, when they governed far more than thatI just can't understand why they have raped character leveling so? What's wrong with an elder scrolls game having stats? Endurance, Magic, Health...
The sad thing about Bethesda is they don't seem to assign a lot of weight to the praise people give for the good things. They only focus on that guy who is going around the forums asking for a levelling mod because he didn't plan his character in advance. Honestly, I don't even know anybody who had trouble with Oblivion - and as I've said before, if anything, it was the ridiculously easy starter dungeon and broken enemy scaling that really caused players who built improper characters to fall behind in Oblivion. Starting dungeons should be difficult (like Daggerfall's) so one can test the viability of their build early on, and a level scaling system as uncompromising as Oblivion's won't leave any good impressions on people either.
One of the many arguments that I always saw thrown around on the Bethsoft forum by those who hated Morrowind. Older RPG players find joy in meticulously developing their character in advance, signature skills and equipment, thinking about their possible backstory, who they'll align themselves with during the game and for what reason. My friend once showed me a post on /v/ of somebody who had their character technically die from equipping the "cursed" Wraithguard after killing Vivec, but was being kept alive due to fortify health enchantments on his armor, which he had to wear around for the rest of the game. Morrowind players imagine the prospect of an animated suit of armor with a sentient corpse inside it and think it's cool, whilst people from the Oblivion camp can't seem to find the fun in it and just said it was stupid.
I think the only real balance single player RPGs should have is NPCs being capable of having a counter against everything the player does - but this doesn't mean all NPCs should be able to. Beyond that, enemy difficulty and item placement should be distributed nicely so that you don't have to resort to avoiding everything but bandits at level 1, but you shouldn't be able to kill everything when you're only halfway through the game. And there have been countless suggestions as to how things from Morrowind could've been revised, like:
— Levitation could only allow you to hover a certain number of feet relative to the ground below you. I mean, that would still be incredibly useful for things like crossing bodies of water or getting over an angry mob of guards. If it needs even more tweaking, have it drain magicka whilst in use (like telekinesis) so that it can't be sustained for so long, or make it a spell you have to "channel" that will be interrupted if you take damage.
— Mark and recall. I can't see a good reason not to have these unless they feared people trapping themselves in scripted areas. I was almost certain before the game came out that it'd return in the form of a dragon shout, at the very least.
— Merging axes and blunt weapons together? Why? Because they're not different enough from one another to warrant the distinction? MAKE THEM. You've added weapon-specific perks in Skyrim, with maces having bonuses like armor penetration, so in some regards merging them was completely unnecessary, because now you want to encourage specialization again.
Is there a reason Bethesda seems aversive to the Codex? I remember the Oblivion review where they (jokingly) made the site's name a filtered swear word on the forum in response, and Pete Hines apparently has no time to do a formal online interview because he's busy teasing bits of information to random proles on his Twitter account.
I've only been here a while, but it seems like all the developers from the 90's are actually honored to be featured on here, whilst Bethesda is afraid to possibly have to, oh no, listen to intelligent peoples' ideas! Too hard, Todd would rather put up with mainstream journalists like Geoff Keighley make horse armor jokes every 20 minutes. And I don't understand why, I know they wouldn't want to reveal everything before the game came out, but I'd rather have them give vague hints about things we hadn't heard about than do ten press releases a day that basically have the same information - "there will be dragons" - "there will be dual wielding."
Brayko
Self-Ejected
People are still having discussions about how Bethesda can make their games better? They're not listening, you're forgotten.
Now get to work, start modding.
Now get to work, start modding.
Stereotypical Villain
Arcane
I love it how Bethesduh phoned it in with the whole vampire shit. Wanna play an Argonian vampire? Well fuck you! No new shiny eyes for you. (Not that I'd want to look like Riddick anyway... sniff... )
)
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